Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Indeed, George Orwell's depiction of tyranny rests to a great degree on the human pro-
clivity, however much it may be denied, to trade individual freedom for the enfolding pro-
tection and intimate contact of the group. “Always yell with the crowd, that's what I say.
It's the only way to be safe,” one character declares in Orwell's novel 1984 . 11 Indeed, the
Internet, explains the novelist Thomas Pynchon, offers the protection of a virtual crowd,
and thus “promises social control on a scale those quaint old twentieth-century tyrants with
their goofy mustaches could only dream about.” 12 Meanwhile, the media amplify present-
ness , the rage and ecstasy and virtue—whatever the case may be—of the present moment,
for good and for bad. In other words, politics in the mass media age will be more intense
than anything we have experienced, because the past and future will have been obliterated.
Crowd psychology supplanted by technology was at work in the election of Barack
Obama and in the panic selling on Wall Street in 2008. It was at work in the anti-Muslim
pogroms in Hindu Gujarat, in India in 2002, in the mass public demonstrations in Europe
against the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, in both the pro- and anti-regime demonstrations in
Iran in 2009 and 2010, in the mass populist rallies against the Thai government in Bangkok
in the same time period, and endemically in the anti-Israel demonstrations in the West Bank
and Gaza; and, of course, in the Middle East's year of revolution in 2011, even as the Arab
Spring promoted the sanctity of the individual while attacking the power of autocrats who
robbed individuals of their dignity.
It is in the megacities of Eurasia principally where crowd psychology will have its
greatest geopolitical impact. Ideas do matter as the liberal humanists and anti-determinists
proclaim. And it is the very compression of geography that will provide optimal circum-
stances for new and dangerous ideologies—as well as for healthy democratizing ideas.
Mass education, because it produces hosts of badly educated people liberated from fatal-
ism, will contribute to instability. Lack of space will be the key factor. The psychological
hearth place of nationalist identity is increasingly the city and not the idealized rural land-
scapes of the past, even as urban crowds will at times demand maximalist foreign policies
from their governments based on this very idealized terrain.
The media will play a crucial role in this process. “No tamer has his animals more under
his power” than the media, writes Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West:
Unleash the people as reader-mass and it will storm through the streets and hurl
itself upon the target indicated.… A more appalling caricature of freedom of
thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he
dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this
is what he feels as his liberty. 13
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