Socrates, Freud, Charlie Hebdo and “La Psychologie de la Foule Globale”

There’s a kind of tacit consensus, I guess, that those who annihilate themselves in the name of a god or a prophet in the course of annihilating their fellow-humans have, in some way, been indoctrinated by powerful and persuasive others at the centre of a nexus of influence.  This primary dynamic invariably gives rise to a kind of secondary indoctrination. Through this, the promoters of a belief system are able to reach through the objects of their immediate indoctrination to have a powerful and telling influence on the thinking and behaviour both of witnesses and of leaders whose role it is to respond to events and protect citizens from harm.  They are unknowingly inducted into a paradigm and narrative determined by those who indoctrinate: unwittingly, they have become partial converts.  Bright, sure-footed leaders become clumsy and bemused, resorting to the convergent, binary language of the enemy: for us/against us, good and evil, right and wrong, them and us, in-group and out-group; and ultimately, or primarily perhaps, good breast/bad breast.

Ideas are more powerful than guns: so change the language, change the thinking, change the response, change the relationship and change the future? Maybe. Questions, when well-framed and neutral, can also be an answer. A patient who pulled himself up from alcoholism and elemental despair to train as a mental health professional himself once told me – in a spirit of regret and resignation rather than anger: “I know the answers – I just wish some fucker would ask me the right questions”. His instinctive intelligence, undimmed by booze or what passed for education in the 1980s, had put him on the epistemological trail forged by Socrates a couple of millennia or so before. Again, maybe. If we respect his heartfelt plea, here are some questions which draw on the mass slaughter of a group of cartoonists in Paris in January 2015.

Is what I may have to say irrelevant and of no value because I am not French and was not directly involved?

How can we measure the value or weight of what a person may say about an event? Should it be according to the person’s status – as victim or a relative of a victim, to proximity to the event, to some other means of validation, to the intrinsic worth of what is said, or to some other criteria?

If I am an instinctive libertarian and believe in free speech, am I being inconsistent if I say we should watch what we say and not offend certain groups?

If I am a determined atheist, am I being inconsistent if I believe that religious groups, even extreme and hypersensitive ones, ought to be protected from insult?

If I don’t do what those who threaten me don’t want me to do, does this necessarily mean I am giving in to threats?

If I feel sad for someone who has done a terrible wrong, does this mean I am condoning his wrongdoing or insulting his victims?

If I feel sorry for those who seemingly revel in brandishing severed heads and random slaughter, am I abetting the aggressor and compounding the sorrow of the bereaved?

If we acknowledge but put to one side the fear, rage and revulsion we feel in response to events in Paris on 7th January 2015, how should we feel towards two young men, their humanity all but effaced, who engineered their own annihilation?

If I have some admiration for or understanding of the intensity of a person’s beliefs, does this mean I am guilty of collusion or appeasement?

If someone has a strongly held religious belief, does this mean we should not develop a psychological or secular understanding of what they may do in the name of that belief?

Would a secular explanation of a strongly held religious belief be an attack on or disparagement of that belief?

Is an unshakeable belief in liberal values of a different order or nature from an unshakeable conviction that a representation in any form of Mohammed must be avenged and offenders summarily punished?

Is the act of believing separable from the object of a belief? Is the act of believing something which we deem reasonable and rational, different in essence from the act of believing something extreme and absurd?

Is there a qualitative difference between a belief in Mohammed and the blasphemy of representing him in any form and a belief in an all-seeing God whose long-dead son will return to earth?

Are some spiritual, metaphysical or religious beliefs more rational or objectively valid than others? Is there a hierarchy of rationality or reasonableness? If so, who determines it?

Is atheism more rational than belief in a god, or God?

It seems to be in the nature of heinous acts that they elicit responses which come from the same cerebral territory or register. Posing philosophical questions appears insulting, grossly misplaced and irrelevant. Rather, we instinctively use a small lexicon of large, sweeping epithets, such as “barbaric”, “inhumane” or even “inhuman” or “animal” in order to convert events which are all but unspeakable into a form that we can at least voice. Nameless horror threatens to overwhelm us: to name is to tame, at least partly. Once a word can be found to attach to obscenely cruel and grotesque acts, the process of finding an antidote to the poison of their power and of ordering or managing them can begin.

The word barbaric has associations with barbe, barba, a beard, though this is a false etymological attribution. Nevertheless, it is packed full with highly pejorative and hostile sentiments. The barbarian is other, not-us, never-us, primitive, unreconstructed and alien – in fact, so profound a threat to us that extermination feels to be the only way of responding to it. The barbarian can never be co-opted, can never be party to compromise or reconciliation. The barbarian is dark-skinned and the pure, pale waters of the west can never mix with the dark toxic oil of the east. If he (and it is always he) is not dark, his soul is dark.

Such barbarity is often characterised as mediaeval; that is, something which belongs to a distant past but maybe still gives out faint, fading echoes like the black box of a plane which lies at the bottom of the ocean. This linear view of time and man, in which we gradually move from the dark to the light, from the primitive to the rational, or from folly to enlightenment, is compelling: that with the passage of time must come the progress of mankind seems logical and inevitable. Time seems to move forward, so mankind must also. This flow towards the light is characterised as civilisation; those who interrupt or hinder it are necessarily and by definition uncivilised and therefore barbarians.

But maybe, far from being involved in “the end of history”, to use Fukuyama’s discredited copywriter’s slogan, there is no history. History is us. That is to say, the fully-fledged capacity for acts of the most extreme violence arising out of ism, ideology or belief lives on in all of us, as potent and terrifying as it ever was. At the distant edge of our understanding, we know this to be true. The latest atrocity in Europe maps back onto the mass killing of shoppers in a market or children at school in Karachi or Kabul, which in turn goes back via the coolly premeditated slaughter of students in US schools and colleges, to 9:11, Treblinka, Dachau, Auschwitz and onwards.

These events differ in scale, scope and degree, of course, but they draw on the same dark well, sunk into the unconscious, although familiarity or closeness to home tends to breed competition and hierarchy. Thus, the spattering of the flesh of the passengers on a number 30 bus on the elegant facades of Bloomsbury or the tearing apart of a teacher by tethering his limbs to four motorbikes while still alive for offending the Taliban by teaching girls may be felt to rank lower than the systematic slaughter of six million Jews. But the source of the drive in each and its modus operandi are the same. And while the ideology or belief-system which are the motor of these events are time-bound and in a sense local, pathology is perpetual and universal.

Freud’s impatience with religion (his attitude to it very much having that feel about it) is well-known. His view was that “it forcibly fixes [people] into a state of psychical infantilism….by drawing them into a mass delusion”, such that learning, adaptation, choice and maturation are severely restricted. While an incidental benefit of this may be that believers are spared “individual neurosis”, overall it “presupposes an intimidation of intelligence”, distorts “the picture of the real world” and “consists in depressing the value of life”.

While this begs the question of what the real world or the value of life may be, there are key passages in his “Civilisation, Society and Religion” which offer a different narrative from the oscillating, binary one which it is so easy to succumb to. Many of them draw on “Psychologie des Foules” [Psychology of Crowds], a seminal treatise written 25 years earlier by Gustave le Bon, a French social psychologist.

Technology has created crowds whose members no longer have to travel. They are psychologically, if not physically, together. As a member of a crowd, whether actual or virtual, the individual is transformed from his “cultivated” self into “a creature acting by instinct”. Le Bon identified a number of elements of crowd mentality which Freud, unusually for him, takes as given.
• anonymity sees to it that “the sentiment of responsibility which always controls individuals disappears entirely”
• “conscious personality and discernment are lost”
• crowd members are “extraordinarily credulous and open to influence….and the improbable does not exist for [them]”
• feelings “are always very simple and very exaggerated”
• “a trace of antipathy is turned into furious hatred”
• “kindness is regarded as weakness….. [they] want to be ruled and oppressed and to fear [their] masters”
• the crowd is “entirely conservative and has a deep aversion to all innovations and advances and an unbounded respect for tradition”
• crowds “demand illusions and cannot do without them”

The provider of illusions is the leader who, in order to have influence, must also have what Le Bon called “prestige”, that is, “the mysterious and irresistible power” which “paralyses our critical faculty and fills us with wonderment and respect”. The medium which is manipulated by leaders consists of “ideas in which they themselves are fanatical believers”.

Crowd members are connected, now digitally rather than directly, by “contagion”, explained as “a primitive sympathetic response”. This means that “the perception of affect automatically arouses the same affect in the perceiver” and “the affective charge of the individual becomes intensified by mutual interaction”, such that conscience is effectively defused, along with the repression of “unconscious instinctual impulses” which impetuously seek out “free gratification”. This explains how absorption in to the crowd can transform football-loving young men, often with jobs and young children, into assassins.

A theory such as this cannot be true but it can ring true, as this one surely does. If we temporarily accept it to be true, not so much for the sake of argument as for the sake of considering whether its implications for action also ring true, different, alternative responses present themselves. First, we shouldn’t try to counteract extremist indoctrination by saying it is evil or outlandish but by saying it is indoctrination. Secondly, it must never be unwittingly or carelessly legitimised. Murdering civilians and annexing territory in the middle-east is not creating a state (as in ISIS) but extending a cult. Thirdly, imprisoning returning cult-members is merely preserving the crowd or group. Instead, they should be quarantined as ruthlessly as a returning nurse infected with Ebola. And, in any event, punishing the individual post hoc for what he did as a member of the crowd is illogical and counterproductive, if understandable.

Most important of all, extreme and obscene events which through technology enter our private, personal sphere require us, first to react maybe, but secondly to do cognitive and attitudinal work on ourselves: group madness must not be met with further group madness but with individual introspection. We should not lose sight of the individual in the crowd member, just because he or she has been under the influence of indoctrinating manipulation. The masked man under the desert sun, holding a Kalashnikov and swaddled in black, is also the grinning teenager on a school paint-balling trip. And, vice versa, while we enjoy the fruits of repression, conscience and individuality, the terrorist lurks in all of us.