Not just one thing explains the new wave of street-populism. Five constituent types, with different levels of understanding and commitment:
1. The mass of protesters:
Especially the younger: conditioned by semi- and mis-education, though sometimes with a partial understanding of a real problem.
Their moral beliefs stand as unquestionable dogmas of faith in their minds.
But as human beings they feel a strong need for commitment to significant action.
Yet as individuals, they sense they don’t have the strategic skills or power to accomplish much.
So merging with a group is irresistible and going out together becomes energizing-intoxicating.
Once on the streets in a mass, group-mob psychology kicks in.
2. The leadership: Savvier about power strategies, including using intimidation and shock tactics against an enemy basically committed to civility, and about how to rile up and direct their mob-mass followers. Often with an ideological agenda unrelated to the particular triggering problem.
3. Hangers-on: Camp-followers who just want to be part of something/anything. Or who go along because everyone else is.
4. Opportunists: Those who like the license to wreck, steal, and hurt.
5. Nice folks: Believe there’s a real problem and that something should be done about it. So they’re willing to support a movement despite its flaws, give the benefit of the doubt to its excesses, and downplay/excuse the wreckers.
Other things:
The #1s have also been conditioned by the existential vacuum created by secularism. Their lives appear to them to have come from nothing significant, to have no guiding principle outside of temporary pleasures, and to be wandering toward oblivion. Nothing worth “giving themselves to” is known to them, no cause “outside of themselves” by which they may measure their maturity, their achievement and their trajectory toward the Good. Suddenly, there appears a great Cause that offers to them the existential meaning they have been lacking, and tells them they can be significant, sacrificial and noble by the level of fanaticism they devote to it. For the first time, their lives can be “about something.” And they take to the offer like starving pit-bulls to a red steak.
Needs more Freud, and more unconscious motivations for such behavior
What would those be, Joel? Let’s making this a working document.
Way too simplistic.
I dont think this deserves any more response that that.
So, it is the “nice folks” who are willing to be useful idiots for the “leadership”, by facilitating the “opportunists” and “hangers-on”, who are the problem.
Not-nice “nice folks”. They hide behind the nice folks guise but have a secret power lust that comes out in tacit support. Many journalists fall under this category.
So far responses seem too simplistic. The 5 observations seem spot on in my world. We are reaping the harvest of post modern views that with little effort cast aside all the good aspects of Western civilization. Yes perfection has not EVER been reached but the ahistorical perspective generally exhausts itself in self absorption and the desire for “personal peace” however that may manifest itself. Look at the “hippies” of the 60’s; many now successful Wall Streeters, tenured professors or other wealthy and “established” individuals. History holds a key to understanding human behavior. Humanity is nasty, selfish brutal and harsh but can also be loving, kind and beautiful. How to sort out the obviously good from the awfully bad? Mob action is usually NOT the answer.
Modernism cannot not set the masses adrift.