[My "Liberty 2000" project... Did I know how personal will it become?]
Do I have to remind myself that every word I hear from them has an opposite meaning? Freedom? Slavery!... Doublespeak? In the kingdom of two kings everything has two meanings and they are opposite.
I. CHILDREN OF MAN: "And Multiply...."
[ image ]
I have many problems. I have children. I took this commendment to heart. I multiplied. A few thousand years from Y2K there will so many that came out of me. I am sure that you understabd my problems. The crowds, I mean. I did my multiplying alredy!
Why should they multiply? Note, they had no children before the Fall. Immortals, they will stop having children with turning into gods. They will watch everything human -- themselves.
The Crowd is my place of birth and space of existence. Always present. That's how the socialization is insured. According to modern genesis, the crowd creates Adam. Is there a need for Eve? Adam without Eve isn't a man but a comrade.
Crowd means Many of the same. Make many and you have the same. There is an opposite of hell -- I am Many. My Many do not speak in one voice, remember the Greeks, a chorus?
The many are silent. They are more primitive than a micro-organism. How many reactions do they have? Two?
Many are born out of fear, each of them can't face himself.
Mind of the Crowd -- leader? Not chorifey. What? Dragon without its own mind? Who is he? Celebrity. Do I have to say more? Later.
Unanimity as the ideal? Pluralism of values was by definition evil inheritance from old class antagonism. How to solve the riddle of modernity? An illusion of diversity. Watch the commercials -- soap, soft drinks, car wars. Are they that different? Do we want to replace the shrinking number of organic spicies with mechanisms? Did you see traffic lately? They are all on wheels! Even the most expensive ones -- the same! Get more -- get more restricted. Didn't a horse have no limitations?
Oh???
Society is an organized super-crowd. What a complexity! It's only a begining, my friend.
We know it.
Corporation (shareholders) v. collectivism, totalitarism. Enough mind is put into it! Enough!
Property relations? Between them, who can't be their own property. What could they own? Each other.
American and Soviet Crowds: different organizational principles: voluntary v. mandatiory participation. It's a matter of degree of indoctrination; the higher the better. We call it "freedom" -- they do it freely. They value self-limitations: they are more civilized, more human.
[ Foucault's Files ]
Little adapted to reasoning, crowds, on the contrary, are quick to act. As the result of their present organization their strength has become immense. The dogmas whose birth we are witnessing will soon have the force of the old dogmas; that is to say, the tyrannical and sovereign force of being above discussion. THE DIVINE RIGHT OF THE MASSES IS ABOUT TO REPLACE THE DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS (AA). (xvii)
Democracy!
Democracy made crowds into a ruling "class." "Masses" -- from Marxism? Crowd is a political statement. It's always a revolt, even at a parade (demonstration of force, a threat). And it's only the bigining, my friend.
Civilizations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. [xix]
Said who?
"The Global Village" image is misleading; our "village" is crowded. "Critical mass" of masses -- humanity, the human race,
six billions, Not an abstraction anymore. Because of mass communications, interconnections (global ecology is an indicator).
The conscious life of the mind is of small importance in comparison with its unconscious life... Our conscious acts are the outcome of an unconscious substratum created in the mind in the main by hereditary influences. This substratum consists of the innumerable common characteristics handed down from generation to generation, which constitute the genius of a race. Behind the avowed causes of our acts there undoubtedly lie secret causes that we do not avow, but behind these secret causes there are many others more secret still which we ourselves ignore. The greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives which escape our observation. (8-9)
What about intentional limitations, any ideology is an organized stupidity -- we leave the mysteries to the unknown. Crowd is after answers, not questions. Crowd is the anti-thesis of mind. Anti-mind = body, the reservoir of action.
It is more especially with respect to those unconscious elements which constitute the genius of a race that all the individuals belonging to it resemble each other, while it is principally in respect to the conscious elements of their character -- the fruit of education, and yet more of exceptional hereditary conditions -- that they differ from each other. Men the most unlike in the matter of their intelligence possess instincts, passions, and feelings that are very similar. In the case of every thing that belongs to the realm of sentiment -- religion, politics, morality, the affections and antipathies, &c. -- the most eminent men seldom surpass the standard of the most ordinary individuals. From the intellectual point of view an abyss may exist between a great mathematician and his boot maker, but from the point of view of character the difference is most often slight or non-existent. (9)
The crowd is the equality at its best, the chronotope of the common. Crowd is a danger, the violation of my inner sense.
It is precisely these general qualities of character, governed by forces of which we are unconscious, and possessed by the majority of the normal individuals of a race in much the same degree -- it is precisely these qualities, I say, that in crowds become common property. In the collective mind the intellectual aptitudes of the individuals, and in consequence their individuality, are weakened. The heterogeneous is swamped by the homogeneous, and the unconscious qualities obtain the upper hand. (8-9)
"In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated." (9) Pictures of hell. "Collective wisdom"? What is that? Only next to the wisdom of an idiot from the crowd. The Collective Force, you mean.
It is not only by his acts that the individual in a crowd differs essentially from himself. Even before he has entirely lost his independence, his ideas and feelings have undergone a transformation, and the transformation is so profound as to change the miser into a spendthrift, the skeptic into a believer, the honest man into a criminal, and the coward into a hero.[14]
Unconscious quality of behavior turned into "heroic"? There is more "heroism" in a criminal who challenges the order in "cold
blood."
It is crowds rather than isolated individuals that may be induced to run the risk of death to secure the triumph of a creed or an idea, that may be fired with enthusiasm for glory and honor, that are led on -- almost without bread and without arms, as in the age of the Crusades -- to deliver the tomb of Christ from the infidel, or, as in '93, to defend the fatherland. Such heroism is without doubt somewhat unconscious, but it is of such heroism that history is made. Were peoples only to be credited with the great actions performed in cold blood, the annals of the world would register but few of them. (14-15)
... I bet you still have no idea how personal it is. When you sleep with a woman, when she is your wife, she is a mother of your children... and they all are having her! Yes, you think that she is yours, but no, she is theirs!
The violence of the feelings of crowds is also increased, especially in heterogeneous crowds, by the absence of all sense of responsibility. The certainty of impunity, a certainty the stronger as the crowd is more numerous, and the notion of a considerable momentary force due to number, make possible in the case of crowds sentiments and acts impossible for the isolated individual. In crowds the foolish, ignorant, and envious persons are freed from the sense of their insignificance and powerlessness, and are possessed instead by the notion of brutal and temporary but immense strength. (35-36)
The Commercials:
To exaggerate, to affirm, to resort to repetitions, and never to attempt to prove anything by reasoning are methods of argument well known to speakers at public meetings. (37)
Mass media = peaceful crowd, TV news, "60 minutes" -- reflecting crowd, does it lose its cruel qualities?
The inferior reasoning of crowds is based, just as is reasoning of a high order, on the association of ideas, but between the ideas associated by crowds there are only apparent bonds of analogy or succession. (54)
Spectacle and democracy: crowds ask for theatricality. The Romans invented entertainment. We -- television set.
"Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images. It is only images that terrify or attract them and become motives of action.
For this reason theatrical representations, in which the image is shown in its most clearly visible shape, always have an enormous influence on crowds. Bread and spectacular shows constituted for the plebeians of ancient Rome the ideal of happiness, and they asked for nothing more." [57]
[ cinema and movies ]
... Sit down! What are you doing in my class? What do you mean that you do not understand "what I mean"? I say what I mean. Everything I say is nothing but the MEANING.
"No form of government," M. Lavisse very properly writes, "was founded in a day. Political and social organizations are works that demand centuries. The feudal system existed for centuries in a shapeless, chaotic state before it found its laws; absolute monarchy also existed for centuries before arriving at regular methods of government, and these periods of expectancy were extremely troubled." (78)
In absence of culture, army organization is the only principle of control. Technology has military origins and targets. In politics its country's own population. Civil war never ends -- we have to fight the war against ourselves, we have to discipline the super-crowds in situation of democracy. What is our substitute for dictatorship? "Majority rule" which is the basis of all our laws.
Images lead.
The images evoked by words being independent of their sense, they vary from age to age and from people to people, the formulas remaining identical. Certain transitory images are attached to certain words: the word is merely as it were the button of an electric bell that calls them up. (101)
Images are beyond critical thinking. Or thinking all together? Buzz-words: democracy, free world, American people.
What vocabulary, what images, models do they have to emulate?
"When the men of the Revolution imagined they were copying the Greeks and Romans, what were they doing except giving to ancient words a sense the latter had never had? What resemblance can possibly exist between the institutions of the Greeks and those designated today by corresponding words? A republic at that epoch was an essentially aristocratic institution, formed of a reunion of petty despots ruling over a crowd of slaves kept in the most absolute subjection. These communal aristocracies, based on slavery, could not have existed for a moment without it... "
Gustave LeBon continues,
"The word "liberty," again, what signification could it have in any way resembling that we attribute to it today at a period when the possibility of the liberty of thought was not even suspected, and when there was no greater and more exceptional crime than that of
discussing the gods, the laws and the customs of the city? What did such a word as "fatherland" signify to an Athenian or Spartan unless it were the cult of Athens or Sparta, and in no wise that of Greece,
composed of rival cities always at war with each other? What meaning had the same word "fatherland" among the ancient Gauls, divided into rival tribes and races, and possessing different languages and religions, and who were easily vanquished by Caesar because he always
found allies among them? It was Rome that made a country of Gaul by endowing it with political and religious unity." (102-103)
.... I don't know what is wrong with madness. I think it's okay to be mad. What do you think?
Modernity:
If one destroyed in museums and libraries, if one hurled down on the flagstones before the churches all the works and all the monuments of art that religions have inspired, what would remain of the great dreams of humanity? To give to men that portion of hope and illusion without which they cannot live, such is the reason for the existence of gods, heroes, and poets. During fifty years science appeared to undertake this task. But science has been compromised in hearts hungering after the ideal, because it does not dare to be lavish enough of promises, because it cannot lie. Daniel Lesueur. (108-109)
It had to come to that, the domination of the masses. How else would I learn about the difference between Man and Men? How would I know about resurrection when existence and life have to be separated? I live, they exist. How would I know that there is a great divine within the human race? Human nature? Who's nature? Enough abstractions and generalizations.
Human nature had spoken.
The philosophers of the last century devoted themselves with fervor to the destruction of the religious, political, and social illusions on which our forefathers had lived for a long tale of centuries. By destroying them they have dried up the springs of hope and resignation. Behind the immolated chimeras they came face to face with the blind and silent forces of nature, which are inexorable to weakness and ignore pity.
... We need to take a break. I need a break. I need five minutes. Make it ten. I have to have my cigarett...
Notwithstanding all its progress, philosophy has been unable as yet to offer the masses any ideal that can charm them; but, as they must have their illusions at all cost, they turn instinctively, as the insect seeks the light, to the rhetoricians who accord them what they want. Not truth, but error has always been the chief factor in the evolution of nations, and the reason why socialism is so powerful to-day is that it constitutes the last illusion that is still vital. In spite of all scientific demonstrations it continues on the increase. Its principal strength lies in the fact that it is championed by minds sufficiently ignorant of things as they are in reality to venture boldly to promise mankind happiness. The social illusion reigns to-day upon all the heaped-up ruins of the past, and to it belongs the future. The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. (109-110)
The lessons of pre-pomo history:
To find out that a society is not to be refashioned from top to bottom in accordance with the dictates of pure reason, it was necessary that several millions of men should be massacred and that Europe should be profoundly disturbed for a period of twenty years.(111)
LeBon didn't know that there were two world wars to follows.
They had to have a better way to fight their wars.... They did --
turn the world into an image and have it on the screen! Give it
to them, let them experience it without bloodshed.
It is the need not of liberty but of servitude that is always predominant in the soul of crowds. They are so bent on obedience that they instinctively submit to whoever declares himself their master. (122)
That was and always will be a single engine of their progress. They always will have Master. Even if they have to manufacture Him.
That's why they do love commercials!
[ image ]
II. THE LEADERS
I am asking you to fight them. I asking you to separate yourself from them! Especially, if you are their leader. Democracy let the slaves to be happy slaves, but you must know how to treat the slave and free man. You need to learn how to recognize them in the crowd.
(2) THE MEANS OF ACTION OF THE LEADERS: AFFIRMATION, REPETITION, CONTAGION
Affirmation pure and simple, kept free of all reasoning and all proof, is one of the surest means of making an idea enter the mind of crowds. The conciser an affirmation is, the more destitute of every appearance of proof and demonstration, the more weight it carries.
The religious books and the legal codes of all ages have always resorted to simple affirmation. Statesmen called upon to defend a political cause, and commercial men pushing the sale of their products by means of advertising are acquainted with the value of
affirmation.
Affirmation, however, has no real influence unless it be constantly repeated, and so far as possible in the same terms. It was Napoleon, I believe, who said that there is only one figure in rhetoric of serious importance, namely, repetition. The thing affirmed comes by repetition to fix itself in the mind in such a way that it is accepted in the end as a demonstrated truth.
The influence of repetition on crowds is comprehensible when the power is seen which it exercises on the most enlightened minds. This power is due to the fact that the repeated statement is embedded in the long run in those profound regions of our unconscious selves in
which the motives of our actions are forged. At the end of a certain time we have forgotten who is the author of the repeated assertion, and we finish by believing it. To this circumstance is due the astonishing power of advertisements. (126-127)
.... 30 seconds is enough. More than enough. But it has to be repeat 30 times. Day after day.
When an affirmation has been sufficiently repeated and there is unanimity in this repetition -- as has occurred in the case of certain famous financial undertakings rich enough to purchase every assistance -- what is called a current of opinion is formed and
the powerful mechanism of contagion intervenes. Ideas, sentiments, emotions, and beliefs possess in crowds a contagious power as intense as that of microbes. This phenomenon is very natural, since it is observed even in animals when they are together in number. Should a horse in a stable take to biting his manger the other horses in the stable will imitate him. A panic that has seized on a few sheep will soon extend to the whole flock. In the case of men collected in a crowd all emotions are very rapidly contagious, which explains the suddenness of panics. Brain disorders, like madness, are themselves contagious. The frequency of madness among doctors who are specialists for the mad is notorious. Indeed, forms of madness have recently been cited -- agoraphobia, for instance -- which are communicable from men to animals. (128)
Human, too human -- you said. Why didn't you tell me more? Marx added: Man is nothing, time is everything. He didn't tell -- man of men. He was not a scientist.
III. MIMESIS
I have to fight. I will fight.... Even after my loses. Because of my lost....
Very long quotation:
"Man, like animals, has a natural tendency to imitation. Imitation is a necessity for him, provided always that the imitation is quite easy. It is this necessity that makes the influence of what is called fashion so powerful. Whether in the matter of opinions, ideas, literary manifestations, or merely of dress, how many persons are bold enough to run counter to the fashion? It is by examples not by arguments that crowds are guided. At every period there exists a small number of individualities which react upon the remainder and are imitated by the unconscious mass. It is needful however, that these individualities should not be in too pronounced disagreement with received ideas. Were they so, to imitate them would be too difficult and their influence would be nil. For this very reason men who are too superior to their epoch are generally without influence upon it. The line of separation is too strongly marked. For the same reason too Europeans, in spite of all the advantages of their civilization, have so insignificant an influence on Eastern people; they differ from them to too great an extent.
"The dual action of the past and of reciprocal imitation renders, in the long run, all the men of the same country and the same period so alike that even in the case of individuals who would seem destined to escape this double influence, such as philosophers, learned men, and men of letters, thought and style have a family air which enables the age to which they belong to be immediately recognized. It is not necessary to talk for long with an individual to attain to a thorough knowledge of what he reads, of his habitual occupations, and of the surroundings amid which he lives." Gustave LeBon, "L'Homme et les Societes," vol. ii. p. 116. 1881. (129-130)
.... Sure, she can do it. God bless America. What else does she have? She can give and take back her little body. But this rape I can't face. It's not so intellectual, it's real. It's not her brains. Its' her. I can't stand it. Every idiot can come and fuck her, because of the democracy and equality?
"Prestige lost by want of success disappears in a brief space of time." (145)
What do we "think"? A pool! How else would we know what we think? Mass media is a reflectory mechanism of nation-crowd, its super-ego.
The close watching of the course of opinion has become today the principal preoccupation of the press and of governments. (160)
Written a century ago! What could be said about us?
This total absence of any sort of direction of opinion, and at the same time the destruction of general beliefs, have had for final result an extreme divergence of convictions of every order, and a growing indifference on the part of crowds to everything that does not plainly touch their immediate interests. (161)
The crowd is a technology of history, a machine of progress, a neutral agent (tool). It has to stay this way to be reshaped, redesigned, improved.
These two kinds of multitudes may, under certain influences investigated in this work, be transformed into organized or psychological crowds. We shall break up these organized crowds into the following divisions: -- 1. Anonymous crowds (street crowds, for example). A. Heterogeneous crowds. 2. Crowds not anonymous (juries,
parliamentary assemblies, &c.).
1. Sects (political sects, religious sects, &c.).
2. Castes (the military caste, B. Homogeneous the priestly
caste, the crowds. working caste, &c.).
3. Classes (the middle classes, the peasant classes, &c.).
(165-166)
You're not about to argue with them, I hope. Let them have an illusion of equality, Al the French. The sects, castes and classes -- they are all here. Nothing is forgotten or lost. Look and you will see them -- the peasants, the soldiers, the priests.
ELECTORAL crowds -- that is to say, collectivities invested with the power of electing the holders of certain functions -- constitute heterogeneous crowds, but as their action is confined to a single clearly determined matter, namely, to choosing between different candidates, they present only a few of the characteristics previously described. Of the characteristics peculiar to crowds, they display in particular but slight aptitude for reasoning, the absence of the critical spirit, irritability, credulity, and simplicity. In their decision, moreover, is to be traced the influence of the leaders of crowds and the part played by the factors we have enumerated: affirmation, repetition, prestige, and contagion. (189-190)
Globalism is the total. Total freedom means total slavery.
Herbert Spencer has shown, in a work already old, that the increase of apparent liberty must needs be followed by the decrease of real liberty. Returning to this contention in his recent book, "The Individual versus the State," he thus expresses himself with regard to the English Parliament: --
"Legislation since this period has followed the course, I pointed out. Rapidly multiplying dictatorial measures have continually tended to restrict individual liberties, and this in two ways. Regulations have been established every year in greater number, imposing a constraint on the citizen in matters in which his acts were formerly completely free, and forcing him to accomplish acts which he was formerly at liberty to accomplish or not to accomplish at will. At the same time heavier and heavier public, and especially local, burdens have still further restricted his liberty by diminishing the portion of his profits he can spend as he chooses, and by augmenting the portion which is taken from him to be spent according to the good pleasure of the public authorities." (224)
Do we need Darwin II to write about Man and Men? We're still looking for a "missing link" between apes and humans; should we study ourselves?
.... Maybe I should surrender. After all I lost her. Yes, this Y2K got me. McDonald's Corp. and the crowds finally reprogrammed her brains. They made her American. It's all just a matter of software, you know. The only problem that she didn't know the secret: she never will be like them. I knew it already about myself... Now I only can see her agony, which she will deny. Like many. Just another face in the super-market crowd.
NOTES
All quotes are from _The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind_ Gustave LeBon, MacMillan NY 1896.
Also, see "Revolt of the Masses" and "Democracy in America" notes.
This is a new arrival from my hard drive and I am not sure that this chapter will make it to the book.
I am searching for the STYLE of this book. It must be different from the one I am working on right now -- SELF. But I come back to the same format.
new: 2003 *
