Be Your Own Person

by James Hudson

  Life as a group member has no purpose beyond the animalistic rage of the moment. Humans think ahead with their cerebral cortex, group members and animals do not do so because they are incapable of understanding the future as a concept. Turning on the instincts turns off the rational part of the mind.

  Anyone who is not in the grip of any sort of a conformist group instinct is an individual. The two are polar opposites. One is in the grip of the jungle, the other is his superior by virtue of being a rational individual. One excludes the other.

  If someone such as a team captain invites a high school student to join the football team as a waterboy, he is trying to use his prestige and hierarchical position to mesmerize his prospective recruit. He wants to manipulate him into turning off his rational mind due to the effect of his supposed prestige. If he uses a bunch of team members to help him, he is guilty of using group pressure to try to wear down his prospects. He wants to infect the prospect with the contagion of low intelligence which is the most common characteristic of groups. Gustave Le bon said that “In a crowd every act and sentiment is contagious.” The idea is to get the prospect to accept that he is a part of a group, not an independent intelligent individual, and to take all of his behavioral cues from other group members.

  Being in a group means lowered intelligence and almost no reasoning powers. This explains the brutal behavior of groups such as sports team audiences and such. They act unintelligently because they are unintelligent.

  Groups always victimize people and animals. The example of an animal hunted by men with sharpened sticks is uppermost in the mind. Individual humans are also victimized by instinctual groups that want to force them into psychological submission or physically abuse them. They all want some sort of control over the minds and bodies of those inside their group and want to extend it to outsiders as well.

  Groups always worship the rule of the instincts over the intellect. For that matter, they simply do not like any form of individuality or intelligence in others. In you are not with them, you are against them. Of course there is no reason to be with them. They stand for the rule of mindlessness over rationality, and are not really human. There is nothing human about an impulsive instinctual group. Henry Adams once noted that “nine minds in ten take polish passively, like a hard surface; only the tenth sensibly reacts.” Group minds are entirely passive and produce only non-intellectual instincts and violence.

  Your individuality is all you have to get you through life, so make the most of it. You and your mind are too important to waste on instinctual groups consisting of impulsively animalistic instinctual minds.

  One thing you can be sure of regarding group influence over individuals. They are not limited by any sort of intellectual constraints. Therefore they will lie about everything if it gives them any sort of degree of control over you. They are naturally dumbed-down, and that is all they offer. The intellectual part of their minds is completely turned off, so they are pure instincts in motion. Imagine Homo Erectus in modern day clothing. According to William James “when the higher brain functions are in abeyance..... instincts sometimes show their presence in truly brutish ways.” That means things like football stadium violence.

  Brainwashing is an interesting topic that reflects what groups do naturally to individuals they can surround on every side with round the clock propagandizing. It is conducted by the military and terrorist groups. Brainwashing is just more concentrated than the usual examples of group control of individuals.

  In the case of the military, the best known example occurred during the Korean War. Prisoners of war were subjected to round-the-clock propaganda and tortured to force them into bogus confessions of war crimes later used for propaganda purposes. After the war they recanted their bogus confessions once they were liberated from coercion.

  In the case of terrorists the situation was a bit different. Some bank employees were taken hostage in Stockholm, Swede, by bank robbers in 1973. They were trapped with them indoors for a few days. They developed a form of identification with the aggressor. Afterwards, some actually said that the bank robbers were actually very nice people, and one later actually raised money for their legal defense. None of the bank robbers developed the opposite case psychological syndrome, where they sided with their crime victims. Group members are not amenable to reason.

  The captive victims identified with the aggressors to the extent that they came around to seeing their world from the aggressors’ point of view. They tune out their individual interests, which often happens to group members swept up in the feelings of losing their individuality by virtue of being surrounded in a group and being forced to think about it a lot, because that is what other group members talk about all of the time - controlling you. In feeling himself to be a member of a group, the individual becomes increasingly instinctual and irrational.

  Groups always think in a simplified, dumbed-down manner, and become easily suggestible, imitative and intellectually primitive. Any local loudmouth strongman can influence a group because group members do not exhibit any sort of intellectual strength or resistance. Minds do not function normally under the team spirit influence because the group mind is both intellectually primitive and of a semi-religious, anti-reality nature. Team spirit chanting does not promote intellectual effort. It does not operate rationally any more than a football team mind operates rationally. It is primarily physical, violent and impulsive. It resemble a normal mind under the influence of alcohol, meaning a mind that is under the domination of an individual, group, work or an idea, what Le Bon characterized as a psychological domination which entirely paralyzes our critical faculty in our cerebral cortex. We know that this involves an emotional component that overwhelms the cerebral cortex, the rational part of the brain, with irrational emotions emanating from the amygdala. The older, more primitive parts of the mind overwhelm the more recently developed intellectual parts of the brain with emotional images. Group spirit is an emotion that overrides intellect to our disadvantage.

  The group mind, or team spirit, always takes the individual mind hostage by default in most people whenever the individual mind fails to resist to a sufficient degree by pushing back cognitively against the group influence. Individuals who do not think with their cerebral cortex instead of the amygdala in the limbic region do not think at all while under the influence of the ant-hive group influence. This is what happens to stupid teenagers who get into a car when the driver is has been drinking alcohol. Going along with the crowd’s group opinion can kills those who go along for the sake of going along. “All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than any existence of mediocrity” according to James Fenimore Cooper.

  When an instinctual group of other people do your thinking for you, you are not really doing your own thinking at all. You get swept along with the irrational emotional tides they create in your mind that wipe away your ability to think critically and analytically as an individual. Le Bon noted that “The renunciation of all its privileges which the French nobility voted in a moment of enthusiasm during the celebrated night of August 4, 1789 would certainly never have been consented to by any of its members taken singly......the crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual.” Many of the French nobility were massacred on guillotines a few years later by group-minded revolutionaries, since the group spirit can turn against anyone at any time for no real reason at all. Conformity kills because it is irrational at the core.

  This is a typical example of the anti-individualism of the group mentality, which contrasts with the benefits of individualistic rationality of the intellectual part of mind. Group spirit always destroys the lives of those who are tricked into taking it on precisely because group spirit shuts down the rational individual part of the brain and expands the irrational instinctual part of the brain into engulfing all parts of the mind. Group spirit is insanity. James Feni
more Cooper wrote “The pursuit of happiness is inseperable from the claims of individuality. To compel all to follow in this manner is to oppress all above the average tastes and information.” Instincts are irrational, individualism is rational. According to Friedrich Nietzsche: “Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups...... it is the rule.” We are not in this world to conform to other people’s expectations and will never get anywhere when we do.

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