Presence against the calm crowd

When information reassures and lulls our democratic vigilance to sleep, how can we resist the allure of voluntary submission? A reflection on the invisible mechanisms of conformism and the vital necessity of autonomy.

Anatomy of consented submission

Let us observe a mundane scene: a crowded major railway station, in the middle of the night, hundreds if not thousands of travelers immobilized due to summer storms. They wait, calm, hanging on announcements broadcast through loudspeakers. This crowd perceives itself as reasonable, adult, master of itself, everyone is calm and understanding. One might think this is a healthy situation. In reality, this apparent serenity reveals a serious phenomenon: the imperceptible transformation of autonomous individuals into a docile mass.

When a human group knows why it is gathered, whether it is an actor in its presence as in a demonstration, or whether it suffers an external situation like this train delay, it remains strangely calm as long as it is informed. This apparently simple observation reveals a very important mechanism: information, even false or incoherent, is sufficient to pacify crowds. It is enough for there to be information for calm to be born, and with it, docility.

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze expressed this with great lucidity in his conference “What is the act of creation?” given at FEMIS on May 17, 1987:

"In a first sense, one could say that communication is the transmission and propagation of information. Now, what is information? It’s not very complicated, everyone knows: information is a set of orders.
When you are informed, you are told what you are supposed to believe. In other words, to inform is to circulate an order. Police statements are rightly called ’communiqués’: we are communicated information, that is, we are told what we are supposed to be in a state of or must believe, what we are required to believe. Or not even to believe, but to act as if we believed. Because we are not asked to believe, we are asked to behave as if we believed.
That’s information, communication. And independently of these orders and the transmission of these orders, there is no communication, there is no information. Which amounts to saying that information is exactly the system of control."

History offers us an absolutely tragic example of this phenomenon: during the deportation of Jews during World War II, a gradual process of discrimination, humiliation and legal normalization had conditioned populations to live with new criteria. Jewish populations had become accustomed to increasingly arbitrary restrictions of freedom.
When they were ordered under threat to board trains, a large part formed calm crowds. Their objective was then to make as few waves as possible to avoid further brutality. The paradox is infinitely cruel: these people were going willingly toward death, convinced they were preserving their integrity through their good faith and moderation. They thought they were under the regime of humanity, while they were being dehumanized by their executioners. The few who resisted were sometimes stigmatized by their peers for their “unconsciousness,” so much did the community fear reprisals.

Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), perfectly analyzes how the banality of evil relies on this collective docility. She writes: “Evil can spread over the entire world like a fungus extends over the surface of a piece of rotten bread.” She demonstrates how bureaucratic obedience and the dilution of responsibilities allow the unthinkable: no one is responsible when everyone obeys. The division of tasks, the anonymity of the crowd, so many mechanisms that transform ordinary individuals, including the victims themselves, into cogs of a murderous machine.

Reassuring violence: a psychoanalytic paradox

How can we explain that authoritarianism, intrinsically anxiety-provoking, can become reassuring? Sigmund Freud, in the article “A Child is Being Beaten”: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions (1919), explores this troubling paradox. He analyzes how the masochistic fantasy can be linked to a feeling of guilt and an ambivalent relationship of love and hate toward the paternal figure. And it’s better to be beaten than to be invisible to one’s father. The punishment, though painful, confirms a symbolic order: “The fact of being beaten, which is humiliating and painful, now contains sexual excitement and provides the satisfaction of auto-erotic pleasure.”

Alice Miller deepens this analysis in For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (1980) where she writes: “The maltreated child will become a maltreating adult, unless he or she has had a helpful witness in childhood.” Then, in Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child (1981), she dismantles the mechanisms of this “poisonous pedagogy” where educational violence is justified as beneficial. She demonstrates how “children learn very early to consider cruelty as normal and even as something good for them.”

The beaten child ends up finding in the blows a perverse form of security: at least, he knows what to expect. This habit of submission, internalized from childhood, prepares the ground for future collective obediences. Violence becomes structuring precisely because it is predictable and repetitive.

Information functions according to the same principle: it emanates from an authority figure, what I metaphorically call the “father,” and structures our relationship to the world. In Nazi Germany as in occupied France, instructions were methodically precise: “You must present yourself on such day, at such time, at such place.” Jews often received official summons, in the form of administrative notices, public postings, or individual letters (“summons for family regrouping,” “census,” “departure for work,” “transfer,” etc.). These messages, always formulated in neutral and bureaucratic language, were signed by an institution: the Prefecture, the police, the Kommandantur, the Gestapo.

In France, during the roundups (like that of the Vél’ d’Hiv in July 1942), police warned certain inhabitants that they had to “prepare some belongings, food, blankets for themselves and their children,” and go to a given appointment, generally at dawn, even before they understood the gravity of the situation. In Germany and Eastern Europe, similar orders organized the “census,” departures to work camps, or “transfers,” without specifying that these were convoys to Auschwitz or other extermination camps.

These instructions were often accompanied by deceptive promises: “You will be rehoused,” “this is simply an administrative check,” “your families will be able to find you later.” Jews were encouraged to bring their valuables or enough to live for several days, instilling the feeling that it was a temporary measure organized for their security. This information system, through its cold rationality, calmed anxieties and resistances: framed by a recognized authority, transmitted in the language of law and order, these injunctions transformed terrifying arbitrariness into administrative routine.

It mattered little that this information was false, or that it organized death on an industrial scale: it gave the illusion of a certain control, a minimum of predictability, where one still believed to have a grip on one’s destiny. Ultimately, it is indeed the very structure of official information, its impersonality, its regularity, its pretension to rationality, that allowed oppressors to orchestrate collective docility, to the absolute abyss.

Contemporary calm crowds: from the station to confinement

Let us transpose this analysis to our era. In this crowded Parisian station, thousands of travelers in transit, without lodging, depend entirely on collective messages. They have no choice but to obey. What else can they do? Rent a hotel and abandon the price of their ticket? The injustice would be flagrant, so they don’t do it, they want their rights to be respected, so they remain calm, without realizing that they have submitted.

Each person within this crowd perceives himself as sensible, organized, defending his rights by waiting wisely. In reality, he has imperceptibly slipped toward absolute docility. He has abandoned his sovereignty to a power that can now do with him what it wants. Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), precisely describes these “disciplines” that shape docile bodies: “Discipline thus produces subjected and practiced bodies, ’docile’ bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience).”

The Covid period offered a striking illustration of these mechanisms. From the point of view of public liberties, the restrictions imposed in France were more coercive than during the German Occupation: strict lockdowns, mandatory certificates, drastic limitations on movement, curfews, etc. This comparison may shock, and I do not minimize Nazi horror in any way. But factually, government by state of exception, which allows governing outside the law for exceptional reasons, was employed in both cases, and movement limitations were stricter between 2020 and 2022 than between 1940 and 1944.

And the majority of citizens, confronted with a deluge of often contradictory information, accepted and even supported, in both cases, these governances outside the framework of law. Giorgio Agamben, in his texts on the state of exception, notably State of Exception - Homo Sacer II (2003), shows how “the state of exception increasingly tends to present itself as the dominant governmental paradigm in contemporary politics.” The Covid period was its epiphany, because this state of exception had as corollary the doubling in two years of the fortunes of the great shareholders of global capitalism.

Critical size: when the group becomes crowd

A crucial element distinguishes the group from the crowd: size. In a group of 10 to 30 people, humanity prevails. Dialogue remains horizontal, everyone keeps their face, their singularity. The person addressing the group doesn’t need a microphone, she can look everyone in the eyes. It’s a democratic assembly where dehumanization is impossible.

Beyond this threshold, which some situate at 150 people according to the work of anthropologist Robin Dunbar, the group tips into crowd. Individuals become a mass to manage, a flow to channel. Gustave Le Bon, in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), wrote:

“The individual in a crowd acquires, by the mere fact of number, a feeling of invincible power that allows him to yield to instincts that, alone, he would necessarily have restrained.”

“In crowds, it is stupidity and not intelligence that accumulates.”

This transformation allows slides outside humanism without restraint. As Stanley Milgram’s experiment showed in Obedience to Authority (1974), the majority of ordinary individuals can commit terrible acts simply by obeying an authority perceived as legitimate.

This is why the greatest vigilance is required in the face of these gatherings that divest us of our singularity.

Autonomy as an act of resistance

For individuals caught in these crowds, who believe themselves calm when they are docile, how to emancipate themselves? My suggestion may seem simple, but it is quite difficult to implement, because it disrupts our attachments. In our crowded station for example, I suggest leaving the premises, abandoning the benefit of the ticket, paying for a hotel. Yes, it costs money. Yes, it’s unfair. But it’s the price of autonomy.

One could object to me: “You’re letting yourself be ripped off! You’re not defending your rights!” On the contrary: I exist in my autonomy. I radically dissociate myself from the submission process. I leave the crowd to become again a free individual capable of freedom. This exit is not necessarily solitary: it can be done with other motivated people, thus creating a new form of horizontal solidarity.

This is not about individualism, but about what Cornelius Castoriadis calls “autonomy” in The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975):

“Autonomy is the project – and now we know it is achievable because it has already been achieved – of a society where all citizens have an equal effective possibility to participate in legislation, government, jurisdiction and finally in the institution of society.”

By leaving the station, I will have to register in the territory, create links, invent solutions. This forced crisis becomes an opportunity for encounter and creation. This may seem uncomfortable, risky, and it is precisely this risk-taking (relatively speaking) that makes our humanism. As Henri Bergson writes in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932):

“The free man is one who can improvise”

Democratic responsibility: a necessary price

Freedom has a price. In these critical moments, this price consists of leaving the docile crowd. A crowd movement is never trivial, it can always degenerate. I don’t want to be paranoid, and I know that SNCF staff sincerely do their best. But yielding to the ease of being taken care of by the “father” in an exceptional situation is to expose oneself to micro-totalitarianisms, voluntary or involuntary.

The democratic system doesn’t depend only on institutions or leaders: it rests on the attitude of citizens. Those who choose autonomy, calmly, without violence or brutal demands, create a barrier against any totalitarian possibility. They embody what Václav Havel called in The Power of the Powerless (1978) “living in truth”: “The power of the powerless lies in the fact that each individual can live in truth, that is, refuse to live in lies.”

Étienne de La Boétie, in Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (written around 1546-1548, published in 1576), expressed it with such clarity:

“Be resolved to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.”

“Tyrants are great only because we are on our knees.”

Each time we choose the ease of collective obedience, we reinforce structures of domination. Each time we opt for autonomy, even at the price of immediate discomfort, we reaffirm our dignity as free beings, for ourselves and for others.

Presence to self against collective absence

People in the calm crowd are actually absent from themselves. They are reassured by the illusion of information, dissolved in the mass, dispossessed of their singularity and ultimately of their dignity.

Authentic presence requires resisting this dissolution. It demands maintaining one’s critical vigilance, preserving one’s capacity for autonomous decision, refusing the seduction of reassuring conformism. In the midst of this information that is so many disguised orders, this resistance is for me an ethical and political imperative.

Obviously, nothing prevents afterward claiming one’s rights, demanding reimbursements, demanding accountability. But in the moment, the urgency is elsewhere: it’s about preserving one’s dignity and integrity by refusing dissolution in the mass. Individual responsibility constitutes the last rampart against totalitarianisms. In an authentic democracy, each citizen must in my view carry this responsibility as a necessary and precious risk-taking.

Let us not forget that during World War II, those we today call “resistants” were qualified as “terrorists” by the dominant media and the majority of citizens. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it stammers. It’s up to us to remain vigilant, present to ourselves, capable of saying no to the deadly seduction of the calm crowd.