On Topic Discussion Herd Mentality

[Norri]

Lazy me. I looked it up. Beheaded by his assassins. Noble Romans, my ass.

Great men should not die as dogs, and Cicero was among the best of their philosophers, if not the best of their politicians.

Cicero is a good example of how good or even great men can be pulled down and destroyed in turbulent political times.

 

[rareboy]

You also see herding with sports fans.

With most of its worst aspects.

 

[belamyi]

Herd mentality is the necessary condition for developing a society.

But I think what we were discussing here is more Lynch mentality: the point in which merely gregarious cattle start foaming and creaming over picking on a perceivably easy victim, with or without a justification, fake or not.

 

[NotHardUp1]

And more than a couple of gay bashings were clearly toughs out roaming and found a victim.

 

[belamyi]

It does not even need to get physical: the way people talk about others, not even caring about whether it is true or not that makes them laugh at or despise others so much, or the way "professionals" treat those perceived to be inferior, shows that the natural state of social aggregation is coarse herd mentality of a seemingly superor and organized herd over scattered and helpless cattle... heck, that is the very discourse that is at the core of proud nationalism, imperialism and suprematism.

People are forced to "enter" civilization before being civilized themselves, and those who know better, who fear and despise them because they are aware of that nature, and take charge of leading and misleading them on occasion and purpose, know that the best it can be done is to tease and deceive that herd with some coating and apperance of morals, religion and "civilization", because the task to trule make of them "real" persons is not just strenuous but, in the vast majority of the heads in all that herd, totally hopeless and useless.

 

[belamyi]

^ Being all the more difficult by the added obstacle of the goodies who will not wrap their heads around the idea that the rest of the people are not, in their "inner core", and with a few exceptions whose evidence is indisputably thrown to their faces in the form of criminals (who may not fall to fascinate them too), as good as they take themselves to be... which is exactly the same belief that supports and pushes the whole herd, the "better"like the "worse".
Without that fantasy about themselves and those who are supposedly their likes, people could not live together: that is why they need to set apart the problem when the illusiom is broken, and they start blaming this or that party, religion, condition or whatever can be wrapped as "the problem" to be excise from the rest of society and keep maintaining that society is a uniform, wholesome unity.