On crowds, pro and con

Sometimes I think I'm the last Freudian...except I'm not exactly a Freudian and if I was I probably wouldn't be the only one. Still, I'm part of the diminishing crowd that thinks he knew a thing or two about a thing or two.

(And, yes, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.)

An example of Freud hitting the mark are these comments on crowd and group behavior, which can be a two edged sword:

When individuals come together as a group all their individual inhibitions fall away and all the cruel, brutal, and destructive instincts, which lie dormant in individuals...are stirred up to find free gratification. But under the influence of suggestion, groups are also capable of high achievement in the shape of abnegation, unselfishness, and devotion to an ideal. While with isolated individuals, personal interest is almost the only motive force, with groups it is very rarely prominent....Whereas the intellectual capacity of a group is always far  below that of an individual, its ethical conduct may rise as high above it as sink below it.

I'd say he nailed it. 

Society everywhere is in conspiracy

Humans are by nature social animals. As Aristotle, whom Dante described as "the master of those who know," put it in his Politics, "to live alone, one must be either a beast or a god." On the other hand, group dynamics can really bring out the beast and drive away the god.

A lot of human evil and just plain pettiness can be attributed to group behavior, conformity, and obedience. Emerson takes a famous whack at those in Self Reliance.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

(I'm guessing this applies to women too.)

LINK TRUCK BROKEN TODAY 

Grab bag

El Cabrero just read his first John Le Carre novel, to wit The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. This is probably going to sound really bad but it kind of made me almost nostalgic for the Cold War. When it came to an end, while other people were celebrating, I remember wondering what other kinds of demons would be loosened which had been held in check before. It turned out to be quite a few.

 I hope I'm wrong about this, but it occurred to me then that the dangers of the future might make that nearly 50 year period of relative equilibrium, also known as a balance of terror, look like good old days.

On that cheery note, here are a few items that caught my eye today...

RATING THE SOTU. Here's Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute on President Obama's state of the union address.

DUMBING US DOWN. Working in groups can do just that.

DOGS appear to have been domesticated as long as 33,000 years ago. Next question: have they found any fossilized squeaky toys?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Fences

Robert Frost somewhere wrote that "good fences make good neighbors." Anyone who has a problem with that idea probably hasn't spent a lot of times around farm animals--especially goats--and gardens.

Farming is, after all, a kind of a game in which the farmers win if they keep critters from going where they don't want them to go and the critters win if the get there. Which is where the fencing comes in.

A few years back, we broke down and installed a five strand electric fence around our goat pasture. For a while, the goats didn't recognize its legitimacy and challenged it, shocks and all. Then they just got used to it. We hardly ever have it on now, unless Honeysuckle, the ornery kid goat, gets too frisky.

It occurred to me that the effectiveness of fences isn't really a function of how hard they are to get over or through. Fences are often more about appearance than reality. It reminds me of the famous lines from Sun Tzu's Art of War: "All warfare is based on deception." So, I'd wager, is most fencing.

Most of the time, most animals don't really make a detailed study of the fence and its weak points or even probe for weaknesses. If they did, they'd have a good chance of getting where they wanted to go.

It also occurs to me that the same is true of people. We don't challenge a lot of the "fences" that hold us in, even though it's likely they have places that are not nearly as strong as they seem to be.

ONE NATION WORKING TOGETHER. This Saturday, thousands of progressives will converge on Washington in support of a positive agenda to move the country forward. Yours truly will be among them, after boarding a bus at 3:00 AM Saturday morning (yuk). My back is hurting already.

SIGN OF THE TIMES. NPR reports that more families are "doubling up" in the wake of the Great Recession.

SOMETHING ELSE FOR THE COAL INDUSTRY TO DENY can be found here.

NO SURPRISE. The latest WV Kids Count report finds that children in the southern coalfield counties are poorer than those in the rest of the state.

MONKEY IN THE MIRROR. It looks like they see themselves, which raises questions about primate self-awareness.

WHAT MAKES A GROUP SMART? Apparently not smart individuals.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Individuals and groups

Reinhold Niebuhr was one of the 20th century's greatest theologians and philosophers. One of his most influential works was the 1932 classic Moral Man and Immoral Society.

The title may be a bit misleading as Niebuhr wasn't convinced that human individuals were necessarily all that moral--it's just that we are even more dangerous when we're in groups. Compared to group behavior, human individuals seem pretty harmless.

As he put it,

In every human group there is less reason to guide and to check impulse, less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others and therefore more unrestrained egoism than the individuals, who compose the group, reveal in their personal relationships.

In his view, one of the (many) tragic features of human life is that we are social animals and need others in order to survive and thrive. Group orientation can bring out the best in people, but it can just as easily bring out the worst. I'll be looking at some over his ideas over the next little stretch. Stay tuned.

WHILE TEA PARTIERS PROTEST high taxes, most Americans paid less than at any time since 1950.

UNEMPLOYMENT. This report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recommends a moratorium on interest payments for states that borrow from the federal government to fund unemployment insurance.

URGENT UPDATE ON HOW SOME DINOSAURS GOT TO BE SO BIG here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

COLLECTIVE MADNESS

Caption: This is a mad crowd.

This week, in addition to news and links on current events, El Cabrero is passing out nuggets from the less whacked out portions of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil for your entertainment and edification.

Is this a full service blog or what?

I may have used today's selection before but it's another one that should be widely posted in public places to remind us of the dangers of group behavior:

Madness is something rare in individuals--but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule.

Although we are social animals and not all groups are nasty, it is the official Goat Rope verdict that the dude wasn't too far off the mark. Aside from the occasional sociopath, people tend to be fairly harmless taken one at a time. Put a bunch of us together at the same time and place, add a few other choice ingredients, and all bets are off.

(Note: the positive and negative sides of group behavior are frequent Goat Rope themes. If you're interested, search the blog for tags such as group psychology, group behavior, conflict, conformity, obedience.)

GAPS. According to a new study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, millions of low wage Americans struggle to make ends meet due to the gap between employer-provided wages and benefits and public work support programs. Here's a shorter article on the subject by CEPR's Heather Boushey.

ON TOP OF ALL THAT, workplace stress can be lethal.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS HOLD THEIR OWN. According to a Washington Post article on study released last week,

Low-income students who attend urban public high schools generally do just as well as private-school students with similar backgrounds, according to a study being released Wednesday.

Students at independent private schools and most parochial schools scored the same on 12th-grade achievement tests in core academic subjects as those in traditional public high schools when income and other family characteristics were taken into account, according to the study by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy.

There's been a lot of public school bashing in the last few years, but the study found that when one controls for factors such as parental involvement, the difference in achievement between public and private schools tends to evaporate.

CHURCHES WEIGH IN. The West Virginia Council of Churches issued a statement on mountaintop removal mining last week. It stopped short of calling for abolition but urged strict enforcement of existing laws and opposed their weakening. Here's AP coverage and here's the statement.

AMERICA IN A FUNK? Some public opinion surveys would indicate one. This is a good follow-up to last week's series on optimism and pessimism.

IT'S ALL GOOD. Here's one on Reaganomics from The Onion.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

BAD CROWD, GOOD CROWD

This is a very bad crowd.

As noted in yesterday's post, crowds have a generally bad reputation--one that is not altogether undeserved. But two fairly recent books talk about the good side of groups.

Let's start with the most recent. Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, recently came out with Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy.

Her main thesis is that for most of human history, until the lamentable rise of the Protestant work ethic (from which El Cabrero is striving manfully to free himself) and the subsequent bureaucratization and commodification of the world, people used to get together and get down in group celebrations that often strike modern observers as "savage."

Relics of this tradition still survive in some sports situations, in carnival (as in Mardi Gras) celebrations, and occasionally in other settings. She argues that "we need much more of this on our crowded planet, to acknowledge the miracle of our simultaneous existence with some sort of celebration."

Our old friend Nietzsche, Goat Rope's mascot of the week, pointed out long ago the two poles of human existence and culture: the Apollonian, based on individuation, reason, and moderation (named for the Greek god of music, prophecy, and measure); and the Dionysian (named for the god of the vine), in which people loose their sense of separateness through group revelry.

(While totally appreciative of the gift of the vine, I lean towards the Apollonian.)

The other book on the good side of group behavior is a little older: James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies, and Nations, which came out in 2004.

Surowiecki writes the financial column for the "New Yorker" and this book deserves the same wide circulation as those of his fellow writer Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote Blink and The Tipping Point.

I was shocked by the title, since "wisdom" and "crowd" are two words that I rarely associate. His main thesis is that large groups of people--including people who aren't necessarily the "smartest guys in the room"--often arrive at better decisions than experts:

If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to "make decisions affecting matters of general interest," that group's decisions will, over time, be "intellectually [superior] to the isolated individual," no matter how smart or well-informed he is.

And again:

The argument of this book is that chasing the expert is a mistake, and a costly one at that. We should stop hunting and ask the crowd (which of course, includes geniuses as well as everyone else)instead. Chances are it knows.

But there's a catch: it doesn't work in herds. It seems to work better if you have a diverse group of people (by almost any measure) who arrive at their decisions independently, with the results compiled and aggregated. I'd say that' s aggregated Apollonianism (with no disrespect for Dionysus). There's lots of interesting data from experiments and experience in the book that make it worth a look.

SUSPICIOUS MIDDLE EASTERN CHARACTERS. I'm talking, of course, about cats. This from the NY Times:

Some 10,000 years ago, somewhere in the Near East, an audacious wildcat crept into one of the crude villages of early human settlers, the first to domesticate wheat and barley. There she felt safe from her many predators in the region, such as hyenas and larger cats.

The rodents that infested the settlers’ homes and granaries were sufficient prey. Seeing that she was earning her keep, the settlers tolerated her, and their children greeted her kittens with delight.

That's just how it starts, however. After a few thousand years, they start horfing up hairballs on your rug and waking you up in the middle of the night. It's a conspiracy....

(If you check the picture of the Middle Eastern cat on the link and check the gratuitous animal picture in yesterday's post, you will notice a strong similarity between that cat and Goat Rope Farm's Seamus McGoogle. I'm gonna call Homeland Security...)

WHY IS IT that I'm writing more about animals than economic justice issues these days? I don't even like them all that much. I'm kind of tired of them--they're a pain in the @$$. Maybe it's because justice is elusive but animals are inescapable...at least around here.

MSHA CITES ITS OWN SHORTCOMINGS. This from Ken Ward at the Charleston Gazette:

Federal inspectors and their supervisors displayed an "unacceptable lack of accountability and oversight" prior to three major coal-mining accidents last year, the nation's top mine safety regulator said Thursday.

Inspectors missed or ignored obvious violations, agency managers failed to ensure inspectors did their jobs, and repeated safety problems were not hit with escalating enforcement actions, according to three lengthy internal reviews issued Thursday by the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Richard Stickler, assistant labor secretary for MSHA, said such oversights will "not be tolerated" and announced an improvement plan the agency said "ushers in [a] new era of accountability."

Comment: fair is fair. Lots of people, including myself, criticized Stickler when he was nominated for this post by the Bush administration. I apologize: he seems to take safety very seriously and is a welcome change from the past.

Question: do you believe that things like coal mine safety should be left to the "market" or the whim of corporations? Some people do...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GOOD CROWD, BAD CROWD

Caption: This is a bad crowd.

Large groups of people have a pretty bad reputation in many circles.

The Christian existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said "The crowd is untruth."

In 1841, Charles Mackay wrote the popular Extradordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, wherein he said,

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.

Our old pal Nietzsche said that "Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."

Freud, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, saw in any crowd a potential mob, noting that

when individuals come together in a group all their individual inhibitions fall away and all the cruel, brutal and destructive instincts which lie dormant in individuals as relics of a primitive epoch, are stirred up to find free gratification.

Gustave Le Bon, an earlier writer who influenced Freud, said "In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated."

Erich Fromm, in Escape from Freedom described the ways people sometimes seek to evade anxiety by seeking submersion in a larger group.

The dangers of the egotism and imperialism of groups was the theme of the great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's classic Moral Man and Immoral Society (although Niebuhr had some doubts about the morality of individuals as well).

Earlier series and posts in this blog looked at the problems caused by obedience to authority and conformity.

Some interesting things have been written recently, however, that talk about the good side of groups. But that will keep until tomorrow. As Scarlett said, "Tomorrow is another day."

THIS COULD GET INTERESTING. West Virginia native and country music star Kathy Mattea is starting to speak out about mountaintop removal mining and climate change, as Ken Ward reports in today's Charleston Gazette. She is currently working on a project of coal-related music.

ATTACK OF THE GIANT PENGUINS. This is not a burning issue of our time, but scientists have discovered a 5 foot tall penguin that lived 36 million years ago in Peru. This baby had bigger jaw muscles than the current crop and a foot long beak.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED