“There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves.” – Soren Kierkegaard
All over the world today the public is taken advantage of; lied, stolen from, and browbeaten into averageness. The illusion of information has, with the advent of social media and the internet, become more and more distant. The reality of the situation is that the media we consume today is no more than thinly veiled opinion. This has become evident to some, but further away than ever to others.
What of this mass of averageness, with its lack of critical thought and oppressive normative totality? What of this group which some philosophers have called the herd, and where lies its false pasture?
It would be prudent to consider the herd in the way that two of its pioneering ideologues, Neitzsche, and Kierkegaard conceived of it. Nietzsche’s philosophy makes use of the herd in reference to a shepherd. In The Genealogy of Morality Nietzsche explains some aspects of herd behaviour outright. He appears to characterize the herd as an ancient, but not primordial, phenomenon via his reference to the ascetic priest as “pre-destined saviour, shepherd, and defender of the sick herd.” Nietzsche calls the herd mentality “The strange limitation of human development” and characterizes it not as a self-sustained group endeavour, but as an “instinct of obedience… inherited most easily and at the expense of giving commands.” In this, Nietzsche groups humanity as it is today into two camps: the commanders and the commanded, where the latter, the obedient, compose the herd.
That being said, it is important to mention that Nietzsche views the modern era to be different from those prior. Whereas prior eras had shepherds, the modern era contains a human race conditioned for obedience with no shepherds as a result of equality. In Thus Spake Zarathustra he writes “No shepherd and one herd! Every one wanteth the same; every one is equal; he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse” Nietzsche makes this transition clearer in a different story wherein he succinctly states “Once, spirit was God, then it became man, and now it even becometh populace.”
There are no shepherds as a result of equality and those who disagree with the hegemony of the herd voluntarily admit insanity (“goeth voluntarily into the madhouse”) due to their lack of conformity clashing with their internalized obedience. Within the second lies the meat of Nietzsche’s ideology around the herd. After the dominion of God, ending with the Renaissance and Enlightenment, came the dominion of man. Individuals (Napoleon being the last, according to Nietzsche) were the driving power behind mass public opinion. With the advent of equality, however, those who had previously obediently followed the ideological tenets set forth by shepherds, came to have nobody to follow and so started following each other.
I like to think of it as a chain reaction, each member of the herd wanting to follow the ideology of the largest number of other people, with that number getting larger and larger until it comprises a single planetwide herd with a single wholesale set of opinions. The way I see it is that Nietzsche considers the herd to be a natural phenomenon created by command structures in society, exacerbated by the present age of equality. The herd is therefore characterized by similarity and, through similarity, averageness (as the average is, mathematically at least, merely that which is most recurring). Another uncharitable viewpoint of the herd comes from Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard, unlike Nietzsche, considers that “the public” is not a passive organism, but an active one which promotes a process of “levelling”; absorbing individuals and making them average. This levelling process, to Kierkegaard, is a relatively new phenomenon resulting from equality. He states very directly that “the dialectic of the present age tends towards equality, and its most logical -though mistaken- fulfillment is levelling.” Levelling, Kierkegaard considers, is best shown through the downgrade of the individual, even the spectacular individual, into a percentage of masses. Another notable symptom is the disassociation between person and event or ideology. To put a modern spin on it, consider the commercialization and depersonalization of ideology, the production and reproduction of props which supposedly showcase one’s ideas, like chic communism or branded clothing. If you were to ask the wearer of this outward display of ideology, would they be able to inform you of its meaning or value?
Kierkegaard goes on to introduce the concept of the phantom, by reference to levelling. Levelling is the “[reduction] to the same level”, but in order to take place it is “necessary [to] procure a phantom…an all-embracing something which is nothing…that phantom is the public.” The phantom is an abstract notion owing to equality, formed with help of the Press and now spearheads a levelling process among humans. To Kierkegaard, the Press is the mouthpiece of the phantom. Kierkegaard specifically mentions that the herd ideology is created and propagated in his current era (rather than being primordial or repurposed from leadership) and specifically states that “The public is a concept which could not have occurred in antiquity because the people…took part in any situation which arose and were responsible for the individual.” He goes on to say that “Only when the sense of association in society is no longer strong enough to give life to concrete realities is the Press able to create that abstraction, “the public.”” It’s also interesting to note that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (briefly) lived at the same time.
What Kierkegaard is saying is that equality has created a phenomenon known as levelling which devalues the single individual and forces them into accepting some wholesale view or other. This leads to a disconnection between individuals, actions, and ideologies which leads to the Press being able to create an abstraction known as “the public” which is supposedly composed of everyone, all of whom agree with one another, and possess no actual views beyond the mass subscription of the masses to the public ideology. To put it more simply, someone, or some group, is attempting to deceive us into believing that we are all the same, and the only differences between us are basically window dressing. Kierkegaard writes “The public is the fairy story of understanding, which in imagination makes the individual into something even greater than a king above his people; but the public is also a gruesome abstraction through which the individual will receive his religious formation- or sink.”
It is at this point that it would be prudent to characterize the public/herd as a single organism with specific traits based on a fusion of the prior opinions. It appears that equality results in what I perceive as a directionless herd. A group organism which is the product of empty conformity and oppressive media and cultural stimuli. The traits of this group organism are that it shares a set of opinions or, more pressingly, values, it promotes obedience and hence averageness, and strongly discourages individualism. I see that its effects are magnified, but not totally created, by the press, and finally it has some form of power due to its pervasiveness. I do not see it as an entirely passive, not entirely active phenomenon. Even so, it requires active resistance to sidestep. It should now be clear that with these traits in place critical thinking is completely impossible. How can a body that promotes conformity and averageness host the divergent opinions that naturally result from critical thinking?
While I am certain that my readers will have perceived mob mentality, mass idiocy, and a proliferation of random views with no clearly discernible source or meaning, I’ll nevertheless provide a real-world example to help make my point; that although in the 21st century we have unparalleled access to tools which allow us to break out of this cycle of control, we have nevertheless entrenched ourselves deeper into it.
Assuming that opinion is truth is not good philosophical practice, so we must first ask where the advent of the Internet has fundamentally changed this. Does the public still consent to social control via media? Is information still an illusion? For the latter I would simply say that any information contains inherent bias down to specific word choice. Words, even the simplest of them, hold an emotional baggage and the necessity of using words to convey information means that all information holds some form of emotional baggage, intentional or otherwise.
Writers’ Note: The following section was written prior to the fall of Bashar al-Assad and does not intend to provide a sympathetic view of the Assad Regime, or any opinion whatsoever about it, merely make a point about methods of information manipulation.
A very basic example can be found in coverage on Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad during the heyday of the Syrian Civil War. Sympathetic news sources referred to him as president or leader, whereas opponents called him a dictator. These are all technically true as he was the president, led the country, and was technically a dictator (by the definition of the term, as he is an absolute ruler). However, dictator has strong negative connotations, president has connotations of democracy (which is considered good), and leader has positive connotations (as to lead implies consent and positive power). This is to say nothing of active bias wherein news sources add or remove information that is, usually, not directly relevant to the situation. Al-Assad’s “Fast Facts” page on CNN at the time mentioned his wife’s shoe shopping during the crisis. We have become enamoured with an illusion of information and right to information, when in actuality media, at least, is largely composed of opinion. Opinion that is impossible to separate from facts, especially by a herd conditioned and levelled into unchallenging, obedient, averageness. For the former question of social control, especially in the Age of Information, I would direct the reader to the miserable cesspool that is Reddit.
Reddit, called “The Internet’s Front Page”, is a website where one can join a set of communities based on personal interest, and post and view related content. It is, to me, the 21st century’s manifestation of the herd. Given the disassociated nature of the website (as it utilizes anonymity) and its simple system of “upvoting” liked content and “downvoting” disliked content (with them cancelling each other out, thus disincentivizing controversy) it shows the new direction of the herd in the Age of Information, which is the migration to mass hysteria and outrage.
Due to the vastness of information available to us today in the form of the Internet, the herd is now in a unique position where supposedly raw and objective information is continuously available, but coloured in opinion which is difficult to disentangle from the supposedly objective fact. The herd, lacking in critical thinking abilities by nature, is as such exposed to a barrage of news 24/7 about everything and as such must sift through to be able to form an opinion; however, the opinions are subtly pre-formed and fed to the masses. It is at this stage that outrage comes into play.
Today it is the news that is most outrageously presented that most easily attracts the herd. This makes perfect sense, as outrage is an emotion without nuance. The opinion one must hold in the face of outrage is black-and-white. You must also be outraged, whether for or against. As such the herd, as an organism, inflates the outrage and spreads it, leading to an incentivization of outrage for media bodies (as it generates more interest) leading to news being portrayed as outrage-inducing as possible. This ideology leads to Reddit; the front-page of the internet where only news that promotes strong positive emotional response is publicized due to being upvoted.
I think it’s prudent to consider the effects outrage has on a mass incapable of meaningful critical thought and with the attributes previously given to a herd: levelling power and passive domination. In a situation of forced outrage where the only meaningful options for a mass is binary, for or against, alongside the ability to access any news source with any number of pre-existing biases, the obvious problem is a split, with both sides attempting to level the side for their group-opinion. We are in a position where we must contend with hundreds of millions of people who live without the nuance of critical thinking, but with the direct emotional power of outrage. With an empty free speech, but without critical thought. With equality, but without substance. In an environment where all opinions are considered basically equal, you can expect nothing but the seeds of infighting to grow within the herd and for it to fragment into smaller herds. This is what happened in Reddit, and warranted the creation of sub-communities or “subreddits”. This, of course, merely legitimized the issue.
So what is to be done?
One possibility is that this will all resolve itself, and we will be better off now than we were previously. As the herd fragments into smaller and smaller portions, eventually we will return to genuine individualism and, in an effort to fulfill the basic human need for social contact, we will once again become capable of accepting the opinions of others and critical thought. This, while rosy and optimistic, does not strike me as very likely. Hand-in-hand with the modern disease of the herd mentality has come an easy condemnation of the other, and alongside the Internet we have come to a position where customary social skills are no longer uniformly present, or highly valued. As a combo, this is deadly to understanding and critical thought. To put it simply, we may be individuals, but we will be shitty ones.
It strikes me that a more radical approach is necessary. That is to say, to tackle the problem at the root. There has already been a decline in the idea of equality, in the sense of sameness. The Internet’s disintegration of the herd has shown us that we have managed, in spite of oppressive cultural hegemony, to maintain different opinions, though we persist in imagining that these opinions and the information which supports them are equal in nature. They are not, some information is better in quality than the rest, and even that better information remains coloured by the values and opinions of its creators. Though we have become accustomed to apathy, laziness, outrage, and generalized foolishness, we can also become accustomed to self doubt, power and control over the self, and figuring out the questions of life on our own and without recourse to looking over the schoolmaster’s shoulder.
Embrace Cynicism. Embrace consistent, unpleasant, reappraisal of your values and the information which gives them weight. Consider the information and the media you consume without recourse to your own opinion, and in doing so develop a research ethic. What are you reading, watching, and consuming? Why? What is the point of this media and what is this person attempting to persuade you of, and why? As Arabs our distrust of centralized authority is a boon, but it also comes with a fundamental stubbornness which we must temper into a strength. With this must also come a frank appraisal of the self, and an understanding of your own difference and abilities, and preferably a return to the basic Socratic ideal; “all I know is that I know nothing.” It is only in this way that we can truly embrace the Age of Information, or otherwise it will consume us, as it has and will consume others.