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BAck before 9/11 and the wars that led to it, the main focus of the international protests was globalization itself. Things came to a head in Seattle in November 1999 when 50,000 protesters disrupted a World Trade Organization party. The ensuing “Battle of Seattle,” as it came to be known, brought untold attention to the growing unrest over the imbalances of the unrestricted free market. This is how, a few months later, I found myself smack in the middle of the anti-neoliberal scene, the “MayDay 2K” protests in London.
My experience of protesting in high school was a nightmare, more like a prank than a protest. Socks down, shirt untucked – take that, man! But again times were good, even a bag of rats. I didn’t have many complaints. At least, nothing could be solved by protests against powerful institutions that were not my parents.
In London that changed on May Day 2000. It was more idle curiosity than emotion that brought me to Whitehall that day.
Gathering under the well-known theme of horticultural culture, the protest against the whole world aimed at restoring the streets for the sake of nature: resistance is good. Happy hippos planted shrubs and flowers in the grassy square opposite Big Ben, while gang gardeners were tearing up and relocating to block the surrounding road.
The crowd was great; it stretched from narrow Whitehall to Trafalgar Square, where many protesters threw themselves on the lions of Nelson’s Column.
At around 2pm riot police rushed into Whitehall to cut the protesters into two groups, moving in to surround them both. Then came the horses.
There is no more vivid and vivid memory I have than the line of police horses chasing me – 700kg horses towering over us, thunderous hooves clattering down the paved road, and the screams of protesters scattered in all directions. All courage, worry and emotions went out the window and I looked down to see my amygdala had already escaped my legs before I even thought about it. Even now, more than 25 years later, I still feel fear in my gut when I remember what happened to write this paragraph. Scientifically, let me tell you why. When the oldest parts of my brain took over – the parts that do instinctive, not rational – the amygdala sent a distress signal to release adrenaline and other hormones to quickly get me out of harm’s way. The upper brain, which would have given the events and sequence of these memories but gets in the way when you run away from your life, shuts down – leaving only the memory of how I lived. to hear.
Socially, the gathering changed during that time. When groups experience a great emotion together, such as a collective release of adrenaline, the nature of the event changes with it. We were very angry because we were surrounded on both sides by riot police but nowhere to go. Together. It spreads like a contagion from person to person. The first victim was McDonald’s, the great symbol of global capitalism that had the misfortune to find itself in the same pen as the newly enraged critics. The McRobin Hoods came in and threw burgers into the crowd.
Planters became painters. Vegans became spoilers. Leninists became dictators.
I could feel something change in me, too. Suddenly I he said something has been taken from me. My right to move. My self-control. My feelings are safe. But most of all I was a blocker – nature’s sure way of bringing about an animal response.
So I got angry. Angry about so many things I didn’t know I was angry about.
Anger at the police. Who were suddenly not part of the scene I was watching, but part of a tribe I was against – a group outside of my own group. My music turned into a scream. I screamed straight at a policeman who blindfolded me.
His soldier came out and I quickly received a harsh lesson in the corporate government’s control of violence.
I am not telling this story as I used to live with my youth – but to explain how, when we are in society, we show inappropriate behavior. Gustave Le Bon was the first thinker to put forward the idea that crowds have their own mind, more than the sum of its individual parts – one group of “group mind” that was bent, in this case, in the destruction of McDonald’s. Le Bon saw this phenomenon during the Paris Commune of 1871 when the French army and Communards spent months brutally killing each other in the blood-soaked streets of Paris.
Le Bon had a front seat to the whole thing, watching Parisians from all walks of life get lost in the psychology of the masses: “In solitude, he can be a cultivated man; in a crowd, he is an outsider.”
Félicie Gimet was a Communarde who had a good relationship with Father Pierre Olivaint, the priest who arrested her. When the French army began to kill the Parisians who had surrendered, Gimet entered the priest’s room and began to laugh with him, ‘Since I will get you a martyr’s helmet, I think you will save me a place in Heaven.’
“I will not fail,” answered the priest happily.
When the hostages were beaten in the streets, Father Olivaint on their heads, the crowd that had gathered grew larger. Something in Gimet said: “They are killing all of you, religious leaders or terrorists!” He shot the priest with his gun and set the box on fire.
The group took out guns and bullets, and killed everyone they caught. “My God, forgive them, as I forgive them,” Gimet heard Father Olivaint speak with his last breath.
That a woman can turn so quickly from a romantic slander to a fearless murder speaks to the power of the collective emotions that Le Bon saw. As a doctor who knows his job well, he compared what he saw with what scientists have recently discovered about pathogens that spread from one person to another. “Thoughts, ideas, and beliefs have the power to spread through a crowd like viruses.”
Like me, Gimet did not start his day thinking that he would kill many priests. Although I am not saying that I would have been circumcised, he felt that what he did that day – thanks to the power of the group – was “a very good thing”.
This is what happens in today’s world, with internet trolls and internet rage. Not all of us are serial killers, although we often act like one online. The unknown breaks down our usual self-control, freezes our intelligence and allows our old tools to take over. We are attracted to the crowd, so we feel good when we treat our enemies badly.
As Harvard psychologist Amit Goldenberg says, “one of the oldest known human behaviors is that when people come together, they are more emotional than they would be if they were isolated”.
Usually, a person who has a negative attitude is encouraged to reduce it. We don’t want to be angry. We don’t want to be sad. We take steps to reduce those feelings. As individuals, our thoughts become fixed over time. In groups, the opposite happens. Depression lasts longer and is more intense. There is no incentive to direct them – in fact, the incentive is to get them going, because they feel it nice meet and express feelings together, even anger.
This is why anger is unique when it comes to contagion. Anger is measles. Years after Le Bon doubted it, researchers proved how contagious anger is: more than sadness. And moral anger is very powerful. The researchers called it “moral diffusion”.
Sharing the ideas of the group in this way is beneficial to us. It gives us a strong sense of identity and being part of a group, as well as strong emotions. Depression is a positive experience in group settings – even if we are not in a group setting. We do this online, with people we’ve never met.
There are good evolutionary reasons for this. While early scholars such as Le Bon considered the “group mentality” to be a mistake that hinders thinking, today we realize that being together creates a sense of unity and solidarity that makes people’s lives possible. Émile Durkheim called this “social tenacity” – the dynamic, shared power that binds people together and strengthens our society.
In 2019 in Chile, widespread dissatisfaction with economic inequality saw large groups of people take to the streets for several months. Researchers found that participants who discussed their feelings were more likely to describe the experience in positive terms – such as “justice”, “courage” and “respect”. Anger, in this context, was a good tool for collective action. Moral anger is necessary to address the ways in which the world is not as it should be.
But anger, with which others are proud of us and make us angry, on the other hand, has taken away these virtues, so that they do not unite us together, but separate us. This causes frustration. We don’t just ‘catch’ the thoughts of others, we also hear our own thoughts instead of of our group.
This is an adapted version of Angertainment by Ed Coper, out here though Simon & Schuster.
