People in crowds often dress in a manner to suggest their allegiance to whatever it is that draws them together. For example, if you go to a college football game, you will often find students from the college and fans of the team are wearing the team colors and sometimes tee shirts and sweatshirts with the team colors and the name of the college or the team (Figure 5.1).

Many people are unfamiliar with semiotics so, since this chapter deals with the semiotics of crowds, let me say a few words about the science of semiotics. There are two founding fathers of semiotics, a Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (Figure 5.2), who wrote a seminal book, Course in General Linguistics that was published in 1915, and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (Figure 5.3), who wrote many books on the subject and who gave the science its name.

The term “semiotics” is based on the Greek word for sign, sēmeîon, and semiotics is the science of signs—a sign being anything that can stand for something else, anything that conveys meaning. For example, our facial expressions are signs, our hairstyles are signs, our clothes are signs, and, according to Pierce, everything is a sign.

Peirce said (cited in Sebeok, 1977, page 6), “this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.”

If Peirce is correct and everything is a sign, semiotics becomes the master science since it enables us to interpret signs, so when you learned what words mean, as a little child and when you learned to read, you began your career as a semiotician. Actually, when you were just a few months old, and your parents smiled at you, and you responded to their smiles, you started your career as a semiotician.

Maya Pines describes this process as follows (“How They Know What You Really Mean”), San Francisco Chronicle, October 13, 1982):

The question this chapter discusses involves why so many people in America refuse to get vaccinated. We find the same reluctance to be vaccinated in other countries but not to the extent that vaccine resistance exists in the United States. In the United States now, since we developed vaccines, almost all of the people dying from Covid-19 are unvaccinated (over 90%) so we must wonder whether they form some kind of death cult, made up of followers of Donald J. Trump.When the virus first appeared, Trump paid little attention to it, saying that it was like the flu. He wasted precious months getting the vaccine out to people and told his followers not to wear masks and not to get vaccinated—though he was vaccinated and that probably saved his life since he caught the disease and ended up at Walter Reed Hospital where he received special treatments. He came very close to dying.

If Angela Merkel Were in Charge in America

Germany has a population of about 83 million people and it is estimated that as of October 2021, around 94,000 Germans have died from the virus. The United States has a population of 329 million people and as of October 2021 around 770,000 Americans have died from the virus. America has approximately three times as many people as Germany.

If Germany had the same population as the United States and we multiply 83 million times three to get approximately 329 million people, around 282 thousand people would have died, so if Angela Merkel and her German colleagues had been running the United States vaccination program, instead of Trump, around 500,000 Americans would still be alive.

Some of the 777,000 deaths occurred after the vaccines were developed and distributed, which means the epidemic of Covid deaths since then are mostly from the unvaccinated (Figure 8.1).

Rationales of the Unvaccinated

One reason many people have not been vaccinated in America is that wearing masks and becoming vaccinated have become part of the hyperpoliticization that is part of the Trump program. Under Trump, everything possible has been politicized, so not wearing masks and not getting vaccinated became political statements rather than public health imperatives.

Along with 9/11 when the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed by terrorists using airplanes as missiles, 1/6 is a day of monumental importance in American history. But unlike 9/11, the terrorists attacking the Capitol building were not foreign terrorists but American ones.

The attack on the Capitol raises a question: when does a crowd become a mob? The answer would seem to be that when a crowd becomes highly motivated and excited and loses its sense of moral composure, it becomes a mob (Figure 3.2).

Le Bon has a chapter on “Crowds Termed Criminal Crowds?” in which he explains that the people who take part in these crowds/mobs are open to suggestion and believe they are acting “in obedience to a duty,” which with the 1/6 insurrection was following Trump's and several other Republican politicians’ instructions to “fight like hell” and, by implication, prevent Joe Biden, who it was said had stolen the election, from being installed as president.

Many of the members of the mob that attacked the Capitol on 1/6 have said that they believed they were acting on the orders of President Trump and that their behavior was not criminal but the behavior of true patriots.

An article, “90 Seconds of Rage on the Capitol Steps” by Dan Barry, Alan Feuer, and Matthew Rosenberg, on the first page of the Sunday edition of The New York Times, describe the behavior of seven rioters who worked in concert perpetrating violence for 90 seconds during the riot (October 17, 2021: 1):

But it may also help to slow down the video evidence, linger on those 90 seconds on the Capitol steps and trace back the roots of the violence and its perpetrators. Doing so provides a close-up view of how seemingly average citizens—duped by a political lie, goaded by their leaders, and swept up in a frenzied mob—can unite in breathtaking acts of brutality.

Scholars and writers often speculate on American exceptionalism, the notion that America differs from other countries and that because of our history, spiritual values, economic wealth, and military power, we have a special obligation to lead the world in many areas.

On September 25, 2015, David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times, had a column titled “The American Idea,” which starts off as follows:

Later in the column, he argues that the conservative Republican politicians who talk about American exceptionalism are destroying the concept by looking backwards to an imagined America, an America that was not multicultural and mixed race and that was not full of immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Africa and everyplace else.

The image of America in the minds of the Republican politicians Brooks was writing about is of a fantasied America made up primarily of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPS) living in farms and small towns and not in an America with huge cities full of people from many other countries with many skin colors and religions. It turns out that over sixty percent of Americans live in cities and only seven percent of Americans live on farms.

Anyone who has traveled to countries in Europe, Asia, and South America can tell you people in the various countries in these continents are all different from one another in many ways, such as their skin color, body shapes, the languages they speak, the food they eat, the clothes they wear, the way they have sex, their racial makeup, and the religions they practice.

The term we use for the differences we find in countries as far as personality is concerned is national character. What national character suggests is that where we are born and grow up plays an important role in the way we think and behave.

Nations differ from one another in various ways, and parts or regions of countries differ from other parts of the same country in important ways.

Leonhard Fronsperger ‘On the Praise of Self-Interest’ (1564)

Introduction

This was the first collaboration with Siobhán Wills, professor of law at the Transitional Justice Institute, Ulster University. Siobhán had discussed with me the value of audiovisual recordings to conduct research ethically using participatory practices and as a means of influencing decision-making in human rights fora. She has written reports and academic texts (and continues to) on international human rights law and international humanitarian law and was looking for ways to conduct field research ethically. Her research had taken her to Haiti to investigate the high number of casualties directly caused by the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping mission there. We agreed that recording survivors’ testimonies on film might offer a means of producing field research that is more accessible to the research participants than text-based interviews alone and would also enhance the value of the research, particularly for communicating the issues within the UN.

In the ensuing film, residents of Bois Neuf, a community in Port-au-Prince, describe the impact of the militarised raids by the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which operated during the period 2004–2017. UN raids to arrest gang leaders led on many occasions to scores of civilian deaths and many more injuries, as well as the destruction of homes and jobs. The film also includes the views of legal, medical and human rights activists on the role of the UN in such circumstances. When we spoke with survivors, they told us that, although it had been ten years since the UN raids took place, we were the first people outside of the community to ask them about their experiences.

Background

Haiti was the site of a successful slave revolt that led in 1804 to the establishment of the first Black republic in the world. Napoleon threatened to reinvade the country (then called Saint-Domingue); the deal that prevented this included the new state paying reparations to France for loss of ‘property’, that is, slaves. The total demanded was 100 million francs (about $21 billion by today's value) which was finally ended in 1947. This partly explains why such a rich agricultural society was reduced to poverty over the years, although initially it was regarded as ‘the richest colony in history’.

Introduction

The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which operated between 2004 and 2017, was led by Brazilian generals. When we filmed in Bois Neuf, a passing MINUSTAH convoy stopped in one of the squares and Brazilian troops poured out, walked around for several minutes and then drove off. They were displaying their presence – organised, armed and in control. We were curious about their role in Haiti and began to research their record in their home country, aware that a dictatorship had ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1986. Brazil has the highest death rate of civilians by state violence in the world and the statistics in Rio de Janeiro state were shocking, with an average of five people killed by the state each day. Siobhán Wills and I followed this up and began by making contacts with NGOs and community groups. When a grant application was successful, we appointed a team, including our indispensable research assistant, Juliana Resende, who became so central that her title changed to associate producer.

Background

General Heleno, MINUSTAH's first force commander, was later appointed as Brazil's Minister for Institutional Security under President Bolsonaro’s government. Bolsonaro was clearly impressed with his role in Haiti, arguing, ‘We are at war. Haiti was also at war. (In Haiti) the rule was: you find an element with a gun, you shoot, and then you see what happened. You solve the problem’. While Haiti was not at war, it was indeed the case that the Brazilian troops were permitted to ‘solve the problem’ by a policy of shoot to kill. It also helped that both men regarded the dictatorship between 1964 and 1986 as necessary. Other generals who had served in Haiti were also appointed to Bolsonaro's government; Reuters journalist, Gabriel Stargardter, writes,

Freud wrote his book in 1921, many years after the publication of Le Bon’s The Crowd. Freud commented on the book in his work on group psychology since they were both, in many respects, writing about the same topic.

Freud begins his book, in his introduction, by explaining that individual psychology and group psychology are really two sides of the same coin (Figure 3.1). He explains that the mental health of individuals is almost always connected to others so that individual psychology is also, at the same time, social or group psychology.

Group psychology, he adds, deals with individuals as they are members of some component of a group, such as a race, a caste, a nation, an institution, or of a crowd of people organized for a particular purpose into a group. This leads him to a discussion of Le Bon and his notion of the group mind.

Freud asks three questions we must consider when dealing with group psychology (1922:3):

• 1. What is a group?

• 2. How does it exercise a decisive influence over the mental life of individuals?

• 3. What is the nature of the change it forces on individuals?

He mentions Le Bon's ideas about individuals in groups being affected by contagion and heightened suggestibility but does not recognize, Freud points out, that contagion is best understood as a manifestation of suggestibility. He adds that all the features of groups that Le Bon discusses can be explained by psychoanalysts: the fact that in groups people lose their individual inhibitions, demand illusions, and are as strongly influenced by what is false as what is true. After dealing with Le Bon's ideas, and saying its emphasis on unconscious aspects of mental life fits in with his thinking, Freud moves on to the theories of a psychologist, William McDougall, who wrote a book The Group Mind, that was published in 1920 and emphasizes the role of emotions in people in groups who behave like unruly children.

Freud discusses McDougall's ideas about dealing with the problems of groups by procuring for their members the characteristics of individuals, which membership in groups extinguish. This involves individuals recognizing their continuity, becoming aware of their self-consciousness, their traditions and customs, and associating with other groups.

Introduction

Creative practice research that is lens based has become more widespread in universities in the UK over the last 20 years. While music, drama and fine art have had a practice research presence for many decades, it has taken concerted efforts by practitioners to convince the academic world that lens-based creative practice can and does allow research insights that might otherwise be hidden. Early examples of such successful initiatives include the Practice as Research in Performance project (PARIP) at Bristol University and the Audio Visual PhD (AVPhD) network based at Goldsmiths, University of London. Publications that consistently supported this acceptance included the Journal of Media Practice, now incorporating Education into its remit. The online peer-review platform for practice research in screen media, Screenworks, was first established in 2006 at the University of the West of England. We have reached the stage where Fitzgerald and Lowe can state, ‘While documentary filmmaking has traditionally been viewed as a creative practice, it has been transitioning into the academic world as a way to undertake and engage with research practices’.

One, but not the only, advantage that film-making has as a research methodology and output over text-based approaches is its more visceral nature, which allows the senses, audio and visual, to engage independently and together so that participants and audiences can engage with both the verbal and the non-verbal signs available, such as hesitancy, voice alterations, body movements, background contexts and atmospheric sounds. And, of course, editing strategies of compare and contrast can create new meanings. This book begins with the premise that documentary filming can be a method of addressing challenges we face in society. Michael Jackson argues, ‘Stories are redemptive not because they preserve or represent the truth but because they offer the perennial possibility that one sees oneself and discovers oneself through another, despite the barriers of space, time and difference’.

Participatory Practices

While using a creative practice foundation, clearly there are older precedents in documentary film-making that involve close collaboration with participants, for example, Jean Rouch tended to screen his films to the participants during the post-production stage to get their input in order to enhance the film’s authority.

The day after we filmed Joseph Pierre-Louis in the Bois Neuf neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, he told us that he ‘feels taller. I don't know if I have grown taller, but I feel taller.’ We had visited the area in 2018, 10 years after a UN peacekeeping mission raid had left scores of civilians dead and many houses demolished. Edren Elisma, whose 10-year-old daughter Vanne was shot in bed during the same raid, said ‘It's the first time since it happened that someone has come to talk to us about it.’ He showed the project team the bullet holes in the roof of his house in which he and his daughter were shot. He continued, ‘I think that thanks to the strangers’ mission and what they do I have the opportunity to be heard.’ As Elif Shafak writes, ‘Stories bring us together. Untold stories keep us apart.’ I have spent most of my film-making life working with communities and individuals who rarely get the opportunity to have their stories recorded and witnessed on a public platform. This has been more than an individual journey, one shared not only with the participants in the documentary films but also with the project teams who have collaborated in the films’ productions. This book is an attempt to critically reflect on the processes and outcomes involved in such a journey.

This is also an update on the publication, Recording Memories from Political Violence: A Filmmaker's Journey (2010), which provided insights into the film-making projects that I had been involved with up to that point, and which had come out of a PhD thesis of the same name. Two of the projects in this book build on previous foundations, for example, the Prisons Memory Archive (PMA), a collection of 160 filmed walk-and-talk recordings inside the prisons of the North of Ireland that operated during the conflict known as the Troubles, has since benefited from a £500,000 grant from the National Heritage Lottery Fund in order to preserve the archive and make it accessible. We Never Gave Up is the third film in a trilogy produced in collaboration with the Human Rights Media Centre, Cape Town, and engages with the legacy of apartheid in South Africa. Two more recent major film projects are also addressed.

Context

Laffemas’ work takes us back to the early beginnings of political economy, and – as part of that Zeitgeist – an emphasis on manufacturing as an indispensable ingredient. Laffemas came to the fore when the fiscal-military state was still in the making but took more and more visible shape; during that time an economic ideology grew ground which established, in economic reasoning as well as practice, a connection between state consolidation and the raising of the wealth of the nation: in order to generate a better, stronger state apparatus, the economy needed some attention as well. Economic policy often took the shape of merchants and other economic actors asking for privileges and monopolies, but Laffemas’ text presents an understanding that policy ought to be more than rent seeking serving the interest of the few. Policy was to feed on a mutual relationship or symbiosis: a strong manufacturing economy was the foundation of a strong state, and vice versa. The best way to curb domestic factionalism, monopoly and rent seeking, and to defend France's political and economic interest internationally was to promote domestic economic growth. During the process industry was identified as a key candidate to achieve this simultaneous strengthening of the nation's power and its wealth, and the main source of the wealth of nations – the birth of modern political economy.

This is borne out in the further works in Laffemas’ oeuvre and career as a writer and ‘consultant administrator’ (using Schumpeter's famous classification), in which he often returned to themes including the dichotomy of agriculture and manufacturing as two very different forms of economic activity, with radically different chances for the growth potential of the nation's wealth. Laffemas also sported an anti-bullionist perspective, never confusing – as a very common allegation against ‘mercantilism’ goes – money with real wealth, advocating for free money flows in and out of the country instead. With his emphasis on import substitution, the prohibition of vital raw material exports (which better be worked into manufactures domestically), promoting manufacturing and national productivity, stimulating domestic employment, increasing ‘industry’ (at that time still meaning industriousness or, in German, Fleiss) across the French lands, encouraging the immigration of skilled foreigners (technology transfer) Laffemas’ work classifies as ‘mercantilist’ in the traditional sense, but also matches Cameralist economic thought.

Full title:

General regulation for the establishment of manufactures in this kingdom to contain the cost of silk fabric and other merchandise that harms and ruins the state, which is the true way of restoring France to her splendor, provide work for the poor, and keep them from begging for a living.

With an extract of the opinion which the Lords of the Assembly held in Rouen have sent to his Majesty, that the entrance of all sorts of gold thread and woolens manufactured outside the kingdom be prohibited here, and that levies on woolens and raw silk be suppressed.

Along with the means of producing silks throughout France.

A note by the translator and the general editor.

The introduction will show that Mr. Laffemas was not raised as a man of letters. If anything, the author of this treatise was certainly more accustomed to legal documents than anything else. His language is often rigid and haphazardly punctuated, so I have had to take some risks in modernising it. Its pre-economic and pre-industrial vocabulary is fraught with difficulties, of which the most general are these:

1. Police is used to designate a system: an economic policy but also the structure that is adopted to support it. Thus, it should be understood that policy in this document does not mean only policy but also this frame. Accordingly, a dictionary of 1606 gives this complex definition: Police ‘is a regulation of a state and community, whether monarchical, aristocratic, or democratic, in supplies, clothing, trade, and other things that concern the welfare of all. It comes from the Greek politéia, derived from polis, city, because the city was first subject to such regulation […].’

2. Manufacture as a noun has no obvious equivalent in modern English. It means a place or structure where things are made by man, as opposed to the production of raw materials, or the process itself. The same dictionary just quoted calls it ‘the making of some piece of work by hand’. Here we use the term in the same sense as Alexander Hamilton's famous 1791 Report on Manufactures to the US House of Representatives.

Introduction

Elif Shafak asks:

Over the last 10 years, I have worked on several creative research projects, utilising documentary film as participatory practice, including single films, web platforms and digital archives, and ranging in location from my home in the North of Ireland to Haiti and Brazil, and to South Africa. The themes range from state violence against residential communities to prisons as a response to political conflict. What underpins these projects, as well as their filmic elements, is the importance of participatory practices both with those contributing their experiences and those collaborating on the production side.

Creative Practice Research

The projects have been made possible because of my employment by universities which has allowed me to access resources, such as camera kits, and to access finance including internal grants for research travel and competitive grants from national research bodies, for example, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) UK, and non-governmental organisations such as the Communities Relations Council Northern Ireland (NI) and the National Heritage Lottery Fund (NHLF). The relatively recent emphasis on ‘impact’ as an important consideration in research funding has benefitted creative practice to some extent, while the ongoing definition of practice as methodology, as well as an output, is foundational to its value.

Participatory Practices

The nature of participatory practices applied is evident from the range of projects under discussion. The Prisons Memory Archive (PMA) achieved the most engaged collaborations for at least two reasons; first, I am resident in the location where the majority of the participants live and where the material focus of the themes exists, that is, the female Armagh Gaol and male Maze and Long Kesh. While I began the project at a university in London, I took it with me to the two universities in the North of Ireland where I was later employed. Such proximity enabled an ongoing and consistent relationship with the participants.

We have already explored, indirectly, what cults are, from Le Bon's socialpsychology perspective and Freud's analytic perspective. The question I wish to resolve here is: how does a crowd become a cult? We might also ask whether all crowds eventually become cults.

Your Dictionary on the Internet offers this definition of a cult:

Cult Meaning: Best Ten Definitions of Cult (yourdictionary.com)

This definition, with its focus on raising money, seems particularly apt when it comes to dealing with Donald Trump as a cult leader and worldclass grifter. Freud talked about the significance of the erotic feelings people in crowds have for each other and their leaders, and the epigraph mentions the religious aspects of cults, so it is not too difficult to see the erotic feelings people in crowds have merging into religious attitudes. A review of a book about Trump as a cult leader by Steven Hassan offers some insights into the relationship between Trump and his followers:

Since the 2016 election, Donald Trump's behavior has become both more disturbing and yet increasingly familiar. He relies on phrases like, “fake news,” “build the wall,” and continues to spread the divisive mentality of us-vs.-them. He lies constantly, has no conscience, never admits when he is wrong, and projects all of his shortcomings onto others. He has become more authoritarian, more outrageous, and yet many of his followers remain blindly devoted. Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert and a major Trump supporter, calls him one of the most persuasive people living. His need to squash alternate information and his insistence on constant ego-stroking are all characteristics of other famous leaders—cult leaders.

In The Cult of Trump, mind control and licensed mental health expert Steven Hassan draws parallels between our current president and people like Jim Jones, David Koresh, Ron Hubbard, and Sun Myung Moon, arguing that this presidency is in many ways like a destructive cult.