The Unfathomable Mentality of the Herd

It’s refreshing to see so many bloggers and posters empathising with the plight of the decent Rangers supporters. If truth be told, they have suffered more than most in this ongoing debacle. In fact, all they ever did was support their team. They weren’t responsible for implementing those dodgy, offshore tax avoidance schemes nor seeking to withhold vital information from the football authorities. It wasn’t them who cheated, it was the morally-bereft corporate ghouls that ran their club into the ground that cheated. They cheated the taxman, they cheated their creditors, they cheated Scottish football and they cheated their fans.

Now these same ‘duped’ fans are being subjected to a blatant form of ‘social engineering’ which has been designed to appeal to their ’emotional centres’ and cloud their rational thinking.

At the extreme end, intensive social engineering campaigns usually only work under authoritarian regimes, particularly where the citizens don’t have (or are not allowed) access to the information necessary to help them make informed decisions e.g. Khmer Rouge’s depopulation of urban Cambodia (witness James Traynor’s appeal to boycott non-compliant media). Non-authoritarian regimes tend to rely on more long-term sustained social engineering campaigns that create more gradual, but ultimately far-reaching, change e.g. the War on Drugs.

Noam Chomsky’s seminal work, ‘Manufacturing Consent’, describes how propaganda, including ‘systemic biases’ function in mass media. The work seeks to explain how populations are manipulated and how consent for economic, social and political policies is ‘manufactured’ in the public mind using this propaganda. Add to this the well understood ‘herd mentality’ phenomenon which describes how people are influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviors, follow trends, and/or purchase items and we can begin to see how easy it is to influence people’s decision making processes.

In times of crisis, this kind of manipulation of information can induce a state of ‘moral panic’ which is defined as “an intense feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the prevailing social order.”

All of these techniques are certainly in play throughout our society on a daily basis and they affect us all in one way or another. However, what we appear to be witnessing here may be no more than a clever manipulation of the natural human tendency to ‘trust’.

Remember the oft heard cries from Ibrox of ‘In Murray we Trust’, ‘In Whyte we Trust’, ‘In Ally we Trust’ and now ‘In Green We Trust’. How has that worked out for them?

Mr Murray, in his ego-driven desire for absolute supremacy over his ‘perceived’ rivals, administered a near-lethal dose of performance-enhancing EBTs and racked up a clearly unsustainable amount of debt before selling the club to a well-kent, two-bit hustler for a quid, more or less consigning the club to a slow, lingering death.

No sooner than Mr Whyte took ownership of the club (paying off Murray’s bank debt by mortgaging £24.4M of season tickets for the next 4 years) he stopped paying the bills, not just some of the bills but ALL of the bills, including the requisite PAYE and NI contributions which was ‘absolutely guaranteed’ to bring HMRC down hard on the club, by now, teetering on the brink of oblivion.

While facing the prospect of administration, Ally McCoist set about presiding over the worst run of results in the club’s 139 year history, lost a 15 point lead in the SPL race and got knocked out of every cup competition that he entered at an early stage. He also spent inordinate amounts of precious cash buying in some of the worst foreign players ever to grace the Scottish game, when, for the same money, he could have bought a full team of Scottish 1st Division players who would have walked over hot coals to ‘play for the jersey’.

Mr Green who bought over the Rangers assets on ‘borrowed’ money before setting up a new club ‘Sevco’ using the newly purchased ‘Rangers’ brand has promised these supporters more ‘moonbeamery’ than even Mr Murray himself would have dared. Stadium upgrades, English football, £100M turnovers, retail parks, cancer hospitals, Adidas sponsorship etc, etc, etc. So far, however, all The Rangers’ fans have seen is multiple holding companies, dodgy share issues, HMRC appeals, threats of winding up orders and the inevitable cup exits. Hardly worth all that loyalty and trust I would say!

Is there no-one that these fans wouldn’t trust? Svengali?, Machiavelli?, Le Chiffre from Casino Royale?

The saddest part of this is not that it was those very men in whom they placed their trust that eventually shafted them. What is worse is how easily they have been convinced to ‘transfer’ this same misplaced trust into yet another obviously self-serving corporate regime. No doubt that Mr Green and now Mr Traynor’s rabble-rousing rhetoric has assisted in this ‘confidence trick’ by playing to the lowest common denominators in the gallery. However, what I don’t understand is, what on earth coerced all of these people to bypass the ‘known facts’ and take another mental-shortcut to Deludeville?

Surely they can’t believe that these guys give a damn about them or their beloved club?

I am trying really hard to see things from their point of view but the truth is I don’t think I can stick my head that far up my arse.