Addictive Human Collective Narcosis

Addictive Human Collective Narcosis

The gathering of people in a high-density environment produces a narcosis of altered consciousness that leads to a state of gratification due to the crowd effect.

Psychosocial and synergetic effects and other synesthesias such as the group effect, system effect, alter sensitivity and modify behavior and the consciousness of selfish personal autonomy and transform us into beings with the behavior of cattle or a school of fish, where each person begins to align their movements to synchronize with the crowd, and then begins to align behavior and mental attitudes to synchronize with their neighbors. Therefore, behavior in a crowd can lead to a feeling of unexpected power and enhance behaviors that an individual outside the crowd would not do alone. There in the crowd, they feel that they are part of a single larger and powerful organism and attitudes synchronize in a single direction.

This collective animal has a personality that is not the sum of all the individual personalities; the group builds a personality that is above and distinct from the sum of the people in the group or the crowd, and then modifies the disposition of each person in the crowd and modifies their limits and potential, removing and reducing moral restrictions and giving them confidence and boldness in certain circumstances.

This experience outside of personal control brings a satisfaction that encourages people to enjoy the crowd, because it cannot be built alone, nor can it be controlled and directed; it can only be enjoyed and appreciated, used to transcend their own limitations and decisions.

People in the crowd realize that they cannot communicate as friends or partners verbally; however, gestural and body communication and the exchange of subliminal and emotional information on another level occur without oral verbiage, and this form of communication and exchange of nonverbal information takes us back to the memories of the cave era of our ancestors before language and sedentarism, the nostalgia of the primitive being that depended on organic solidarity for the survival of the sapiens species.

Human beings like crowds to feel part of a powerful organization that is superior to their individuality, such as religion, science, and government, which were created by civilization to protect us from ourselves.

Roberto da Silva Rocha, professor universitário e cientista político