So You've Been Publicly Shamed (9 page)

“I don't mean him,” I said. “I mean the effect it has on the people watching.”

“The public liked it.” Poe nodded. “People stopped and talked to him about his conduct. One lady wanted to take him to church on Sunday and save him! She
did!
” Poe let out a big high-pitched Texas laugh. “She said, ‘Come with me, you poor thing!' End of the week, I brought him back into court. He said it was the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to him. It changed his conduct. Eventually, he got a bachelor's degree. He's got a business in Houston now.” Poe paused. “I have put my share of folks in the penitentiary. Sixty-six percent of them go back to prison. Eighty-five percent of those people we publicly shamed we never saw again. It was too embarrassing for them the first time. It wasn't the ‘theater of the absurd,' it was the theater of the
effective
. It worked.”

—

Poe was being annoyingly convincing, even though he later admitted to me that his recidivism argument was a misleading one. Poe was far more likely to sentence a first-time offender—someone who was already feeling scared and remorseful and determined to change—to a shaming. But even so, I was learning something about public shaming today that I hadn't anticipated at all.

It had started earlier that morning in my hotel room when I telephoned Mike Hubacek, the teenager who had killed two people while driving drunk in 1996. I had wanted him to describe the feeling of being forced to walk up and down the side of the road holding a placard that read
I KILLED TWO PEOPLE WHILE DRIVING DRUNK
. But first we talked about the crash. He told me he spent the first six months after it happened lying in his prison cell, replaying it over and over.

“What images did you replay?” I asked him.

“None,” he replied. “I had completely blacked out during it and I don't remember anything. But I thought about it daily. I still do. It's a part of me. I suffered a lot of survivor's guilt. At the time, I almost convinced myself I was in a living purgatory. I lived to suffer. I went more than a year and a half without looking in a mirror. You learn to shave using your hand as a guide.”

Being in purgatory, he said, he had resigned himself to a lifetime of incarceration. But then Ted Poe unexpectedly pulled him out. And he suddenly found himself walking up and down the side of the road holding that placard.

And there on the side of the road, he said, he understood that there was a use for him. He could basically become a living placard that warned people against driving drunk. And so nowadays he lectures in schools about the dangers. He owns a halfway house—Sober Living Houston. And he credits Judge Ted Poe for it all.

“I'm forever grateful to him,” he said.

—

My trip to Washington, D.C., wasn't turning out how I'd hoped. I'd assumed that Ted Poe would be such a terrible person and negative role model that the social media shamers would realize with horror that this was what they were becoming and vow to change their ways. But Mike Hubacek thought his shaming was the best thing that had ever happened to him. This was especially true, he told me, because the onlookers had been so nice. He'd feared abuse and ridicule. But no. “Ninety percent of the responses on the street were ‘God bless you' and ‘Things will be okay,'” he said. Their kindness meant everything, he said. It made it all right. It set him on his path to salvation.

“Social media shamings are
worse
than your shamings,” I suddenly said to Ted Poe.

He looked taken aback. “They
are
worse,” he replied. “They're anonymous.”

“Or even if they're not anonymous, it's such a pile-on they may as well be,” I said.

“They're
brutal
,” he said.

I suddenly became aware that throughout our conversation I'd been using the word
they
. And each time I did, it felt like I was being spineless. The fact was,
they
weren't brutal.
We
were brutal.

—

In the early days of Twitter there were no shamings. We were Eve in the Garden of Eden. We chatted away unself-consciously. As somebody back then wrote, “Facebook is where you lie to your friends, Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers.” Having funny and honest conversations with like-minded people I didn't know got me through hard times that were unfolding in my actual house. Then came the Jan Moir and the LA Fitness shamings—shamings to be proud of—and I remember how exciting it felt when hitherto remote evil billionaires like Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump created their own Twitter accounts. For the first time in history we sort of had direct access to ivory-tower oligarchs like them. We became keenly watchful for transgressions.

After a while, it wasn't just transgressions we were keenly watchful for. It was misspeakings. Fury at the terribleness of other people had started to consume us a lot. And the rage that swirled around seemed increasingly in disproportion to whatever stupid thing some celebrity had said. It felt different to satire or journalism or criticism. It felt like punishment. In fact, it felt weird and empty when there
wasn't
anyone to be furious about. The days between shamings felt like days picking at fingernails, treading water.

I'd been dismayed by the cruelty of the people who tore Jonah apart as he tried to apologize. But
they
weren't the mob.
We
were the mob. I'd been blithely doing the same thing for a year or more. I had drifted into a new way of being. Who were the victims of my shamings? I could barely remember. I had only the vaguest recollection of the people I'd piled onto and what terrible things they'd done to deserve it.

This is partly because my memory has degenerated badly these past years. In fact, I was recently at a spa—my wife booked it for me as a special surprise, which shows she really doesn't know me because I don't like being touched—and as I lay on the massage table, the conversation turned to my bad memory.

“I can hardly remember anything about my childhood!” I told the masseur. “It's all gone!”

“A lot of people who can't remember their childhoods,” she replied, as she massaged my shoulders, “it turns out that they were sexually abused. By their parents.”

“Well, I'd remember
THAT
,” I said.

But it wasn't just the fault of my lousy memory. It was the sheer volume of transgressors I'd chastised. How could I commit to memory that many people? Well, there were the spambot men. For a second in Poe's office I reminisced fondly on the moment someone suggested we gas the cunts. That had given me such a good feeling that it felt a shame to interrogate it—to question why it had beguiled me so.

“The justice system in the West has a lot of problems,” Poe said, “but at least there are rules. You have basic rights as the accused. You have your day in court. You don't have any rights when you're accused on the Internet. And the consequences are worse. It's worldwide forever.”

It felt good to see the balance of power shift so that someone like Ted Poe was afraid of people like us. But he wouldn't sentence people to hold a placard for something they hadn't been convicted of. He wouldn't sentence someone for telling a joke that came out badly. The people we were destroying were no longer just people like Jonah: public figures who had committed actual transgressions. They were private individuals who really hadn't done anything much wrong. Ordinary humans were being forced to learn damage control, like corporations that had committed PR disasters. It was very stressful.

“We are
more frightening than you
,” I said to Poe, feeling quite awed.

Poe sat back in his chair, satisfied. “You are much more frightening,” he said. “You are much more frightening.”

—

We were much more frightening than Judge Ted Poe. The powerful, crazy, cruel people I usually write about tend to be in far-off places. The powerful, crazy, cruel people were now us.

It felt like we were soldiers making war on other people's flaws, and there had suddenly been an escalation in hostilities.

Man Descends Several Rungs in the Ladder of Civilization

G
roup madness. Was that the explanation for our shaming frenzy, our escalating war on flaws? It's an idea that gets invoked by social scientists whenever a crowd becomes frightening. Take the London riots of August 2011. The violence had begun with police shooting to death a Tottenham man, Mark Duggan. A protest followed, which turned into five days of rioting and looting. The rioters were in Camden Town, a mile from my house, smashing up kebab shops and JJB Sports, Dixons, and Vodafone stores. Then they were in Kentish Town, half a mile down the hill from us. We frantically locked our doors and stared in horror at the TV news. The crowd had become contaminated—according to Dr. Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist writing in
The Observer
—by a virus that infects the mind and causes a “collective communal group-think-motivated violence.” (Here Slutkin was quoting the cognitive psychologist Aaron Beck.) It sounded like a zombie film. In
The Guardian
, Jack Levin—a professor of sociology and criminology at Northeastern University in Boston—called the riots “the violent version of the Mexican wave.” People were infected with “emotional contagion. It is a feature of every riot . . . People get together in a group and commit acts of violence that they would never dream of committing individually.”

Luckily, the rioting fizzled out at the bottom of our hill that night. Which, now that I thought about it, didn't sound like the violent version of the Mexican wave at all. If the rioters had really lost their minds to a horrifying virus, you'd think they would have carried on up the hill. Our hill, Highgate West Hill, is very steep—one of the steepest in London. I think the rioters made the extremely lucid decision not to climb it.

—

It turns out that the concept of group madness was the creation of a nineteenth-century French doctor called Gustave LeBon. His idea was that humans totally lose control of their behavior in a crowd. Our free will evaporates. A contagious madness takes over, a complete lack of restraint. We can't stop ourselves. So we riot, or we jubilantly tear down Justine Sacco.

It wasn't easy to learn about Gustave LeBon. For being the father of such an enduring theory, almost nothing has been written about him. Only one man has ever tried to piece his life story together—Bob Nye, a professor of European intellectual history at Oregon State University.

“LeBon was from a provincial town in the west of France,” he told me over the telephone. “But he decided he wanted to go to medical school in Paris.”

This was a France so wary of the crowd that in 1853, when LeBon was twelve, Napoleon III commissioned the town planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann to demolish Paris's twisted medieval streets and build long wide boulevards instead—urban planning as crowd control. It didn't work. In 1871 Parisian workers rose up in protest against their conditions. They took hostages—local bureaucrats and police officers—who were summarily tried and executed. The government fled to Versailles.

LeBon was a great admirer of the Parisian elite (even though the Parisian elite didn't seem in the slightest bit interested in him—he was making his living as an ambulance driver at the time), so he was hugely relieved when two months into the revolution the French army stormed the Commune and killed around twenty-five thousand rebels.

The uprising had been traumatizing for LeBon. And in its aftermath he decided to embark upon an intellectual quest. Could he prove scientifically that mass revolutionary movements were just madness? And, if so, could he dream up ways the elite might benefit from managing the insanity? It could be his ticket into the upper echelons of Parisian society because that was exactly the kind of thing an elite liked to hear.

He began his odyssey by spending a number of years among the Anthropological Society of Paris's huge collection of human skulls. He wanted to demonstrate that aristocrats and businessmen had bigger brains than everybody else and were less likely to succumb to mass hysteria.

“He'd take a skull and fill it with buckshot,” Bob Nye explained to me. “Then he'd count the number of pieces of buckshot in order to determine volume.”

After measuring 287 skulls, LeBon revealed in an 1879 paper, “Anatomical & Mathematical Researches into the Laws of the Variations of Brain Volume & Their Relation to Intelligence,” that the biggest brains did indeed belong to aristocrats and businessmen. He reassured readers who might have been worried that “the body of the Negro is larger than our own” that “their brain is less heavy.” Women's brains were less heavy too: “Among the Parisians there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion. All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. They excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason.”

He conceded that a few “distinguished women” did exist, but “they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity . . . Consequently, we may neglect them entirely.”

And this, he argued, was why feminism must never be allowed to flourish: “A desire to give them the same education, and to propose the same goals for them, is a dangerous chimera. The day when, misunderstanding the inferior occupations which nature has given her, women leave the home and take part in our battles; on this day a social revolution will begin, and everything that maintains the sacred ties of the family will disappear.”

“When I was writing my biography of LeBon,” Bob Nye told me, “he seemed to me the biggest asshole in the whole of creation.”

—

LeBon's 1879 paper was a disaster. Instead of welcoming him into their ranks, the leading members of the Anthropological Society of Paris mocked him, calling him a misogynist with shoddy scientific methods. “For LeBon, woman is seemingly an accursed being and he predicts abomination and desolation if woman leaves home,” the society's secretary-general, Charles Letourneau, announced in a speech. “We naturally have all kinds of reservations about this conclusion.”

Stung by the humiliation, LeBon left Paris. He traveled to Arabia. He asked the French Ministry of Public Instruction to fund his trip, proposing to undertake a study of Arabians' racial characteristics, which would be useful were they ever to “fall under French colonial domination,” but his request was denied and so he paid for it himself.

Over the next decade, he wrote and self-published several books on the neurological inferiority of Arabians, criminals, and exponents of multiculturalism. He was honing his craft. As Bob Nye solicitously put it in his biography of LeBon,
The Origins of Crowd Psychology
, he was now “concentrating on brevity, using no sources or notes, and writing in a simple and graceful style.” What Bob Nye meant was that there were no more skulls and buckshot, no more “evidence” gathering, just certainty. And it was in this style that, in 1895, he published the book that finally made him famous:
The Crowd
.

—

It begins with LeBon's proud announcement that he isn't part of any recognized scientific society: “To belong to a school is necessarily to espouse its prejudices.” And after that, for three hundred pages, he explains why the crowd was insane. “By the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct . . . In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious.”

Every simile LeBon uses to describe an individual in a crowd highlights his or her mindlessness. In a crowd we are “microbes” infecting everyone around us, a “grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.” We are impulsive, irritable, irrational: “characteristics which are almost always observed in beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution—in women, savages, and children for instance.”

It is no wonder LeBon identified in women, ethnic groups, and children a universal trait of irritability, if that was the way he talked about them.

—

But
The Crowd
was more than a polemic. Like Jonah Lehrer, LeBon knew that a popular-science book needed a self-improvement message to become successful. And LeBon had two. His first was that we really didn't need to worry ourselves about whether mass revolutionary movements like communism and feminism had a moral reason for existing. They didn't. They were just madness. So it was fine for us to stop worrying about that. And his second message was that a smart orator could, if he knew the tricks, hypnotize the crowd into acquiescence or whip it up to do his bidding. LeBon listed the tricks: “A crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. Exaggerate, affirm, resort to repetition, and never attempt to prove anything by reasoning.”

—

The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
was, on publication, a runaway success. It was translated into twenty-six languages and gave LeBon what he'd always wanted—a place at the heart of Parisian society, a place he immediately abused in a weird way. He hosted a series of lunches—
les déjeuners du mercredi
—for politicians and prominent society people. He'd sit at the head of the table with a bell by his side. If one of his guests said something he disagreed with, he'd pick up the bell and ring it relentlessly until the person stopped talking.

All over the world, famous people began declaring themselves LeBon fans. Like Mussolini: “I have read all the work of Gustave LeBon and I don't know how many times I have reread
The Crowd
. It is a capital work to which, to this day, I frequently refer.” And Goebbels: “Goebbels thinks that no one since the Frenchman LeBon has understood the mind of the masses as well as he,” wrote Goebbels's aide Rudolf Semmler in his wartime diary.

Given all of this, you'd think LeBon's work might have at some point stopped being influential. But it never did. I suppose one reason for his enduring success is that we tend to love nothing more than to declare other people insane. And there's another explanation. One psychology experiment more than any other has kept his idea alive. It's the one created in a basement at Stanford University in 1971 by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo.

•  •  •

Z
imbardo was a working-class New York City boy, the son of Sicilian immigrants. After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1954, he taught psychology at Yale and NYU and Columbia before ending up at Stanford in 1971. Crowd theory—or “de-individuation” as it was by then known—preoccupied Zimbardo so deeply that in 1969 he wrote a kind of prose poem to it: “The ageless life force, the cycle of nature, the blood ties, the tribe, the female principle, the irrational, the impulsive, the anonymous chorus, the vengeful furies.”

Now, at Stanford, with funding from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, he set about trying to dramatically prove its existence.

—

Zimbardo began by placing a small ad in the local paper: “Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $15 per day for 1–2 weeks beginning August 14.”

After selecting twenty-four applicants, Zimbardo turned the windowless basement of the psychology department into a mock prison, with “cells” and a “solitary confinement room” (a janitor's closet). He split the participants into two groups. Nine would be “prisoners,” nine “guards,” and the remaining six would be on call. He gave the guards batons and mirrored sunglasses so nobody could see their eyes. He gave himself the role of “superintendent.” The prisoners were stripped and put into smocks. Chains were placed on their feet. They were sent to their “cells.” And it began.

—

The experiment was abandoned six days later. It had, as Zimbardo later explained to a congressional hearing, spiraled violently out of control. Zimbardo's fiancée, Christina Maslach, had visited the basement and was horrified by what she saw. The guards were strutting around sadistically, screaming at the prisoners to “fuck the floor” and so on. The prisoners were lying in their cells yelling, “I'm burning up inside, dontchya know? I'm all fucked-up inside!”

Maslach furiously confronted her fiancé: “What are you doing to these boys? You're a stranger to me. The power of the situation has transformed you from the person I thought I knew to this person I don't know.”

At this, Zimbardo felt like he'd been slapped awake. She was right. The experiment had turned him evil. “I have to end this,” he said to her.

—

“What we saw was frightening,” Zimbardo told the congressional hearing two months later. “In less than a week, human values were suspended and the ugliest, most base, pathological side of human nature surfaced. We were horrified because we saw boys treat other boys as if they were despicable animals, taking pleasure in cruelty.”

Zimbardo released a selection of clips from the footage he'd covertly filmed throughout the experiment. In them the guards were seen screaming at the prisoners: “What if I told you to get down on the floor and fuck the floor?” and “You're smiling, [prisoner] 2093, you get down there and do ten push-ups,” and “You're Frankenstein. You're Mrs. Frankenstein. Walk like Frankenstein. Hug her. Tell her you love her.” And so on. As a result, and to this day, Zimbardo's basement has become for students of social psychology the incarnation of LeBon's crowd—a place of contagion where good people turned evil. As Zimbardo told the BBC in 2002, “We put good people in an evil place and we saw who won.”