When we study ants, we do not begin with a belief that their behavior is wrong or improper. We assume that they act in a way that is required for their survival and proliferation.
It would be ‘nice’ to say that such things are just a social dysfunction that we can safely avoid. They may not be. A lemming that follows the herd may find that it has led them off a cliff, but a lemming that doesn’t will certainly die.
We may now have better options to opt out. I’m mostly speaking to the relatively wealthy, skilled, and able. But I’m not sure. Opting out of one hysteria may also require membership in another such mass movement, complete with an obvious enemy, and a ridiculous but necessary set of rituals to convince others that we are not a threat.
I’ve believed throughout most of my life that communications and especially privacy technology would give us better options. I’m not sure it’s ending up that way. I see great technological developments in that direction, but almost all social developments in their use going the opposite way.
I think what these things come down to is each individual assessing a practical threat to themselves and reacting accordingly. I don’t generally accept explanations that assume entire populations acting wholly irrationally. It can also probably be seen as arising from material conditions such as increased resource scarcity, which is a tautological result of economic cycles, regardless of how the economists may measure their positive effect. This view requires extraordinary sociological imagination, to consider what type of situation that you could find yourself in, which would lead you to switch sides on your most ardent beliefs. That situation is therefore the threat, not the people, but it may be unavoidable. I believe that people are smart and compassionate and empathetic and do realize this, but it doesn’t affect their best option for actions, posturing, and espoused beliefs.
I like the analogy with ants; we can observe ants, understand that their own individual needs / programming create emergent group behaviors and say "oh, that's why that colony behaves as it does" (making the colony of millions of ants into an individual somehow). But when it comes to humans, we waste too much intellectual effort on the individuals and not on the group, i.e. on why and how the social group / team emerges and behaves as it does.
For example, it's pretty clear to me that whether you are talking about a startup team, or a cult, or a religious group, or a political party (the smaller the party, the truer this is) one of the core aspects of social organization is recruiting: i.e. why can you attract people to your group. That messaging is important and has to work and it has to address some core human/individual need, but after you make it work, adding people to your group becomes easier.
Now, conversely, if that startup is not doing very well, or that political party doesn't look like it will get power, the messaging / recruiting mechanism becomes much more important: it's how the group is tied together and how it survives (by attracting more people / replacing attrition). At that point, for the people in the group that need the group to continue, recruiting becomes a primary goal; more so than even the actual operative / paper goal of the group (profit, political power, whatever). That's where niche marketing / issue of the day becomes more important than ever: join our startup/party to provide alternative food sources to the world; to shift the world's consciousness; to provide justice to those wronged; whatever.
To me that's a core failure point, where the startup/party/group should just fold up tents and do something else. They are wasting energy just to keep being a group rather than achieve an end result (their original goal). But we, as social animals (ants as per the OP) can't/won't see that far. We just keep on grinding.
It would be ‘nice’ to say that such things are just a social dysfunction that we can safely avoid. They may not be. A lemming that follows the herd may find that it has led them off a cliff, but a lemming that doesn’t will certainly die.
We may now have better options to opt out. I’m mostly speaking to the relatively wealthy, skilled, and able. But I’m not sure. Opting out of one hysteria may also require membership in another such mass movement, complete with an obvious enemy, and a ridiculous but necessary set of rituals to convince others that we are not a threat.
I’ve believed throughout most of my life that communications and especially privacy technology would give us better options. I’m not sure it’s ending up that way. I see great technological developments in that direction, but almost all social developments in their use going the opposite way.
I think what these things come down to is each individual assessing a practical threat to themselves and reacting accordingly. I don’t generally accept explanations that assume entire populations acting wholly irrationally. It can also probably be seen as arising from material conditions such as increased resource scarcity, which is a tautological result of economic cycles, regardless of how the economists may measure their positive effect. This view requires extraordinary sociological imagination, to consider what type of situation that you could find yourself in, which would lead you to switch sides on your most ardent beliefs. That situation is therefore the threat, not the people, but it may be unavoidable. I believe that people are smart and compassionate and empathetic and do realize this, but it doesn’t affect their best option for actions, posturing, and espoused beliefs.