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Of mobs, mania and delusions in recent weeks. - Part 2

Continued from Part 1 here

The Herd

The thing about mass psych is that it doesn't need a reason to exist but it exists. 

We have been seeing these things that bring us all together in one swoop of headlines. Moving the attitudes and opinions with every passing moment. Collecting new people into the melee and discarding few. The wave gathers steam if new additions outnumber the dropouts, until finally dropouts re-evaluate only to join what they had discarded to form one final blow-off into these mass psych movements / events.

For an observer, this begs the question as to what is triggering the COHESION of attitudes, thoughts, communities and human beings. What is that one factor binding the disparate, disconnected and I-couldn’t-care-less-about-you souls?

It would seem impossible for these diverse people to experience the same events and back up the same thought-process without a binding factor. I don't claim I know that. But what is essential for such a thing to happen is that the foundation for such a thought process is pre-laid. Laid far ahead in time, by recurring experiences in real life finally coming into force as one giant wave of mass movement of thoughts, actions and exodus. 

It is not necessary these movements be earth shattering, but the frequency of these movements / events point to a deeper underlying dynamic which is syncing the society much closer than we will find comfortable. More synched we are, more impressionable and herd able we become. More immersed in the event - knowingly or unknowingly with a strong current of feedback. Being an outlier and outcaste in such mass waves is filled with large disincentives - economical and emotional. As long as the "loner" remains an outlier the pressure to join the "group" intensifies. It could be for a worthy goal of fighting corruption or ditching your kids education to fly home or plain mindless pelting of stone on some random target chosen by somebody out of sheer boredom.

Crowds can be smart, can be dumb and can create new trends that could possible last decades. Mass psych waves have a huge impact on society it courses through. It would be very prudent to watch how things evolve as society moves into rather difficult moments of time.

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