Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
The oppressed rise to their feet. Police sink to their knees. Silence is violence.
And violence is speech.
From sea to glittering sea, from one continent to the next… protests yet rage.
An injustice somewhere on a Minneapolis street evidently threatens justice everywhere.
It certainly threatens the peace everywhere.
Here in Baltimore, storefronts up Charles Street and down Charles Street are barricaded against bricks:
Is there a greater symbol of hope, of love, than a plywood sheet stretched across a storefront window?
We have yet to encounter one in this world.
“When a Man Enters a Crowd He Exits Civilization”
We have nothing to say against protests, of course. If a man wishes to march against perceived injustice, let him march… lest the heavens fall.
Yet our spacious and tolerant disposition places us in a pickle jar. For a man in a protest is a man in a crowd…
And when a man enters a crowd he exits civilization.
He goes in, his blood goes up… and his reason goes out.
As Herr Nietzsche observed, madness is a rarity in individuals — but the rule in crowds.
Or as argued Mr. Charles Mackay, author of the 1841 classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds:
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
“A Crowd Runs Not on Thought but on Hormones”
A man in a crowd ceases to be a man but a face.
He ceases to be an independent unit but a cog in a lunatic machine.
A man in a crowd does not think for himself. The crowd thinks for him.
That is, the man ceases to think whatsoever.
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