Hideous Groups

Chemical Brothers' Glasto set - fantastic. An exercise in group psychodynamics using emotive sounds.

One of the books I'm currently reading is The Lucifer Principle, by Howard Bloom. A very interesting read suggesting, with strong evidence, that groups are the key to the forces of history and can do some very nasty things that individuals would shy from. 

A quote from early on in the book:

At first glance, our dependence on our fellow human beings sounds encouragingly angelic, but it is a blessing with a barb. Harvard psychologist Daniel Goleman, paraphrasing Nietzsche, says, “Madness . . . is the exception in individuals, but the rule in groups.” A study by social psychologist Bryan Mullen shows that the larger the lynch mob the more brutal the lynching. Freud declares that groups are “impulsive, changeable and irritable.” Those caught up within them, he asserts, can become infantile slaves to emotion, “led almost exclusively by the unconscious.” 

Swept up by the emotions of a crowd, humans tend to lose their ethical restraints. As a result, the greatest human evils are not those that individuals perform in private, the tiny transgressions against some arbitrary social standard we call sins. The ultimate evils are the mass murders that occur in revolution and war, the large-scale savageries that arise when one agglomeration of humans tries to dominate another: the deeds of the social group.

A pertinent warning in these polarised times. I've only just started to read the book, but it has extremely good reviews.

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