A mob is the graveyard of reason—a truth Friedrich Nietzsche captured with piercing clarity when he wrote:
“Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it’s the rule.”
A group gives identity, confidence, conviction, and camaraderie. But the problem with groups is that, over time, they often devolve into mobs—and with mobs, madness becomes a festival. In such a festival, the first tradition is the symbolic slaughter of intelligence, just as animal sacrifice is seen as tradition. The mob consciously begins this sacrifice. So, in mob culture, hyper-emotions and aggression aren’t exceptions. They are the rule.
In such environments, imitation is institutionalized. Mimicry becomes standardized—and tragically, it’s rebranded as education. The more one spends on this ‘fancy education’—often at the cost of everything truly meaningful in life—the louder the applause from a system fueled by sentiment and irrationality rather than wisdom.
Whether it’s education or religion, caste or creed, men or women, gender-neutral or gender-fluid—when these morph into mobs or cults, rational discourse collapses. Hyper-emotions take the throne, and wisdom is crucified. What remains is chaos disguised as liberation. What is called ‘freedom’ today is often not freedom at all, but fragmented identities asserting themselves without self-awareness. Society then becomes a patchwork of mobs, each shouting its version of truth, none nurturing either the real individual or the collective good.
The core of human existence is self-discovery. Society is born from the individual, not the other way around. In a healthy society, the self is never sacrificed; it grows—and in that growth, society truly flourishes.
I remember speaking with someone about education. They were proud of taking hundreds of children and training them in a single stream—engineering. But real education is not about filling molds; it is about nurturing the natural core of each child. True education isn’t dictated by a teacher’s agenda but discovered in the student’s nature. One may be a psychological engineer, another a passionate, educated farmer. Forcing everyone into a single mold—whether engineer or farmer—only manufactures misfits. Such disproportionate growth of any one branch disrupts the balance of all others, creating a professional mob that displaces holistic harmony.
Modern times are more influenced by mob psychology than perhaps any era before, and the journey of the individual is under siege.
The Bhagavad Gita is, at its heart, a guide to self-discovery. It teaches us to find our svadharma—our personal duty—and through it align with the greater order of society. But today, individuals are not discovering themselves; they are becoming more selfish, and that is not the same. Selfishness drowns the self, while self-discovery dissolves ignorance.
Modern society has turned students into robots, disciples into blind followers, and gurus into celebrities. Spiritual life has degenerated into cultism. Sports and play have become mere performance. Entertainers are worshipped as heroes, serving as false benchmarks for how to live.
The greatest tragedy? Millions elevate selfish, hooligan-turned politicians into devatas—gods. The list of such misplacements is endless. Yet awakening people is a near-impossible task. The mob resists the nectar of awareness, preferring instead the intoxication of poison.
– Govind Das (ISKCON MEMBER)
