THE CYBER CROWD -- FACEBOOK AND YOUTUBE -- A TALK ON THE POPULAR MIND IN A TIME OF CHANGE TO HIGH SCHOOL SENIORS

THE CYBER CROWD – FACEBOOK AND YOUTUBE – A TALK ON THE POPULAR MIND IN A TIME OF CHANGE TO HIGH SCHOOL SENIORS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 2,2011

REFERENCE:

My grandson, Ryan Carr, asked me to give a talk to his senior class in “ethics and leadership.”  I handed out the missive "The Challenge of Moral Leadership," which was prepared for this talk.  What follows is a transcript of my recorded remarks.

*     *     *

My name is Jim Fisher.  I am Ryan’s grandfather.  I’ve taught graduate school, undergraduate school, and have conducted executive seminars over a good part of the world, but have never addressed a high school class.  So, I hope you will forgive me if I sound nervous.

In route here, I told Ryan that the most important thing for a speaker is to know his audience.  Quite frankly, I don’t know you but will endeavor to bridge this void.

The subject is leadership.  I planned to bring books on the subject that I have written but put them in Ryan’s grandmother’s car, and didn’t discover the error until I reached your school.  It would be safe to say, in any case, that these ten books are but chapters in the same book as leadership, like human behavior, hasn’t changed in millenniums.

To illustrate my point, allow me to quote Gustave Le Bon, a French social psychologist who specialized in crowd theory.  He writes in “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” (1896):

The thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation.  Two fundamental factors are at the base of this transformation.  The first is the destruction of those religious, political, and social beliefs in which all the elements of our civilization are rooted.  The second is the creation of entirely new conditions of existence and thought as the result of modern scientific and industrial discoveries. 

This idea of the past, although half destroyed, being still very powerful, and the ideas which are to replace them being still in process of formation, the modern age represents a period of transformation and anarchy … While all the ancient beliefs are tottering and disappearing, while the old pillars of society are giving way one by one, the power of the crowd is the only force that nothing menaces, and of which the prestige is continually on the increase.  The age we are about to enter will in truth be the ERA OF CROWDS (the author’s use of higher case).

Now, 105 years later, my wonder is how he would define the crowd today.  What do you think?

Silence.  (This is not unusual when a stranger enters the midst of young scholars, twelve seniors, seven boys and five girls.)

Let me help you.  Le Bon would be fascinated with an interest common to you all.  What do you think that might be given what I quoted him as saying?

Silence.

It is the cyber crowd epitomized by FaceBook and YouTube.  More than a billion souls participate, speaking many languages, engaged in many disciplines, with diverse perspectives and cultures, beliefs and values, forced by the pressure of the era onto this stage.

Without conscious awareness, without the discernible screen of intelligence, there has been a transformation and collectivization of the will and sentiment, for better or worse.  There has been a retreat from the individual to the clamor of the crowd as hero in this innocuous social electronic connection.

We are witnessing the vanishing of the conscious personality to the collective mind.  Doubtlessly, this transition is unconscious by yet has a conscious organization to form the psychological crowd.  It differs little with that of Le Bon’s a century ago.  Eric Hoffer called the herd mentality in “The True Believer” (1951).

This phenomenon is not simply an accidental cyber space communication of a few individuals with families and friends about the sense and nonsense of their daily lives but of tens of millions with an agenda.  The “Arab Spring” movement and “Occupy Wall Street” moment are expressions of anguish, the Arab Spring with totalitarian rule, and the Occupy Wall Street with inequity of income and opportunity.  Crowds are leaderless with no infrastructure, organization or hierarchy, the modern definition of the cyber crowd.   

Media see these as innocent.  A few people, even a single individual touches the feelings and thoughts of the many in a definite direction and launches the spontaneous disruption and ultimate disappearance of the conscious personality replaced by the clamor of the crowd.

My purpose is to alert you to what begins in innocence can spin off into lawlessness.  It happened in Nazis Germany with the rise of Adolf Hitler.  I’m not making that connection here but alerting you to the fact that the immoral can be disguised in the rhetoric of moral and ethical leadership, as was the case with Hitler as he came to power.

This paper (handing out “The Challenge of Moral Leadership”) complements my talk today. 

WHERE DOES THAT PUT YOU AS STUDENTS?

Your focus is on the scintillating world of ideas, concepts, theories, the beauty of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, literature, history and the arts.  You will draw on this base as you process life experiences.  Education provides you with armament against illusion and inclusion into moments and movements designed to entice you.

Education protects you from dreamily being seduced by half-baked ideas or someone’s hidden agenda to perpetuate collective needs at your individual expense.  To belong to a movement (Arab Spring) or moment (Occupy Wall Street), it is necessary to unflinchingly espouse selective prejudices, preconceived ideas and opinions, radical measures for implementation, and a mania for reform.  Otherwise, you are like sheep to the slaughter caught up in a delirium and you have no idea why.

Education is a lifelong process in the development of a point of view, hopefully, derived from study, personal experience, supportive values, and a perspective that enables you to get where you intend to go.

If this sounds like moral leadership, it is.  The most critical job of leadership is the nurturing individual essence and experience leavened with free will to meet the challenges of life.  Everyone is a leader or no one is.  It starts with you now.

One of the first challenges in life is to straddle the breech between what is ethical and what is legal.  Most corporate enterprises favor the legal such as competitive industries and Wall Street, which are directed and driven by the so-called one percent.

As I say in the paper you have in your hands, once the focus is on the legal, it is likely to be at the expense of what is ethical.  We are all caught in a legalistic society as morality is in the mind of the times.  Given this, we attempt to persuade ourselves that what is legal is also ethical, but alas, seldom does that twain meet.

Given possible examination questions before the test may be legal, but ethically, does it measure learning?  What is the ethical value of a designed review course in preparation for the taking of the Standard Achievement Test (SAT)?  Again, it certainly doesn’t measure learning, but as we all know it is quite legal.  

Our minds are constantly bombarded with information to dislodge pure reason from practical reason, fictitious shapes from real shapes, unreal truth from real truth, theoretical values from practical values, doubtful facts from obvious facts, destiny from providence until our solitary minds are so confused to be vulnerable to the genius of the crowd.

Mass media and the Internet with such vehicles as FaceBook and YouTube have combined in cyber space to shape the mind of today to resemble that of the crowd.  Consequently, what seems conscious participation is largely unconscious and represents the secret strength of the crowd.  The complexity of the modern world astounds us finding us retreating to instinct and maneuvering on automatic pilot. 

We make celebrities of people who read the news, and fill our minds with the provocative horrors of the day, media pundits that tell us who we are, what we should think, how we should live, while encouraging us to buy their CD’s and books that we never read.  We make them best selling authors, attend lectures that awards them six figure honorariums, and often elect them to public office.  We equate their sanguine and glib delivery with wisdom and clarity of thought.  Their other qualification is they look like us.

I have watched all twelve of the Republican Presidential Debates as entertainment.  I see none of them an improvement on the present occupant of the White House, who admittedly is not very effective but is a known entity.  How many of you have watched these debates?  (No hands go up)

That is understandable given your full academic schedules, extracurricular activities and active social lives.  I mention it here for a reason, and that I would like to discuss now.

THE CRITICAL IMPORTANCE OF MAKING CHOICES

What do you think is the most important quality of leadership?  (No response)  It is the ability to make sensible choices.

We see with the alleged personal false steps of presidential hopefuls Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich, among others, that if the whispers of impropriety exist, they will surface as deliciously as gossip and promulgated as fact.  In the court of public opinion, you are guilty until proven innocent, and even then few are likely to buy your innocence. 

We are all fallible, sinful, incomplete human beings who in the course of our lives make choices we later regret, but hopefully more right than wrong choices.  The irony is we expect our leaders to be better than we are.  We put them on pedestals to make them more than human then knock them off treating them as less than human.  This encourages dissembling, corruption, cover up and conspiracy among their ranks, and we wonder why. 

If we look at this from a personal standpoint – I’m speaking to you now as individuals – and buy the idea we are special because we are told we are brighter, more gifted, taller, more attractive, more vivacious, more cunning and likeable than others than we lose connection with other people.  More importantly, we lose connection with ourselves.  We are vulnerable to flatterers who can manipulate us to their purposes.  They tell us we are a special race, group, contingent or class.  This finds us surrendering our personal identity for a collective one.  The genius of the crowd depends on this. 

One of the first rules of leadership is awareness of whom you are where you are why you are here as opposed to somewhere else.  This perspective provides you with the vision to see and the capacity to serve, while being able to evaluate accurately what is going on right now. 

In that paper I’ve handed out, I mention General Motors.  GM in the 1950s, likely before your parents were born, the CEO of GM, Charles Wilson said, “As GM goes so goes America.”  This arrogance was pretty much treated as fact.  Detroit was the economic center of a burgeoning American economy after WWII. 

GM was a law unto itself, or saw it thought.  Its moral leadership was tested in the person of Ralph Nader, a young Lebanese American attorney who wrote a book about the GM’s Corvair titled “Unsafe At Any Speed”(1959). 

To neutralize the impact of this assessment, GM did not check Nader’s findings for validity but instead attempted to compromise his character by uncovering a seedy past.  GM had an army of private investigators examine every aspect of Nader’s life, placing electronic bugs in his apartment, clocking every moment of his existence to find dirt, only to confirm his integrity.  The media caught GM in the act, reporting this harassment, which led to the death knell of the Corvair while sullying GM’s reputation.

GM confused management and leadership.  Management is good at managing things, inanimate things; leadership is good at leading people.  Management quantifies things leadership develops people.  Your teacher is in the leadership of student development.

Our institutions are aging and crumbling in their effectiveness.  They have become defensive aspiring to infallibility and operating with dogmatic authority in the spirit of business as usual despite the taint of corruption, scandal or wasteful practices.  They do as they please with impunity, as they have become a law unto themselves.

Indicative of this is Penn State where a celebrated coach, Joe Pattern, who was treated like a god on campus, failed to take action when his assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was first accused of child abuse in 2002.  Recently, Sandusky was caught abusing a boy in the shower of the athletic complex.  Paterno and the college president were abruptly fired when this came to light.  Sandusky now faces charges of some forty counts of child abuse, some of which occurred as early as the 1990s.

How could that happen?  In South Africa during the time of apartheid, I asked my Catholic Church pastor, “How can the church not take a stand on apartheid?”  He answered, “The church is not political,” when no institution could be more so.

In 1933 when Hitler came to power, Cardinal Pacelli was the Nuncio of Munich, later Pope Pius XII in the same decade, yet he did nothing when the “Jewish Question” materialized into the Holocaust, nor did President Roosevelt.  FDR could have authorized the bombing of railroad lines to prevent the transport of Jews to some 20,000 concentration camps.  He didn’t, not wanting to upset his ally, the Soviet Union, which had its own problem with Jews.

These are examples of lapses in moral leadership.

Abraham Lincoln worried about inevitable corruption to follow the Civil War (I read the quote from the missive on the subject).  What does the word “corruption” mean to you?

Student answers: collapse of morality, money, abuse of power, and loss of morality.

These are good answers.  Since morality is in the mind of the times, you might think corruption never changes, but it does (questioning expressions on student faces).  You don’t think so?  Well, greed has been treated as good, and greed often has the aspect if not the taint of corruption. 

In his book “How” (2011), Dov Seidman attempts to get past this cynicism of:

(1)   It’s not my job to it’s everyone’s job.

(2)   Just do it, to do it right.

(3)   Business as usual to thinking outside the box.

(4)   Too big to fail to cultivating the small.

(5)   Greed is good, to good is good.

(6)   Let the stick and carrot extract maximum performance to the pleasure of work itself.

(7)   Man is rational to man is in search of meaning and happiness.

Student: I understand all these but the stick and carrot.

The stick is the use of fear to motivate. The carrot is the use of incentives to excel in performance.

While we are talking about jobs, your job is to get an education.  When you complete your education, you go out into the world as the next generation of leaders.  It is why you are here.  It is why I am here. 

Innovative leadership will have to deal with the cyber crowd and its future iterations, as FaceBook and YouTube are only the current renditions of mass appeal.

The cyber crowd perpetually hovers on the borderline of our unconscious. None of us are impervious to its heroic or cowardly dimensions. 

The individual is patiently and patently discriminating.  The crowd is incapable of willing as of thinking for any length of time on a subject.  Individuals admit doubt and learn from their mistakes.  Crowds are incapable of doubting their existence or the validity of their demands.  Individuals are alert to reality checks.  Crowds are impulsive, irritable, and incapable of reason, devoid of judgment and live on existential sentiment.  Is it too much of a stretch to see cyber crowds in this context? (No response)

I am of an age unlikely to find out.

In any case, moral leadership at the personal level will be reduced to a matter of making choices.  I never drank or smoked, a choice.  I come from an Irish clan in which excess was the custom.  Two years spent in the US Navy in the Mediterranean as a white hat sailor, where drinking and carousing was the modus operandi on liberty, I went on tours across Europe to acquaint myself with my roots.  A choice.  Perhaps it was because I saw too many ruinous lives in my extended family. 

Tim Tebow, former Heisman Trophy winner from the University of Florida, and now quarterback of the Denver Broncos in the NFL, is deeply religious with a strict moral code, which he wears on his sleeve to the irritation of many.  No matter how you feel about him, he is up front about his choices.  People look for a chink in his armor as GM looked for a chink in Ralph Nader’s. 

It might be inferred from this that we are cynical of someone making consistent moral choices.  The herd mentality abhors individualism and is more interested in belonging than in being self-willed.

Belief is an important value when it comes to choices.  What else influences our choices?

Students: Someone said, morality, and then there was silence.

Come on now, you know the answer.  It is our peers.  They dare us. 

“Take a few puffs (on a cigarette or marijuana) it won’t hurt you.  Don’t be a sissy.” 

Guys in my day felt manly smoking; girls felt adventuresome if they did.  The same was true with alcohol.  All addictions start innocently.

Sixty years ago, it was cigarettes and booze.  Today it is mind-altering drugs that can quickly induce such dependency that users engage in prostitution, breaking and entering, robbery and other crimes, even murder to feed the habit.  Here in Tampa there are more murders every month related to addiction than Japan suffers in an entire year.  Choices.

My mother died of emphysema after a lifetime of smoking cigarettes from the age of twelve to seventy-nine.  It is not a pretty death.  Family members were around her hospital bed with her naked, not being able to stand anything on her body because even with oxygen she couldn’t breathe.  As shocking and embarrassing as it was, I found myself saying to her nurse, “Seeing this must cure you of the idea of smoking.”

She said almost defiantly, “I smoke!”  Choices.

People who make bad choices don’t think it is going to happen to them.  Personal smugness fed by optimism finds them denying a downside.  The statistics on smoking are staggering:

(1)   Smoking causes 443,000 deaths annually including 49,400 exposed to secondhand smoke.

(2)   269,655 men die annually from smoking.

(3)   173,940 women die annually from smoking.

(4)   Some 25 million Americans still smoke, the majority from lower socio-economic status.

(5)   One of every five deaths in the United States annually is caused from cigarette smoking.

(6)   Cigarette smoking is contributory to breast cancer, strokes, heart disease, and heart attacks.

(7)   Smoking only one cigarette a day can reduce a person’s life by ten years.

You would think this incentive to change behavior, yet one of every twelve Americans is a smoker.

THE CULTURE OF NARCISSISM

 My premise thus far is that moral leadership is individualistic.  We are all leaders or none of us are.  We must have control of this organism called “self,” and in that control be able to perceive and deal with reality, not as we would have it be, but as it actually is.

A Gallup Poll asked young people in 1950 if they thought they were a very important person.  What percent of the respondents’ do you think thought they were important?

Students: 50 percent?

Actually, 12 percent thought they were.  The same poll was taken in 2005, what do you think the response was then?

Students: 25 percent?

No, it was 80 percent.

Time magazine did a recent study, asking people if they considered themselves in the top 1 percent of earners: 19 percent claimed they were in this income bracket.

Who we are has gone from being taken for granted six decades ago to what Christopher Lasch calls in “The Culture of Narcissism” (1978), “narcissistic preoccupation with the self.” 

Think of it, a child born into the world feels it is the center of the universe and the world revolves around it, and is there to meet its every demand.  In a strange way, a juvenile fixation has become a cultural norm.  There is great pressure never to grow old and so little societal inclination to grow up.  Growing up requires struggle, pain, disappointment, delay, and failure on the way to some level of success.  Juvenility shows an inclination to avoid risks, to play it safe, cheat or retreat into recreational drugs and lifestyles to live on maxed out credit cards and borrowed time

A study asked people to respond to statements similar to these:

(1)   I’m a very impressive person.

(2)   I can manipulate people to fulfill my needs without any trouble.

(3)   I live to show off for other people.

This was part of  “The Narcissistic Test” given to a national audience over the past several years.  It has seen a 30 percent spike since 1990. 

Another reflection of self-importance is reflected in executive compensation.  In 1950, it was 43 percent of GDP to 143 percent of GDP in 2005. 

The social norms of the 1950s were against disproportionate executive compensation.  Should some executives realize exceptional incomes, however, they would hardly flaunt it by pretentious living or lifestyle. 

Executive compensation remained flat despite impressive company profits after WWII and up to the 1970s, and then incomes took off.  In the 1970s and 1980s, executives became impressed with themselves, reflective of these narcissistic studies.  They campaigned for increasing salaries and bonuses, and saw themselves as indispensable.  So today, it is not uncommon for CEOs to earn $20 million a year with retirement incomes in excess of $5 million annually for only being in the top role for a few years. 

In the 1990s, and again in the first decade of the twenty-first century, institutional polarity saw the dot.com bubble, and the subsequent real estate and Wall Street bubble.  Greed became protocol and restrain took a holiday.  Institutional integrity, integration and efficiency were supplanted by high finance.  It became more rewarding to move money than to produce goods. 

Name an institution, including the academic institution of which you are a part, and you will see a regressive decline of function and purpose across the board.

In the 1950s, when reality was gray, when you thought your opinions were weak or only partially right, you were inclined to seek the input of others to correct your errors and to get matters more right than wrong.  You not only encouraged feedback, you depended on it.

In the 1970s and beyond, as compensation packages went through the stratosphere, executives not only believed they deserved them, but felt a need to prove they did.  They came to believe they possessed one hundred percent of the truth, that they were not only astute managers, but infallible; that they possessed something akin to genius, and so they looked for “yes” men and women, and tended to kill messengers who questioned their authority or brought them bad news.  Whistle blowers were treated as pariah, and added to their enemy’s list.

CYBER CROWD

Is FaceBook and YouTube part of the cyber crowd or a respite from the moral retrenchment of our times?  Do these electronic conduits fad the lines between fantasy and fad, or blur the lines between innocent connection and senseless preoccupation?  True, they bring loved ones and friends together, an opportunity to keep abreast of activities, and a touchstone for a sense of belonging to something bigger than self. 

With all this upside, my wonder is if it is incipiently cultivating the heard mentality, the view that this cyber connection, which is images, words and cliché, is all innocence.

Could it ultimately become a vehicle for destabilization?   The power of words is bound up with images that can evoke volatile reactions quite independent of their real significance. 

We have seen how the “Arab Spring” and “Occupy Wall Street” has used FaceBook and YouTube to their purposes.  Images, words and clichés delivered insouciantly and spontaneously, but are ill defined can lead to good and bad influences.  Reason has no role in the cyber crowd.  Indeed, the cyber crowd aborts reason to cavort in the privacy of irrational space.  Forgive me, I’m just thinking out loud.

Attention has been given the fact that the “Arab Spring” and “Occupy Wall Street” have no leaders.  Leaders in cyber crowds are likely to first surface as ringleaders and agitators.  They rise out of the crowd, as they are first complete followers. 

Crowd leaders hypnotize by expressing what is collectively felt with images, words and clichés’.  Videos supply images – placards and pamphlets – that are words of affirmation, which are repeated with cacophony zeal to become contagions.  The individual ceases to be isolated and falls prey to the spell of the leader and the crowd. 

A quarter century ago, I wrote a book (Work Without Managers) that profiled my concerns and what I thought would follow.  Regrettably, it has all materialized.  Referencing the cyber crowd now is cautionary, as our collective unconscious invariably becomes the motive for the actions ultimately forged.  

FaceBook and YouTube are contagions.  Few are bold enough to run counter to the fashion of checking or sending messages hourly.  Personal interest is sacrificed to collective interest with little conscious understanding of why.  People can’t get their work done for this irresistible magnet, that is, until the company install restrains or the boss is breathing down their neck. 

In crowd speak, suggestibility feeds contagions with a conscious loss of personality replaced by the compelling influence of frenetic texting to find the individual in a paralyzed state of irresistible impetuosity.  It drives causes against repression (“Arab Spring”) and inequity (“Occupy Wall Street”) among other crusades, and it hasn’t changed in thousands of years. 

My respect for the unconscious mind, which knows so much more than I know, is too great to become enslaved to this supposedly innocuous medium, which I see as a possible conduit to the cyber crowd.  Doubtless the cyber crowd is addictive, the evidence is too overwhelming to think otherwise with more than a billion members.  My aim is none other than to cause you to think.  You are our leaders of tomorrow, which is a very different world than it was when I was your age.  Good luck, God bless and peace.

*     *     *