Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Most people are insane.

As we await the results of the British EU election, I am enjoying, sometimes in a perverse way, watching Carl Benjamin/Sargon of Akkad’s YouTube videos of himself campaigning. He engages interested passersby in an exchange of views.

Sargon has been branded by both the left and the Mainstream Media—if there is a distinction here—as “far right.” Yet his views seem, down the line, classically liberal. By any traditional measure, up until perhaps the last dozen years or less, he is on the moderate left. He is also a master of the admirable English tradition of polite political discourse with those with whom you disagree. I would never have his patience.

So why is he frequently attacked with milkshakes? More frequently, in fact, than the less moderate-mannered Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farage?

One guy he interviewed, initially intensely hostile, turned out to have views very similar to Sargon’s on every issue he heatedly raised. Right up until Sargon brought up the matter of Pakistani Muslim “grooming gangs” in the north of Britain. At which point the interviewee started ranting incoherently, would not let Sargon state his position, and stormed off. Another bystander, apparently a member of the town council, then came up and told Sargon he was not welcome in their town.

I'd like to link to the video, but, oddly, it seems to have been removed from YouTube. That may itself be telling.

Sargon’s point was that these particular Pakistani Muslims and their brand of Islam were intolerant and racist. The interviewees were apparently adamant that to call anyone who was not “white” racist was racist. An obvious logical contradiction, and an obviously racist attitude.

Sargon’s interlocutors abruptly ceased being rational. It was a plainly hysterical reaction. It was not simply that the two people could not follow Sargon’s argument, either; it was not stupidity. That could not account for refusing to hear it, or for the sudden rage. It was “denial,” in psycho lingo: knowing their own view was wrong, and refusing to accept this.

One of the great benefits of religion is that it teaches that most people are insane. That insight is most helpful in such cases.

This may sound odd. But it is fairly obviously so. Lots of people are now acting just like this guy in the video. It may well be a majority of the public, in the UK or in Canada. Many or most people are denying obvious realities on a variety of topics: not just on immigration, but on feminism, where Sargon is also attacked and not listened to, or on the half-dozen other subjects everyone knows will cause someone to become agitated or even violent if brought up in public: abortion, transsexualism, Donald Trump, and so forth.

Whenever this happens, this fairly obviously happens because one side knows they are wrong, and is consciously in denial. Inevitably, and self-evidently, this is the side that wants to shut talk down and resort to force.

A critical problem with modern psychology and psychology is that, not having any valid philosophical foundation, it denies this basic truth. It defines “sanity” as “thinking the same way most people think.” This is obviously wrong: it is the ad populum fallacy. Einstein thought very differently from his peers about relativity. By this logic, then, he was simply insane.

Religion in general, and Christianity and Buddhism in particular, teaches instead that most people are likely to be fundamentally wrong in their perceptions or assertions. And they explain why: guilty conscience; Buddhism would say “desire.”

Raising a second critical problem with modern psychiatry and psychology: that it ignores morals. A dehumanizing omission. As here, the denial and the hysteria seems always based on some implicit moral issue. Many if not most people are irrational on subjects where their conscience is troubled. Abortion is the obvious example. But it is people who are themselves clearly racist who seem most eager to accuse others of racism: it is a form of instinctive scapegoating. Feminism, too, is arguably best explained as a mask over a tacit awareness of female privilege, and guilt as a result; women have traditionally been placed on a pedestal, at least in the West. They did not have to go out and get killed in the World Wars, Korea, or Vietnam. They were exempt from the draft.

The New Testament has the straight goods:

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.

Jesus further suggests that this will commonly be the majority.

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

Buddhism’s claims on this are even more extreme.

If it is indeed the majority, the influence of modern psychiatry and psychology actually appears as pernicious. The appeal ad populum is an easy way to justify immorality, and so to sustain one’s personal madness.

This seems, in turn, the fatal error of modern mainstream Christianity: it has come to simply hold that whatever the majority of the congregation wants to assert as true and moral, is true and moral. This assumption is actually incompatible with religion; man does not create God. So that anyone who is religious will fall away.

Newfoundland and Beyond

He blew it.

The recent Newfoundland provincial election conforms in broad strokes to my theory that politics are getting more radical and more disaffected. In this heat, the middle-of-the-pavement Liberals beat back, barely, what might have been another in a recent string of Conservative provincial victories. The polls again were wrong. A Conservative win, however, would have been historic—Newfoundland and Labrador voters are not inclined to turf out governments quickly, and this one had been in for only one term. Even so, they were reduced to a minority. 

I think they did no worse because the Tories under Crosbie chose the wrong strategy. They fought the Liberals for the centre. “Vote for me! Nothing will change!”

This is a good strategy only if the electorate is simply tired of the government; or if they are corrupt. Not smart against a one-term government. There was as a result really nothing to choose in terms of policy or ideology between the Rouge and the Bleu. The disaffected had no ballot option, no way to “send a message” if they wanted change. This was the old cynical politics.

Instead, as a result, we had a surge in independents. We might have seen a surge in the NDP too, but for the fact that they were caught flat-footed, and did not run candidates in most ridings.

In other, related news, Drudge reports a recent Gallup poll finding that 40% of Americans now identify themselves as pro-socialism. It used to be around 25%, back in Stalin’s day. Greater polarization and radicalization, again.

This seems incompatible with the recent poll surge for Joe Biden as a “moderate” in the Democratic primary stakes.

Either poll may be wrong—polling has been wrong a lot lately. But if 40% of the American electorate is now socialist, that translates to 80% or so of Democrats. If Biden has 40% of the Democratic vote, that means that 50% of his vote must be pro-socialist, and ideologically more aligned with other candidates. They are probably only parking their votes, then, and can be easily stripped off. If they are supporting him now, it is not because he is a moderate. Perhaps they just don’t know what he or the other candidates stand for yet. His natural ideological ceiling, even if the only moderate in the race, is 20%. His current boom is probably a mirage.

Some, it is true, might just have as their first priority somehow stopping Trump, and be gravitating to Biden on those grounds. But that does not tend to be the usual reaction, even in the case of a President despised by the other side. The Dems ran the ideological Mondale against Reagan for his second term. They ran the ideological McGovern against Nixon for his.

Moving over to Britain, we again see evidence of growing polarization. Milkshakes have been flung now at Nigel Farage, Carl Benjamin, and Tommy Robinson. It’s becoming a thing. Heavier projectiles have been aimed at Benjamin and Robinson, and things seem to be escalating. For Britain, this seems shocking public rudeness.

While Farage, Benjamin, and Robinson represent a radicalization of politics on the right, it is the reaction on the left that seems truly extreme. These three have all been declared beyond the realm of permissible discourse, “racists,” “Nazis.” Yet their public positions are not at all extreme. Benjamin seems to simply be a liberal. Farage is concentrating at least for now only on the issue of leaving the EU, something a majority of Britons demonstrably support. Robinson is more radical: critical of Islam and Muslim immigration.

But if the left finds this last troublesome, they are being remarkably hypocritical. Until perhaps two minutes ago, by my watch, the left was loudly criticising Islam. They were demanding invasions to end female genital mutilation. They were protesting the US being in alliance with “intolerant” “fundamentalist” Saudi Arabia who oppressed women. They were insisting the burkha was oppressive; and so on.

Obviously, it is not opposition to Islam that troubles them about Robinson, or about UKIP.

It is the sense that they are losing their power. 

Storming of the Bastille, July 14, 1889.

Most often, these extremists on the left when unmasked turn out to be teachers and professors.

These are not a powerless or disenfranchised group. This is an elite. This is a group invested with a good deal of power, privilege, and material comfort. They simply feel they deserve more.

They expect to be respected and obeyed. Because they are supposedly superior. Increasingly, they are not.

That, it seems to me, is the source of all the radicalism on the left.

It looks like hysteria. And it is perfectly self-destructive. The growing radicalism of this "elite" is sure over time to shake the allegiance of remaining members of the general public still inclined to defer to their established authority.

Again, I think we are seeing a collapse of an ancien regime. 

Where Great Leaders Come From

Put him in power, and who knows what he'll do?

A generation ago, Ronald Reagan was president in the US; Margaret Thatcher was PM in Britain; and John Paul II was in charge at the Vatican. All three generally acknowledged as great leaders. How did we happen to get all three at once? And, by comparison, nobody of comparable stature since?

This is not the first time this question has come up in my lifetime. In the seventies, people were feeling about the same way. A generation of great leaders had passed on, and nobody of comparable stature had appeared since. Churchill, FDR, De Gaulle, Tito, Nehru, Kenyatta, Adenauer, Ben-Gurion, had all been in power at the same time.

Then suddenly, just when we had despaired of it all, along came a new wave of greats.

How come? And why do great leaders seem to come in waves? The answer seems to be that they are always available, but rarely reach power. Churchill, for example, was always there, and well-known, but never put in charge. Politics as usual does not produce the best leaders, because politics is the art of compromise. It produces able tacticians, deft compromisers, but not men or women of vision. Yet vision is what is needed for true leadership. Warren G. Harding, Neville Chamberlain; these are the solid compromise choices.

It takes a time of crisis for the ordinary math to be set aside. People need to be desperate to give someone strong the helm. Of course, this does not always work out well; but when it does, it does.

A striking resemblance to Meryl Streep.

World War II threw up a good share of strong leaders. So did the independence movements that followed. Then things were going well, and there was no need for strong leaders. The Churchills were left painting and bricklaying. The crisis of separatism in Quebec threw up Pierre Trudeau; perhaps a mixed blessing. The crisis of stagflation in the Seventies threw up Thatcher and Reagan. The crisis in the Catholic Church following Vatican II threw up JPII. They went on, once in command, of course, to win the Cold War into the bargain. But it first has to get bad, for anyone to take the risk of putting them in power.

With all respect to our American cousins, I have always thought that the Westminster system was better for this task of putting the best leader in power when needed. If the times call for a certain man, the matter can be accomplished in Britain in a matter of days, as it was with Churchill. In the US, you have to hang on until the next scheduled election, and hope the country holds together by dumb luck until then.

Fighting them on the beaches.

Which brings us to the present. The prolonged period of recession, the ongoing financial crisis, the US’s growing debt, seems to suggest that this is a time when people might again turn to strong leaders, for good and ill. Ted Cruz, for one, seems to fit the bill in the US. Maybe also Rand Paul. In the UK, this is why Nigel Farage is making such inroads. Since Jack Layton died, I cannot think of any comparably commanding figures on the left. But it is a bad time to be middle-of-the-road. The usual logic of seizing the centre, I suspect, does not currently apply.