Social Matter

You’re supposed to feel warm inside when you see a big crowd of people demonstrating for ‘unity’ and ‘tolerance’ carrying candles and signs, speaking soothing words of peace. The images are intended to reassure you, just as the mass of the herd reassures animals like deer, gazelle, kangaroos, sheep, and cows that they are safe from predators.

But the herd is as much of a target of predators as it is a form of protection. And humans are not, ultimately, herd animals — we are pack hunters with a sophisticated social structure. The herd is not a form of social organization that is natural to us, even if we make use of herds, even if we sometimes march together in herd-like formations. Herding is a survival mechanism for defenseless creatures, and to see crowds of our fellow-men walking together in the night, decrying violence, it comes to mind that the people marching believe themselves to be largely defenseless.

The call for peace in the face of an aggressive, conquering enemy is identical to a call for surrender, although expressed using different language and alternative visual symbols. We commonly associate the white flag with surrender, but it is the same sort of surrender to permit a foreign people to impose themselves upon your own without any sort of resistance, either formal or informal. When people behave like lambs, and act as if they wanted to be herded like lambs, it should be unsurprising to anyone when they are slaughtered like lambs in turn.

Leaderless herds are prone to stampedes and other outbreaks of irrational behavior. When one small element of the herd begins behaving in one way, the rest of the herd becomes forced to react to it in order to avoid being trampled or otherwise left behind to be eaten. The herd-game is a game of mass-mimicry, similar to that of schools of fish, each fish watching what the fish next to it is doing in order to decide which way to go next, and at what speed to swim at.

Humans in crowds, whether on the streets of Paris or on the screens of mobile phones and laptops, are much the same: watching the others for queues on what to do next, rather than taking lessons from the wisdom of the ancients and the gods.

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn dedicated the “Menace of the Herd” to the men who defend freedom with the sword rather than the pen. He did this because, when pens fail, as they often do, the sword must be grasped and used for righteous ends. The mob devolves all individual distinction, all moral values, all higher culture into a dim reactivity  to the actions of tyrants, criminals, and other predators. Individuals within the mob give up their moral sensibility, instead dissolving themselves into the actions of the group.

Herds and fish-schools are great: if you are a sheep, cow, horse, clown-fish, or zebra. For humans, the appearance of mindless crowds is cause for alarm, because it presages outbreaks of mass violence and other forms of chaos.

The candle-crowd is the pacified parody of the jackbooted Red Army-march, and in that case, the crowds of intellectualized beggars demanding “land, peace, and bread” earned themselves a demagogue who promised all of those things and only brought them “gulag, war, and starvation.”

There are times for war and times for peace. Picking the wrong actions in response to the dilemmas of the world always has devastating consequences.