It’s wise to use the word ‘evil’ sparingly because there’s a level of subjectivity attached to it but it just might apply to Chris Murphy. The Connecticut senator is urging people to take to the streets of America in protest of President Trump’s program for deporting illegal aliens. But the potential for evil lies not in a simple utterance but in the manipulation of human behavior.
During a Monday interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, Murphy told co-host Mika Brzezinski, “My first message is to keep it peaceful. I mean, obviously, this is a moment where we have to be on the streets all over the country to protest what’s happening to our immigrant community.” He and his staff will remind anyone who asks that the senator is calling for peaceful demonstrations, which is designed to inoculate him from criticism should any of the demonstrations for which he's calling turn violent.
But we can’t let Murphy or his cohorts off the hook so easily. He and other Democrats are well aware that people turn into something different when gathered in a large group. It’s called herd mentality or mob mentality. It’s been studied by psychologists for more than a century and, notwithstanding the nuances of psychology, the research findings are pretty consistent.
During a May, 2023, podcast from the American Psychological Association, University of St. Andrews Professor Stephen Reicher described the common opinion that people, when in a large crowd, “become incapable of thinking. They become like sheep led by others, and also they revert to a more primitive self and behave destructively.” That’s a byproduct of what French psychologist Gustave La Bon called submergence, the notion that people in crowds can become deindividualized and experience greater or lesser degrees of anonymity.
One result of this deindividualization, according to Reicher, is that “People shift from the personal self to the social self or social identity, from I to we, and they start acting in terms of the norms and the values of the group.” For people sitting in a sports arena watching their team win a championship, this phenomenon is relatively benign. But when hundreds or thousands of people are incited to gather in protest of something, all of whom harbor some level of anger, they often devolve to a more primitive and violent self.
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The research firm EBSCO has also studied herd mentality and concluded, “When people are in a group, they tend to surrender their individuality and their individually held beliefs and values to those of the group.” EBSCO researchers noted this deindividualization “removes the normal inhibitions and makes it seem okay to go along with what the crowd is doing, even if the person would never even consider those acts if he or she were alone.”
Given that herd mentality has been studied since the late 19th century, it beggars belief that Sen. Murphy, a lawyer by education and trade, is unaware of what happens to people when they gather in large, angry mobs. He can speak of peaceful demonstrations all he wants but he knows the potential for violence when he announces, “we are going to rise to this moment by being out there on the streets,” as he did on MSNBC.
Thus far, we’ve seen violent confrontations over immigration law in Los Angeles, New York City, Minneapolis and smaller scale events elsewhere. Sen. Murphy is now calling on Democrats, progressives, anarchists and other denizens of the Left to replicate this chaos across the entire nation. Some demonstrations may be peaceful - and I certainly hope they all are - but it just doesn’t seem like a good bet. The nature of the human animal is ingrained in our species and Murphy understands the dynamics of herd mentality.
Claiming a desire for peaceful protests, all the while knowing the near-inevitable results of inciting large mobs of angry people to take to the streets, borders on evil if not constituting it outright. Whether Sen. Murphy is clueless about herd mentality leading to destructively primitive behavior in response to legitimate law enforcement efforts is unclear, but the man’s not stupid; he knows what he’s doing. There is no question that his calls for nationwide street protests are unhelpful at best and deadly at worst. There’s enough genuine evil wafting across America already and we don’t need elected Democrats inviting more of it.
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