Delusional group behaviour - voluntary or involuntary?

[BurnedOut]

I attended a mandatory seminar today which was based on 'Unsung Heroes Of India' which was about 4 hours and at the end, I just could not help but think how nonsensical my life is sometimes. What if you are in a group full of people who are willingly believing popular lies that have been debunked several thousand times but then you still see them behaving like cult group members? I will provide several instances of the same -
In most Indian states, Gandhi = God insofar his picture is there on banknotes. However, where I live, Gandhi is not the hero of the story. There are other heroes for them which they use as a social and political identity to separate themselves from the ideologies of the other states' intellectuals. I call this pure intellectual masturbation which is not based on facts but on the fact that my cock is bigger than yours. These people bash Gandhi for being a pedo amongst other things but the pedo trend is slowly catching on. Similarly Teresa is a revered figure in India but all of you know about her satanic side. However, despite providing evidence to such idiots, argument is essentially impossible as instead of refuting the facts, they continue to be delusional about their heroes. It might simply be the case that they know that their heroes are nothing but fortunate victims of circumstances, they are unwilling to let go of the social commingling the delusion provides. What does not make sense to me is that if everybody likely knows this, what is the point of keeping up with the delusion? Everybody also knows that your status quo in the present is what counts at the end, therefore what is the point of keeping up with the historicist crap?

At the end, there was a dance done because government officials cannot have enough of women dancing in the name of cultural performance. This dance was carried out an hour after a female researcher highlighted the role of women in the freedom struggle (whatever the fuck that is) and how they are discriminated and ignored in the nationalist discourse. I said, fair enough, that's perfect. However, the dance started off with a bunch of girls doing some classical dance moves and after a minute, several guys (other volunteers) pop up and start 'harassing the women' by grabbing them by the arms to display the 'lusty eyes of the British' serving as an omen for impending doom of India. In the next scene, a group of 'Indian men' emerge and take down a British man with an AK-47 (probably before the birth of Kalashnikov or during it) with a pistol. These pistol-wielding men were the 'courageous Indian freedom fighters who assassinated the British officials' because terrorism is heroism in a colonial country (forgetting that such terrorism only begat execrable horrors and suffering on other people who supported such terrorism). Then these courageous freedom fighters dance happily with the girls (who should have been among the freedom fighters too given the feminist discourse that happened an hour ago). At the end, the classical figure of 'Goddess India' with several hands was depicted. Before the depiction, 'Goddess India' was again coerced by a 'lusty British official' but was freed by other females (who were supposed to be the saintly history-friendly gigawomen).

People ended up with a huge applause and whistling and cheers and I was nothing but stupefied by the grand oxymoronic performance that shat on itself. Then our Head of Department for Political Science ended up praising all the volunteers (whom she has admitted to being utterly stupid to other professors and implicitly to me) for supporting and helping her when all the work was to fetch them from the gate to the auditorium and guiding them with their seating arrangements. After this, there was an impromptu felicitation arranged by the volunteers (who wanted to appease the HOD for not felicitating her in previous programmes), everybody cheered and roared with an applause. But the irony was that the junior students were laughing and giggling while cheering at the professors (tongue-in-cheek remark about their magnanimous egos) and my class was somehow mighty proud. The professors grew pink with the cheers and endless rounds of applauses. Now one of them just blushed hard because she was new. However this very same professors talked about how postcolonial scholars are criticized for bashing the West endlessly while ignoring the endemic problems in the Indian society but she was quite happy with 'Goddess India' being saved from the 'Lusty British'. It was such a fucking shitshow of hypocrisy, I ended up quite annoyed at the end. The fake smiles exchanged from their uncomfortable glances at each other combined with their awareness of how farcical all of this was and nothing but my HOD's way of becoming popular in the eyes of the principle who would probably then raise their salaries and profile simultaneously. During the felicitation, one professor was nowhere to be found, she disappeared. I suppose she realized what was going on. This professor is notorious for hitting on undergraduates and graduates but is ironically the most well-read among all the other professors who took advantage of her scandal to stall her salary and status quo.

 

[Black Rose]

In every society myth, there is an outside group that the inside group overcomes and prevails over. The contradiction is that if your society is a degenerate society then that victory is not so much anything to do with you being a better society that the people you overcame but only that you succeded. Tribalism is the name of the game. So the British left does that make India better as a society? Does that mean India is more noble? This is why the caste system exists because the nobles separated from the people who were supposed to have degenerated. But does that make everyone lesser than the nobles? No, but people who are less able to be morally strong were separated from those at the top. So then those at the top believed they were better which was only partially true, and those at the bottom were seen as morally weak which again was only partially true. So the heroes came and the morally weak said look at our leaders and how they make us better than the people who ruled us. but before the Brahmin rules us but they were our ingroup. but the British were illegitimate because they were an out-group. And so the weak morally had reason to celebrate because an outgroup had been defeated even if those morally weak people had nothing to do with it. And again being morally weak has nothing to do with being part of the noble caste of ignoble caste but just that an outgroup was defeated all tribal and morally weak people had reason to celebrate.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Attachments.
If you don't love yourself you can't let go.
Very cliche thing to say, but people being attached to hero worship is basically that.
We want light to shine on crap life, and if life does not provide it, we invent idols to provide it for us, so we can feel better about our life, despite it not changing.

If you are willing to follow in steps of good, you don't need heros.
But being good is hard. Being good is hard and thankless job.
The real heros of life are people who don't shine.

I like Lao C philosophy in this respect. Would not be surprised if he were pedo too, in that time period it was normal stuff.
That being said he said it well.
When you see a job has to be done keep working until its done and then rest.
That is my life motto.
I don't care for status, recognition or money.
What can motivate me to do good things if I don't get rewarded for them.
Simple answer. Nothing. I just do good things because I have to. I don't need a reward for it.
When there is a right thing to do I do it as best I can.
I don't need Jesus or Ghandi or Miss sadist to tell me how to be a good decent being.
People who do are lost.

 

[dr froyd]

are we to demand from the masses that they start thinking??

sir you must be joking