Crowds & Power at Boarding School | Why We Joined In (And How to Forgive Ourselves) | Piers Cross

Okay, welcome. So today I wanted to offer some reflections about crowds and power and this idea here about how there was this group mindset in boarding schools or any education facility really growing up and just putting it into this work of Elias Canetti and his book Crowds and Power, and essentially forgiving ourselves. A lot of us, you know, beat ourselves up because of, say, being involved in a group. So I just want to talk about this, some fascinating research, and yeah, I just want to talk about that today. So enjoy. So I've been reading, you know, as you know, I read all the time, as you can see by my books. But this book here, Sam Walker, The Captain Class, and it's a great leader is not what you think. So I lead a lot of— I read a lot of leadership books, peak performance. I'm currently reading Leadership in Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin, The 5 Levels of Leadership by John C. Maxwell, The Captain Class among others, and I've just finished this book here. I interviewed Pete, Peter, a couple of days ago on the podcast, and as I was reading through Captain Class I just— page, I think it's 176, and they talk about this idea of crowds and power, and I just thought, ah, you'd often see this phenomenon in boarding schools. And I'm like, you know, that puts it into context, that some boy or girl would be struggling, whether they were angry, whether they were crying, whether they were upset in some way, and suddenly a crowd formed. Everyone gathered in. It was like, ah, either shouting psycho, psycho, or, you know, jumping on top of them, sometimes kicking them. You know, it's like it wasn't just the one person, it was Very soon a group. And Canetti, who wrote a book called Crowds and Power— it's 1960 he wrote that— and I'll read a little bit from this. He says, Canetti described the way an emotion would sweep rapidly and wordlessly through a group of people, creating an irresistible impulse to join in. Most of them do not know what has happened, he says. And if questioned, have no answer, but they hurry to be there where most other people are. He wrote, there is a determination in their movement which is quite different from the expression of ordinary curiosity. It seems as though the movement of some of them transmits itself to the others in the crowd. The individual feels that he is transcending the limits of his own person. And I think you see that so much in these schools. I remember I've told this story many times when I, a couple of weeks being at boarding school crying, suddenly everyone's in my cubicle. Ah, Cross is not so confident. Suddenly it's like, whoa, where did they all come from? And I'd often see this, and this puts it into context. Most of them do not know what has happened, and if questioned have no answer, but they hurry to be there where most other people are. So he goes on. Canetti believed that people didn't decide to join mobs. They were moved to do so by an emotional contagion that seeped into them unconsciously, creating a simultaneous alignment of their biology. That contagion would drive them To pursue some unified course of action, even at the risk of injury or death. A crowd, Canetti wrote, quote, wants to experience for itself the strongest possible feeling of its animal force. And I saw that a lot. You know, people would get involved. And interestingly, years later— well, actually, a part of it was actually boarding school. I was at football matches, I was a Portsmouth supporter, and Portsmouth in the '80s and '90s was quite a violent place, certainly the football team was, it was renowned— Leeds, Chelsea, Portsmouth, Millwall, they were the ones who would always be fighting in England, so I would go off to these games and you'd often see people from Portsmouth storming the pitch, and they'd be like, whoa, you know, it's like that group, and it's real tribal kind of angry energy. And so this puts it into context here. He goes on to say, Sam Walker, in this book, for 3 decades, Canetti's observation remained definitive, the definitive work on the subject. Scientists concluded experiments to try to better understand the neurological forces he described. He says, however, in the 1990s, with the aid of advanced brain scanners, researchers in Italy made a significant breakthrough, and this talks about the idea of mirror neurons. Now, I've talked about mirror neurons at boarding school from the perspective that you'd see someone being hurt and you would be receiving that pain in your brain. So if someone was being beaten, or picked on or bullied, you would be receiving as much pain in your brain. So when people said, oh, nothing happened to me, no, no, mirror neurons show that your brain has been affected as well. But what this kind of brings in, saying that's partly what's happening, is the mirror neurons, is we want to get involved. So he writes, Sam Walker, a group of neuroscientists from the University of Parma discovered Quite by accident, a class of cells inside the brains of monkeys that would fire up when the monkeys were watching other people perform various tasks, such as eating ice cream— an ice cream cone. And the discovery of these reactive cells, or mirror neurons as the scientists called them, offered the first physical evidence that the phenomena of brain interconnectedness that researchers had observed in groups might be the result of a complex, hardwired neurochemical system in our bodies that operates below consciousness. It also suggested that this pipeline could be manipulated by others and that humans could be forced to feel powerful emotions. So, you know, that's just kind of interesting just to see that, and why I think this is important for us As ex-boarders, is we will— we have very strong inner critic and outer critic. I've talked about that a lot over the last month with the outer critic, before about the inner critic, beating ourselves up. And so if as a child we were part of the, the group and we bullied others and we kicked or punched others, as a collective, we're going to beat ourselves up. We're going to give ourselves a hard time. And I've been using this phrase with some of my clients in the last few weeks, and it's the— basically the phrase is, it's not my fault, but it is my responsibility. And what that means is it's not to beat ourselves up and go, well, you know, you, you did this wrong, you did that wrong. It's to go I did that. There was a reason I did that. I did that to survive. This was the only way to survive in an environment. If I didn't join the crowd, I would have been picked on, so I had to do that. But then it's my responsibility to feel this, to somatically anchor, and to go, I feel some grief. I'm so sorry I hurt that person. And to forgive ourselves. It's like that breaks the loop by feeling what we're feeling, the shame, the guilt, and to go, oh shit, yeah, and therefore to have that compassion that, you know, this is mirror neurons, this is Crowds and Power, Canetti, is just saying this is kind of common in, in most groups, that there's this, this pull. And, you know, I'll carry on reading. Since the discovery of mirror neurons, scientists have learned a great deal more about the nature of emotional transfers and just how quickly they can overtake us. In 2004, Science published an article based on the work of University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Paul Whelan and his colleagues, who discovered that when it came— comes to looking at images that convey a powerful emotion like fear, the human brain registers and begins to buzz with activity in just 17 milliseconds. Before we're even aware that we've seen a fearful image, our brains are already processing it. And I think as well as ex-boarders, because we've dissociated, it's not conscious. We've kind of learned, oh, and so this is really important. So yeah, yeah, I'm not gonna share any more from that, but I just think this is really key for us just to Start forgiving ourselves. Oh yeah, yeah, I did do that. This is how it feels. And then forgiving. This was the only way I could survive in this environment. This was a survival mechanism. Nick Duffell, strategic survival personality. That was the only way I could survive. And it was such a clever thing on one level for an 8-year-old, a 7-year-old, a 4-year-old, an 11-year-old, 13-year-old to do. And yeah, to forgive ourselves. So that's the message really. So bless you. And yeah, I'm currently having a break this week, so I've recorded this before I began my break. So I'm away and yeah, I've got Few podcasts lined up, probably not this week because I'm away, but the week after when I get back. So yeah, please do share. Maybe you had some experiences of that—that crowd and power at school where it was like that group mentality. Teachers went around and anger or shaming someone, or it's like yeah. Just to notice that, that, that happened, and this is a potential reason behind it from Canetti in his book Crowds and Power. So any questions, any reflections, please do leave them below. Okay, take care.