How’s everyone’s weekend going?
Thanks for spending a portion of your Sunday with the Six.
Let’s get right to it.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PROTESTS
We’ve been bombarded all week with video across the country from the college campus protests.
Any reasonable person can see how most of the Occupiers are late teens, early 20-something college students, prone to copy cat syndrome, victims of their own undeveloped brains.
Many can’t even explain why they are there. They just scream at Jewish kids to go back to Poland, (”Zionists don’t deserve to live!”), paint their nails black and attempt to party like it’s 1968.
It’s fun! We’ll get on Fox News! Hi Mom!
How’s that $90k per year investment is working out for ya?
The story is perfect for television news, an industry at its best when it can frame a narrative like a sports contest, using binary labels (good vs bad) with images to match. Depending on what channel viewed this past week and the political leanings of the editorial staff, here’s how anchors and reporters characterize those involved: on one side, there’s the insurgent firebrands (students/police) and on the other, the freedom defenders (students/police). Throw in the unseen conspirators (administrators/outside agitators) and you have all the characters of a Cold War-era Battle Royale (re-watch the 1985 movie “Rocky IV”, a film that presents capitalism vs collectivism with zero nuance as effectively as any piece of pop culture in the last 40 years). Television news hasn’t changed much from the “if it bleeds, it leads” pathos of the 1980s and 90s. As soon as the masked perpetrators decamp for summer break, and the cannon-shielded police leave with them, so will the cameras. On to the next BREAKING NEWS story. But with the students, there’s a deeper pathology afloat here that deserves closer scrutiny, a psychosis around group think and mobs.
One of weird things the happened to our country during Covid was the unobjectionable acceptance of voodoo science. We had a contagion that was responsible for deaths, but rather than do as we had during previous viral outbreaks, public institutions took on a kill-the-enemy-at-all-costs doomsday response, rather than a co-existence, endemic one.
Any dissent about the “pandemic” narrative—science is supposed to be about relative probability and acknowledging what we don’t know, but we forgot that in 2020—was met with swift rebuke. One of those dissenters was Dr. Mattias Desmet.
A Belgian psychology professor, Desmet in early 2021 criticized the public’s copacetic acceptance of government Covidian policies. He was one of the first academics to point out fundamental mistakes made and how lockdown policies were more detrimental and harmful than the virus itself. Desmet wrote a 2022 book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, where he gives an account of how the mentality responsible for this mistake is shaped historically and psychologically.
He referred to mass population’s affirmation of mitigation measures as “mass formation psychosis.”
In his book “The Psychology of Totalitarianism” Mattias writes:
In the process of exercising power—i.e., shaping the world to ideological beliefs—there usually is no need to make secret plans and agreements. As Noam Chomsky put it, if you have to tell someone what to do, you’ve chosen the wrong person. In other words: The dominant ideology selects who ends up in key positions. Someone who does not share the ideology is usually less successful in society, apart from a few exceptions. Consequently, all people in positions of power automatically follow the same rules in their thinking and in their behavior and are under the influence of the same “attractors” (to use a term from complex dynamical systems theory). Furthermore, they all succumb to the same logical fallacies and the same absurd behavior, independently of each other, or at least without having to gather in secret meetings.
Mattias lists a statistical formula to detect mass formation psychosis around an event: 20 percent of the population is “all in”, meaning they engage in every practice of demagoguery whether it be mask-wearing, quarantines, acts of violence, etc. They are weak, delusional and easily influenced. The overwhelming majority (75% or so) are silent, fearful of rebuke and just want to let it be. The smallest percentage—around five percent according to Mattias—put up the bullshit flag and take a critical distance from the propaganda. They are also more prone to speak out against authoritarianism and question authority.
Sound familiar? Those numbers are fairly accurate when applied to Covid Hysteria.
I think those percentages are appropriate when labeling those involved in the student protests now happening all over the country.
Measured, yet forceful, speech against institutional elites is essential towards change, and you’re starting to see it with celebrity commentators.
Joe Rogan, an O.G. liberal with a daily podcast of millions of listeners, said this recently about the campus protestors:
This thing that’s going on right now could not be going on right now without the influence of the internet. The internet has created this mind virus that is sweeping through college campuses and also the universities and marxist philosophies that they’ve been pushing at universities
HBO host Bill Maher, who pre-Covid was in the elite Hollywood liberal camp, has used his talk show to criticize the students for their anti-semitism and hypocrisy in aligning with Iran, a country that last month invaded Israel.
Said Maher: “Now they’re cheering for Iran because they just fired all the missiles at Israel. So Iran is the good guys?”
Separate from the student protests are comments this week from Jerry Seinfeld.
Appearing on a New Yorker podcast to promote a new film, the comedian decried what he sees as the end of television comedy:
it used to be that you would go home at the end of the day…people would go, ‘Oh, Cheers is on. M*A*S*H is on. Oh, Mary Tyler Moore is on. All in the Family is on. Where is it? Where is it? This is the result of the extreme left and P.C. crap and people worrying so much about offending other people
Rogan, Maher and Seinfeld are all members of the 75% percent Desmet theorizes who see the delusional state of the 20%, and in the case of Seinfeld and Maher, are using their platforms to speak up and shift into the 5% category (Rogan is a carrying card member of the “no bullshit” frat). More need to do the same (not just celebrities, although they have outsized influence with mass media).
We can all agree on this: none of us as adults would want to be judged based on deeds done by our 20-year old selves. We were not on digital surveillance 24/7.
But the temperament driving so many of the protestors is not that hard to figure. It swept our country just a few years ago to devastating consequences. That disposition is an almost illusional neurosis driven by the internet and narcissistic tendencies of young people.
When you hear politicians and commentators utter the now ubiquitous phrase “threat to democracy”, it isn’t one person—Trump—they should be all that worried about.
It’s the psychology around mass formation. That’s much more dangerous.
Let’s proceed with the Six.
Some boots-on-the-ground reporting here from The Free Press newsletter. Columbia University has been labeled “ground zero” for the student protests, which has spread nationally. The War in Gaza was supposed to be the hill worth dying for but maybe that’s been forgotten amongst all of the phony fame and glory gained from cable news? From the article: “…a PhD student named Johannah King-Slutzky spoke to the press about students’ demands, which included catering. When a reporter asked her, ‘Why should the university be obligated to provide food to people who have taken over a building?’ King-Slutzky replied, ‘First of all, we’re saying they are obligated to provide food to students who pay for a meal plan here.’ Palestine, shlamestine…where’s my Doordash Thai entree?
2. Illinois Ended Cash Bail. Reformers Want More.
We are almost six months into the enactment of no cash bail in the state of Illinois, the first state in the country with such a policy. The idea of the law sounds good in theory: eliminate long stays in prison for those charged with a crime but can’t afford bail money. Those folks can be released and while awaiting trial, can work and support their families. The problem, as is always the case with criminal justice reform, is at what cost? What about rate of recidivism for hardened criminals who leverage their freedom to commit other crimes? What about the tax on prosecutors and judges forced to adjudicate a case before enough evidence can be gathered on the accused? We don’t have enough data yet to answer those questions but that’s not stopping reformers for pushing for more resources spent on those on pre-trial release, as this article from Bolts Magazine explains.
3. Hertz Selling Off More EV’s After Major Losses.
Rental car behemoth Hertz announced it will sell an additional 10,000 of its electric vehicles from its existing fleet, on top of the initial intention to sell 20,000 electric models. It has been a complicated time at Hertz, as for auto manufacturers, as the high maintenance costs and depreciation of its EVs have resulted in a $392 million loss in the first quarter on revenues of $2.1 billion. The original plan was to buy 100,000 Tesla cars on the rental car industry’s rebound after Covid-induced dips. Now, investment in electric cars are only the second-worst longstanding financial relationship Hertz Rental Car has found itself in.
A sobering glimpse inside the publishing industry gleaned from the antitrust trial transcript of Penguin vs. the Department of Justice. From the newsletter The Elysian, the author reveals that very few books get their authors big advances or are sold in numbers that come anywhere close to the goals of authors and publishers. In fact, 96 percent of all books sell fewer than 1,000 copies. And less than 1 percent of authors receive advances over $250,000. Most revenue comes from backlists, comprising SAT books, bibles, and longtime bestsellers like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. A wise career path for young authors in the year 2024 and beyond: build your own audience and sell to them directly.
5. Jerry Seinfeld Says Movies Are Over But He Made One Anyway.
In this excellent GQ Q&A, Jerry Seinfeld (this is not the interview where he bashes the current state of television) pronounces movies are dead, even though he just made one; explains why he won’t crack jokes about turning 70, though he finds it funny; and offers up this piece of life advice: “There’s nothing I revile quite as much as a dilettante. I don’t like doing something to a mediocre level. It’s great to be 70, because you really get to preach with some authority. Get good at something. That’s it. Everything else is bullshit.” My advice to Jerry: if TV sucks so much (which it does), go do something about it. Write a new series. If funny, people would watch.
6. Savage Bees.
You probably heard by now about the baseball Bee Game this week in Arizona that made a social media star of the beekeeper. The event got the crack staff at the Six to work: weirdest pop culture moments in history involving bees? The research team found this clip from the mid-70s promoting a TV movie called “Savage Bees.” Enjoy the 70s-era news studio promo—filled with hideous color palettes—straight from the anchor desk of WMAQ in Chicago.
Thanks for reading everybody and have a great rest of your weekend.
Have a suggestion for The Sunday Six? Send email to jonjkerr@gmail.com.
Seinfeld's show at The UC last fall was HORRIBLE. He's stale and inexcusably refused to reinvent his comedic style over the past 40 years. Y - A - W - N. Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee was funny because of the guests... not him.