Human beings in a mob
What’s a mob to a king?
What’s a king to a god?
What’s a god to a non-believer
Who don’t believe in anything?
Will he make it out alive?
Alright, alright
No church in the wild
— Frank Ocean
Isn’t it strange that we often associate leadership with high moral values when history boasts of a long list of leaders who were the opposite? What other word would we use to describe someone like Hitler? A tyrant?
Hitler had all the qualities of a good leader. In the words of John Maxwell, Hitler had massive influence. At work, a trainer once claimed that Hitler lacked integrity because he was on a coercive mission to bend the world to his will. But what is integrity? It’s where your behaviour, actions and values align. By these standards, Hitler was a man of integrity.
JAŸ-Z raps:
Socrates asked whose bias do y’all seek?
It is, therefore, necessary that we find alternative labels for these individuals; failure to do so may result in subsequent generations getting role models in leadership who may worsen the fate of the human race. Leadership has to be assigned the proper, ethical values, or it risks decadence. Decay was what leaders who wanted to control the masses would do. An appropriate word is manipulate.
I present to you, exhibit 1 — Pontius Pilate.
Pilate stood at the Gabbatha and asked the crowd, which was literally beneath him, what they demanded. From a crowd, his powers were levelled. With numbers, the crowd convinced the leader (there goes the word again) to free Barabbas. This guy was a straight-up criminal. He was even guilty of murder. However, at this point, the crowd was the judge, jury, and executioner. The Son of God had to go back to his Father in a most painful way.
Granted their wish, the crowd followed Jesus as the cross tore into his flesh, climbing the upslope to the place of the skull. As every nail struck his hands, the observers cheered. And when he was raised, positioned between two thieves, he breathed his last words. When he died, the Bible reiterates, a series of events followed that made the crowd acutely aware of what they had done.
Bear in mind, Pilate had washed his hands. The blood of Jesus did not rest with him; he so publicly made it known. It rested with the crowd. They cheered him on for granting them their wish. And now, when he had died, he was nowhere. The crowd witnessed the death. Their actions sank to the pit of each of their bellies. One soldier even lamented that truly he was the son of God.
That is how a leader manipulates.
Let me break it down for you
Hatred against an individual
Back on campus, we used to have several incidents of theft. I lost two of my laptops. It was not uncommon. And we hardly ever found a victim.
To a campus student, a laptop is heaven at arm’s distance. It is their ticket to graduation, their access to the internet, a license to make money, a creative portal. A laptop was everything to a student. Prometheus came down from Mt. Olympus to give the student a laptop. Stealing one is condemning the owner to misery. I suffered this fate twice. The second time was the most painful one, because I had left it on top of my desk, with my friends around, to relieve myself in the washrooms. I came back to find only a book and a pen. It was gone. All my music. All my books. Painfully, I swore that if I ever found that person, I would make them pay.
One evening, as dusk was setting in, we heard shouts from one of us.
Mwizi. Ameiba laptop. Mwizi.
That was enough to trigger us. Everyone left their hostels. Our thief was surrounded. Everyone had the urge to throw a punch, preferably on the face, a kick regardless of where it landed, any possible form of physical harm to serve as a painful lesson to the others who thought they would continue getting away with our property.
The crowd had its way. But after some point, we realised we would kill him. The hatred was too much. We needed to vent. One of us raised the alarm. Rather than take his life, we would report him. Regardless of what the justice system would do, for a brief moment, we had our pound of flesh.
This was after campuses had begun opening up after the COVID-19 pandemic. Medical students were the only ones present. We were less than a year away from taking the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm, but these individuals had done enough harm to nearly all of us by stealing our devices.
The crowd that formed around him was different from the typical crowd. If he were a few meters closer to Nairobi’s CBD, he would have died. Mob justice. That’s how Jesus became crucified, and Barabbas was freed. It’s how the guy would have had a tyre fitted around him and burned alive. A necklace, as it was typically called. And after the victim died, the crowd would be heavily aware of what they had done. They would scatter faster than they had formed.
For ages, leaders have known this. And they have used this to control crowds. This is how leaders manipulate people.
The central question is: What happens to the crowd during these moments? To answer this question, we need to get an idea of the features of a crowd.
Elias Canetti identifies crowds using these four qualities:
1. A crowd has an urge to grow.
2. In a crowd, there’s equality
3. Crowds crave density
4. A crowd needs a goal
The typical crowd that ends up killing someone for the victim’s misdeeds is known as a baiting crowd. That is, a leader baits the crowd to kill someone, and like Pilate, wash their hands. The sins are now with the crowd, not the leader.
A true crowd grows. Once we heard the cry that a thief had been identified, we raced out. The crowd grew fast. Everyone wanted to have a glimpse of the malefactor. More than that, they wanted to inflict pain, for all the pain we had suffered without our laptops. The closer we moved, the more the density increased. That’s the third quality.
Since each of us had suffered at the hands of these people, we were equal to each other. Recall that this was a class of soon-to-be clinicians. And within our class, there were clear differences.
Most academic institutions have cliques. Several factors separated one group from another. A colleague had broken it down into four groups based on sponsorship for college tuition. You were either a JAB (Joint Admissions Board) student or a parallel student. The latter group we called “PARA”. JAB students were sponsored by the government for their stellar performance in high school. PARA students were self-sponsored.
JAB-PARA students were government-sponsored students who still had the force field of money around them. They drove cars, dined at pricey cafeterias, and would go to high-end clubs on the weekend. Until they told you they were JAB, you would have thought they weren’t.
PARA-PARA students have money and were self-sponsored. They behaved similarly to the JAB-PARA.
PARA-JAB were the self-sponsored students who survived inside campus. They didn’t have external accommodation, but found a way to secure a room within the institution. They had a way. We would know they are PARA students through their admission numbers or if they confessed the kind of fees they pay.
Then there were the JAB-JAB students. Here’s where I belonged. We were the sufferers of campus. We stayed within the school’s hostels, ate at the students’ mess, and walked whenever we could from one campus to another if we missed the bus because we didn’t have a personal car nor could we comfortably afford a cab.
When we found someone who stole our laptops, all these distinctions dissolved. Everyone wanted to punish the guy. The more the punches landed, the more difficult it was to make out who the person was. All we could summon was the hatred for the ilk he represented. Crowds tend to dissolve the distinctive barriers among individuals with the same goal. The crowd that shouted for Jesus to be crucified behaved like a single organism. They were highly packed, accounting for density. And they had a goal — to crucify Jesus. Back on campus, the goal was to punish the thief.
Without the goal, the crowd disintegrates.
Canetti calls the process discharge. That is, when crowds break the barriers distinguishing one from another, and with an urge to fulfil a mission they otherwise could not by themselves. Consider the hatred I haboured for the one who stole my last laptop. I couldn’t achieve much by myself. Those around me could only empathize with me. But when we identify a victim, someone we don’t know at all, but who represents one of the people who caused us suffering, we crave a conduit to discharge.
The goal reinforces the density, stimulates growth, dissolves all individual distinctions, and everyone wants the guy to feel their pain. A discharge need not be negative, but for a baiting crowd, it is. In the case of a thief, it is to make them pay, often with death.
Public executions, such as the one Jesus suffered, were used by leaders to control crowds, because once the execution is done, everyone is acutely aware of what they have done. The leader who gave the victim to the crowd is not around anymore. The guilt sits with the crowd. Since each of them was equal at the time of the discharge, each is to blame. But this kind of blame cannot fit inside a court of law. It follows the individual to their homes. And that is how a leader manipulates: By dividing and conquering.
Charlie Munger liked to say that we should never appeal to reason. If we did, crowds would see the issue with killing. A leader could have convinced them to see the irrationality. But rather, we should appeal to emotion. Leaders in the past knew it. As the crowd chanted to crucify Jesus, their discharge was already beginning. Tensions were high. And Pilate gave Jesus to them.
When your leader listens to you, you will without a doubt applaud them. And right before Jesus was released, Pilate washed his hands. The guilt would only fall on the crowd.
At the time when they demanded Barabbas be released, they were nearly equal to Pontius Pilate. A leader who wishes to preserve their control over their subjects has to notice that a crowd can turn against them. The smart option is to give them what they want. After the murder is done, the crowd immediately sees what their actions have done. In a single sweep of the guillotine, the severing of the head from the body deflates the power of the crowd. They then disintegrate. Now the only residual power lies with the leader. The crowd exists no more.
By granting the crowd their goal, they fell for the bait. Now they suffer, without their leader.
Online rage
The sense of equality a crowd gives baptizes their urges as noble. He stole. Justice delayed would be justice denied. Action is necessary at that point.
Online rage borrows some features of a bait crowd through that popular term — rage bait. A common individual or institution does an unspeakable evil. Everyone gets mad. The more comments you read, the angrier you become. A common goal begins to take form.
Unlike the historical crowds where people would meet individually, online, it is through social media accounts. A version of equality emerges from the goal of swift, punitive justice. What’s more, online accounts offer an anonymity that is seen in crowds. Everyone is mad. Faces don’t matter. It’s the distance between the online gathering and the goal. Everyone wants to discharge. It becomes a crowd when many people converge united by the goal. Density forms.
I observed this in two years ago. We would all gather daily at the X-spaces where people discussed all the hostile measures the government had undertaken to coerce and pacify the public. These spaces were charged with hatred. Everyone who joined was getting madder after every speaker who continued to vent about the ills they had observed, if not suffered. The physical manifestation happened in June 2024.
From all nearby settlements, people flocked to the heart of Nairobi. One person who held the top seat needed to feel the wrath of the public. The goal was to storm the parliament. The crowd would not be satisfied until the goal was achieved. The density increased as the day wore on. All barriers were broken. The crowd’s urge to grow was so powerful that famous artists joined the movement. Eventually, the parliament was breached.
But recall that crowds need a goal. Once you have broken into the parliament, what else remains? It is now easy to scatter the crowd. And they did just that. By evening, more armed units were being sent. Live bullets were used. People were killed. And the leader blamed the “terrorists”, that is, the “the crowd of vandals.”
The difference between this kind of crowd and the typical one in history is that leaders introduced a scapegoat. The thief, the miscreant, the insurrectionist. Kenyans didn’t have anyone to execute. The goal was targeted at a building. It represented the idea of a body we loathed. Nobody felt guilty for the actions done at the parliament, as no member of the crowd pushed for the killing of any human being.
The discharge was aimed at a house meant to preserve democracy, to listen to the voice of the people. It is difficult to feel bad for destroying property, as most crowds are inclined to do. The goal was achieved — disrupt the parliamentary proceedings to pass a malicious financial bill. The financial bill was a legal instrument, not a human being. It didn’t have organs like you and me. We could squash it and not feel awful.
But after achieving this goal, it became easy to scatter the crowd. The leader felt disrespected and began projecting. Unlike Pilate, who achieved control after the guilt sat with the crowd following Jesus’ execution, this leader did not regain control as he would have wished. His goal ever since has been to prevent such huge crowds from forming.
But unlike the crowds in the past, online crowds are not limited by space. Unless they take over the internet, which was attempted at some point during the 2024 protests. And when you cannot use this option, you would rather distract the public. Distraction is extremely efficient. It’s a means to bait the crowd and scatter them by ensuring they never get a unified goal.
So when we claim that leadership is all about influence, grey areas exist.
Now back to Hitler. Was he a great leader? Or was he an artistic baiter of the nation? Did the Germans feel bad for the mass genocide then, or are the historic records still pulsing with the evidence for what they did?
What I’m trying to say is…
Leadership, preached to the young generation, is meant to inspire positive change. History, however, is riddled with countless efforts of manipulation. Baiting a crowd is one such means.
And many great leaders have led others to kill. Alexander the Great is given such a title, but I doubt the people who fell under the mercy of his blade think of him as great. William Wallace was a hero in Scotland. He was a public enemy in England. To the Scots, he was a man of integrity. The English would not be keen to accept that. And Germany was forced to bear the blame for their actions while the colonialists believed they were blame-free for colonizing distant lands.
Leadership — how two-sided that term is.