Slopulism and Psychology
Originally, the intention of this article was to interrogate the reflexive reactions to the death of Charlie Kirk; as time has elapsed, so has the merit of writing an article on the fallout of the assassination; in the process of penning it, the question of psychology metastasized — blooming from its peripheral position to occupying centre-stage, thus displacing the matter of Kirk altogether. That said, it would be incorrect to affirm that the treatment of psychology, high level as it is, is not apropos of the question of Kirk’s death — specifically, the reception of it by the masses, as well as the possibility for it to act as a catalyst for the mobilisation of said grouping. Keep it in mind as you read.
Times of tragedy constitute a veritable spring harvest for the psychologist, for at such junctures they are privileged to bear witness to phenomena belonging to the domain of mass-psychology - to be more precise, the psychology of the crowd exhibitionistically displays itself for all to see, with the exception of those caught up in its collective trance: the constituents of the crowd. My invocation of the word ‘crowd’ is, of course, a reference to that seminal work of mass-psychology, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, by the lamentably peripheral polymath Gustave Le Bon.
The text was written at the tail end of the 19th century; the circumscribed, elitist liberalism of the early 19th century, embodied by the French statesman François Guizot and the censitary franchise that was then the status quo, was by this stage calcified, if not dead — something vital and potent, if fickle, was in the process of supplanting the order of the burghers.
Its ascent was marked by urbanisation; it flexed its muscles via the trade union and workers’ syndicate; the ideas of unfettered egalitarianism, Marxism, universal suffrage, and others that hailed or were contingent upon its strength; owing to its power, even its ostensible enemies transmuted from putative elitists to reformers in the vein of Solon — emblematic in this regard are Disraeli’s One Nation Conservatism and the alliance between Lassalle and Bismarck.
The society for the bourgeoisie, by the bourgeoisie, and of the bourgeoisie, seemed destined to be eclipsed by mass society. Henceforth, the masses constituted a problem — a problem by virtue of their demographic power in their electoral process; a problem by virtue of their purchasing power; a problem by the virtue of the threat of mass-insurrection, or sabotage of transport or industry by workers’ syndicates. The aggregated problem of the masses accorded legitimacy to, and acted as a catalyst for, a concurrently ascendant discipline: psychology.
Unlike a warlord or general, the masses lacked a permanent figure which could be reasoned with; leadership of a crowd owed to a fickle mandate — dialogue with the enemy (the term is telling — the masses think dualistically and absolutely) may be perceived as weakness, thus disfavouring the leader in the eyes of the crowd. For the tottering establishment, the quandary of an entity possessing immense power, but deficient in reason required a novel solution — psychology offered one.
Works such as Gabriel Tarde’s The Laws of Imitation and Le Bon’s The Crowd merely set out to describe the nature of crowd psychology; later psychologists instrumentalised their insights, most notably Edmund Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew. Having gleaned the essentials of the mass mind — its inferiority on account of its suggestibility and tendency for ideas to spread like a contagion amongst its ranks; its superiority on account of its potency and inculcation of self-sacrifice and the abrogation of petty, personal interests among its membership — Bernays fielded a profitable query:
“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it?”
States and corporations both readily availed of the techniques of Bernays to discipline, direct, shape, and contort the masses; to transmute this produce of urban, industrial modernity into a dead weight, capable of being impressed upon by subtle propagandistic measures. It’s telling that the field of public relations, conspicuous in politics and business, was previously known as propaganda; a shift that owed to the efforts of Edmund Bernays, the discipline’s founder.
Cursory viewing of the first episode of Adam Curtis’ seminal Century of the Self suffices to elucidate the real interests behind the faux-feminism undergirding Bernays’ ‘Torches of Light’ campaign; liberty and liquid capital united in their promotion of lung cancer, thus proving that the vibes economy is not merely the preserve of the post-TikTok internet.
My intent is not the explicate the multiplicity of means - from the theories of I. P. Pavlov to Skinner’s Behaviourist school - whereby psychologists have sought to re-engineer human behaviour, though such an article would be welcome, especially if emphasis is accorded to the ersatz alliance between academic anti-fascism and the psycho-cultural imperatives of post-war American hegemony.
Rather, the target of this piece is populism and its stalwart: the populist theoretician. Your subject, the masses, have been the object of intrigue - from propagandistic measures to the employment of sophisticated algorithms to curate a demographic of content-junkies, with the added benefit of a nullified attention span. No conspiracy is needed. The system - however defined - requires a thrall capable of being manipulated by governmental diktat — the “problem” of the masses is downstream from this.
Ideology and structure requires this. Revolutionary developmentalism (whether Fascist or Marxist Leninist) mandates this, for how can the necessary sacrifices be made in order for the, say, nation to take its place in the sun — to use a phrase of A. James Gregor’s provenance. Demo-Liberalism, ideological differences aside, is equally contingent upon disciplines to shape the masses, for how else will that shaky alliance between the people’s will (Democracy) and a rules laden order (liberalism), the historical and contemporaneous beneficiary of which is the rich, persist?
They have had a century to study the subject of your political theory; a century in which they have proven themselves capable of shaping and curating this mass in their image. And yet you put sufficient faith in this subject to allot them the role of toppling “the elite”. The dualistic thinking is telling, for it the same thinking that underlay the calls for unity in the wake of Kirk’s assassination, and the genre of thought which is characterstic of the masses, that sorry receptacle of infotainment, brainrot, and the catalyst of moralism. Be careful lest you devote yourself to a movement that is, in actuality, a psychologist’s scheme.
And it must be asked, cui bono? The sharp demarcation along left-right lines served to shore up support for the sclerotic master-class of the Republican and Democratic parties. It’s been two months since the death of Kirk, and while this memory has begun to fade, it’ll indubitably be resurrected as a necrotic totem in the service of the GOP. For Kirk is no longer a man — he is an image, an icon of post-religious veneration in the land of cargo cult absurdism.
Contemporaneously, the youth wings of both the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as the vote bases of both, are at odds with the upper-stratum of each. Introspection and a reckoning of asymmetries are in order, as are the following questions? Who does ideologically-defined macro-tribalism benefit? Is there a name for one who is consistently loyal to an authority which persistently rebukes them? At what point is a strategy, say populism, verifiable? Or is it an article of faith, a religious dogma sustained by social media slop? Do AI videos of Kirk in heaven violate the second commandment?