the crowd [Theme]

You are an excellent manipulator. You know how to press on people's weaknesses. <...> You have an approach, a technique. But do you know what the problem is? You are too smart and there is no room for common sense in your head anymore. Because if you had it, you would realize that you started something that you cannot control. Do you think you're the boss now? Wake up guy, this mass is the boss now.

The dictatorship of the masses exercises control over the individual, so he can no longer live independently, without regard to how he is perceived in society. People's self-respect is mistakenly based on constantly looking into the face of their neighbor in order to detect approval or censure in his expression and facial expressions in order to adapt their behavior to the requirements of the group. But since the main characteristics of the crowd are mediocrity and lack of morality, a person who imitates society dooms himself to self-destruction.

Dmitry had a nightmare - a crowd of painted crappers with scales and yellow feathers stormed a machine-gun point on the mountain under wild chants, and those who ran back were mowed down by another machine gun. In the dream, it was clear that the machine gun was actually the same, and the reason for the illusion was the spherical shape of all earthly meanings and the eternal Russian guilt before some murky authorities (either local, or global, or again as with the machine gun).

In the modern world, everything seems to be specially designed to turn people into a crowd, that is, to “demoralize” or destroy their morality through merging with the crowd. Demoralization directly leads to loss of the meaning of existence and, as a consequence, to moral degradation.

Television is a huge force that homogenizes and unites people into a crowd.

A characteristic feature of the crowd is that in it a person loses his individuality. This is also true for a flock of sheep: the herd instinct makes each of them go where the others go.

The merging of an individual with a crowd is a direct path to the destruction of personal responsibility, and therefore to the disappearance of moral values, which leads to crime, violence or corruption.

The most striking fact observed in the psychology of a crowd is this: whatever the individuals who compose it, whatever their way of life, their occupations, their character or mind, their mere transformation into a crowd is enough for them to develop something like a collective soul that makes them feel, think and act completely differently than each of these people individually would think, act and feel.

We are so dependent on the opinions of others that we allow the crowd to be the judge and arbiter of our behavior; we sacrifice anything to be considered “the same as everyone else.” We strive for universal recognition as a reward, we are afraid to be different from others, because this causes a reaction from society: distrust, rejection, suspicion. As a result, we inevitably become part of the homogeneous mass, and this gives us self-confidence and a feeling of acceptance and love, but at the same time we are oppressed by a feeling of loneliness, internal anxiety and lack of personal identity.

The mass is the average person. Strictly speaking, a mass can be defined as a psychological phenomenon, and one should not expect that individuals will appear in a cluster. The masses are those who, for some reason, do not evaluate themselves as either good or bad, but feel the same as everyone else. At the same time, no one is upset about this, but on the contrary, people are pleased to feel that they are indistinguishable.

The crowd is a mindless monster, devoid of reason and will, which devours everything in its path. And we are forced to obey this faceless crowd, because the principle “the majority orders” applies.

A whole crowd poured into the casino, all the ladies were wearing diamonds and mink coats - the uniform of the rich.

She moved through the crowd, and her green eyes reflected anxiety and confusion, and her fragile body shrank a little under a simple cotton dress every time she was touched by fat and old, flabby and wrinkled people: they shrilly shouted something, pushed and pressed to get closer and gape in amazement at the tropical fish, who opened their mouths in response with the same amazement.

But it is better to be alone than among annoying and stupid people.