The Tyranny of Crowds

Robert Kaplan, writing for the Wall Street Journal, discusses a 1960 book by a scholar named Elias Canetti who, Kaplan says, "may have written the most intuitive book about the crisis of the West over the past 100 years."

The book is titled Crowds and Power, and it discusses among other things the role of technology in accelerating the decline of the West.

Kaplan points out that the mass movements of the 20th century, Nazism and communism, would've been impossible without the technological advances that made mass communication possible:

It’s impossible to imagine Hitler and Stalin except against the backdrop of industrialization, which wrought everything from tanks and railways to radio and newsreels. Propaganda, after all, has a distinct 20th-century resonance, integral to communications technology.

Kaplan then notes that,

The mass ideologies of the 20th century, Nazism and communism, represented a profound abasement of reason. Yet those ideologies reveal more than we’d like to admit about our own political extremes....Nazism and communism shared two decisive elements: the safety of the crowd and the yearning for purity.

In addition to Nazism and communism Kaplan might have added Islamism. In any case, condemning others, destroying others, compensates for one's own inadequacies and spiritual impoverishment. It fulfills one's need for power, self-importance, self-righteousness, and purpose. It's a need that the individual is unable, by himself, to gratify but which can be satisfied by one's participation in "the crowd."

Here's Kaplan:

The crowd, Canetti says, emerges from the need of the lonely individual to conform with others. Because he can’t exert dominance on his own, he exerts it through a crowd that speaks with one voice. The crowd’s urge is always to grow, consuming all hierarchies, even as it feels persecuted and demands retribution. The crowd sees itself as entirely pure, having attained the highest virtue.

Thus, one aim of the crowd is to hunt down the insufficiently virtuous. The tyranny of the crowd has many aspects, but Canetti says its most blatant form is that of the “questioner,” and the accuser. “When used as an intrusion of power,” the accusing crowd “is like a knife cutting into the flesh of the victim. The questioner knows what there is to find, but he wants actually to touch it and bring it to light.”

There are strong echoes of this in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “1984,” and particularly in Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” But Canetti isolates crowd psychology as an intellectual subject all its own.

Crowds have existed since the dawn of time. But modern technology — first radio and newspapers, now Twitter and Facebook — has created untold vistas for the tyranny of the crowd. That tyranny, born of an assemblage of lonely people, has as its goal the destruction of the individual, whose existence proves his lack of virtue in the eyes of the crowd.

Social media amplifies the individual's sense of power. It amplifies all the worst characteristics of crowds (or mobs) which no longer need to be comprised of people physically present to each other as they did in the previous century. By folding solitary persons into a like-minded mass of anonymous individuals modern social media enables the otherwise impotent individual to slake his thirst for significance and meaning.

It also enables him to manifest his bitterness and vent his hatreds in politically effective ways.

Kaplan again:

There is a difference, however, between the 20th and 21st centuries. The 20th century was an age of mass communications often controlled by big governments, so that ideology and its attendant intimidation was delivered from the top down. The 21st century has produced an inversion, whereby individuals work through digital networks to gather together from the bottom up.

But while the tyranny produced has a different style, it has a similar result: the intimidation of dissent through a professed monopoly on virtue. If you don’t agree with us, you are not only wrong but morally wanting, and as such should be not only denounced but destroyed. Remember, both Nazism and communism were utopian ideologies.

In the minds of their believers they were systems of virtue, and precisely because of that they opened up new vistas for tyranny.

The need to parade one's own "virtue" is a major impetus behind "cancel culture." To condemn the sins of others, to humiliate them for their transgressions, is a means of drawing attention to one's own moral superiority. Social media mobs offer unprecedented opportunities for moral preening.

The lust for purity combined with the tyranny of social-media technology in the hands of the young—who have little sense of the past and of tradition—threatens to create an era of the most fearsome mobs in history. The upshot of such crowd coercion is widespread self-censorship: the cornerstone of all forms of totalitarianism.

This ultimately leads toward a controlled society driven by the bland, the trivial and the mundane, wearing the lobotomized face of CNN weekday afternoon television. Outright evil can surely be dealt with, but a self-righteous conformity is harder to resist. Left unchecked, this is how the West slowly dies.

As Victor Davis Hanson writes in the introduction to his book The Dying Citizen:

...everything that we once thought was so strong, so familiar, and so reassuring about America has been dissipating for some time....Contemporary events have reminded Americans that their citizenship is fragile and teetering on the abyss....

If we soon tumble over the edge of that abyss it'll be hate-filled crowds of shrivelled souls on social media who'll be largely responsible.