The Crowd as a Biological Event

Bloodroot

 What we have to remember about le Bon is that he was a skull measurer, he had a faith in biological determinism, the sort of thing that lead the flaccid minded and barrack dwelling to divide humanity into racial characteristics from savage to civilized, inferior to superior. His many interests included an invention for measuring skulls while in the field whether at an anthropological site of a bus stop his Pocket Cephalometer was a useful tool for measuring character.

As a disciple of the gospel of Transcendence as recorded by Kant, I am very unwilling to give any credence to le Bon's version of biological determinism, I do think we should give thought to le Bon's idea of a crowd being a 'biological event' capable of something very similar to contagion. The Crowd can riot, it can reduce a sense of isolation, it can bring together. We have looked at the Paris communes with their long tradition of the crowd that I think you might agree goes back to the Revolution of the 1790's and achieved yet another moment of glory in 1968.

 I suspect the riot le Bon experienced might be categorized as a food riot. The 400,000 Crowd at Woodstock 1969, was more of a "happening" than a riot. The 1,500 Crowd at the Glastonbury Festival of 1970 felt like a happening and became the beginnings of an annual happening. There were the Nuremberg and Trump Rallies. And too it's difficult to avoid thinking of the Women of Greenham Common as a crowd which developed a unique series of behaviors built around peace. It does seem that people, especially those in power, are increasingly alarmed by uncontrolled crowds, but the contagions of the Crowd aren't always bad or ignoble. 

 In our new world of verbs, the contagions of the Crowd contain the resonances of becoming.

Un-collapsed and Nounless

Lenten Rose

 Let's toss a few verbs around. First we will call it the Civilization of the Sliver, and for those who wonder, this is possibly the first time in the existence of me I can use the word "Civilization" without sneering or cringing.

 We are the back row, we are the guardians of transcendence as a verb and yet, like pornography, we don't know what it is but we know what it's not. So lets go back to the 1890's and explore Gustave le Bon's The Crowd: A study of the Popular Mind (1895).

 If a date is important to you the book has the provenance of being described as a "Foundational Text" in the dimly lit cathedral of social psychiatry that more recently has been swallowed by the branding ding-bats of Madison Avenue's marriage to what I think are referred to as "The Botox Obsessed Tech Bros."

 It was the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war that le Bon found himself in a food riot. A relief convoy had found its way into the city, it's was protected by ill-trained national guardsmen. Le Bon knew full well that patience and trust was required from all parties. In the wider world there was a growing distrust between Citizens of Paris, the Napoleon complex of their national government which had been so soundly squashed by Prussian and German soldiers in the field of battle.

 Le Bon argued that the emotions which suddenly dominated the crowd were not "New" emotions, they were Atavistic emotions. In another way for those of us who live as verbs on the slope toward nouns, these atavistic emotions were from the "Basement of the Human Foundry." They were emotions of the swamp out of which all other emotions emerged. 

 In the maw of this atavistic brew the Individual vanished, the back row was empty. It was a contagion that caused straight-backs to dissolve. Our back row sliver sense was gone, everyone was half baked jostling for a selfie on the front row. Gustave, a polite young man who could read and write threw himself into the smiley face of a riot.

What was it? What had happened?

In a crowd, what some call "uncertainty," what others call that holy grail of answerlessness required of us verbs, was experienced as a physical threat. The crowd wanted a Frictionless Certainty. It doesn't want to "Wrestle." It wanted to Strike. And if you want a simple answer call it the fear of answerlessness?

The Fear of the Void, the argument continues, is a fear that predates reasonableness. But, brothers and sisters, to be an individual is to be "Answerless." To be an individual is to stand alone in the Void of Potential. It's a cold, thick weight, and not far away in a warm crowd is the Lure of a Noun that offers an escape from the burden of becoming.

It’s not that people are "Wrong!" They are Terrified of being Un-collapsed and nounless. 

And Here We are in the Spring of 2026

Protecting Towhee from rearview mirrors

 Baxter and I would like to take a look at the following two sentences. The "Pedagogy of Hatred" explored by Jorge Luis Borges in notes he wrote between 1936 and and 1945 wasn't just about teaching children to dislike an "Other." It was about the structural perversion of the "Process of Becoming."

 The Pedagogy of Hatred. Borges' understanding of Germany included the idea that Germany was one of the most civilized well organized nations the world had ever seen.  Pedagogy can be explained this way: the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political, and psychological development of learners.

 In 1936 the fourth edition of a children's book was published, it had sold 51,000 copies in Bavaria. The book was titled, "Don't trust any Fox from a Heath or Any Jew on his Oath." The book had pictures. of young, athletic German boys and girls, and let's continue the familiar message with a poem from the text, "The German is a proud man who knows how to work and struggle, Jews detest him because he is so handsome and enterprising." Step aside Hollywood, when it come to denigrating the other you'd met your match in an eighteen year old Kindergarten teacher named Elvira Bauer who died in 1945. Hers was a prosperity doctrine of National Glory.

 A man called Doctor Johannes Ruhr of Berlin edited, or re-edited, the "History of German Literature." Amongst others he removed the name Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht. Kafka was a Jew. Brecht's wife was Jewish. 

Corrupting the Process of Becoming. Ah right, sounds snow flake libtard. But greater minds than yours and mine have identified the Process of Becoming. Borges, an Argentinian, in the months before the Second World War was about to explode beyond the consciousness of us people into the reality of killing,  identified his own feelings in 1939. He listened to the slogans on the streets of Buenos Aires and he wanted to be neutral, his love of German Literature and his joy in an English Language that had produced Bernard Shaw, his admiration for Bertrand Russell's critique of newspapers as a source of truth was complete. Not for a minute did Borges believe that a regime that'd eradicated Schopenhauer for being Schopenhauer was powerful. Far from it. In 1939, for Jorge Luis Borges, Hitler and his homespun Übermenschen were a banal curse on mankind.

In 1945, contemplating the peace, with the great powers still dividing up the world. In the west it was what to do about Iraq, with all that oil, Palestine and the Zionist, should France go back to Syria or was Lebanon good enough for them. Borges returned to his Ancient Greeks, he found them alive and well. His Plutarch: "No-body is what he was, nor will he be what he is now." His Heraclitus: "No-one steps into the same river twice."

We can leave it to Hannah Arendt to remind us of Heidegger's "Becoming" then look at Borges Total Library, a place were every word ever written could be found in one place. Would this absolute knowledge, would knowing everything be the functional equivalent of know nothing. And why? Because finding the truth among infinite false variants is impossible. 

Covenant

Vinca Minor

 The meanings in the English Speaking word covenant start with the ideas of cutting and sharing. This cutting and sharing form of covenant either followed a blood oath or followed how the meat of something like an Ox or a Goat was divided following an ordained by the Priest sacrifice. Today Covenant still has Legal and Religious meanings all of which we are going to ignore and concentrate on the sacred rather than mixed up diddle-dads of the profane. And by sacred the meaning is clear you can't get a priest or a lawyer to release you from the shame of breaking an understanding between yourself and another. The issue being, a covenant hasn't hurdled the distance between a small almond shape in the temporal lobe and the Humpty Dumpty of the Left Hemisphere that produces work for lawyers, Priests and Grammarians.