The Brain Of The Mob

KELECHI DECA

Something happened yesterday that made me remember a very instructive section I read in Shakespeare’s Julius Cesar years ago.

One story that struck with me is that of Cinna the Poet. Remember him, the poor guy who was a victim of mistaken identity when an angry mob confronts him on the streets of Rome and they asked if his name is Cinna.

But the Cinna they were after was one of the conspirators against Caesar. He has a distinct way of walking. He leaves one of the anonymous letters for Brutus, and is one of the more enthusiastic killers. So if the mob was intelligent enough they’d know they have the wrong Cinna because of that physical ailment.

But we know that the average IQ of a mob is slightly higher than that of a goat, so an unfortunate Poet with same name was accosted by the mob, and everybody was asking him questions at the same time, and mostly senseless questions.

First one asked who he was, another asked after his address, another asked if he was married, another asked where he was going, while another asked if he was Caeser’s friend or foe.

Truly, my name is Cinna, he replied.

First Plebian: Tear him to pieces! He’s a conspirator.

Cinna the Poet: I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet!

Because a crowd baying for blood is out for it and wouldn’t want to disappoint themselves so they manufactured an excuse to kill him by saying he writes bad verses.

Fourth Plebian: Tear him for his bad verses; tear him for his bad verses!

Cinna the Poet: I am not Cinna the conspirator.

Fourth Plebian: It is no matter. His name’s Cinna.

Pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going.

And they killed him.

This simple argument between the Plebians and Cinna the Poet is a depiction of crowd think. When the crowd is unleashed, thinking becomes a luxury they cannot afford. And anyone irrespective of station in life, belief or ethnicity can fall victim.

The above brings me to the works of Gustave Le Bon, especially his classic titled “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind which was first published in 1895.

In the book, Le Bon claims that there are several characteristics of crowd psychology: “impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and others…”

Le Bon claimed that “an individual immersed for some length of time in a crowd soon finds himself – either in consequence of magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from some other cause of which we are ignorant – in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer.”

Sigmund Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego refer heavily to the writings of Gustave Le Bon. Freud says that as part of the mass, the individual acquires a sense of infinite power allowing him to act on impulses that he would otherwise have to curb as an isolated individual.

These feelings of power and security allow the individual not only to act as part of the mass, but also to feel safety in numbers. This is accompanied, however, by a loss of conscious personality and a tendency of the individual to be infected by any emotion within the mass, and to amplify the emotion, in turn, by “mutual induction”. Overall, the mass is “impulsive, changeable, and irritable. It is controlled almost exclusively by the unconscious.”

You see some of these traits on social media very often. People easily lose their individuality in an effort to align with the positions of their friends, political affiliations or sentiments, or ethno-religious tunes. The first thing to die during such process is the individual, and it is very interesting that when you engage some of these people individually, you’d be shocked that they are opposites of the songs they sing in chorus with the group.