I’ve been thinking a lot about mob mentality this year.
The news, of course, is one reason mob mentality has been on my mind. The fervor that turns demonstrations into rallies, and rallies into riots…it’s been on TV much more in the past 2 years than any other time in my life.
In The Tetradome Run I have a character who gets a kick out of activating the herd instinct among her friends. She’s the most charismatic, manipulative individual I’ve ever written.
To write her properly, I went to the library and gathered all the books on cults, herd behavior, and mob mentality I could find. Of those books, the one that was far and away the most interesting was by Sigmund Freud (go figure, I know). It’s titled Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Here’s a quote from that book which really informed my writing on the mob mentality in action in The Tetradome Run:
“The impulses which a group obeys may according to circumstances be generous or cruel, heroic or cowardly, but they are always so imperious that no personal interest, not even that of self-preservation, can make itself felt.”
