I’d wager that many of you have already heard of A Gentleman in Moscow, and surely more than a few have already read it. For those that haven’t had the pleasure yet, please note that I trip over gold bars laying in the street more often than I stumble across writing this good.

The reason I bring up this lovely novel is that I’d like to share a few beautifully worded paragraphs and then consider how we might interpret the meaning in a modern context. The following scene takes place several years after WWI, when the Bolsheviks have seized Russia and the communification of the country is well underway.

“A complaint was filed with comrade Teodorov, the Commissar of Food, claiming that the existence of our wine list runs counter to the ideals of the Revolution. That it is a monument to the privilege of the nobility, the effeteness of the intelligentsia, and the predatory pricing of speculators.”

“But that’s preposterous.”

For the second time in an hour, the unshrugging Andrey shrugged.

“A meeting was held, a vote was taken, an order was handed down. . . . Henceforth, the Boyarsky shall sell only red and white wine with every bottle at a single price.”

**********

With a quick accounting of columns and shelves, the Count determined that in this row alone, there were over a thousand bottles—a thousand bottles virtually identical in shape and weight.

Picking up one at random, he reflected how perfectly the curve of the glass fit in the palm of the hand, how perfectly its volume weighed upon the arm. But inside? Inside this dark green glass was what exactly? A Chardonnay to complement a Camembert? A Sauvignon Blanc to go with some chèvre?

Whichever wine was within, it was decidedly not identical to its neighbors. On the contrary, the contents of the bottle in his hand was the product of a history as unique and complex as that of a nation, or a man. In its color, aroma, and taste, it would certainly express the idiosyncratic geology and prevailing climate of its home terrain. But in addition, it would express all the natural phenomena of its vintage. In a sip, it would evoke the timing of that winter’s thaw, the extent of that summer’s rain, the prevailing winds, and the frequency of clouds.

Yes, a bottle of wine was the ultimate distillation of time and place; a poetic expression of individuality itself. Yet here it was, cast back into the sea of anonymity, that realm of averages and unknowns.

Bravo! What an extraordinary passage.

Now let’s allow the wine to represent individuals in a society. Throughout history one of the binding themes of a large scale mass movements is that they have a system for sorting people into simplistic and arbitrarily created groups. In fact, I would make the case that a movement’s most potent weapon/tool/power is its ability to define the groups and then choose who goes where. In Dune, he who controls the spice controls the universe. In a nation, he who controls the terms of grouping controls the society.

For a mass movement to gain power it must erase a person’s identity and contort their unique characteristics until every psychological bone in a citizen’s soul is fractured and the husk can be conveniently slotted into a mold.

• The Russians created the bourgeoisie and proletariat, where the sole determinant of a citizen’s character was their means of winning bread and/or history of decadence. If your father was a farmer you might make it, if he was a jeweler you were screwed.
• The Nazi’s sorting system is so well-known that it doesn’t bear repeating.
• Today’s flavor is oppressor and oppressed. According to those who subscribe to this trend, nearly all societal issues can be evaporated away until all that’s left is a power dynamic. White males are loathsome perpetrators of patriarchy, and Latino women (for example) are hapless victims.

We might reasonably ask: is it merely a happy accident or is there a reason that mass movements love the label? Based on Eric Hoffer’s ideas it becomes apparent that the facile sorting systems are a feature not a bug. Here’s why.

Certainty is a key reason that a person may participate in a mass movement. With unambiguous gusto an ideology explains that if you’re on its side you’re on the side of the good and the righteous. Whereas all those who have not joined are unenlightened heretics who are not privy to the divine truth. Allah is the one true god, the Nazi party is the highest ideal of mankind, everything is about the color of your skin and power dynamics, etc. etc. For these binary propositions to achieve widespread adoption they must be simple, sure of themselves and offer the true believer a chance to be on the “good” side.

Here’s Hoffer in his own words (from my review of his book).

The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. No doctrine however profound and sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth. – Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth.

Cohesion

Cohesive societies with a strong sense of purpose are relatively immune to mass movements. During the Cold War, for example, the West was self-confident in the story that it told itself: we’re the hero saving the world from the depravity of communism. How much of that story actually reflected reality? To a limited extent the narrative was true, but it was punctured by a massive dose of bullshit, grandiose exaggeration and scaremongering propaganda that led to exquisite flops like the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam War and the McCarthy show trials.

That story – free market democracies allayed against the wicked commies – was as full of holes as any ideology, but I would argue at least it was a halfway decent fable. Its simplified version of reality – Westerners are good and commies are bad – created division between countries not within them.

While my ultimate preference would be for no division, failing that I would much prefer to live in a society in which all of America stands united against Russia, rather than our current situation whereby one half of America hates the other half and we can’t even agree on something so simple as whether Vladimir Putin is a scoundrel… Блять!

So far we have established that a mass movement employs elementary categorization because it provides certainty to the follower, and the determining of the labels themselves is a source of power for the group.

The label’s final advantage is that it allows the true believer to maintain his/her/zir’s sanctity even as they harm the perceived enemy. The Germans wouldn’t have agreed to send their fellow neighbors, lawyers, piano teachers, baby sitters, bank managers, librarians and drinking buddies to the camps if the Jews had maintained their status as full-fledged citizens.

First the Nazis had to dehumanize the Jews through vigorous and repeated propaganda propagated over a number of years. That task achieved, the party could begin the extermination and the German populace wouldn’t lose sleep over the atrocity because an infinite spectrum of humanity had been reduced to a single mass, the sub-human Jew, which must be dealt with…

To be perfectly clear I am not saying that anything so extreme is happening in our society, of course not. However, there are echoes and reverberations of these dehumanization techniques floating through the air, and the sooner we put an end to this malarkey the better.

Conclusions

As a white male every morning I wake up and ask myself: who am I going to oppress today 😼

Seriously?

No, of course not. Every morning I wake up and say hello to my dog. I make some coffee, consider checking myself into a mental institution because I’m clearly insane for taking on the task of simultaneously managing two newsletters, and then I shake it off and get to work.

In order to survive and thrive, a mass movement requires a straightforward narrative that can be encapsulated in a thirteen-second soundbite. Today’s banality is something along the lines of if you’re white you’re an oppressor and if you’re black you’re a victim. The Caucasian garbageman in Detroit and Oprah Winfrey in her castle would beg to differ, but truth is of little consequence in these matters.

Or perhaps we should say, yes there are elements of truth within the social justice creed. On average a black woman may find it harder to succeed than a white male. However, a massive gulf of tortured logic is required to move from the veracity of that statement to an endpoint of therefore every white person is an evil tyrant who must publicly flagellate themselves for their numerous sins.

I wanted to write this article because I thought it could be useful to point out that mass movements employ asinine and inaccurate characterizations because they serve a purpose. In fact these labels are of foundational importance to a belief system and no mass movement will surrender their use voluntarily.

What can be done?

Poke fun at the inaccuracies. Disarm the nonsense with humor. Stare down the online mob, look cancellation in its putrescent profile and laugh at the emperor’s bare ass. I don’t like being shoved into a stupid fucking box that has absolutely nothing to do with my daily existence, and I suspect you don’t either. Let’s end this simplified insanity and stand up as nuanced and straight-boned individuals who refuse to be broken into a non-encompassing mold.