Ep. 382: Freud on Group Psychology (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 382 is what holds a social group together? And we read Sigmund Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the ego from 1921. More information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, only accomplishing my heroic deeds with the help of bees and ants in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:34 Seth: This is Seth Paskin experiencing social angst in Austin, Texas.

0:40 Wes: This is Wes Alwan converging on his ego ideal in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:45 Dylan: And this is Dylan Casey dreading being provoked by danger or the cessation of emotional ties in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:52 Mark: All right, so we talked recently in our Royce discussion about people bonding in groups and what makes us do that and what makes a legitimate group. And Freud seemed right, at least that suggested to your mind this Freud book, Wes, that you had read before, more than once.

1:09 Wes: Yeah, And I was thinking in particular about something relevant to politics of our times. And I took this book to be, in large part, even though it's in large part about why it is that groups can have such a negative effect on us that they can lead us, for instance, to be disinhibited in certain ways and meaning, to be susceptible to our emotions and incapable of thinking, and then ultimately capable of great crimes at the group level that we might not be engaged in at the individual level. Why is our conscience so compromised by groups? And so Freud will take a lot of, you know, many, many, many various of his theories and try to apply them to that question.

And then, of course, in the course of that, he's going to try to say, well, what is it that binds groups together psychologically? How do we apply individual psychology to derive group psychology out of it? Which is something he doesn't think his predecessors preceding theorists have done. And by contrast, what causes groups to become disinhibited? What's happening in individuals, and how are they affected by the larger group?

2:16 Dylan: I think it's very timely. Like you said, Wes, and I wasn't on the Royce episode, but thinking about how we interact as groups. To me, it was. I don't remember reading it. I don't remember if we reread it at St. John's but I had not read it before. I found myself having to work pretty hard to understand the conclusion of the observation. So I'm going to be interested in talking about it.

2:44 Seth: This topic is very relevant to me right now just in thinking about the thoughts I'm having about how consciousness functions and people are prone to destruction and so forth. So you know, I've been thinking about it in terms of individuals and self consciousness. But this is a very interesting. I like the whole concept of the group a kind of a group experience or the way that groups function to, you know, is it to create the situations where this is possible or to amplify or to enable. You know, I think the conclusion here is right, that the. At some extent it's about really enabling something that's already latent in human beings.

But I just as a. For the topic and the thesis here are like really resonated with me. You know, it's just in the first, like I said, the first, you know, maybe third to a half of the book it's very clear what the problem statement is. He's, you know, he summarizes some other thinkers and. But when he, as Wes says, you know, is kind of trying to put it all together with all these other elements of his the then it became a lot harder to follow and just trying to hold on to the thread like Dylan said of like okay, how do we bring this home? How is all this going to help us understand and explain the group psychology aspect?

So but I mean I enjoyed reading it for sure.

4:09 Wes: So I think, you know, in the spirit of Mark, we should give the answer to the test before we. At the beginning. Right? Or what I think it is. And I think I expect you guys to differ on this to some degree. But what I take the overall gist of the book to be is that he wants to incorporate the idea of a group leader and to say that a group leader and that that could be. It doesn't have to be an actual person. It could just be a leading idea is what he calls it, or an ideal. Right? And so it could be a nationalist ideal, for instance. But the leader of the group is important to its composition and whether it's cohesive or whether it disintegrates.

The leader of the group is important to the relationships between group members. And most significantly the leader can replace the conscience of individual group members. Freud is using the phrase ego ideal at this point, which he later starts to use the word superego. But an important part of the superego, right, is just conscience, these sorts of prohibitions, but also our idealized selves, what we think we would like to be ultimately and why. So why does conscience go away in certain circumstances? Why do groups Become disinhibited and do terrible things because in a way, they outsource their conscience to the leader and in a way to the group as a whole.

So the dictates of the leader can be acted upon as if they are moral dictates. And of course, we see this in politics all the time. Sort of nastiest sorts of views. People. It's not just like people give in to them, like they're giving in to some temptation. Ooh, well, I know I shouldn't, but it's. They. They're really gung ho about their terrible objectives. So we can see in some ways, I was thinking of linking with this, you know, the love of lawlessness, the mobocracy, which I think we're seeing a bit of in our country right now. This, in a way, is an explanation of that possibility within human beings.

And it depends ultimately on his theory of the ego ideal or the superego.

6:04 Mark: So I'm not going to keep bringing up Royce here, but just to accept you are ground right apart from this instance. I think, though, Seth, what you were saying about Royce being scary, I think is because you were sort of seeing some of what Freud is saying into it, that Royce was giving an aspirational saying. You know, I'm actually only talking about certain kinds of communities that are founded on loyalty, that involve the whole self, not, you know, dumbing yourself down to enter into this, but like that. Your loyalty, your willingness, your willing participation harnesses you as a whole being and puts you in the mindset of this.

And Freud, he does see himself as arguing against his immediate predecessors who were focused on crowds, as dumbing everyone down and making everyone evil. Right. That, that you instantly get your pitchforks and go, it's a mob mentality. Isn't. Isn't the German German here in the title, like crowd psychology, Wes? Or am I wrong about that?

7:01 Wes: What is the German?

7:02 Mark: I don't remember. I thought I saw in the very beginning a footnote to the point of. I see the Le Bon thing he talks about is the Crowd, A study of the popular mind.

7:12 Seth: Massenpsychologie.

7:14 Mark: Mass.

7:15 Seth: Massenpsychologie.

7:16 Mark: Yeah. So mass psychology or something like that. In any case, the people. He's immediately starting to. He starts sort of with a little literature review and he's responding to people who are specifically concerned about dumb crowds. Like the right. The opposite of what Royce is arguing for. And so Freud is like, you know, actually a crowd can improve the ethics. It seldom improves the intellect. Maybe if it's organized in a certain way and people are Actually given the chance to do like a scientific society or something. So he kind of considers some overlapping things to what Royce is looking at, but overall he's still concerned with and what he gets down to, you know, what binds people together, right, is you are surrendering something, as Wes just said, you are instead of your own conscience, you are letting the leader or the ideal of the group take over.

And I think that that is exactly what happens in this super group that Royce was talking about. But he sees it at least, you know, the one that he's interested in, this Christian community that's going to take over the world as wonderful because this ego ideal has such superior ethics to us, right? The example of Jesus is so wonderful. Whereas Freud is going to look at that same thing as it actually occurs in the world, not as St. Paul hopes it would eventually occur, and seems to see it as certainly counter individualistic at the very least. It's not, as Royce says, that the whole individual, in a second naivete post, you know, is not just fitting through the small door that will allow him into the crowd, but is bringing his whole self.

I feel like Freud thinks that the analysis of groups does not work like that. If you are diverting your libido to love all these other people and glue them to you, that's that you are not being narcissistic, individualistic, the Nietzschean superman, the self contained person.

9:04 Dylan: So this gets to articulating one of the questions that I have about. So look, relationships between communities and individuals has been part of people thinking for a long time and even before you might be thinking about it, what your relationship as an individual to those around you and the various kinds of communities you have, both in their ethics and in their forces on you. That's just a super common theme. And someone like Aristotle, for instance, would say human beings are political animals. They fundamentally need relationships between others.

And that this back and forth between your community relations and you as an individual, in shaping you and in making you who you are as an individual. And that being a feedback mechanism, it's a both. And that seems like sort of the most basic observation. And so understanding what that is becomes the challenge. So what I found myself wondering about is, is the account given for causes or psychology of groups and individuals with respect to those groups, mainly focused on the account of the pathologies of group activities or accounting that clarifies the pathologies of group activities, but also applies to the mechanisms and ways in which all group activities work.

Because not all group activities are pathological. In fact, far from it and so it could be that the pathological is a, the most interesting because it's the most dangerous, it's the most convulsive. Right. We're going to be much more scared of mobs that go around lynching people for no good reason than we are of scientific societies that are measuring the opening angle, angle of a refraction from a prism or something like that. But our group activities extend to us forming communities, forming political relationships, building civilization is a group activity both in its negatives and its positives.

And so it wasn't clear to me what level of insight I was supposed to be getting out of that.

11:10 Wes: So he's explaining a particular sort of phenomenon about groups, but in doing so he has to explain the cohesion of the group. And also he's giving large elements of his psychology that explained normal development as well. Although with Freud it's always tricky. Right. Because his theory of normal development, which involves identification, which he goes into in this book, but it involves the idea that we do incorporate values from our environment. Our superego is built up of these identifications with groups. Right. So the group already has this formative role and can be inhibiting, as he points out. Right. We get our ethics, we get our norms from the group.

11:50 Dylan: But.

11:51 Wes: So there's a developmental theory. But that concept of identification actually comes out of his thinking about depression. He thinks depression is predicated on the same sort of thing. And I think as we've seen many times over, this incorporation of values from the community is just a double edged sword. Is it normal, Is it pathological, when is it patriotism, when is it nationalism? Violence is often moralized. That's the part of the problem. And I'll say here, I think we usually see it in our episodes in discussions about Thomas, because that's what I consider to be the correlative of the superego. So the question of recognition and all that stuff we've been over many times. Yep.

12:29 Seth: So let's kind of work our way into the text here. Just the structure of the first part. You guys have mentioned lots and lots of points. So at the beginning of the book he outlines the view of somebody named Le Bon and some others characterize the individual participation in, in a group as negative in the sense of heightening the emotional response, lowering like intellectual activity and engagement and essentially reducing inhibitions, as we've said, to behaviors that they would, as in if they were just by themselves would not have done. In other words, the kind of like self inhibiting part of ourselves that, you know, disappears when we get into the group.

So it's just a characterization of the behaviors of the group. And Freud says. He essentially, I think, agrees with that characterization. But he says, you know, the point is here we have to explain it. How does this actually happen? We're observing it as a phenomenon, but how does it actually happen? So that's what he proposes to do. But then again, the first thing that he sort of brings up is they are focusing on just a very, very small or a sub segment of groups, namely mobs. Right? Revolutionary spontaneous groups, things like that. And so he says, you know, we'll have to look at other types of groups as well.

And so I think. First thing I just wanted to establish was, is it agreed that he agrees more or less with Le Bon's characterization of the individual in a group, at least with respect to these mob like. Or I don't remember what the term was, spontaneous groups? I think.

14:16 Wes: Yeah, I think he does. Although importantly, and this is pages 10 to, like, 14, right. So Le Bon wants to explain. Part of the problem is to explain why groups can have this disinhibiting effect on individuals. And Le Bon will use these ideas, like contagion. Right? Feelings could be contagious between people, or there's this suggestibility, which is almost like being hypnotized by the group magnetic influence. And Freud says, okay, but that's not good enough. We need to explain what contagion or suggestibility actually are. What is it in the individual mind that would make them susceptible to that from a group?

Because we know in individual situations, yes, we might be contagious by someone, but we might also just naturally resist it. They're in a good mood. It might put me in a good mood, but it also might be, say, say, screw them. I'm not in a good mood. I might react against the suggestion. So why would people be more susceptible to it in a group? So Le Bon doesn't go far enough.

15:19 Mark: This also seemed to be a time where people were fascinated by hypnotism. So there's the question of, like, well, can we explain the suggestion by hypnotism, or do we in turn have to explain hypnotism by suggestion? Like, is there. Which one of these, if either is a raw, inexplicable thing? And as you've said, Wes, the solution ends up being neither. Neither one is basic. It has everything to do with identifications of the ego and how we see ourselves, how we split ourselves up into pieces and have one part fight the other part. So the superego, the ego Ideal ends up being one part of the ego that branches off.

We have all these just basic Freudian dynamics of. Well, I start out all narcissistic, but then I love an object and I put that narcissism on the object. So just the way that the libido moves around from object back to subject, back to object again and splits the subject in half, makes part of it, an object identifies with something, you know. So we're definitely. To get to his final answer, you have to go deep into what makes Freud, especially Freud. Whereas he ends this initial chapter on Le Bon said. Everything Le Bon has said here is obvious and often repeated.

These guys are not doing real science. They're just kind of doing everyday observation. And it's true, insofar as it goes,

16:39 Dylan: this is almost idle interest. But do we know, is Le Bon somebody who sort of had the mind share regarding group psychology at the time? So it makes sense for Freud to engage. And he's doing the thing in this book of. Let me talk about what people think about group psychology up till now. And he focuses mostly on Le Bon. Then he goes to some summaries after that and then he moves on saying that these have a lot of good points, but now they don't go far enough, as Wes said, or they're incomplete. They're critical things that we need to understand more. So I'm going to do that. Is Le Bon picked out particularly because. For any particular reason, I don't know how.

17:23 Wes: I assume it was very popular at the time.

17:26 Dylan: Yeah.

17:26 Wes: But I don't know for sure.

17:28 Mark: So it's Gustave Le Bon. The book was 1895. This is just Wiki telling me. Influenced by Scipio Sighele's The Criminal Crowd, 1891. So I think these were probably well known books. Influenced not only Freud, but also Mein Kampf. Interesting. So apparently Hitler talks about Le Bon as well. So if he was still spinning around by Hitler's time, this must have been a pretty big book.

17:54 Dylan: Yeah.

17:54 Wes: Hitler is very interested in Mein Kampf.

17:56 Dylan: Yeah.

17:57 Wes: And he's interested in exploiting this. Right. So we get lines in here about the way leaders can hypnotize crowds and by repetition, something Hitler was very interested in. Rhetorical repetition can have a hypnotic effect, is the idea. And Hitler used that.

18:15 Dylan: Yeah. From Hitler's point of view, a book like this is like a how to for public rhetoric to get people to do what you want.

18:24 Wes: Yeah, exactly. It can be. Which is interesting because we will at some point we'll probably talk about, well, what is inhibited versus disinhibited crowd. Right. We're going to get to organized groups like the church and the army and what's going on in the army. It's supposed to be organized and restrained. But then also it can be the tool of, you know, often it's. It can be doing things as it. As disinhibited as well. Or its acts can be horrible, horrific and involving atrocities against civilians and all that. So people lose their conscience in a way. Can lose their conscience in the context of war, even though they could be very disciplined about it in their unit, so to speak.

19:03 Dylan: So all this seems to get to what are the ways in which we. In doing our actions? Are we making choices about those actions that we effectively take responsibility for? We own them ourselves, or in what variety of mechanisms? And these seem to be some of them. Do we take actions that we basically offload the decision making about them?

19:29 Mark: I guess a related question is, is Freud in reporting this, saying, this is something that we all do. We all get into crowds, we all are at public speaking events, we all act in organizations. And so this is something. Or is it these rubes that pick up their torches. This is how they are corrupted by a strong leader. Whereas we. Once you retract and take the scientific point of view, then you're just not going to be subject to this anymore.

19:59 Wes: I don't know from personal experience because I don't get disinhibited crowds. Not capable. I don't go to a rock concert and feel less inhibited even after a few drinks. But yeah, are we all. I mean, I. Do any of you have the experience of getting riled up by at a political speech or some other?

20:18 Seth: No, I was just thinking about this earlier. I seem to have been born with a no join gene like I'm naturally hostile to. I just physically and spiritually and mentally react negatively whenever I'm in a situation. Like even if somebody. Violent physical reaction, like when religious people come to your door, just the mere thought that you're even gonna try to talk to me about this upsets me. Even like when religious people approach you on the street or come to your front door, like I just have a violent physical reaction like to even projecting into the future the idea that they would want me to be a part of who they are. Physically revolting.

21:00 Wes: I think we got the gist of that.

21:02 Dylan: But isn't being a fan part of this whole thing? Being delighted at how the point guard on your kid's basketball team had a great game and everybody's just Swept up in the enthusiasm for how awesome the game is going and it's the kids on your side. And part of that delight is the delight that comes from witnessing that and being part of that group. It's the same kind of thing. Right.

21:28 Wes: Especially if you're like a European soccer fan and then you can riot, but. Just kidding. But you know, but the other.

21:35 Dylan: I'm going to keep emphasizing this. That, yes, I know definitely all of these negative things are totally. But I'm going to keep emphasizing that all of the things about how we come together to rescue each other in the face of disaster and how we stick together, tribulation and how we sacrifice ourselves for the greater good also are

21:58 Wes: part of this, you know.

21:59 Mark: Yeah.

22:00 Wes: What, what is being a fan? Where do, how do we classify that?

22:04 Dylan: Sure.

22:04 Wes: Is it an organized group or is it disorganized or is it neither? And then the other thing I think that Dylan, you've brought up is how do we classify communal influence in general? Right. Because there's only a passing allusion in here to how we get our ethical ideals from the group. Right. And we don't even have a superego unless we incorporate all that stuff from the group. So it's much more tacit and procedural. Right. It's organized in some sense, arguably, but it's not organized like the army or the church. It's just organized the way, you know, you'd think of norms as a self organizing entity that spreads from generation to generation, like DNA almost. So the organization is structural and lies outside of any particular human organization. So I think that's a very good point to think about that.

22:51 Dylan: Yeah, well, and I think you're also emphasizing that group psychology might be a specific or subset of this. Right. If we're going to really talk about intentionally or formally organized groups, or at least organically organized groups that have structure to them, that get added onto them. And that's what we mean by groups or do we mean spontaneously organized groups like mobs? Those are two different things. You know, a political party that's organized with a hierarchy and laws and organization of punishments for disloyalty, that's a different thing than a mob.

23:27 Wes: Well, I would say what's interesting to me about your distinction is the difference between tacitly organized groups, which is to say organized by norms, which are kind of free floating in a weird way. And then, yeah, explicitly organized groups like here's your army, here's your church, and then of course they're all related, but still. Yeah, that's something that doesn't really get addressed very much in this book. Even though it kind of lurks in the background. Right. For thinking about identification and all that stuff, that the larger implications of that are lurking in the background.

23:58 Mark: Yeah. If he were Aristotle, there would be a straight ahead taxonomy. Instead, Freud drops things like, okay, we need to distinguish between organized groups, unorganized groups, groups with leaders, groups without leaders. But he starts talking about mobs, because that's what Le Bon is interested in. And he ends the book seemingly like he brings it back to. Compared to the. The church and the armies. But it is an explanation that fundamentally applies to mobs. And Yeah, I won't give any more away. We're gonna get into that later. But.

24:32 Dylan: Yeah.

24:32 Mark: Well, I guess this is maybe a question for Wes. The idea that when I take the leader or the leading principles and place of my superego, is that something that I can. It seems like that's something that I can carry with me even in a very dissolute.

24:46 Wes: Right.

24:47 Mark: A political party. They don't even all know each other. They don't get together. It's not just, you know, a bunch of people coming together on the street one day. It is something that can be a life mission, a community. In Royce's sense, the very existence of time gaps between, you know, when the group would be exerting it seems like it introduces an opportunity for self reflection that is not there in a mob. So it seems like the groups of the moment would be more stable, at least for that moment, because people are, you know, are being swept up.

Whereas, you know, the Communist Party in general, like, yes, people are. I guess so I'm connecting like a fanatic to somebody that's just in a group at that moment, you know, which they're. With their pitchfork like that. You'd have to have that sort of level of mania. And most groups do not inspire that level of mania. So maybe they're not acting as true groups. Right. Because I'm not accepting. Just because, you know, we're all members of the Royce Society, apparently that is the real thing, doesn't mean that we have accepted any sort of substitution of Royce as a leader for their own superego.

They're just an interest group. So there are plenty of kinds of groups that have bylaws, you know, that. That do not fall into this group psychology whatsoever.

25:59 Wes: I mean, one good question here is what does it mean to belong to a political party, especially if that party has become quasi crim. Not to get too political here, like the Nazis, let's say, or Maybe other things going on right now. But yeah, if the party has become essentially vicious in its tendencies and is engaged in very destructive acts, and I am a gung ho party member, what does that mean? I might, you know, the love of the leader and the fascination with the leader, especially if he's a strong man, might play a big part in that. But then there are also out group dynamics, right?

Those damn liberals. Or there's just leading ideals like family and traditional family values or something like that. That could be a leading idea that replaces the capacity to think. I think this is the way Hannah Arendt would put it. It becomes unthinking. It's just like that. You can call it an idea or an ideal, but it's not really a thought. It's just like a leader. It's just that slogan with which I become fascinated. And so, yeah, I'm not out with a pitchfork necessarily, but I might be scrolling social media, getting off on ice officers brutalizing people, or I might be walking down the street in Germany even in 1933.

This is a very good novel called Goodbye to Berlin. It's more like a memoir by Christopher Isherwood, who's an Englishman in Germany at the time when Hitler is rising and he's seeing things on the street and some people are resisting and mistreatment of Jews, and some people are resisting and standing up. There are people who see it and they're gratified. So they don't have the pitchfork necessarily, but they have a pitchfork mentality.

27:38 Mark: Is that a better band name or an album name? I'm trying to think Pitchfork mentality.

27:42 Wes: Pitchfork mental.

27:43 Mark: Neither.

27:44 Wes: That is. Yeah, that is pretty good.

27:46 Mark: A podcast name. That's a good podcast name.

27:49 Wes: Yeah.

27:50 Mark: I was a little wrong that Freud was saying, in contradistinction to Le Bon, that a group can raise your ethical level. He says. Even Le Bon admits this. Right. Le Bon is mostly saying groups make you dumber. They make you. Certainly they're not open to subtle turns of logic. Right. If you're giving a speech to a group, it has to be a very simple, you know, and groups, they'll. They'll turn on a dime based on, you know, what the. Let's say the speech giver is propounding. They demand illusions. They have a thirst for obedience. But if the speaker is, say, emphasizing compassion or something and wants you to sympathize with this, like, look at this, you know, this person who was brutalized by this.

Granted, that example that is often used in politics might be used to rouse up hatred against somebody else. But it could be a positive moral thing, like a sense of moral outrage. I guess maybe that's a question that even when supposedly the standards are being raised. Right. I've adopted the group leader as a substitute for my superego. Maybe the group leader actually is objectively has more of a conscience than I do. Given that I'm not open to sophisticated moral reasoning or something, are we really going to pay much attention to this grudging acknowledgement by Le Bon that Freud describes that you could actually be made more moral by a group or you inevitably because you're made dumber?

Per Aristotle, if you're dumber, you are less moral. That is just what reason is essential to morality?

29:18 Wes: Yeah. So do we need to be doing any Arendt style thinking? If we have the right leader, maybe many people are not capable of it. So if we have a Churchill who inspires us with his Churchill rhetoric to do the right thing as a society, then maybe that's the best we can hope for. Is that the idea?

29:39 Dylan: Well, it makes me think a lot about habit and about how that part of the development of habit that's good is it allows us to offload choices all the time. And in fact, the cultivation of the right kind of habits might be critically important to us. Flourishing. Well, and our relationships with our. The people around us end up being key to helping cultivate the right kind of habits, such that we're not making choices all the time, that we're not in fact individually completely responsible for every single thing that we are prone to doing. Because we end up having ways of working, ways of being habits that take our potentialities and turn them into actions that just happen kind of without thinking hard.

And so we have this capability and maybe even this desirability to offload decisions at every moment of every day, just to go through actions. And then there's the question. Well, turning those actions into something that is somehow gratifying, this might be the part that Freud is tied into the most, is as individuals, what are the things that are gratifying to us? And how does that gratification manifest itself? Because sometimes it's not just, you know, enjoyable to us, but we're. It's actually a gratification that's also pathological. It's not working to our own benefit, even though that's the way it's working.

31:06 Wes: So when you're talking about habits, I thought you were talking about something non pathological.

31:11 Dylan: I was. Yeah, but I'm. I'm looking have this offloading of decisions and offloading of having to think things through. It might be just analogical, it might not be exactly the same thing, but it does make me think that because there's a psychology deeply involved in habit formation and makes me want to link up our tendencies to just not want to think things through all the time.

31:33 Wes: Yeah. I mean, you had me just thinking about norms again. Right. So habit in Aristotle virtues just are these dispositional qualities that we have, these states within us that are more permanent and they're habitual. And Freud identification is just that process by which we build up these virtue states. Right. Character.

31:53 Dylan: Yes.

31:53 Wes: Which is what the superego is. It's. And it could be virtuous or vicious. So you had me thinking for some reason of just something as simple as I get into the habit of saying please. And I might feel weird, I might not feel guilty or ashamed. I might, I guess, if I forget to say that in a certain context where I should have said it, but I might feel weird about that. But I'm not thinking about. I don't have to make some sort of, ooh, what's the right thing to do in this situation. I just do, you know, I follow the norms that are important to the cohesion of society, and I do that without thinking.

32:27 Dylan: And you might get offended if you do that all the time. You might get offended by people not following it through with you.

32:33 Wes: I sure do, all the time. That's when the pitchfork comes out.

32:40 Dylan: Exactly.

32:41 Mark: We're making a connection in some of these comments here between the sort of offloading of the superego that Freud is talking about and the offloading about matters of fact and maybe matters of ethical judgment that we do by necessity all the time that we've said is actually rational and that if you say, no, no, no, I must prove to myself, you know, that vaccines work or don't work or whatever, like, you're not going to be able to do that. You're not in a position to do that. So what is it to be humble in this area? Is it to take the word of experts or is it to say, oh, well, you claim vaccines cause autism or ivermectin works. Who am I to say, you know, I'm not a scientist in this area, so I really shouldn't even have an opinion.

33:23 Dylan: Yeah, see, this is where this whole thing leads up to leadership matters. And, you know, whether I think about the leadership of groups that are explicitly formed or tacitly formed, or even to think about cultivation of parent child relations or the relations of the seniors in a group versus the novices in a group, the cultivation of those leaders actions and whether they cultivate say excellences that are associated with the group dynamic as a whole for the benefit of the individuals or whether they are not. That seems to me like just a key thing. But the force of the leader is. Well, we've been discussing this is one of the points of the book is the leadership matters a lot because it has an extra effect on what's going on. And there's something about how leadership and deference to leaders works in this respect.

34:18 Wes: And I think the leader can. We should expand this so it can be. It doesn't just have to be a person or an idea. It could be a process like it could be the discursive process as a whole. As I think this is what Mill in a way is arguing for. And on liberty, the discussion itself should be the leader. So Mark, you're thinking about testimony and its role in knowledge. And I think that's a good advertisement for some future testimony episode that I've long wanted to do because I think it's our relationship to experts and expert expertise and their testimony is actually complicated just by virtue of having credentials.

They don't necessarily become the leader or the right leader. We do evaluate testimony even from. From experts and we have important psychological resources for doing that. I'm now the stupidity of anti vaxxers. Don't get me wrong. It's idiotic and it represents a fundamental misconception of our relationship to testimony. They go to this opposite extreme and they don't have the tools, psychological tools to be good evaluators of who's the authority and who isn't. But yeah, this is still a question about who's the leader and the discursive process, right?

If it's working properly and people's processes for evaluating testimony in this context, ideally that becomes the leader something larger than any given individual or idea.

35:41 Dylan: It also is something that sets something like I'll call the culture in the sense that the culture is in the way in which people in groups, whether they big or small, interact and make decisions amongst themselves, offload their choices based upon the culture that's generated by the environment through leadership. That happens all the time. It happens in companies, it happens in small groups. And this is where again, whether it's the leading, the leadership in the sense of the person or the leadership in the sense of the idea. And for good and bad you just

36:16 Wes: have to have the resources, right? When is a leader vicious? When is he a grotesque monstrosity? And if you don't have the ability to suss that out, then you're in trouble. Or, you know, when is a piece of testimony, obviously nonsense, same thing. And this is about the ability to, like, have a good theory of mind, right? We figure out what's false and testimony often because it's just psychologically implausible. We have a good theory of mind. Theory of mind collapses in these contexts. So that's another example, I think, from Mark, where, you know, this like, disorganization on the down low where it's not necessarily people out with pitchforks, but something is happening that's mob like in the individual psyche, the collapse of their capacity for thinking.

And thinking may not be, oh, I got to reason about what's the right thing to do. But it could just be something as simple as people having compromised resources for evaluating who the right leader should be or what's plausible testimony and what isn't. These sort of feedback mechanisms that put little checks and balances on our everyday tacit, habitual reliance on what's outside of us because we can't just do it all ourselves.

37:30 Mark: So even for Freud, the superego normally is something that we're bringing in an external influence, right? The influence of the parent tip the father, typically, and making this a little part of your mind. So it's not a question of, well, in a group that's pathological because you're just taking whatever your dear leader says and you're substituting that for your own conscience. Because the conscience is always something that is pulled in externally. The question seems to just be sort of, how quickly and shoddily is it pulled in? If it's purely this leader might even be unpredictable, might make this decision, this decision, this decision.

And I'm just going to defer to them in all things that's different than something that is solidified from the entire culture, the entire entire religion, you know, Judeo Christian tradition of right and wrong and stuff like that. That's going to be. Even though it's not any more authentically myself in a fundamental way, because nothing is authentically myself. It's all. It's all sucked in from the outside, but at least it's done so with greater habit. I habitually defer to the scientific and perhaps ethical leaders in my community, as opposed to, I'm just going to take whatever this person is saying right now.

So if we're going to apply this to the current situation, right. The way that Trump generally riles people up is not they come to his rally. And that's the thing like it is a long term, like listening to a podcast. A podcast can be an hour, two hours long. These Ben Shapiro or whoever it is, and they're giving you arguments, they're doing the thing. It's just, you know, it's a one sided, you don't get to answer them. And so I don't think there's a sharp distinction between I am letting somebody do the thinking for me and I am thinking along with them.

Like that's what we do in university lectures. The smart person is talking to you and you are learning how to think by thinking along with them. And maybe you're like, wait a second, I don't agree with that. Maybe you run off and make write your own, your own treatise in contradistinction between this. But usually like the way that we're able to do what we're able to do in this podcast is because we all had educations where we were walked through the steps and sort of participated in that. So it just seems a matter of degree. You could say that somebody who's an academic is too much of a Freudian or too much of a.

Because they're sort of. Not because they, you know, Freud does their thinking for them, but because their thinking has been trained along Freudian lines. And so what is the difference between that and now somebody that is. I don't want to say that they're just a sheep. Like they think all the time, but their thinking has been trained by listening to Rush Limbaugh or whatever the thing is.

40:12 Wes: Wow, I feel like I'm getting compared as a psychoanalyst to Trump supporters. Am I a sheep for being too influenced by psychoanalysis?

40:23 Mark: Again, I'm not saying you specifically, but go ahead, Seth.

40:26 Seth: Well, I want to at least go question if not take issue with that characterization you just made, Mark. Cause he says explicitly, once you sacrifice, once you trade your ego ideal for the leader, that you just don't care about truth and falsity don't matter. It's not about training your intellect and buying into the arguments or being inculcated in some way. It's about being swept up in the emotion and that in fact you're like heightened, that you have a heightened sensitivity. And it's important that that be a characteristic. This heightened emotional sensitivity because the leader is going to try to evoke an emotional reaction in you.

It's not going to make an argument and try to convince you. It's going to evoke an emotional reaction and in your heightened state. The key is that that heightened emotional state makes you More prone to action. And the goal of the group is to take action. So I'm not sure the analogy that you mentioned holds, but that doesn't mean that what you're talking about isn't a valid and probably neglected piece of this. Right. If there's such a thing as an artificial group and then there are these spontaneous groups, then there has to be something that's like an informal group, something where you, like, I'm an Austinite.

What does that mean? It doesn't meet McKellen's or Magellan's, whatever the guy's name was. Criteria, five criteria for what constitutes a group.

41:54 Wes: MacDougall. Right.

41:55 Seth: McDougal.

41:56 Wes: One of the people. Freud is Seth. It means you think, keep things weird. It's clear what it means to be.

42:01 Seth: Yes, yes, exactly. And keep things weird. So anyway, you get my point is that I think we've already established that there are probably other forms of organizations and groups that are mentioned in the text. But. But I am interested in pushing a little harder on the whole concept of a leaderless group, because he kind of mentions it and teases it and then we don't really get into it and how that could possibly work. But we haven't even talked about the mechanism for how the leader does what we said, the substitution for the. Or the replacement of the ego ideal with the object. Is that the right way to say it, Wes?

42:36 Dylan: Yep.

42:36 Seth: Yeah.

42:37 Wes: We could get into some of the more specific psychological mechanisms in the next part if you guys want to.

42:41 Mark: Yeah, I think that sounds good. We've been. We've freeforming about groups.

42:44 Wes: We'll.

42:44 Mark: We'll get really into Freud's language and his way of analyzing this as opposed to just what he's quoting in, to some extent agreeing with from Le Bon. Come back next week, get part two of this discussion or go to partialexaminelife.com support to get it right now. Thanks.

43:00 Dylan: Thank you.