We live in the Age of the Herd. After all, people want to belong. They adopt ideologies, attitudes and poses from those around them. They invest money in the same way they adopt opinions. They draw conclusions without thinking. They make decisions without foundation. It is, after all, a reasonable shortcut to assume that someone else has thoroughly examined everything beforehand; that all the angles have been calculated, that a safe path has already been cut through the wilderness. Think of the work and study one must do in order to justify one's own independent conclusions? Who could possibly afford the time, the effort and the humiliation of discovering that his peers are mainly interested in the more plausible ideas of the multitude? And so, for the most part, our self-advertised individualists are frauds; their individualism is a pose with which they fool themselves and others. The genuine individualist is rarely seen. He would rather avoid a public lynching, and keep alive by staying out of the way. Over a century ago, Friedrich Nietzsche noted "the inner enfeeblement, discouragement and self vexation" of Europe's non-herd animals. He said that "the perpetual emphasizing of qualities of mediocrity as the most valuable" was progressively making the "strongly constituted" more gloomy.
We imagine that we are building individualism when we celebrate the individual. In movies, books and plays this tendency has turned to celebrating idiosyncrasy and abnormality. Our educational establishment now teaches that each student is special, that individuality is supreme - while engaged in mass testing and curriculum homogenization. In doing this, we have ruined the very soil of individualism. "Open your eyes, you sociologists of the future!" exclaimed Nietzsche. The individual doesn't arise from being coddled or "helped" to his individuality. According to Nietzsche, "The individual has grown strong under opposite conditions." What we describe as the process of building individualism, he warned, "is the most extreme weakening and impoverishment of mankind."
In the last analysis, what is the psychology of a society based on political and economic equality? Is it not a herd psychology? And here, even the shepherds of the flock, by relying so heavily on polls and television, are merely navigating in such a way that they do not wander too far from its comforting mass. Nietzsche alleged that a great nihilistic counterfeiting of moral values was underway. Even more likely is a great counterfeiting of political values. If all men are equal, and the herd consists of most men moving in the same direction, then the herd's direction is ultimately justified (however mindless it actually might be). By the logic of this undirected system the helm itself dissolves into an illusion. There is no rudder.
So here we arrive, after many decades. America faces a great reckoning. Its false system of values cannot continue much longer. We are warned to expect terrorist attacks. The border remains open, with drugs and weapons and enemy operatives pouring through. The president is a castrate. A vast enemy alliance is rapidly arming and positioning itself around the world. Russia is churning out new tanks and missiles and aircraft which are being shipped to Iran and Venezuela and Syria. Meanwhile, the hollowness of the American economic position is about to ring out for all to hear.
It is said that credit inflation causes market bubbles. In recent years we have seen a bubble arise in the stock market. So people moved their money into real estate. This helped to create a real estate bubble. One day we will wake up and find that everything has grown into a bubble, and everything is about to burst. The ever-inflating ideas of the American herd have even inspired a national bubble. Imagining itself invincible, imagining itself the guardian of history's winning ideas, imagining itself the center of the world economy, America's inflated self-conception is about to pop.
What will the herd do when its values collapse?
The first word that comes to mind is "panic." It is a word closely related to the word "pandemonium," defined in Webster's Dictionary as: "1) The abode of all the demons; in Milton, the capital of Hell or the palace of Satan; 2) a wildly lawless or riotous place."
It has just been announced that the Fed is approving a half-percentage cut in its discount rate on loans to banks. "In other words," noted one analyst, "despite saying they wouldn't bail out the markets, the risk is so high it looks like the underlying U.S. economy is at stake." The first sign of panic, the first indication of pandemonium, is the application of desperate measures in an increasingly desperate situation. As St. Louis Federal Reserve President William Poole recently observed, "There's no need for the Federal Reserve [to cut the discount rate before the next meeting] unless there's some sort of calamity taking place...."
Last week the financial crisis was seen as "spreading." In response, central banks poured out tens of billions. Alice Rivlin, a former Fed vice chairman, noted: "The Fed has almost unlimited ability to supply liquidity if they feel that it is appropriate." But this statement doesn't take panic or pandemonium into account. All the liquidity in the universe cannot quench the fires of Hell. The flames subside for a moment, but then they flare up anew.
Panic is something that spreads. It begins in one place and moves outward, in every direction. "There is no fence against a panic fright," wrote Thomas Fuller in 1732. When the herd fall prey to a pack of wolves, the herd begins to panic. Who will stop the panic? The government is expected to stop it. The government must do something. But the government is part of the herd. It shares the herd's mentality. So who will save the government?
