Psychology Of Crowds Quotes

I was anti-everything and everyone. I didn't want people around me. This aversion was not some big crippling anxiety; merely a mature recognition of my own psychological vulnerability and my lack of suitability as a companion. Thoughts jostled for space in my crowded brain as i struggled to give them some order which might serve to motivate my listless life.

A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal, which is the reason why the ethical attitude of large organizations is always doubtful. The psychology of a large crowd inevitably sinks to the level of mob psychology. If, therefore, I have a so-called collective experience as a member of a group, it takes place on a lower level of consciousness than if I had the experience by myself alone.

I think one can tell a lot about a person from the way he chooses to let the stub of his cigarette burn out...

It is more difficult to undermine faith than knowledge, love succumbs to change less than to respect, hatred is more durable than aversion, and at all times the driving force of the most important changes in this world has been found less in a scientific knowledge animating the masses, but rather in a fanaticism dominating them and in a hysteria which drove them forward.

I’m an anarchist. I’m implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest.

It still would be years before I understood the seriousness of my change of view. Much later, I recognized it in "Revolution," the essay of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who describes the moment when a man on the edge of a crowd looks back defiantly at a policeman — and when that policeman senses a sudden refusal to accept his defining gaze — as the imperceptible moment in which rebellion is born. "All books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottering authority or the misery and sufferings of the people," Kapuscinski writes. "They should begin with a psychological chapter — one that shows how a harassed, terrified man suddenly breaks his terror, stops being afraid. This unusual process — sometimes accomplished in an instant, like a shock — demands to be illustrated. Man gets rid of fear and feel free. Without that, there would be no revolution.

The public is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying common justice when too strenuously demanded as a right; but quite as frequently it awards more than justice, when the appeal is made, as despots love to have it made, entirely to its generosity.

Being simply “better than average” is not good enough. You have to be head and shoulders above the crowd to win a minus-sum game.

Here's the truth: People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain. Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions, and then again within those twenty-four hours. It's a daily pantomime, one man yielding control to the next: a backstage crowded with old hacks clamoring for their turn in the spotlight. Every week, every day. The angry man hands the baton over to the sulking man, and in turn to the sex addict, the introvert, the conversationalist. Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots.

Every job looks easy when you’re not the one doing it because the challenges faced by someone in the arena are often invisible to those in the crowd.

Here is yet another important consideration for helping us to understand the individual in a group: Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised group, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian— that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings. He then dwells especially upon the lowering in intellectual ability which an individual experiences when he becomes merged in a group.

To the Jacobins of this epoch [the French Revolution], as well as to those of our times, this popular entity constitutes a superior personality possessing attributes peculiar to the gods of never having to answer for their actions and never making a mistake. Their wishes must be humbly acceded to. The people may kill, burn, ravage, commit the most frightening cruelties, glorify their hero today and throw him into the gutter tomorrow, it is all the same; the politicians will not cease to vaunt the people's virtues and to bow to their every decision.

With DID patients, if they feel hostility or aggression they take it out on themselves with self-harm... They’re self-destructive and repeatedly suicidal, more so than any other psychological disorder. So that's what's typical – not this wild aggression, or stalking women [or robbery]. - Dr Bethany Brand, on Billy Milligan and Multiple Personality Disorder (DID)

A growing body of work in social psychology offers a possible explanation for this commercialization effect. These studies highlight the difference between intrinsic motivations (such as moral conviction or interest in the task at hand) and external ones (such as money or other tangible rewards). When people are engaged in an activity they consider intrinsically worthwhile, offering them money may weaken their motivation by depreciating or "crowding out" their intrinsic interest or commitment.

Beware of your kid's screen consumption time - it's a matter of life and death - of psychological life and psychological death. Raise them in a way that they do not lose their sense of community in the fake crowd of hashtags and emojis.

frequently the crowd is mistaken because they are not acting on the basis of any superior information but are reacting, themselves, to the principle of social proof.

In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated,” Gustave Le Bon noted in his 1895 classic on crowd psychology.

I can look at a crowd," he said to his friends, "I can just look at it. It's all, uh, very scientific, and I can diagnose the crowd psychologically. Just four of us, properly positioned, can turn the crowd around. We can cure it. We can make love to it. We can make it riot." Jim's friends looked at him blankly. "Hey, man," Jim said, "don't you even want to try?

Love is the great intangible. In our nightmares, we can create beasts out of pure emotion. Hate stalks the streets with dripping fangs, fear flies down narrow alleyways on leather wings, and jealousy spins sticky webs across the sky. In daydreams, we can maneuver with poise, foiling an opponent, scoring high on fields of glory while crowds cheer, cutting fast to the heart of an adventure. But what dream state is love? Frantic and serene, vigilant and calm, wrung-out and fortified, explosive and sedate –love commands a vast army of moods. Hoping for victory, limping from the latest skirmish, lovers enter the arena once again. Sitting still, we are as daring as gladiators.

Be YOU. There is nothing sexier than someone who is confident enough to be themselves, quirks and all. It is often your unique nature that separates you from the crowd in the best way possible for your romantic match to notice you.

This now leads us to elucidate more precisely the error of the idea that the majority should make the law, because, even though this idea must remain theoretical - since it does not correspond to an effective reality - it is necessary to explain how it has taken root in the modern outlook, to which of its tendencies it corresponds, and which of them - at least in appearance - it satisfies. Its most obvious flaw is the one we have just mentioned: the opinion of the majority cannot be anything but an expression of incompetence, whether this be due to lack of intelligence or to ignorance pure and simple; certain observations of 'mass psychology' might be quoted here, in particular the widely known fact that the aggregate of mental reactions aroused among the component individuals of a crowd crystallizes into a sort of general psychosis whose level is not merely not that of the average, but actually that of the lowest elements present.

In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated.

when we are uncertain, we are willing to place an enormous amount of trust in the collective knowledge of the crowd.

Direct response marketing focuses heavily on the needs, thoughts, and emotions of the target market. By doing this, you enter the conversation already going on in the mind of your ideal prospect.

But the physical danger was judged to be less important than the psychological stresses. Eight humans, crowded together like monkeys for almost three Terran years, had better get along much better than humans usually did.

Ours is not an age that wants heroes. Ours is an age of envy, in which laziness and self-involvement are the rule. Anyone who tries to shine, who dares to stand above the crowd, is dragged down by his lackluster and self-appointed “peers”.

No matter what I study, I can see patterns. I see the gestalt, the melody within the notes, in everything: mathematics and science, art and music, psychology and sociology. As I read the texts, I can think only that the authors are plodding along from one point to the next, groping for connections that they can’t see. They’re like a crowd of people unable to read music, peering at the score for a Bach sonata, trying to explain how one note leads to another. As glorious as these patterns are, they also whet my appetite for more. There are other patterns waiting to be discovered, gestalts of another scale entirely. With respect to those, I’m blind myself; all my sonatas are just isolated data points by comparison. I have no idea what form such gestalts might assume, but that’ll come in time. I want to find them, and comprehend them. I want this more than anything I’ve ever wanted before.

The patrolman’s account provides certain insights into the way we respond to social proof. First, we seem to assume that if a lot of people are doing the same thing, they must know something we don’t. Especially when we are uncertain, we are willing to place an enormous amount of trust in the collective knowledge of the crowd. Second, quite frequently the crowd is mistaken because they are not acting on the basis of any superior information but are reacting, themselves, to the principle of social proof.

Most active investors fail to realize that they are part of the crowd themselves. They are trying to beat the crowd while being the crowd.

The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.

He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.

When studying the fundamental characteristics of a crowd we stated that it is guided almost exclusively by unconscious motives.

When a crowd gets scared, they blame the odd ones out.

Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase.

In former days, people frustrated in their will to meaning would probably have turned to a pastor, priest, or rabbi. Today, they crowd clinics and offices. The psychiatrist, then, frequently finds himself in an embarrassing situation, for he now is confronted with human problems rather than with specific clinical symptoms. Man’s search for a meaning is not pathological, but rather the surest sign of being truly human. Even if this search is frustrated, it cannot be considered a sign of disease. It is spiritual distress, not mental disease.

History tells us, that from the moment when the moral forces on which a civilisation rested have lost their strength, its final dissolution is brought about by those unconscious and brutal crowds known, justifiably enough, as barbarians.

The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics.

Time collapsed into a delicate dark pencil brushed against our eyebrows, the emergent rumble of crowds gathering above our heads. We slid into our costumes. Pirate, outlaw, futuristic rebels. Red, purple, gold. Chains hanging from our belts, tight black trousers. We were moved upstairs, closer to the stage. Finally, we heard the cannon's roar: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome... Tanzar recording artists... THE MASTER PLANETS!" The world shot forward. We stepped into the spotlight.

Crowds exhibit a docile respect for force, and are but slightly impressed by kindness, which for them is scarcely other than a form of weakness. Their sympathies have never been bestowed on easy-going masters, but on tyrants who vigorously oppressed them.

It must be classed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order, which we shall shortly study. In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest.

Abandoned to themselves, they soon weary of disorder, and instinctively turn to servitude. It was the proudest and most untractable of the Jacobins who acclaimed Bonaparte with greatest energy when he suppressed all liberty and made his hand of iron severely felt. It

Les foules n'ont jamais eu soif de vérités. Devant les évidences qui leur déplaisent, elles se détournent, préférant déifier l'erreur, si l'erreur les séduit. Qui sait les illusionner est aisément leur maître; qui tente de les désillusionner est toujours leur victime.

The senior physicist at the Institute was named Mitis. She was not at present directing the physics curriculum, as all administrative jobs rotated annually among the twenty permanent postings, but she had been at the place thirty years, and had the best mind among them. There was always a kind of psychological clear space around Mitis, like the lack of crowds around the peak of a mountain. The absence of all enhancements and enforcements of authority left the real thing plain. There are people of inherent authority; some emperors actually have new clothes.

The psychological crowd is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly.

Georges Sorel, to whom fascism is so much indebted, wrote at the beginning of our century that all great movements are compelled by 'myths.' A myth is the strongest belief held by the group, and its adherents feel themselves to be an army of truth fighting an army of evil. Some years earlier, in 1895, the French psychologist Gustav Le Bon had written of the 'conservatism of crowds' which cling tenaciously to traditional ideas. Hitler took the basic nationalism of the German tradition and the longing for stable personal relationships of olden times, and built upon them as the strongest belief of the group. In the diffusion of the 'myth' Hitler fulfilled what Le Bon had forecast: that 'magical powers' were needed to control the crowd. The Fuhrer himself wrote of the 'magic influence' of mass suggestion and the liturgical aspects of his movement, and its success as a mass religion bore out the truth of this view.

I wanted to evaluate my own escape from the crowds in 5 different stages so that I could clarify my thoughts and help my readers get more benefits. (1) Getting away from the media (2) Getting away from the big city (3) Going to nature as a life style (4) Getting away from the social media (5) Being only with people I want

There is also another problem that commercial culture exacerbates: People feel a profound need to belong, and thus a kind of mob mentality takes over. If a person wants to advance his career it is necessary for him to belong to the "in-crowd." Therefore the criteria for thinking is not truth and logic, but group-dynamics and trendy "duckspeak." As Gustav le Bon showed in his famous study of crowd behavior, the "psychological crowd" possesses a low critical intelligence, and accepts the most idiotic nonsense as truth. It doesn't make the least difference if the individual is highly intelligent, if his emotional need to belong is active he will be reduced to idiocy.

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 civilisation are rooted. The second is the creation of entirely new conditions of existence and thought as the result of modern scientific and industrial discoveries.

Given to exaggeration in its feelings, a crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. An orator wishing to move a crowd must make an abusive use of violent affirmations. To exaggerate, to affirm, to resort to repetitions, and never to attempt to prove anything by reasoning are methods of argument well known to speakers at public meetings.

This scene expresses the basic situation of immaturity; lyricism is an attempt to face that situation: the individual expelled from the protected enclosure of childhood wishes to enter the world, but at the same time, because he is frightened of it, he fashions an artificial replacement world out of his own verse. He makes his poems revolve around him like the planets around the sun; he becomes the center of a small universe in which nothing is alien, in which he feels as much at home as a child inside its mother, for everything here is fashioned only from the substance of his soul. Here he can accomplish everything that is so difficult "outside;" here he can, like the student Wolker, march with a proletarian crowd to make a revolution and, like the virginal Rimbaud, lash his "little girlfriends" because that crowd and those girlfriends are not fashioned out of the hostile substance of an alien world but out of the substance of his own dreams, and they are thus he himself and do not shatter the unity of the universe he has constructed for himself.

An isolated individual knows well enough that alone he cannot set fire to a palace or loot a shop, and should he be tempted to do so, he will easily resist the temptation. Making part of a crowd, he is conscious of the power given him by number, and it is sufficient to suggest to him ideas of murder or pillage for him to yield immediately to temptation.

The candidates’ written programme should not be too categorical, since later on adversaries might bring it up against them; in their verbal programme, however, there cannot be too much exaggeration. The most important reforms may be fearlessly promised. At the moment they are made, these exaggerations produce a great effect, and they are not binding for the future.

This very fact that crowds possess in common ordinary qualities explains why they can never accomplish acts demanding a high degree of intelligence. The decisions affecting matters of general interest come to by an assembly of men of distinction, but specialists in different walks of life, are not sensibly superior to the decisions that would be adopted by a gathering of imbeciles.

Little adapted to reasoning, crowds, on the contrary, are quick to act. As the result of their present organisation their strength has become immense. The dogmas whose birth we are witnessing will soon have the force of the old dogmas; that is to say, the tyrannical and sovereign force of being above discussion. The divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings.

What is the nature of Othering's comfort, its allure, its power (social, psychological, or economical)? Is it the thrill of belonging - which implies being part of something bigger than one's solo self, and therefore stronger? My initial view leans toward the social/psychological need for a "stranger," an Other in order to define the estranged self (the crowd seeker is always the lonely one).

The first is that the individual forming part of a crowd acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept under restraint. He will be the less disposed to check himself from the consideration that, a crowd being anonymous, and in consequence irresponsible, the sentiment of responsibility which always controls individuals disappears entirely.

Whatever I can do, whatever insignificant talent I might have, people just expect me to sell it—I mean literally, sell it for money, until I have a lot of money and no talent left. And then that’s it, I’m finished, and the next flashy twenty-five-year-old with an impending psychological collapse comes along. If I have met anyone genuine along the way, then they’ve been so well disguised in the teeming crowd of bloodthirsty egomaniacs that I haven’t recognized them.

Visual over-stimulation is a distraction from concentration and evokes the same sort of reactions as over-stimulation from noise. But the source might surprise you. Even fussy clothing moving around can be a visual distraction, or too many people in the room, or too many machines with moving parts. For those who work outside, a windy day is a triple-threat—with sound, sight, and touch all being affected. Cars moving, lights, signs, crowds, all this visual chaos can exhaust the AS person. Back in the office, too many computer screens, especially older ones with TV-style monitors, and sickly, flickering, unnatural fluorescent lighting were both high on the trigger list. The trouble with fluorescent light is threefold: Cool-white and energy-efficient fluorescent lights are the most commonly used in public buildings. They do not include the color blue, “the most important part for humans,” in their spectrum. In addition to not having the psychological benefits of daylight, they give off toxins and are linked to depression, depersonalization, aggression, vertigo, anxiety, stress, cancer, and many other forms of ill health. It’s true. There’s an EPA report to prove it (Edwards and Torcellini 2002). Flickering fluorescent lights, which can trigger epileptic seizures, cause strong reactions in AS individuals, including headaches, confusion, and an inability to concentrate. Even flickering that is not obvious to others can be perceived by some on the spectrum.

The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation.

Getting away from the media was the first step of breaking away from the crowds, and let me clearly state, not in 1 day, 5 days, 10 days but in 4-5 months, I started to feel relief in myself, and I had the ability to think more positively about the things I experienced. I know that there are millions of people around me who believe that following current events and knowing them, as I did once, is an important thing. Besides, I also know that they are the millions of people who have not been able to build their own world yet.

Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them." In the midst of two or three hundred, the divine presence becomes more problematical. And when the numbers run into thousands, the likelihood of God being there, in the consciousness of every individual, declines almost to the vanishing point. For such is the nature of an excited crowd (and every crowd is automatically self-excited) that, where two or three thousand are gathered together, there is an absence not merely of deity, but even of common humanity.

Being well acquainted with the psychology of castes, and also with the psychology of other categories of crowds, I do not perceive a single case in which, wrongly accused of a crime, I should not prefer to have to deal with a jury rather than with magistrates. I should have some chance that my innocence would be recognised by the former and not the slightest chance that it would be admitted by the latter. The power of crowds is to be dreaded, but the power of certain castes is to be dreaded yet more. Crowds are open to conviction; castes never are.

Look! when I am in a drawing room, a church, a station; on the terrasse of a cafe, at the theatre or wherever crowds pass or loiter, I enjoy considering faces from a strictly homicidal point of view. For you may see by the glance, by the back of the neck, the shape of the skull, the jaw bone and zygoma of the cheeks, or by some part of their persons that they bear the stigmata of that psychological calamity known as murder. It is scarcely an aberration of my mind, but I can go nowhere without seeing it flickering beneath eyelids, or without feeling its mysterious contact in the touch of every hand held out to me. Last Sunday I went to a town on the festival day of its patron saint. In the public square, which was decorated with foliage, floral arches, and poles draped with flags, was grouped every kind of amusement common to that sort of public celebration—And beneath the paternal eye of the authorities, a swarm of good people were enjoying themselves. The wooden horses, the roller-coaster and the swings drew a very meagre crowd. The organs wheezed their gayest tunes and most bewitching overtures in vain. Other pleasures absorbed this festive throng. Some shot with rifles, pistols, or the good old crossbow at targets painted like human faces; others hurled balls, knocking over marionettes ranged pathetically on wooden bars. Still others, mallet in hand, pounded upon a spring which animated a French sailor who patriotically transfixed with his bayonet a poor hova or a mocking Dahomean. Everywhere, under tents or in the little lighted booths, I saw counterfeits of death, parodies of massacre, portrayals of hecatombs. And how happy these good people were!

In psychology, the concept of ‘social proof’ suggests that people like to follow the crowd. If everyone else is doing it, you assume it’s the right thing to do. Other people influence your actions more than you realize. For example, if you had to pick between two new bars and you could see that one was packed while the other isn’t, you’d assume that the empty one sucked and the popular one was much better! But just because everyone else is doing it does not mean it’s right. Slavery used to be legal, but now nearly everyone would agree that it’s inhumane, degrading and immoral.

MIND IS A DISEASE. This is a basic truth the East has discovered. The West says mind can become ill, can be healthy. Western psychology depends on this: the mind can be healthy or ill. But the East says mind as such is the disease, it cannot be healthy. No psychiatry will help; at the most you can make it normally ill. So there are two types of illness with mind: normally ill – that means you have the same illness as others around you; or abnormally ill – that means you are something unique. Your disease is not ordinary – exceptional. Your disease is individual, not of the crowd; that’s the only difference. Normally ill or abnormally ill, but mind cannot be healthy. Why? The East says the very nature of mind is such that it will remain unhealthy. The word ’health’ is beautiful. It comes from the same root as the word ’whole’. Health, healing, whole, holy – they all come from the same root. The mind cannot be healthy because it can never be whole. Mind is always divided; division is its base. If it cannot be whole, how can it be healthy? And if it cannot be healthy, how can it be holy? All minds are profane. There is nothing like a holy mind. A holy man lives without the mind because he lives without division.

On occasion, the leader may be intelligent and highly educated, but the possession of these qualities does him, as a rule, more harm than good. By showing how complex things are, by allowing of explanation and promoting comprehension, intelligence always renders its owner indulgent, and blunts, in a large measure, that intensity and violence of conviction needful for apostles. The great leaders of crowds of all ages, and those of the Revolution in particular, have been of lamentably narrow intellect; while it is precisely those whose intelligence has been the most restricted who have exercised the greatest influence.

Everybody is condemned from his early childhood. Whatever he does on his own is not acceptable, because the crowd of people in which a child is born have their own ideas and ideals. The child has to fit with their ideas and ideals. The people who are in power are able to mold the child in the way they want. This is the psychology behind the fact that everybody wants to pretend to be what he is not.  They have never been allowed to be themselves. Each person has been made into somebody else. Everybody knows that they have been forced and molded into something that they are not. Nobody is themselves and nobody is at ease with themselves.

Beginning in the eighteenth century, entire nations would seek succor not from God, but rather from Mammon, as a succession of financial mass delusions swept through Europe. On their surfaces, the religious and financial events appear to represent different phenomena, but they were powered by the same social and psychological mechanisms: the irresistible power of narratives; the human proclivity to imagine patterns where there were none; the overweening hubris and overconfidence of both their leaders and followers; and, above all, the overwhelming proclivity of human beings to imitate the behavior of those around them, no matter how factually baseless or self-destructive.

Nikdy si nejsme jisti, že se nějaká nová idea nezmocní buď nás samých, anebo našeho souseda. Víme právě tak z nové historie jako ze staré, že takové ideje bývají často tak zvláštní, ba tak podivné, že nad tím zůstává rozum stát. Fascinace, která je téměř vždy s takovou ideou spojena, vytváří fanatickou posedlost, která způsobuje, že všichni disidenti, to jest lidé, kteří smýšlejí jinak – zcela lhostejné, jak dobrý úmysl mají nebo jak jsou rozumní – jsou upalováni zaživa, stínáni nebo masově sprovozeni ze světa modernějším kulometem. Nemůžeme se ani utěšovat myšlenkou, že něco takového patří dávné minulosti. Bohužel se zdá, že k přítomnosti nejen náleží, ale že je lze v obzvláštní míře očekávat ještě od budoucnosti. “Homo homini lupus” (Člověk člověku vlkem) – to je smutný, ale věčně platný výrok. Člověk má opravdu dostatečný důvod pro to, aby se bál neosobních sil, které sídlí v nevědomí. Tkvíme v blažené nevědomosti o těchto silách, protože se nikdy nebo alespoň skoro nikdy neprojevují v našem osobním jednání a za obvyklých okolností. Když se však na druhé straně lidé shluknou a vytvoří dav, uvolní se dynamismy kolektivního člověka – bestií nebo démonů, kteří v každém jednotlivci dřímají, dokud se nestane součástí masy. Člověk uprostřed masy klesá nevědomě na nižší mravní i intelektuální úroveň; na úroveň, která je stále pod prahem nevědomí připravena prorazit, jakmile je podpořena a vylákána vytvořením masy.

When you skip a meal, telling your rumbling stomach that food is coming later in the day, and therefore it has no reason to fear starvation, doesn’t alleviate the powerful sensation of hunger. Similarly, explaining to your brain that the neglected interactions in your overfilled inbox have little to do with your survival doesn’t seem to prevent a corresponding sense of background anxiety. To your entrenched social circuitry, evolved over millennia of food shortages mitigated through strategic alliances, these unanswered messages become the psychological equivalent of ignoring a tribe member who might later prove key to surviving the next drought. From this perspective, the crowded email inbox is not just frustrating—it’s a matter of life or death.

Another clue to the evolutionary existence of casual mating comes from variations in sperm production and insemination (Baker & Bellis, 1995). In a study to determine the effect on sperm production of separating mates from each other, 35 couples agreed to provide ejaculates resulting from sexual intercourse from condoms. The partners in each couple had been separated for varying intervals of time. Men’s sperm count went up dramatically with the increasing amount of time the couple had been apart since their last sexual encounter. The more time spent apart, the more sperm the husbands inseminated in their wives when they finally did have sex. When the couples spent 100 percent of their time together, men inseminated 389 million sperm per ejaculate, on average. But when the couples spent only 5 percent of their time together, men inseminated 712 million sperm per ejaculate, almost double the amount. The number of sperm inseminated, according to the authors of the study, increases when other men’s sperm might be inside the wife’s reproductive tract at the same time due to the opportunity provided for extramarital sex. The increase in sperm insemination upon being reunited did not depend on the time since the man’s last ejaculation. Even when the man had masturbated to orgasm while away from his wife, he still inseminated more sperm on being reunited if he had been away from her a long time. The increase in sperm inseminated by the husband after prolonged separation ensures that his sperm will stand a greater chance in the race to the egg by crowding out or displacing a possible interloper’s sperm.

affect, effect. As a verb, affect means to influence (‘Smoking may affect your health’) or to adopt a pose or manner (‘He affected ignorance’). Effect as a verb means to accomplish (‘The prisoners effected an escape’). As a noun, the word needed is almost always effect (as in ‘personal effects’ or ‘the damaging effects of war’). Affect as a noun has a narrow psychological meaning to do with emotional states (by way of which it is related to affection). It is worth noting that affect as a verb is nearly always bland and almost meaningless. In ‘The winter weather affected profits in the building division’ (The Times) and ‘The noise of the crowds affected his play’ (Daily Telegraph), it is by no means clear whether the noise and weather helped or hindered or delayed or exacerbated the profits and play. A more precise word can almost always be found.

From my viewpoint, by far the greatest challenge facing the young today is that of responding and conforming only to their own most delicately insistent intuitive awarenesses of what the truth seems to them to be, as based on their own experiences and not on what others have interpreted to be the truth regarding events of which neither they nor others have experience-based knowledge. This also means not yielding unthinkingly to 'in' movements or to crowd psychology. This involves assessing thoughtfully one's own urges. It involves understanding, but not being swayed by, the spontaneous group spirit of youth. It involves thinking before acting in every instance. It involves eschewing all loyalties to other than the truth and love through which the cosmic integrity and absolute wisdom we identify inadequately by the name 'God' speaks to each of us directly-- and speaks only through our individual awareness of truth, and through our most spontaneous and powerful emotions of love and compassion.

He looked up at her and saw that she wore the face of Everyone. It was the face of the two women who talked in the seat behind him on the bus; it was the face of Mrs. Leslie, saying to him, "Some of us are going to organize a Pretentionist Club ..." It was the face of those who did not dare sit down and talk with themselves, the people who could not be alone a minute, the people who were tired without knowing they were tired and afraid without knowing that they were afraid. And, yes, it was the face of Mrs. Leslie's husband, crowding drink and women into a barren life. It was the grinding anxiety that had become commonplace, that sent people fleeing for psychological shelters against the bombs of uncertainty. Gaiety no longer was sufficient, cynicism had run out, and flippancy had never been more than a temporary shield. So now the people fled to the drug of pretense, identifying themselves with another life and another time and place--at the movie theater or on the television screen or in the Pretentionist movement. For so long as you were someone else you need not be yourself. Clifford D. Simak. Ring Around the Sun (Kindle Locations 1207-1215). Avon. Kindle Edition.

Here is another example of how such self-fulfilling prophecies operate. I recall an incident when I was lecturing to a college audience on the psychology of romantic love. Afterward, a group of students crowded around with questions. Among them was a young woman who began by complimenting me on my talk and then went on to say, quite bitterly, how much she wished “men” would understand the principles I had been discussing. As she went on talking, I became aware of an impulse to withdraw from her, to turn away. At the same time, I was intrigued by my reaction because I was in a very good mood that evening and feeling very benevolently disposed toward the whole world. She was delivering a monologue to the effect that men did not appreciate intelligence in women, and I stopped her by saying, “Listen, I’d like to share something with you. Right now I’m feeling an impulse to break off talking with you. I am feeling an impulse to avoid you. And I think I know how it’s happening. I would like to tell you about it, if you’re interested.” Taken aback, she nodded, and I went on, “As you began to talk, I received three messages from you. First, I received the impression that you liked me and wanted

Односторонность и преувеличение чувств толпы ведут к тому, что она не ведает ни сомнений, ни колебаний. Как женщина, толпа всегда впадает в крайности. Высказанное подозрение тотчас превращается в неоспоримую очевидность. Чувство антипатии и неодобрения, едва зарождающееся в отдельном индивиде, в толпе тотчас же превращается у него в самую свирепую ненависть. Сила чувств толпы еще более увеличивается отсутствием ответственности, особенно в толпе разнокалиберной. Уверенность в безнаказанности, тем более сильная, чем многочисленнее толпа, и сознание значительного, хотя и временного, могущества, доставляемого численностью, дает возможность скопищам людей проявлять такие чувства и совершать такие действия, которые невозможны для отдельного человека. В толпе дурак, невежда и завистник освобождаются от сознания своего ничтожества и бессилия, заменяющегося у них сознанием грубой силы, преходящей, но безмерной. К несчастью, преувеличение чаще обнаруживается в дурных чувствах толпы, атавистическом остатке инстинктов первобытного человека, которые подавляются у изолированного и ответственного индивида боязнью наказания. Это и является причиной легкости, с которой толпа совершает самые худшие насилия.

I began to see that the stronger a therapy emphasized feelings, self-esteem, and self-confidence, the more dependent the therapist was upon his providing for the patient ongoing, unconditional, positive regard. The more self-esteem was the end, the more the means, in the form of the patient’s efforts, had to appear blameless in the face of failure. In this paradigm, accuracy and comparison must continually be sacrificed to acceptance and compassion; which often results in the escalation of bizarre behavior and bizarre diagnoses. The bizarre behavior results from us taking credit for everything that is positive and assigning blame elsewhere for anything negative. Because of this skewed positive-feedback loop between our judged actions and our beliefs, we systematically become more and more adapted to ourselves, our feelings, and our inaccurate solitary thinking; and less and less adapted to the environment that we share with our fellows. The resultant behavior, such as crying, depression, displays of temper, high-risk behavior, or romantic ventures, or abandonment of personal responsibilities, which seem either compulsory, necessary, or intelligent to us, will begin to appear more and more irrational to others. The bizarre diagnoses occur because, in some cases, if a ‘cause disease’ (excuse from blame) does not exist, it has to be 'discovered’ (invented). Psychiatry has expanded its diagnoses of mental disease every year to include 'illnesses’ like kleptomania and frotteurism [now frotteuristic disorder in the DSM-V]. (Do you know what frotteurism is? It is a mental disorder that causes people, usually men, to surreptitiously fondle women’s breasts or genitals in crowded situations such as elevators and subways.) The problem with the escalation of these kinds of diagnoses is that either we can become so adapted to our thinking and feelings instead of our environment that we will become dissociated from the whole idea that we have a problem at all; or at least, the more we become blameless, the more we become helpless in the face of our problems, thinking our problems need to be 'fixed’ by outside help before we can move forward on our own. For 2,000 years of Western culture our problems existed in the human power struggle constantly being waged between our principles and our primal impulses. In the last fifty years we have unprincipled ourselves and become what I call 'psychologized.’ Now the power struggle is between the 'expert’ and the 'disorder.’ Since the rise of psychiatry and psychology as the moral compass, we don’t talk about moral imperatives anymore, we talk about coping mechanisms. We are not living our lives by principles so much as we are living our lives by mental health diagnoses. This is not working because it very subtly undermines our solid sense of self.

Others praise ceremonial Magic, and are supposed to suffer much Ecstasy! Our asylums are crowded, the stage is over-run! Is it by symbolizing we become the symbolized? Were I to crown myself King, should I be King? Rather should I be an object of disgust or pity. These Magicians, whose insincerity is their safety, are but the unemployed dandies of the Brothels. Magic is but one's natural ability to attract without asking; ceremony what is unaffected, its doctrine the negation of theirs. I know them well and their creed of learning that teaches the fear of their own light. Vampires, they are as the very lice in attraction. Their practices prove their incapacity, they have no magic to intensify the normal, the joy of a child or healthy person, none to evoke their pleasure or wisdom from themselves. Their methods depending on a morass of the imagination and a chaos of conditions, their knowledge obtained with less decency than the hyena his food, I say they are less free and do not obtain the satisfaction of the meanest among animals. Self condemned in their disgusting fatness, their emptiness of power, without even the magic of personal charm or beauty, they are offensive in their bad taste and mongering for advertisement. The freedom of energy is not obtained by its bondage, great power not by disintegration. Is it not because our energy (or mind stuff) is already over bound and divided, that we are not capable, let alone magical? 

She had come to analysis because she was, as she put it, “ruining her children.” ... “But you are so frustrating,” she said. “I want you to take something away from me, and you keep giving it back.” And what, I asked, was that “something” she wanted to give away? “The pain. The crazy,” she said. She said there was a little shrine, somewhere in the north of Brazil. The land was dry, the town impossibly poor, but people would travel for hundreds of miles to get there, to leave candles, gifts, and ex- voto offerings thanking the saint for answered prayers, for healing, for having rescued them from distress. “I bring you my worries. I bring you my tears. I bring you the dreams I have. I want to leave them here. I want to hang them on your wall and return home healed. But everything I give to you, you give back. You say, like you just said, ‘What is this “something” you want to give away?’ ” Years later I looked it up, the shrine. There were many like the one my Brazilian patient had described. One of them was a kind of cave or grotto, where pilgrims would leave little body parts carved from wood or wax: a foot, a breast, a head. From time to time the priest collected the wax objects and melted them down, making candles to be sold to other pilgrims. The walls and ceiling of the shrine were black with candle smoke and crowded with these suspended offerings. I think now that my Brazilian patient managed at least to give that away, the conjured image of a blackened shrine, hung with a jumble of body parts. I think that in the soul of each psychoanalyst such a place must exist, in spite of what we profess about our neutrality, our professional detachment. Perhaps something of what we receive can be melted down and sold back as candlelight— our costly illuminations— but other elements remain just as they appeared, the dreams nailed to the walls, the abandoned hearts and limbs, the soot of inextinguishable longing.

Negroes have proceeded from a premise that equality means what it says, and they have taken white Americans at their word when they talked of it as an objective. But most whites in America in 1967, including many persons of goodwill, proceed from a premise that equality is a loose expression for improvement. White America is not even psychologically organized to close the gap—essentially it seeks only to make it less painful and less obvious but in most respects to retain it. Most of the abrasions between Negroes and white liberals arise from this fact. White America is uneasy with injustice and for ten years it believed it was righting wrongs. The struggles were often bravely fought by fine people. The conscience of man flamed high in hours of peril. The days can never be forgotten when the brutalities at Selma caused thousands all over the land to rush to our side, heedless of danger and of differences in race, class and religion. After the march to Montgomery, there was a delay at the airport and several thousand demonstrators waited more than five hours, crowding together on the seats, the floors and the stairways of the terminal building. As I stood with them and saw white and Negro, nuns and priests, ministers and rabbis, labor organizers, lawyers, doctors, housemaids and shopworkers brimming with vitality and enjoying a rare comradeship, I knew I was seeing a microcosm of the mankind of the future in this moment of luminous and genuine brotherhood. But these were the best of America, not all of America. Elsewhere the commitment was shallower. Conscience burned only dimly, and when atrocious behavior was curbed, the spirit settled easily into well-padded pockets of complacency. Justice at the deepest level had but few stalwart champions. A good many observers have remarked that if equality could come at once the Negro would not be ready for it. I submit that the white American is even more unprepared.

Between the extreme limits of this series would find a place all the forms of prestige resulting from the different elements composing a civilisation -- sciences, arts, literature, &c. -- and it would be seen that prestige constitutes the fundamental element of persuasion. Consciously or not, the being, the idea, or the thing possessing prestige is immediately imitated in consequence of contagion, and forces an entire generation to adopt certain modes of feeling and of giving expression to its thought. This imitation, moreover, is, as a rule, unconscious, which accounts for the fact that it is perfect. The modern painters who copy the pale colouring and the stiff attitudes of some of the Primitives are scarcely alive to the source of their inspiration. They believe in their own sincerity, whereas, if an eminent master had not revived this form of art, people would have continued blind to all but its naïve and inferior sides. Those artists who, after the manner of another illustrious master, inundate their canvasses with violet shades do not see in nature more violet than was detected there fifty years ago; but they are influenced, "suggestioned," by the personal and special impressions of a painter who, in spite of this eccentricity, was successful in acquiring great prestige. Similar examples might be brought forward in connection with all the elements of civilisation. It is seen from what precedes that a number of factors may be concerned in the genesis of prestige; among them success was always one of the most important. Every successful man, every idea that forces itself into recognition, ceases, ipso facto, to be called in question. The proof that success is one of the principal stepping-stones to prestige is that the disappearance of the one is almost always followed by the disappearance of the other. The hero whom the crowd acclaimed yesterday is insulted to-day should he have been overtaken by failure. The re-action, indeed, will be the stronger in proportion as the prestige has been great. The crowd in this case considers the fallen hero as an equal, and takes its revenge for having bowed to a superiority whose existence it no longer admits.

As you know, the public conversation about the connection between Islamic ideology and Muslim intolerance and violence has been stifled by political correctness. In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed, it would seem, to protect Muslims from having to grapple with the kinds of facts we’ve been talking about. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars—deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields—who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take Islamists and jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations. When one asks what the motivations of Islamists and jihadists actually are, one encounters a tsunami of liberal delusion. Needless to say, the West is to blame for all the mayhem we see in Muslim societies. After all, how would we feel if outside powers and their mapmakers had divided our lands and stolen our oil? These beleaguered people just want what everyone else wants out of life. They want economic and political security. They want good schools for their kids. They want to be free to flourish in ways that would be fully compatible with a global civil society. Liberals imagine that jihadists and Islamists are acting as anyone else would given a similar history of unhappy encounters with the West. And they totally discount the role that religious beliefs play in inspiring a group like the Islamic State—to the point where it would be impossible for a jihadist to prove that he was doing anything for religious reasons. Apparently, it’s not enough for an educated person with economic opportunities to devote himself to the most extreme and austere version of Islam, to articulate his religious reasons for doing so ad nauseam, and even to go so far as to confess his certainty about martyrdom on video before blowing himself up in a crowd. Such demonstrations of religious fanaticism are somehow considered rhetorically insufficient to prove that he really believed what he said he believed. Of course, if he said he did these things because he was filled with despair and felt nothing but revulsion for humanity, or because he was determined to sacrifice himself to rid his nation of tyranny, such a psychological or political motive would be accepted at face value. This double standard is guaranteed to exonerate religion every time. The game is rigged.

FACT 4 – There is more to the creation of the Manson Family and their direction than has yet been exposed. There is more to the making of the movie Gimme Shelter than has been explained. This saga has interlocking links to all the beautiful people Robert Hall knew. The Manson Family and the Hell’s Angels were instruments to turn on enemy forces. They attacked and discredited politically active American youth who had dropped out of the establishment. The violence came down from neo-Nazis, adorned with Swastikas both in L.A. and in the Bay Area at Altamont. The blame was placed on persons not even associated with the violence. When it was all over, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the icing on this cake, famed musicians associated with a racist, neo-Nazi murder. By rearranging the facts, cutting here and there, distorting evidence, neighbors and family feared their own youth. Charles Manson made the cover of Life with those wide eyes, like Rasputin. Charles Watson didn’t make the cover. Why not? He participated in all the killings. Manson wasn’t inside the house. Manson played a guitar and made records. Watson didn’t. He was too busy taking care of matters at the lawyer’s office prior to the killings, or with officials of Young Republicans. Who were Watson’s sponsors in Texas, where he remained until his trial, separate from the Manson Family’s to psychologically distance him from the linking of Watson to the murders he actually committed. “Pigs” was scrawled in Sharon Tate’s house in blood. Was this to make blacks the suspects? Credit cards of the La Bianca family were dropped intentionally in the ghetto after the massacre. The purpose was to stir racial fears and hatred. Who wrote the article, “Did Hate Kill Tate?”—blaming Black Panthers for the murders? Lee Harvey Oswald was passed off as a Marxist. Another deception. A pair of glasses was left on the floor of Sharon Tate’s home the day of the murder. They were never identified. Who moved the bodies after the killers left, before the police arrived? The Spahn ranch wasn’t a hippie commune. It bordered the Krupp ranch, and has been incorporated into a German Bavarian beer garden. Howard Hughes knew George Spahn. He visited this ranch daily while filming The Outlaw. Howard Hughes bought the 516 acres of Krupp property in Nevada after he moved into that territory. What about Altamont? What distortions and untruths are displayed in that movie? Why did Mick Jagger insist, “the concert must go on?” There was a demand that filmmakers be allowed to catch this concert. It couldn’t have happened the same in any other state. The Hell’s Angels had a long working relationship with law enforcement, particularly in the Oakland area. They were considered heroes by the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers when they physically assaulted the dirty anti-war hippies protesting the shipment of arms to Vietnam. The laboratory for choice LSD, the kind sent to England for the Stones, came from the Bay Area and would be consumed readily by this crowd. Attendees of the concert said there was “a compulsiveness to the event.” It had to take place. Melvin Belli, Jack Ruby’s lawyer, made the legal arrangements. Ruby had complained that Belli prohibited him from telling the full story of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder (another media event). There were many layers of cover-up, and many names have reappeared in subsequent scripts. Sen. Philip Hart, a member of the committee investigating illegal intelligence operations inside the US, confessed that his own children told him these things were happening. He had refused to believe them. On November 18, 1975, Sen. Hart realized matters were not only out of hand, but crimes of the past had to be exposed to prevent future outrages. How shall we ensure that it will never happen again? It will happen repeatedly unless we can bring ourselves to understand and accept that it did go on.

Lost and afraid in a crowd of our own alienated facets turned other, we create a cultural narrative of pure projection to try to impose some order onto the chaos

It is perfectly easy to recognize that there are people who are born intersex. After reading the account of someone like Morris it is possible to understand there may be some people born as one sex who sincerely believe that they should be in the body of the other sex. What is exceptionally hard – and what we currently have few means of knowing – is how to navigate the leap beyond biology into testimony. Intersex is biologically provable. Trans may in the years to come turn out to be psychologically or biologically provable. But we don’t even have much idea which field it might ever come under.

we want to see less of it—we tend to see more of that behavior. The same dynamic works in romantic relations and with co-workers too: praise what you love and you tend to get more of it. In fact, many proponents of the study of positive psychology talk about how our subconscious mind cannot understand the word don’t. So when interacting with others, it’s much more impactful to say what you want from someone rather than you don’t want. For example, while on a crowded street with a child, you could say, “Walk by my side so I can keep you safe,” rather than, “Don’t run ahead of me.” Putting our attention on what we want rather than what we don’t want is not only incredibly powerful from a manifesting and law of attraction standpoint, it’s also incredibly powerful when making requests of others in our lives.

There is a noticeable parallel between the ways that commercial fishermen and department stores generate a competitive fury among those they wish to hook. To attract and arouse the catch, fishermen scatter some loose bait called chum. For similar purposes, department stores holding a bargain sale toss out a few especially good deals on prominently advertised items called loss leaders. If the bait—of either form—has done its job, a large and eager crowd forms to snap it up. Soon, in the rush to score, the group becomes agitated, nearly blinded, by the adversarial nature of the situation. Human beings and fish alike lose perspective on what they want and begin striking at whatever is being contested.

Most crowds are rather easy to influence and hypnotize because common longings and yearnings increase the suggestibility of each member of the group. Each person has a tendency to identify with the rest of the group and with the leader as well, and this makes it easy for the leader to hold the people in his grip.

By declaring that everyone is equally an end, Kant ignores all personal differences, and therefore the fact of individuality as such. We are each an end in respect to those qualities only in which we are identical—namely, in that we are "rational beings." But this rational being is not a personal intelligence; it is a fiction, a bundle of mental faculties assumed a priori to exist, and then treated as if it were universally and equally applicable to all actually existing intelligences.

Every job looks easy when you’re not the one doing it.” Every job looks easy when you’re not the one doing it because the challenges faced by someone in the arena are often invisible to those in the crowd.

Like many women, I found it easy to deny to myself that the fascinating thoughts and images that crowded my mind were sexual in nature. (Women, unlike men, cannot look down to gauge a phallic barometer of sexual arousal.)

The legendary U.S. investigative journalist I. F. Stone supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, even embedding himself on one of the clandestine boats, crowded with Holocaust survivors, that eventually made it to safety in “stucco-colored Haifa” in 1946. But after the 1967 war, he conceded, “For the Zionists, the Arab was the Invisible Man. Psychologically he was not there.” Or as the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir put it, “There was no such thing as Palestinians … They did not exist.

understand bubbles and crashes in the same way. For example, their pathophysiology involves the vagaries of human psychology and the unstable supply of credit from a modern banking system. Their anatomy consists of the “four ps”: promoters, public, politicians, and press. Finally, their signs and symptoms include the contagious societal infatuation with nearly effortless wealth, the hubris of the promoters, and their veneration by the public.366

If I have dealt at some length with this single side of Wesley's character-I mean his preoccupation with strange psychological disturbances, now commonly minimized-it is because I think he, and the other prophets of the Evangelical movement, have succeeded in imposing upon English Christianity a pattern of their own. They have succeeded in identifying religion with a real or supposed experience. I say 'real or supposed', because in the nature of things you cannot prove the validity of any trance, vision, or ecstasy; it remains something within the mind. Still less can you prove the validity of a lifelong Christ-inspired attitude; in the last resort, all it proves is that certain psychological influences are strong enough to overcome, in a given case, all the temptations towards backsliding which a cynical world affords. But, for better or worse, the England which weathered the excitements and disappointments of the early nineteenth century was committed to a religion of experience; you did not base your hopes on this or that doctrinal calculation; you knew. For that reason the average Englishman was, and is, singularly unaffected by reasonings which would attempt to rob him of his theological certainties, whatever they may be. For that reason, also, he expects much (perhaps too much) of his religion in the way of verified results; he is easily disappointed if it does not run according to schedule. It must chime in with his moods, rise superior to his temptations; a decent average of special providences must convince him that it works. Otherwise, though without rancour, he abandons the practice of it. He is not prepared for that unrewarded adventure of naked faith which is, for the Quietist, the common lot of Christians. Not on the scale, but in the spirit, of those eighteenth-century pioneers, he demands 'heart-work'. And, in days when we are apparently less moved by the crowd-appeal, it is hard to come by.

In its 2018 guidance on how its members should treat ‘traditional masculinity’ in boys and men, the American Psychological Association wrote: Awareness of privilege and the harmful impacts of beliefs and behaviours that maintain patriarchal power have been shown to reduce sexist attitudes in men and have been linked to participation in social justice activities.16

I'm tired of being in a room filled with air.

Probably the most telling point of likeness between the crowd-mind and the psychoneurosis—paranoia especially—is the "delusion of persecution.

A pre-recorded message, timed to go off just as the crowd was reaching a fever pitch. A way to get them to take that one step further and push them from civility and into madness. Stocks are running out. Stocks are running out. STOCKS ARE RUNNING OUT.

All of a sudden, he felt that palpable, magnetic dread that makes horror-movie heroines look behind the curtains. There she was, a drink in each hand, parting the crowd like somebody who didn’t have to wait in line. He wasn’t a deer in headlights, but there was nowhere to run.

All of a sudden, he felt that palpable, magnetic dread that makes horror-movie heroines look behind the curtains. There she was, a drink in each hand, parting the crowd like somebody who didn’t have to wait in line. He wasn’t a deer in headlights, but there was nowhere to run.