It’s nothing new to say that these are strange and momentous times. Out here in the crowd, nearly everyone senses the shifting winds, no matter where they might stand re the various hot-button issues of the day. Even the ostriches fear something is up—otherwise they wouldn’t have their heads so deep in the sand. In late 2024, only a head of cauliflower would be unfazed.
Instead of attempting to address all the issues—an impossible task—this essay will (1) touch upon a few figures associated with mass movements (Gandhi, MLK, Gustave Le Bon); (2) unearth the buried roots of two words (satyagraha and alethophobia) that might help guide us through this dark confusion; and (3) discuss the weighty role of crowds—whether primed for creation, destruction, or continued inertia—and how individuals can steadily immunize themselves against manipulation—and organize to help reclaim some territory from tyranny.
A key theme throughout is that to get through this confusion, we must maintain focus on discovering the truth—no matter what it is, even if it’s unpleasant—and acting accordingly. Though much of the crowd might be heading the other way, we can rarely go wrong aiming towards the light and staking out solid ground.
Gandhi’s Satyagraha: Persisting after Truth
Perhaps the greatest triumph of the numerically superior weak over the less numerous strong was that of Mohandas Gandhi and 390 million Indians over the late-stage British Empire, which, though victorious in WW2, was also broke and exhausted. The end of the war saw the shedding of European empire in much of Africa and Asia—and greater India, the crown jewel of the British Empire, gained independence on 15 August 1947, after decades of struggle. India immediately divided into India and East and West Pakistan; the traumatic Partition claimed over a million lives in a bloody population transfer, but after nearly two hundred years of European domination, the Indian subcontinent was reasonably self-governing.
Well known is Gandhi’s principal strategy of nonviolent resistance, encompassing tactics of national strikes and mass marches, boycotts of colonial goods, and moral appeals to conscience—but lesser known is that the Sanskrit term, satyagraha, usually translated as “nonviolent resistance,” has much more color and specificity than does its customary translation.
Etymologically, satyagraha breaks down into satya (truth) + graha (to grasp, grab, hold onto)—and so in sum, something like “to cling to the truth” or “persist after the truth.” The core image of satyagrahis (those dedicated to satyagraha) is of people doggedly pursuing truth—and once they get sight of it—giving chase, grabbing hold of it, and never letting go.
Truth is what these seekers are after: and when events also align, truth will literally set them free.
The Powers That Be might try to shake them off, fake them off, drug them, slug them, beguile them, rile them—anything to get the resisters to tire, lose their focus and grip, and drop inertly back into the tamasic mass of the confused and fearful herd.
Since the outset of his activism in 1906, Gandhi was after truth: the truths of imperialism and justice and power, and the growing leader capably leveraged both Hindu religious tradition (especially the Bhagavad Gita) and the British legal system (he was a lawyer) to expose the darkness of the British Raj and force it to squint into the glare of its patent hypocrisies.
Though the British often failed to play fair (—what empire doesn’t rig the game?), with their high ideals and some landmark historical reforms (e.g., trial by jury, the Magna Carta, and their 19th c. naval war on the slave trade), the British were vulnerable to shame, and Gandhi and the hundreds of millions of India (and the future Pakistan) eventually compelled their overlords to relinquish the pith-helmet burdens of empire.
It certainly greatly furthered Indian independence that Britain was depleted, war-weary, and broke, but what really broke the British grip in India was the stark moral truth that after a devastating war with Imperial Japan and expansionist Germany, no unlaughable argument could be made for continued subjugation of a freedom-seeking people.
MLK & the Media: Prime Time Words & Images
In the USA, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders adopted Gandhi’s victorious tactics, got out in public, and so continually exposed the injustices of legal discrimination that the system was outlawed with the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Like Gandhi, MLK “adhered to the truths” of the Bible, natural law, and America’s founding documents to shame a laggard country to finally live up to its ideals.
Though press coverage of the civil rights movement differed, and was muted in places, public support for reform generally increased with the accumulation of stories and images that made Jim Crow a festering sore that could no longer be shrugged off as stubbornly insoluble or inevitable. The freedom marches, the police dogs, the water cannons, the “I Have a Dream” speech delivered from the Lincoln Memorial—these widely televised and often sympathetically reported events shone a glaring light on America, and by the mid-1960s, amidst a restive social landscape, the country made some dramatic and necessary corrections.
Adherence to Truth in an Age of Relentless Maddening Propaganda
Now, at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, we’re in a different bewildering mess—one perhaps imagined more clearly by Orwell than by Gandhi and King, but there is much to be taken from all these thinkers—in particular, to keep on doggedly pursuing the truth: that is the prize on which to fix our attention. And though its scent is sometimes elusive, or splashes foxlike through diluting waters—or is outright bulldozed, buried, or blocked—the trail of truth always leads infallibly to solid and higher ground, to a stable place of sustenance and life.
Alethophobia: the Self-Inflicted Neurosis of the Powerful
Along with satyagraha, whose etymology yields the satisfying root of truth, here’s another word that might shed some light on our murky times and perhaps show a way forward. It’s an obscure word, not on many vocabulary lists, yet still one whose parts vibrate with vitality and insight.
The word is “alethophobia,” or “fear of truth,” or perhaps more accurately, “fear of exposure, awakening, or revelation.” The term can describe people, institutions, or entire regimes that fear the exposure of scandalous truths that can swiftly bring down—in a tumult of righteous ruin—their entire fake personae and power apparatus. They tremble for their seemingly formidable but utterly hollow battlements plastered over with naught but lies upon lies upon lies. Theirs is a masterpiece of sheer mendacity: a fresco of fraudulence, a Sistine Chapel of astounding fabrication—but without a fleck of the inspired genius of Michelangelo. Bernays is not, after all, Raphael. We are in such a time.
Back to the etymology. While it’s clear that “phobia” means “fear,” the other root particle “aletho-” is far lesser known but yields subtle flavor and insight. “Aletheia” was a Greek goddess of Truth (Roman counterpart: Veritas), but the root aletho also shares kinship with “lethargy,” “lethal,” and “Lethe,” the mythical river whose waters are drunk after death to wipe out the memory of the past life. The root suggests, then, it seems, a narcotic numbing of the mind: a deadly laziness, a dull forgetting, a willful oblivion—and, when it comes to liars, an intentional covering up—of the past and of the truth.
Therefore, the true alethophobe is one who fears the unearthing of facts and deeds that would fracture or shatter the carefully constructed artifice of appearances that he or she presents to the world.
Sound familiar? It probably should. Such is the face of any corrupt person or post-prime institution that has lost its original animating spirit—assuming it had any at all—and is now dedicated almost entirely to evasion, denial, stonewalling, image-control, and vicious attacking of its victims, critics, or whistleblowers. In short, such an entity has become a monster of anti-Truth and anti-Life fighting to maintain its lies and living death, like a dragon-king fiercely defending a hoard of dead and useless skin, no matter what the cost in lives or treasure.
Why Truth is Anathema to Tyrants
Truth is lethal to these tyrants—hence their vigorous suppression of opponents via censorship, legal harassment, false “fact-checking,” and methodical assault on character (i.e., innuendo, dirt, disparagement). And when character assassination fails to intimidate and silence “dangerous” truth-tellers, the figurative becomes literal—and bullets can fly.
At no point will tyrants discuss or debate anything fairly or transparently on the merits—because if they did, their lies would become instantly exposed and their positions collapse. Therefore, they do the only things they can do: deny, deride, obfuscate, silence.
And so the world blunders on. Though new hot wars seem to burst aflame every week—destroying the many while enriching the few—the chosen battlefield of the alethophobes, of the truth-haters, is the electronic Antietam of information control, falsified imagery, and saturation-bombing propaganda.
Long Perspective on the Role of Crowds
Our glorious leaders—or rather, our misleaders—have determined, as Gustave Le Bon surmised in 1895, and as Joseph Goebbels codified into doctrine by the 1930s, that what galvanizes the ever-shifting masses are arresting slogans and images, highly emotive and often irrational, clad in the armor of belligerence, false compassion, or prestige—and therefore forbiddingly beyond discussion. The walls of Mordor reach to the skies.
But the fatal flaw of any fortress of deceit or evil is that it is built on nothing. Nihilism is nothing but nothing: nada, a nullity. Evil is void; sin a rent in the holy; lies emptier than air. The word “prestige” itself is derived from “trick, illusion, magic.” What terrifies leaders walled in by their own crimes is that the truth will eventually out (it will) and their prestige instantly collapse (ditto), and their heads might be swiftly impaled on spikes (figuratively, or literally), as happened at the end of the Reign of Terror, when in the mere span of a day, 26-27 July 1794, the Jacobins lost their tyrannical grip on power and the suddenly-severed crania of Robespierre and others were bouncing jauntily into baskets before the guillotine. 151 years later in his Berlin bunker, Hitler was so disturbed by news of the grisly death and upside-down hanging of Mussolini that he killed himself the next day to avoid falling into the hands of either the Red Army or “the masses.”
Corpse of Benito Mussolini, 2nd from left, Milan, April 1945
Bread & Circuses of a Slumbering, Insolvent, Bamboozled Nation
Fast forward 230 years to today. In this time of sometimes harmful healthcare, near incessant warmongering, Ponzi economics, and puppet-show politics—with highly dubious polls and profoundly undemocratic “Democracy” (one of the big words that mean nothing, as both Le Bon and Hemingway said)—all that keeps our tyrants in power is the hypnotic spell with which they continue to enthrall so much of the population, and with which they maintain popular “consent” through deception, psyops, and other manipulative distractions.
Juvenal’s famous duo of “bread and circuses” (panem et circenses) has morphed into a runaway train of pot, porn, pop stars, propaganda, and processed Everything (e.g., food, meds, media, music, McHistory), everything that can be squeezed for a buck while also locomoting the favored narratives—and the nation—closer to the cliff.
Like nearly every other swindle in history, these will be discovered; the truth will be revealed. (Actually, the facts have already been revealed, but because of information suppression and an utterly captured corporate media, not enough people know—and far too many remain naively and perilously unaware that many of the old institutions have lost much of their integrity.)
As Le Bon, Hannah Arendt, Eric Hoffer, and Mattias Desmet have observed, when the masses fall under a uniform spell, atrocities can happen. To prevent this risk of widespread mind-capture, more people need to arouse themselves to learn what’s going on and speak up; the means of awakening is exposure to truth. Some will remain stubbornly asleep and even lash out at anyone who disturbs their dream. Indeed, many prefer delusion: the blue pill is addictive. Yet everyone who rises and joins the ranks of the living defects from the ranks of the dead, the lethargic, the lethally lazy, the shuffling herd trapped in its instinctive clumping round and round upon the rumored whiff of the lioness. But it’s not the lioness the herd has to fear: there exist far more menacing threats that it cannot even see.
The Power of Crowds in Public Places
In addition to their diligent seeking and sharing of facts, people also need other people. Especially in a fragmented time like our own, with individuals adrift in fractured attentions spans and on rafts of electronica, attempting to bond with nothing terribly real, people need to get together, in person and en masse, to wake up to the memory of their strength. Tyrants everywhere deeply fear crowds of like-minded citizens—which is why they prohibit opposition marches, demonstrations, meetings, churches, and public petitioning of the government for redress of grievances. Regarding any public spectacle they haven’t staged, despots shudder at anything more political than a football game—a colorful circus to entertain the crowds.
As is also the case in Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which have shown authoritarian zeal in clamping down on their own native populations, it is both telling and chilling that the authorities have often focused their life-wrecking powers on ordinary citizens—especially those who gather online or in person to protest government power gone rogue.
Yet numbers are numbers and crowds are crowds, and the masses are the means by which the likes of Gandhi and MLK peacefully prevailed. Regarding today, even though in the mainstream media we won’t see much coverage—and certainly no positive coverage—of rallies unaligned with Officially Approved Narratives; even so, a crowd of steadfast and peaceful resisters will know and measure its own spirit—and take comfort and strength from it. (When asked in a British court to state his occupation, Gandhi calmly replied, “Resister.”) Le Bon wrote that without the unified effort of the masses, no civilization could have ever been built.
And also sensing the will of the people are of course the manipulators, the would-be tyrants—and they should know that an increasingly alert crowd has the power to shake off its lethargy and reclaim its country—and though the way will be difficult, and very long, in time victory will come—because sheer negativity and falsity cannot endure. Nature abhors it, entropy scatters it. Just as an electronic surveillance state must inevitably collapse for lack of energy and spare parts, fakery must surely tumble down like a rotted façade.
Restoration of vitality and flow is as inevitable as sunrise after a long night—and like Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King or the Founders themselves, the People can begin the long and patient work of rebuilding our country anew in the light of solid fact, common sense, and truth. And that work has already begun—it is happening right now.
