One of many, Many of one.

                                               One of many, Many of one.

Indian elections in recent times have touched a new low that is embarrassing both for us in India and for all civilized minds elsewhere who are already subjected to daily dose of low level tweets from the White House. The recent outburst of the President of the ruling party using a metaphorical analogy to dehumanize opposition political parties is a case in point. Despite the logical defence by the party that its President had not made any  direct one to one link between dogs, cats, snakes, scorpions  etc to any single or multiple opposition parties, the remark was not only distasteful but was symptomatic of the war of attrition employed by political leaders as  a strategy to win the elections by wearing down the opposition through the use of uncultured and uncivilized language. The election debate today is not about ideologies or about issues that affect the nation and its people or about new thinking, new directions, new ideas that will galvanize the nation to a new age of advancement in its social, economic, intellectual and ethical spheres. It is only about personalities and calling names to insult them. The language is abusive, vituperrious and uncivil. Unfortunately the effect of uncivil behaviour on the masses lasts longer well beyond the election period and leaves an indelible residue of bitterness, hatred and violence in society. The last four years have witnessed frenzy among our masses who are first divided on caste, class and religion and then  adequately incited to see ghosts where there are none and follow this with aggressive killings, at times sometimes spontaneous and even unpremeditated. Our leaders, not really fully aware of the consequences of their words on the masses have influenced crowd psychology to suit their immediate purpose of winning the elections.

Crowds are of two kinds- active mobs and passive audiences. The active crowds are aggressive and expressive and often turn violent. These types of mobs are the reason why it is wrong to incite them through use of abusive and hate filled language. Wth regard to crowd psychology, it is shown that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one individual, and go mad in following the individual and his pursuit. We have seen this at work during Hitler’s mesmerizing the Germans to destroy the Nazis. Millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one man, one hero, one delusion, and run after him till such time their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. One of the causes for individuals developing herd mentality is it frees them from personal responsibility and gives uncivil behaviour  the impression of universality of behavior, both of which increase with the size of the crowd. In India 1984 riots was one such incident of herd psychology that drove people to heinous murders. It is now three and a half decades since the anti Sikh riots took place.  The scars of the riots are not, nor can they ever be erased

Today the coarse and bullying language used on the social media like Twitter and Q&A platforms has a lot to do with the language of our political masters. The constant effort to bring down great men and women of the past on the alleged charge that they had been too long on the historical pages  to the neglect of many others of equal or even greater status has blurred the line dividing truthful facts and imagined falsehoods. The recognition of greatness need not be done by pulling down the heroes of the past. The process of addition cannot be done by the process of subtraction.  On all matters, political or sociological, economic or ethical, controversy rages between contending parties to such a degree that there is no end to the contumely heaped on each other. There is no attempt to hide or conceal the harsh or scornful language employed by the Facebookers, Online  bloggers and Twitteratis. Social media is a powerful tool in perpetuating herd behaviour. Its immeasurable amount of user-generated content serves as a platform for opinion leaders to take the stage and influence the masses In all this, the greatest casualty is loss of self control. These website posters take advantage of remoteness and faceless identity and resort to scurrilous writings that are offensive to accepted standards of decency in crass imitation of their political masters.. They have lost control over their emotions that have been roused by the current crop of leaders who are gerrymandering the election vocabulary for political purposes. The loss of control over one’s emotions, actions and words is all pervasive.  Every day we read reports of shooting in blind anger, violence and murder due to road rage, killings committed under the pretext of righteous indignation, stonewalling legitimate discussions and debates in the parliament, terrorist attacks arising out of misguided religious hysteria… one can go on citing examples of lack of self control in all acts of wanton destruction of life and property. It is easy to pick up a gun and thoughtlessly pull the trigger.  But the life lost in this act is a life snuffed out forever. Can there be any way to restore the dead to life? It is finished, finished once and for all. Investigations, trials, justice, punishments etc cannot bring back the dead to the family that has lost a son or a daughter, a brother or a father, a wife or a mother. All these are happening due to lack of self restraint. They occur not as acts of isolated, mentally unhinged individuals but are collective acts indulged by the masses, referred to as ‘crowd psychology’ by Freud and ‘collective unconscious’ by Jung. Herd psychology or mob psychology is frightening and unnerving. While there are instances when herd behaviour has been benign as in the case of the Nirbhaya movement with its integrative social function, more often than not, we see its negative fall- out. The frequency of rape incidents by a group of savage men of helpless women and innocent children is a chilling example of herd instinct raising above human instinct. According to Freud, in a crowd, the overall shared emotional experience reverts to the least common denominator (LCD), leading to primitive levels of emotional expression, almost that of the ‘primeal horde’ or pre-civilized society. Mass rape arises out of lack of control over sexual urges in typical crowd situations. This is what psychologists refer to as de-individuation theory.  “All factors such as anonymity, group unity, and sexual arousal weaken personal controls (e.g. guilt, shame, self-evaluating behavior) by distancing people from their personal identities and reducing their concern for social evaluation. This lack of restraint increases individual sensitivity to the environment and lessens rational forethought, which can lead to antisocial behavior.” It is of urgent and immediate concern that society seems  powerless to rein in herd psychology and it has to be brought back from the pre civilized age of self destruction to  a new age of dispassion, where to be civilized is to refrain from intellectual, emotional and psychological assault on our fellow human beings in word and action. We have to respect our individuality which inter alia makes us individually responsible for others around us. We have to affirm our identity so that we are wary of any aberration or deviation from moral rectitude and disorder of thought and emotion. Last but not the least  we have to recognize the oneness of humanity which we share with all others and cultivate self restraint so that we do not overstep the  norms that hold us together and constitute the society as one of many and many of one.