“Never underestimate the power of stupid people
in large groups.”― George Carlin“Two things are infinite: the universe
and human stupidity"...
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| "Much more effective than the ointment and can be used on Shabbos" |
People
are weak. They are susceptible. They are easily manipulated through
their fears. They long to prostrate themselves. They can be led by the
nose into the gutter. The angels of their better natures, if they’ve
ever given a moment’s thought to them, are a lot less powerful than the
devils of their diabolical urges.
They
lie, they exploit, they seek distraction at any price from the monotony
of existence. The life of humankind, as Hobbes famously put it, is
“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Especially short: You no
sooner begin to get the hang of it, learn a few useful tricks like
lowered expectations, than it’s over. Poof!
This is the basic setup. Society is an exercise in trying to offset horrors through law and convention.
Every
now and again, along comes somebody, or some new technology, or both,
capable of taking this raw human material and shaping it into a crazed,
baying, hypnotized mob that is convinced the Great Leader has come.
Whatever this Messiah says goes. The moon is a balloon, if he says so;
and entire communities with the wrong beliefs or shade of skin are
chopped liver.
Examples?
Dear reader, I respect you too much to belabor the obvious. Look
around. The wealthiest society on earth is currently subjected to the
chaotic rule of a mean and vulgar charlatan who refined the manipulation
of humanity through a TV show that was a ratings smash
in its first season, continued under his guidance for more than a
decade, and relied on the cruelty of whimsical humiliation for its
frisson. Donald Trump had a solid education in the power of images, the
flimsiness of objective reality, and the magnetism of authority.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, O.K.?” he declared during the campaign.
Let’s hand it to Trump: he was right. Americans voted him into office
after he said that. They were ready to roll the dice, even on nuclear
war, if the alternative was to be bored. They were mad.
There’s
not much new under the sun. Long before Facebook and Twitter and
Russian trolls on social media, the potential to combine the bombardment
of visual media, the “genius” of an individual (Trump’s word), and mass
disorientation to forge dystopian madness had been imagined.
So
here’s a little test. The following three passages are not in
chronological order. Which came first, and when do they date from?
“We
deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there,
day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all
you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here.
You’re beginning to think the tube is reality and that your own lives
are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you.”
Here’s
the second: “This whole country’s just like my flock of sheep!
Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers —
everybody that’s got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle…..
They’re mine. I own ’em. They think like I do. Only they’re even more
stupid than I am, so I gotta think for them.”
And
finally: “The stresses set up by the social changes wrought by the
advent of technology are straining the structure of civilization beyond
the limits of tolerance. The machine does our work for us and meekly
comes and goes at our bidding. But it inexorably demands its wages.”
The answers are: the first dates from 1976 and is from the extraordinary Sidney Lumet movie “Network,” written by Paddy Chayefsky. The second, from 1957, appears in the equally prescient
Elia Kazan movie “A Face in the Crowd,” written by Budd Schulberg.
(Watch them both if you want to understand Trump.) The third dates from
1938. It’s a passage from my father’s high school magazine in
Johannesburg that I stumbled on while researching my last book.
“Civilization,” of course, would collapse a year later when Hitler
invaded Poland.
“Network”
traces the apotheosis of a news anchor, Howard Beale, who goes
off-script on TV, raging against the world and television — their lies
and manipulations — and develops a following with his unforgettable cri
de coeur: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!”
His ratings, previously in a dive, soar. “A Face in the Crowd” also
follows a media sensation, Lonesome Rhodes, who parlays his charm and
popular touch into a meteoric rise to national television. He is a
fraud, with startling instincts for human weakness, who takes everyone
in.
Beale,
whose rise begins when he announces he will commit suicide live on TV,
succumbs in the end to the terrible logic of his success when he is
assassinated during his show.
Rhodes
is undone by a hot mic as he dissects the idiocy of the Americans he
has entranced: “Those morons out there? Shheh, I can take chicken
fertilizer and sell it to ’em for caviar. I can make them eat dog food
and they’ll think it’s steak ... You know what the public’s like? A cage
full of guinea pigs."
Somewhere,
a hot mic is waiting for Trump. Its name might be the Mueller
investigation, whose painstaking nature is making him hotheaded. People
are dumb, but they know when their president is compromised. As a wise
man once observed, “You can’t fool all the people all the time.”