The Crowd

We are high-tech primitives living in a new reversionist age. Despite our smartphones and global connectivity, we are walking a narrow path toward a past most of us thought (at least I naively did until 2016) humanity had finally left behind.

​The image that I've attached, reflects my interpretation of a "crowd" so profoundly distracted that they are no longer even aware of the warning signs surrounding the far-right’s rise in the 2010s and 2020s. See the imagery, see the collective inertia where the “canaries” of truth and civility lie dead at our feet, yet we march on, fueled by digital suggestibility and the blind groupthink of following the specific leader/archetypes that Gustave Le Bon warned in 1895 would eventually replace individual thought.

​When I first read "The Crowd" in college, I was struck by how tragically people ignored his warnings. Le Bon saw exactly what was coming. Unfortunately millions died because of that collective blindness, manifested in the global horrors of the 1910s, the 1920s, and, arguably worse still, the 1930s.

​Bringing us back to the present: here we are again, amidst another round of failing empires.

We are watching the return of the "Strongman" who promises to fix everything while deploying modern-day Gestapos like ICE to do the unthinkable. It is so infuriating for me to watch people who otherwise have functional brains, lose all grip on reality, making endless excuses for every horrific mistake because they are under the spell of what Le Bon called "Prestige" the very real psychological paralysis that prevents them from seeing things as they actually are.

A century has passed, the tools have changed, but our susceptibility to the demagogue remains the same.

We still have not learned a goddamn thing.