The crowd is not a demon.
Women's History Month! Part 2
I promised you a “few items” for this History Month of Women.
The following journal entry is not about women, or Their History, but it was inspired by a few historically significant women and what they shared with me in a crowd from a stage earlier this month.
In other words, this is a strrrrretch (which reminds me of yoga—and women love yoga!).
There’s more, though. Feminism has been the major American cultural movement of my lifetime, and so I have seen its history inhabited, inspired, and possessed by the spirit I felt in this crowd, demon or not.
I don’t keep a journal, and I rarely write without an occasion or an audience, but I felt compelled to capture this revelation for its own sake, late into the witching hours after arriving home from these women’s performances.
It is still unedited, not made for you to read, not shaped into an Official Display Of Me, barely understandable (IYKYK), and it is too late to change that. You’ll see why.
The crowd is not a demon.
I saw a concert tonight by Heart, the rock band from the 1970s and 1980s.
The lead singer, Ann Wilson, was led onto the stage by a handler. She is at least 75 years old and recently made it through cancer treatment. The opening act also had an elderly female singer who was led onto stage in the same way. Both made me catch my breath and hold back tears at their frail humanity devoted to performing the supernatural feats we were about to see.
More than their frailty though, the crowd’s presence is what got me. I watched myself react to these devoted ladies and then realize that the crowd was reacting the same way. I saw hopeful faces awestruck and yearning for their success. I said to myself, “The crowd is not a demon,” and I began to cry.
I have been telling myself that the crowd is a demon for a while now. It is what I saw unmasked when Charlie Kirk was murdered, and it is the same demonic presence many of us noticed throughout the COVID debacle. It makes a direct line through every cruelty I have witnessed, back through history to human sacrifice, the tribe’s victim asking “why me?” while his killers shrug and perform the ritual—PERFORM the ritual, for the crowd.
Without the crowd, there is no ritual and no sacrifice, just another human being.
When Western missionaries confronted tribes engaging in these rituals, this is the light they were following. They may have garbled the message just as badly while performing these missions for their own crowds, but we can all see why they tried and the virtue they were pursuing.
They were trying to snap the crowd out of it.
The crowd is a current. It carries demons and angels alike.
Tonight I saw the crowd without its usual demon. At first I perceived the demon’s absence, like a shadow or afterimage. I saw the individual people, helpless, knowing not what they do. Then I perceived the yearning and the team spirit and almost took it for an angel. It feels like a soaring recognition of oneness and a desire to take up one’s rightful place in the crowd, where just the right amount of authority and submission is waiting like a soft nest. It is a spirit that loves the light but is easily led into darkness.
Some months ago, I saw another band perform to a similar crowd, but the experience was completely different. The band was not real. The band was imitating AC/DC. They did a good job, and the crowd enjoyed it, but it was an imitation of a performance. The crowd got to pretend that we were watching AC/DC, but we knew we were not, a suspension of disbelief. While Ann Wilson tonight was not able to duplicate her younger self’s original performances due to age and health, the imitation band had been unable to perform like AC/DC because they were never AC/DC. Ann Wilson graced us with that connection to her own original talent, and we returned the favor. The imitation band exchanged something with us too, but it was something cruder, a sort of mutual pandering or flattery. Plus, AC/DC’s material is crude and pandering to begin with—singing about “Hell’s Bells” just for effect, so stripped of meaning that it doesn’t even need irony to escape being Satanic.
Another thing awakened too: The crowd needs to be led. 20th century Western culture has celebrated the breakdown and subversion of this leadership, a punk-rock anti-aesthetic masquerading as anti-authoritarian populism but really just pandering to the population like promising a toddler endless candies. And the worst kind of people have exploited this. There is even some evidence that “they” started it, creating entire subcultures of inverted virtues worshipping self-destruction (cf. Laurel Canyon and wild tales of CIA-inspired drug culture). Who benefits from sowing these seeds? People who cannot take leadership without it. But then it is not leadership. It is ruling over ashes.
For this reason I had exited several communities I used to enjoy (or try to enjoy), such as social media. I became very aware of the crowd and its pandering self-performances and how differently we all act under mass observation. This is my “laser dot of mass approval” I discuss in the Twadpockle Report. It is a laser pointer captivating a cute kitten... leading the kitten... where? And this, of course, opens the door to Awareness Recursion Theory, which is all about people watching each other watching each other. Or, an audience performing for its performers. Or, a subculture full of rituals that no one would have thought of on their own and that most members appear to be pretending to embrace, just to satisfy the other members, who are faking it as well. It’s enough to make you go on a mission to snap the crowd out of it.
There may be a way to rejoin these communities with properly tuned intention. There may not. This is making me think about the themes of proper authority that are laced throughout my Human Design chart. They have always been tricky for me. I had a sense of purpose at the concert, watching the fragile crowd needing to be led, palpably aware that I recoil from exercising authority and yet it keeps calling to me and putting me in leadership roles. Am I here to learn these things, to observe and report back... to my next life? (which I don’t entirely believe in) Is there something I can do about this? I have a feeling of rising to a challenge, but I don’t know what.
One thing I can do is stop pandering. I do less of it than ever but probably not zero. And I have to say “probably” because it’s hard to find that boundary. I like being nice to people, and I know it is not something to give up in the name of “not pandering.” That is the light I am trying to follow.
Read Part One of this series,
The crowd is an amplifier.
Sometimes, it goes to 11.