Two’s a Crowd
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THE INFLUENCE OF GROUPS
It is important to recognize that group behaviour is not, in itself, unusual. In fact, groups emerge as a result of the same basic laws that apply to the rest of nature. As Erich Jantsch2 has shown, building on the implications of quantum physics, all of nature consists of multi-levelled structures. Each level in this hierarchy has the power to organize its lower levels and use them for its own purposes. Consequently, each level is able to perpetuate itself or maintain its identity despite changes in its individual components. This hierarchical structure applies to human society: individuals become members of groups, groups merge to form societies and societies merge to form civilizations.
THE INSIGHTS OF GUSTAVE LE BON
One of the first people to analyze the phenomenon of human groups in any detail was Gustave Le Bon.6 He was fascinated by the influence and role of a very particular type of group – namely, the crowd – in the unfolding of the French Revolution. His seminal book The Psychology of Crowds was written in 1895, but it still stands out as a classic of social psychology. Its analysis has been validated by subsequent analysts such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, as well as by theorists such as Arthur Koestler. Its conclusions have been found to be applicable to such diverse historical phenomena as the Nuremberg Rallies and the Holocaust in Nazi Germany; the attempted destruction of ‘bourgeois’ and reactionary values during the Cultural Revolution in China; and the attempted elimination of individualism by the Khmer Rouge in the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Le Bon saw a crowd as being primarily a psychological phenomenon rather than a physical one (although the two concepts are not necessarily mutually exclusive). He considered that any number of otherwise independent and spatially separate individuals could form a crowd, provided that the members had a common cause. This, of course, confirms the idea that ‘crowd’-type pressures can be found in a large range of groupings. They can, for example, be found in companies, football teams, armies, religious sects and patriotic nation states, as well as riotous mobs. As we shall see, they can also be found in financial markets. Le Bon himself argued that:
The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind that makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation . . .What really takes place [in the formation of a crowd] is a combination followed by the creation of new characteristics, just as in chemistry certain elements, when brought into contact . . . combine to form a new body possessing properties quite different from those of the bodies that have served to form it.
This profound insight into the nature of crowds used two important concepts:
a crowd is something other than the sum of its parts – in particular, a crowd has an effective ‘mind’ of its own;
each individual’s behaviour is altered by their membership of a crowd.
These two concepts are now central to the general theory of group behaviour. Within this theory, the phenomenon of the crowd presents itself as a special, and extreme, case.
THE GROUP’S ABILITY TO ORGANIZE ITSELF
From the group’s point of view, it is crucial to its own autonomy that it can ‘organize’ its own membership. This is the only way that energy can be directed towards the overall objectives of the group. Such ‘self’-organization operates through the group’s belief system. To be a member of a group, an individual has to accept uncritically the same beliefs as other members of the group. In 1961, the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion proposed that these beliefs were ‘basic assumptions’ held by group members. In 1976, Richard Dawkins called the beliefs/assumptions ‘memes’. A meme is a simple, self-replicating idea (or habit, or feeling, or sense of things) that spreads from mind to mind. The presence of a particular meme does not necessarily exclude other memes, so a group member can belong to more than one group. However, whatever term might be used for the commonly held beliefs, group members will necessarily suppress behaviour that might cause them to be excluded from the group. In other words, a person’s individuality – or self-assertiveness – will be modified by group membership. This situation obviously means two things:
the more intense is the integrative pull of a group, the less is the degree of individuality that is allowed.
it is the like-mindedness of group members that gives the group its cohesion.
A group therefore organizes its members via a unifying belief system. In this way, a group becomes something more than just the sum of its parts and group members will reveal a sense of altruism towards one another in the context of group activity. Hence – whether they overtly recognize it or not – group members will act in the interests of the group as a whole.
MIND AS A DYNAMIC PRINCIPLE
This analysis has necessarily been very brief and hardly does justice to the concepts involved. Nevertheless, we now have the tools to enable us to look a little more closely at the idea of a group ‘mind’. This idea is not an easy one either to grasp or to convey. Part of the difficulty lies in our language itself. As commonly used, the word ‘mind’ is taken to refer to that part of the physical structure of the brain that is capable of self-aware, rational thought. According to this view, people have minds, but animals do not. However, this usage not only ignores the role of the so-called ‘subconscious’ mind, but assumes that the physical structure of the brain is identical to, and provides the defining limits for, the inner processes of the mind.
The best way to understand the difference between the concept of ‘brain’ and the concept of ‘mind’ is to recognize that the brain is the structure, while the mind is the processing capabilities that are originated within that structure. Importantly, however, the processes of the mind are not confined to the boundaries established by the physical brain: laterally, the processes extend through the living body, dealing with automatic functions, physical movement and emotions; and, vertically, they extend (layer upon layer) into the depths of the personality. These processes are known generically as ‘mentation’.
The essential point to grasp at this stage is that mentation is primafacie evidence of the phenomenon of life. This was the profound insight of the great philosopher and biologist Gregory Bateson. Bateson found that exactly the same characteristics that define mentation in the human brain can be found both in all the other processes of the human body and in every aspect of nature. Mentation is actually a logical process – a single dynamic blueprint – that is the very hallmark of life on this planet. It does not, therefore, have to be encased in any particular physical structure and, conceptually, can extend beyond all physical structures. The difference between mentation in the human mind and mentation in other aspects of nature is in the quality, or depth, of consciousness. Only human mentation allows for thinking to be aware of itself.
Bateson’s own criteria for the existence of mind (that is, the existence of ‘life’) in any system were essentially four-fold, namely:
the ability to control functions that are internal to the system;
the ability of the system to process information;
the presence of fluctuations in the processing of that information;
the existence of a continuous exchange of energy and information between the system and its environment.
As we shall see, these criteria produce some very important insights into human behaviour.
THE GROUP MIND
Bateson’s criteria for the existence of mind extended the concept to include all aspects of the living universe and, it may be said, added an important new dimension both to the conclusions of the New Physics and to the framework of the scientific process. Hence, the concept of mind can be used not only to describe the phenomenon of life, but also to describe and explain any particular ‘unit’ of life. It can be found in both the most simple and the most complicated of processes. In terms of human society, it can be found in the dynamics of people’s relationships with one another: it can be found in a small group of people, in a physical crowd, in a nation state or in a whole culture. An individual’s mind may (in a non-self-assertive state) be regarded as a subsystem of a greater whole. Each whole, in turn, has a ‘collective mind’ that organizes its own parts. From this analysis we could say that each and every human grouping may be said to have a collective consciousness.
THE TRIUNE HUMAN BRAIN
As already observed, however, the collective consciousness of a human grouping is qualitatively different from the consciousness of an individual human being. The former is essentially simplistic and is not usually recognized, while the latter is not fully understood, even though it is accepted. The essential difference between the two phenomena is that a group does not have the ability to be aware of its own existence, whereas an individual does have such an ability. And it is this difference that is so important to our study of the influence of a crowd. The fact is that, as described by Le Bon, crowd behaviour involves a dramatic suppression of self-awareness by individuals and an increase in the power of the group entity that is, by definition, not self-aware in the first place. The ‘total’ quality of consciousness therefore deteriorates. As Scott Peck put it, ‘groups are, from a psychological standpoint, less than the sum of the parts’.
We can isolate two aspects to this important phenomenon. First, when an individual adopts a group belief, then, by definition, they also accept a reduction in self-awareness. This is so because the boundaries between the individual and the group become blurred. However, a reduction in self-awareness necessarily happens in all group behaviour. What makes crowd behaviour so distinctive is the degree to which an individual’s self-awareness is suppressed. It seems almost as if there is a switch somewhere in the brain that flicks self-awareness to ‘off’ whenever a crisis arises.
This brings us to the second aspect of the deterioration in the quality of consciousness that accompanies the crowd phenomenon. There does seem to be something of a fault-line within the structure of the human brain. The problem stems from the fact that the brain consists of three main processing areas that can, to some extent, operate independently of one another. Each part is structurally and chemically different from the other parts, and appears to have its own intelligence, its own memory and its own separate functions. The brain stem (the innermost part of the brain) is concerned primarily with instinctive behaviour patterns, biological drives and compulsive behaviour. Surrounding this part is the limbic system, which is mainly involved with the recreation of external experiences in the ‘inner’ world, and with emotional activity. Importantly, it is also the area of the brain that is most concerned with group activities. Finally, the neocortex (the outermost part of the brain) deals with the ability both to be aware of the thought process itself, and to anticipate the future and recreate the past. It also contains the areas of the brain (the so-called ‘frontal lobes’) that are most involved with concern for humanity. Because of its three-fold nature, the American neurophysiologist Paul D Maclean has called the human brain the ‘triune’ brain.
THE NEOCORTEX
Of the three areas, it is undoubtedly the neocortex that (among other things) separates humankind from other mammals. The evolutionary history of the neocortex is, however, uncertain. No one really knows when (or how, or why) it first appeared. Current guesswork suggests it developed only during the last 50 million years or so. This compares with more than 150 million years for the limbic system, and more than 250 million years for the brain stem. Importantly, evidence from the evolution of civilization18 suggests that the specific abilities associated with the neocortex have only developed within a very recent period. The modern ego – that is, the tendency of mental processes to organize themselves in such a way as to assert themselves as an independent entity – seems only to have arisen some four thousand (or so) years ago. The ego, therefore, is very young in terms of evolution. We can therefore hypothesize that the operation of the neocortex can easily be overwhelmed for two related reasons:
the neocortex has still not yet been properly integrated with theother two parts of the brain;
the capability of ‘self’-awareness is still likely to give way to morearchaic states of consciousness when an ‘external’ authority is favoured.
THE AMYGDALA
In fact, research by Joseph LeDoux at New York University has found that the main problem almost certainly rests with a tiny part of the human brain known as the ‘amygdala’. The amygdala is a small neural cluster that lies between the brain stem and the limbic system. It is responsible both for storing information about emotional events and for scanning the environment for patterns that match those events. Despite the fact that it is very small (about an inch long), it receives a vast range of inputs from the visual, auditory and olfactory systems, and it connects to innate behaviours and physiological responses via the brain stem. Once aroused, the amygdala immediately triggers an emotional and physiological reaction. The critical point is that the arousal starts before the neocortex has even had a chance to register an incoming signal. If the arousal relates to a threat, and if the threat is significant, then the neocortex has very little chance to intervene. Consequently, we might jump out of the way of an oncoming bus or remove our hand from something hot, and only recognize what has happened after the event.
More generally, once a threat has been perceived and the amygdala has activated an emotional and physiological reaction, the range of potential behaviours tends to narrow down to the fight–flight–freeze complex. Since we all have limited experience, and none of us has access to all the available information, we become acutely aware of what others are doing. This is the trigger for the ‘herd’ instinct in human beings.
The amygdala has been implicated in emotions that generate feelings of well-being, as well as those that are fear-based. The fact remains, however, that its evolutionary function is to enhance survival prospects, and it can be aroused before we even realize it. Perhaps, for many of us, it is too sensitive and needs positive intervention to be ‘retrained’. In the meantime, it is quite obvious that the amygdala is influential in the formation of crowds.
THE RESPONSE TO A THREAT
Significantly, a crowd is most likely to emerge in the presence of a threat of some kind. A group of people can have a common cause, but will not be regarded as a crowd, as such, until a threat appears. A crowd has a certain urgency and immediacy to it, which is not necessarily present in a group. Hence, there are two possibilities:
a number of individuals will feel threatened in some way and then form a crowd;
a group already exists that is then sufficiently threatened to transmute into a crowd.
In either case, it is not fanciful to suggest that crowd members’ emergency amygdala circuits will be triggered. As a result:
group survival needs overwhelm individual self-assertiveness needs;
group beliefs replace personal beliefs;
the influence of the neocortex is overwhelmed by the influence of the brain stem and the limbic system.
Crowds are, accordingly, involved primarily with instincts, biological drives, compulsive behaviour and emotions. Hence, their behaviour is essentially non-rational (and is, in fact, often irrational). To paraphrase Arthur Koestler:
emotion and intellect, faith and reason, [are] at loggerheads. On the one side, [is] the pale cast of rational thought, of logic suspended on a thin thread all too easily broken; on the other, [is] the raging fury of passionately held irrational beliefs, reflected in the holocausts of past and present history.
THE ‘INTELLIGENCE’ OF CROWDS
This certainly helps to explain the popularly held delusion that all members of a crowd are unintelligent: it is not that they are unintelligent as such – it is that their ability to remain self-aware and think logically becomes suppressed in the face of a threat. This is as true of pairs of individuals confronted with a challenge (such as a couple whose child-rearing abilities are criticized) as it is of a large group of people facing a physical threat (such as a military unit under fire).
Whether or not the challenge to a crowd is physical, it almost certainly involves a threat to its underlying belief system. As a result, the strength of this belief system becomes intensified and severe limitations are accordingly imposed on the quality of data that the crowd will recognize as genuine information. Gregory Bateson defined information as ‘differences which make a difference’. A crowd mind can usually only perceive differences that are relatively large and that occur over very short periods of time. In other words, a crowd will only recognize obvious changes. Slow changes can be observed only by the lengthy process of continually, and rationally, scanning all the potentially relevant data. Crowds are incapable of such analysis: they think in terms of simple images and communicate with slogans. As they emerge in times of crisis, they are all too often the main vehicle for historical ‘progress’.
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