Tim Wyatt – England
Throughout the tortuous annals of human existence there have been three distinct and consistent enemies of free thought, originality and mental innovation. The influential Canadian esotericist Manly P. Hall – along with others before and since – have identified these three malign forces as the church (or prevailing religious authorities), the state and the mob.
Let’s explore the third of these – the mob.
Mob mentality is a powerful and persistent archetype deeply embedded in the human constitution – almost interwoven into our DNA. It sits quiescently as a thought form until suddenly triggered and activated. This often happens suddenly, spontaneously and violently.
Some are more susceptible to its insidious clutches than others. Some are easily seduced. Some relent. Others are immune.
Clans, cabals, tribes are often a central ingredient in the make-up of the mob. (See my previous article Tribes & Tribulations.)
The mob is a classic example of the mass mind – the lower rather than higher mind – being mobilised and directed towards usually violent collective action in response to external events. Mob violence can be sparked both by widescale catastrophic events of all kinds or at the other end of the spectrum by the most trivial of incidents. Sometimes the latter provoke the former. Its workings are mysterious to say the least.
When this happens, certain individuals get sucked into this dynamic and are no longer capable of engaging in individual thinking or autonomous action. They surrender to collective action. It’s possible that these people didn’t have a strong capacity for this kind of mental activity prior to whatever events cemented them to the collective.
Peaceful, rampaging or somewhere in between mobs appear in varying guises in virtually every country on earth today are precisely the same as every other mob throughout history. Their behaviour isn’t fundamentally different from that of our ancestors, tearing their opponents to pieces, ransacking cities, burning liparies and/or religious buildings or watching gladiators hacking each other to pieces in The Colosseum.
Jesus faced the mob and so did Paracelsus. Galileo, Giordano puno and Jacques de Mollay all faced ecclesiastically-created versions of it.
In the past the mobs slaughtered heretics, witches and magicians. They protested against laws viewed as unjust and sometimes prevailed. They engaged in ethnic, religious and political violence often without much provocation. Religious mobs very often globalised their bigotry. These particular mobs were instigated and led by priests.
The mob mentality never goes away. It erupts from generation to generation in myriad forms varying from religious extremism or eco-fanaticism to civil disorder, political protest, gang culture or football hooliganism.
If nothing else, it proves there is such a thing as collective consciousness albeit in a crude, primitive and uncontrolled form. It all shows the ferocious potential power of the mass mind fuelled by anger, injustice or too much alcohol.
Some people have a well-developed capacity for provoking coarse discourse and ugly action – along with the means of unleashing it in others. Politics has been captured by those with this mindset.
Lies, rumour, propaganda and spin are all central to the dynamics of the mob. They act as its fuel and accelerant. Any crowd of people can easily become a mob. I’ve watched it happen myself in the various riots I’ve covered in the UK over the years as a reporter.
It’s a hot summer evening. Tensions are rising. A large group squares off to the police chanting slogans about politics, job losses or some other glaring social evil. Suddenly something comparatively trivial dramatically changes the scenario. A traffic cone is hurled at a riot officer’s shield. Within three seconds all out violence explodes on to the street. The police are showered with bottles, picks, street furniture and Molotov cocktails. It’s all been building for hours and now erupts in an ugly orgasm of violence.
Now all order has fragmented. Everything is loud, raucous and raw. All rationality has evaporated. The confrontation continues into the night until exhaustion or the rain intervenes and an uneasy peace resumes – until the following night when it all unfolds again except that this time it gets even worse. The opening confrontation, it turns out, was merely a dress rehearsal for a more determined and serious performance later.
Some incarnations of the mob aren’t spontaneous any longer but carefully planned and orchestrated. However, the result is very often the same. An outburst of righteous anger gets twisted into mayhem, looting, arson and sometimes murder.
A man is shot in a car by police in the capital city. Within minutes protests and riots erupt in cities hundreds of miles away. The anger turns acquisitive and youths smash shopfronts to steal 48-inch TV sets or designer trainers.
Since a mob is a collective entity with a collective consciousness, this limits and subsumes individual consciousness, often masking it completely.
The individual behaves in ways that they would never contemplate themselves. The situation somehow issues them with a permit to unleash their inner demons and atavistic behaviour. What was once unthinkable suddenly becomes justifiable and even noble. The usually mild-mannered accountant suddenly finds himself hurling a bottle at a police vehicle. When it’s all over, he wonders how he could have done such a thing. He wouldn’t have behaved that way if he’d been by himself.
Yes, there have always been riots and mobs. Why, where and how they occur may change but the fundamentals don’t. It’s always the same – the crude collective mass mind with its base, desire-driven thoughts easily gains supremacy especially in fepile and confrontational situations. Our reptilian pains are suddenly reactivated and we respond accordingly.
The mob can behave peacefully – at large music and sports venues or even political rallies. But even then, the seeds of disorder only wait to be sprinkled with a few drops of nutrient before rapidly blossoming.
Mobs have killed millions and trashed sacred buildings, cities and entire civilizations. This collective role is always reprised because it’s based on a potent inner archetype yet to be dismantled.
Mob rule in one form or another remains a ubiquitous feature of life in the twenty-first century. I wonder how many generations it will take for us to supersede this need for violent collective disorder. Probably more than we imagine.
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Tim Wyatt (PHOTO) is first of all a dear friend, but also an esoteric author, filmmaker, researcher and journalist based in England, Greece and occasionally elsewhere.
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