THE FLOCK SYNDROME (or THE CULTURAL DEPENDENCE)

by Alfredo Anania

The illusion of liberty is a collective phenomenon that indiscriminately concerns the individual and the groups. The psychoanalysis underlines that the human being is specially a cultural animal; so when it seems to detach itself and to fight the dominant social-cultural model in reality it conform itself to an underground subgroup (group attack-escape) or it mixes with a common unconscious feeling that is symptomatic of a new social transformation in a nascent state. The destiny of every new social world in nascent state is influenced by many factors that we can reassume in two great categories: static quality strengths and dynamic quality strengths.

To estrange the group and, in relation to the process of personal individuation, to develop a very satisfactory autonomous-thinking, both they can happen but losing the other also very satisfactory feeling that origins from the sense of affiliation to a group, the conformation to the general way of thinking and the adjustment to the dominant social models.

The tendency "to ape" the others, the instinct of imitation, that the ethnologists say so important also in the animal world, is very developed in the human being. This instinct not only induces to emulate the others but paradoxically also to overcome them and to self-affirm; on this base some feelings as ambition, envy and jealousy come up. In a last analysis, from the tendency to overcome the others it originates the attainment of things as the success, the prestige, the power and the social elevation; these sentiments prod some persons into establishing an undisputed superiority towards the mass that is driven, exactly as a flock, by the imitation-instinct.

Did it have so wrong Freud when in his analysis of the social world he saw the masses as subjugated by the figure of the leader, for a process of global identification that unites and level the multitude? Then, that the chief is unconsciously a perfect interpreter of the underground collective feeling (Bion) - therefore that the head is as a "living expression" of the common sentiment  - rather than a "people-fascinator",  in practice it seems don't change so much.

Since the birth, as it is evident, the individual receives the cultural inheritance, that assures the personal formation and sets some necessary imprinting to socialize: the child to develop in adequate way his identity and his Self doesn't have other choice that to conform himself to the society in which he lives.

The principal fault that can be imputed to the group, in its dimension of "place of social events", is that the validation of the experience, inside the collective, bases not much on the examination of reality or on the verification of the experience how so much on the process of co-participation: it has only validity what in the group it is widespread belief. Insofar, in the group, the widespread opinion represents the principal criterion of validation of the experience.

We have written elsewhere already that paradoxically properly Internet - the mean of communication that is blamed as the principal tool of control in the world - in truth constitutes the principal way of liberalisation, because Internet allows to overcome the time-place limitations; it is so spread in the world to be able to escape every cultural mass-control and, as now clearly it is progressively emerging, in the web above all the contents will be to have greater importance in comparison with the various types of business.

The flock syndrome gets many people on the base of the diffused passion for various consumer products, many of these are totally unnecessary, but, as in the infancy, equally they mobilize envy for the object possessed by the other and, consequently, people is pushed to buy without ratiocination, in this way every adult appears as a "little-great children", toward it the advertising communication go with the same way of speaking with which it talks to babies. All that will have end only when the passion for thinks will succeed in replacing the passion for things!