What makes people do stupid things

Screenshot from Nick Park's "Barashek John" (2007)
In the story, the farmer thinks that his flock is simple animals that are only interested in food.
His sheep are always looking for entertainment.

The pragmatic approach, which works well in the exact sciences, does not work at all in anthropology. What causes perfectly adequate people to do completely inadequate things? Say, vote for Hitler, hunt witches, panic and go to fortune tellers? Why do so many people succumb to mass hysteria?

We like to evaluate the probability of certain events from the point of view of whether such an option corresponds to the practical interests of the participants. In general, everything in history is viewed from a pragmatic, purely rational point of view. Overall, this is a good approach, useful. But there are nuances.
Anthropology has also adopted a pragmatic approach since the First World War, where ideas and ideological systems are judged on the basis of what practical problems they solve. Whether these ideas help to maintain the unity of the collective, or help to rationally manage natural resources or monitor personal hygiene, or contribute to the maintenance of the power system, which also has its own benefits. In short, ideas began to be viewed in a social context.

In fact, in other humanities, this approach took root even earlier, but it reached anthropology only in the First World War, when it was adopted by British functionalists. The name of this scientific movement, functionalism, hinted at the need to consider ideas in relation to their probable functions in society. Useful functions.

By the way, one of the positive consequences of the new pragmatic approach in anthropology was that the old concept of supposedly blind submission to customs in “traditional” societies was sent to the trash. Before this generation of anthropologists and folklorists sincerely believed that if there are any customs in society, then all the behavior of members of society proceeds strictly within the boundaries established by these customs. Advocates of the pragmatic approach, living for a long time among the studied societies and observing real behavior, found that people can talk about proper behavior, but act completely differently. Although this is a familiar picture, but at one time it literally turned the existing ideas in science.

But this beautifully pragmatic approach soon revealed serious costs. Advocates of pragmatism underestimated the influence of ideas in encouraging and mobilizing people, inducing crowds to action. As Eric Woolf writes, “Many rationalists, with the best of intentions, simply did not believe, until it was too late, that scientifically untestable and irrational ideas could still resonate with vast numbers of people, and that belief in witchcraft, anti-Semitism with extermination calls, or millenarism could be taken seriously by apparently intelligent people.” This “too late” for some came soon enough in Hitler’s Germany, although history evidently knows many such examples.

Today, of course, approaches to the study of such phenomena have become many times more complicated. Considering various examples from the field of extermination of each other by people, one can point out that there was a tactic of terror in order to retain power, or a struggle for access to resources or markets for their industry, or fear of competitors, any geopolitical games, etc. One can consider how the underlying ideology echoes the interests of certain groups, how it is intertwined with culture at all levels, with the help of which methods propaganda works. We can explain the economic, political and other interests of the process, and the historical and cultural characteristics of the process. Why was it a witch hunt yesterday and Nazism today? But why the process has acquired such scale and such forms, why it suddenly went on such a track – it remains without explanation. Why people end up with an ass instead of a head en masse, including those who initially controlled the process and looked reasonable, remains unexplained. The very essence of the bloody madhouse remains unexplained, although we can see roughly how it all began. It is as if the forces that govern consciousness are subject to suprahuman logic and cannot be understood or explained. Whoa! and everybody's got ass for head in an exhilarating atmosphere of mass hysteria. One can only state the work of these forces and describe the course of action and consequences. Which, in general, is also interesting in its kind.



Source:livejournal.com

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