Monday, March 14, 2016

WHEN DOES AN ASSEMBLY BECOME A MOB




GROUP PERSONALITIES 



In the military I was a SERE (survival, evasion, resistance and escape) instructor, and as part of our program we studied how individual prisoners and prisoners as a group behaved in captivity – this included interviewing our own U.S. prisoners of war that had escaped or were released in Vietnam.

This characterizing of people vs group behavior can carry over to any assembly of people.   As individuals people are restrained, but as they become a part of an assembly or group, individuals tend to take on the character of the group personality.  

The seventy-two-year-old man that punched the young black man at the Trump rally would never have considered doing that if he and the young man were in a room by themselves.   The man was not acting as an individual, he was acting as a bonded part of a larger personality – the personality of the Trump assembly at that venue.



Groups of people, assemblies, mobs or whatever you would like to call them, unify to take on the persona of a single personality; and if you can identify the characteristics of the group personality, you can understand its personality traits, and even manipulate it.

But, unlike more stable people, most mobs are Schizophrenic: capable of abnormal social behavior and failure to understand reality.  This volatile group personality easily buys into false beliefs and unclear or confused thinking of situations. 



The group personality of the Trump rallies is a low intelligent, angry, zealous, bigoted group personality that is easy manipulated by a charismatic leader;


 but, one capable of losing self-control and become a mindless mob without direction.




There are other people at the Trump rallies with more reserve, but they are marginalized because of the temperament created by Trump.  If the extremist were decried by their leader the more reasonable   personality could assert itself, though the overall characteristics of the group would not have change.


Maybe I am over thinking this: what we all need is a glass of wine, a good fuck and a nap.

Words of wisdom from 
the Ol'Buzzard   





  

2 comments:

COMMENT: Ben Franklin said, "I imagine a man must have a good deal of vanity who believes, and a good deal of boldness who affirms, that all doctrines he holds are true, and all he rejects are false."