Pretty Women, Mob Violence, and the Hive Mentality

I have to confess, my eyes are drawn to pretty women. Most men's eyes are. It gives men great pleasure to look at pretty women. We want to see them clothed, and half-clothed, and disrobing and naked. Some men commit crimes or act indecently for the pleasure--which soon stops being a pleasure and becomes a compulsion. There's no word I know that attaches to this compulsion-pleasure which one simultaneously craves, enjoys and loathes, loathes because it controls the man. It's an addiction--the experience is exactly the same as the experience of any other addiction, including those for which one goes to jail. It's a weakness. It's not necessarily a weakness any contemplation or exercise or even prayer can surmount. When does an innocent glance at a beautiful woman become a compulsive, addictive inability to not look at a beautiful woman? I can't say.

I can say, however, that the compulsion is not limited to the erotic realm, to sexual desire. Human instincts are very poorly analyzed in popular culture. We are so in love with the strong, self-controlled, responsible-for-his-actions individual--the kind we can in good conscience put in jail--that we rarely think or anatomize the way that none of us are that individual. We are creatures of instinct. We all have part of our brains and nervous systems that exert pressures on us that we are at times incapable of resisting. Every single one of us. (I suppose we see the analysis symbolically manifest in horror films, zombie movies etc, but always in a way that allows us to think of the possessed falsely as "other").

I've read analyses of the mob mentality that deny its reality. Those analyses are wrong. While it may be true that in any given mob there will be those who are not swept up--that one needs a certain pre-existing affinity for the object of the mob's ire for the phenomenon to kick in--the phenomenon itself seems to me to be beyond question. It accounts for lynchings and pet rocks. It must be understood.