A mob is a place where people go to take a break from their conscience,” Atticus Finch, “To Kill a Mockingbird”
How are we to respond to a culture dominated by ever-increasing mobs? The January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and destructive protests after George Floyd’s death (more than $1 billion in property damages) fit the definition of a mob: a crowd of disorderly people, many bent on violence or destructive action.
But in our political parties, corporations, school boards, churches and even our work groups and families, the actions and then the reactions of lesser mobs now feed an all-too-familiar cycle of contentious news:
- Bud Light’s transgender promotion and customer boycott
- Target’s Pride Month merchandise and blowback from all sides
- LA Dodgers’ Pride Night invitation to drag queens and religious backlash
- Disney’s and the Florida governor’s ongoing battle over gender education
- Stanford Law School’s fed judge shout-down and retort over free speech
- Supreme Court’s controversial decisions and violent threats to Justices
- Church splits over same-sex marriage and ordination
- School boards facing hostile groups on race, curriculum, gender identity
For every action there is a reaction – and usually an escalation. What once felt like political jousting now feels more like hand-to-hand combat. Target, in justifying its move, said it was “concerned about threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety.” Sometimes, however, the destruction is non-violent. Let me share a recent local example:
It was a place where members with certain types of disabilities could gather, connect, and do projects as a self-governed member-group under the direction of an executive director and a board. It provided a sense of accomplishment and an alternative to long, idle days alone. At some point the elected member-leader shared with his colleagues that he was going through gender transition. No one voiced concern. Over the course of a few months, a second and then a third member began transitioning. The transitioning group formed an informal leadership subgroup – excluding non-transitioning members – and began recruiting new members who were transitioning. They began to impose new gender identity rules and guidelines on the other members.
Some members, not a part of this transitioning group, began to complain about abuse of power, and several left. As the executive director and the board became aware of this internal movement, they began to lose donors. Some of their government funding, tied to headcount, dried up and they verged on financial collapse. Eventually the ED and board stepped in, the transitioning member-leader resigned, and several of the transitioning group left. The worthy, once thriving organization is now in survival mode.
Mob action nearly put this non-profit out of business. Regardless of what side you take, self-righteous mobs on one side beget self-righteous mobs on the other side. Victims of exclusion, securing power, transform into persecutors who exclude – who in turn eventually often become excluded victims themselves. In this circular process the higher purpose of the whole is overpowered and fractured by “us vs. them.”
A senior pastor provided this insight about how polarization can lead to losing long-standing church members: mostly it is not the differences that cause people to leave, it is when they come to feel like an outsider. How might it have turned out differently if the groups had prioritized relational purpose over the animus of relational differences. “Uncompromising” can sound righteous and inclusive but its authoritarian enforcement usually winds up excluding and creating outsiders.
Closer to home, certainly a notch below the threshold of mobs but devolving on the same spiral of harm, are vertical silos – at home, work, church – where “my group” claims selfish attachment to my way and indifference or intolerance of “the other group.” Covid has contributed to this dominance of insular vertical silos over the loose ties of the horizontal. As the CEO of a non-profit lamented last week, “everyone learned during Covid work-from-home to just do their job and let it go at that. Our ability to work horizontally and share important information and responsibility across silos has atrophied.” That streak of self-centeredness not only infects our individual lives, but a social version is present in our group lives. The narrowness of our vertical world keeps increasing as our horizontal footprint and our tolerance for those outside our tribe shrinks.
Our tendency toward mobs and silos has been greatly enabled by smart phones and social media, turbo-charging two age-old renewable energy sources: fear of rejection or oppression by an untrustworthy and maybe even evil other; and, selfishness that righteously demands I and my group have it our way.
De-Mobbing Your Group: Three Mob-Stopper Actions
Unless we want to continue down this destructive path, we must look in the mirror and ask: How is my behavior contributing to tit-for-tat mob-like norms? It starts with redirecting my focus from the excesses of opposing tribes, over whom I have little influence, to the excesses of my own tribes.
The best time to de-mob a group is before the mob forms. The best remedy for countering destructive mob forces is to intentionally and proactively build productive, diverse stakeholder relationships within a group. Mobs are a symptom; deficient relationships are a significant cause.
In the original Hebrew the word “honor” can be translated as “prize greatly.” What if in our groups we made a pact, not to just tolerate or accept, but to honor or prize our relationships – including those we dislike or distrust – over our differences? What might that look like? Let me suggest three actions as a starting point – a place to be on the lookout for ways to truly honor relationships:
1. Stop preferring and rewarding enemy-directed mob behavior: It is always valuable to ask how destructive behavior is being rewarded. Who benefits? Enemy-directed attention-seeking drama is often a path to group leadership and reinforcement by social media. Politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have risen to power by becoming Mob Stars (mobsters?).
How do we extinguish mob behavior? There is no slick, easy answer, but the place to start is with constructive purpose that captures what you are for – that is higher and more noble than who you fear or dislike. Purpose provides the connective tissue that enables a group to deter “us vs. them.” There is only us – all of us. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a master at elevating the purpose of racial equality to keep his own group from exerting mob-like retaliation against their oppressors. What you are for evokes a very different response than Whom do you blame or hate? A leader who magnifies feelings of self-righteous hate toward your opposition should set off alarms. De-mobbers redirect the group back to purpose and away from enemy-directed leading and leaders. And, as in sports, they recognize contributions to team purpose, borrowing from measures such as assists in basketball, sacrifices in baseball and “no jerks” in business.
2. Prize and engage outsiders to balance your group. The behavior of outsiders who question or resist the conventional can be time-consuming, frustrating and stressful. It is also one of the most valuable assets any group has because it helps avoid narrowness of vision, a form of blindness. Further, research confirms that as groups become more homogeneous over time, they become more extreme, bold and mob-like. It is a deadly combination: blindly and boldly more extreme. Remember when people said, “I did not know anyone who voted for Trump,” or “I had no idea that Kansas would support abortion legislation?” The lack of diversity and attendant blindness lowers the IQ of the group. It is not enough to be “conveniently” diverse. As one board member lamented, “I graduated from Yale and you graduated from Princeton,” is not diversity. Rather shoot for constructive oppositional “diversity” – gender, race/ethnicity, ideological, theological and geographical differences that tie to issues that matter most, thus enabling broader perspective and greater innovation.
And, it is not enough to just include – also engage. Engagement means taking action to stay connected, open to opposing views and polling “outsider” group members to avoid hearing just from the loudest or majority positions. How would our world be different if rather than demonizing them, the NRA engaged outsiders to consider key concerns regarding access to assault rifles? Or, if progressive transgender leaders engaged outsider concerns regarding age-appropriate access to gender-affirming care. When groups and their leaders ignore those who hold different or unpopular opinions, who sit silently in alienation, they contribute to the narrowing and uniting of tomorrow’s mobs. Engaging outsiders broadens commitment – so crucial to implementation of big decisions that require support from those luke-warm or even somewhat opposed.
3. Counter victim-addicts that impede purposeful progress: I believe no greater harm can befall individuals or groups than to become addicted to the drama of their victim status. Black, Hispanic, rural, gay, trans, poor, disabled – unequal opportunity and unfair treatment comes to many groups. Regardless, as individuals or groups take on the resentful mindset of a victim, entitlement undermines responsibility and accountability – so crucial to purposeful thriving. Two examples:
The Texas Attorney General was indicted on felony securities fraud in 2015 and impeached last week by the Texas House on 20 articles of impeachment including bribery. The testimony of more than a dozen members of his own staff including four whistle-blowers contributed to the indictment. Yet, despite wide-spread knowledge of his history, he was re-elected in the Fall of 2022 by a healthy margin. Why? In my view, because many of his supporters – self-proclaimed righteous and upstanding – were so blinded by their woundedness and contempt for his opponents, that they “took a break from their conscience.”
Black Lives Matter, after the death of George Floyd, in an outpouring of support, received over $77 million in fiscal 2021. Yet, highly publicized reports of financial impropriety dropped the giving by nearly 90% a year later. No one knows exactly what happened, but it appears a very purposeful group focused on racial equality felt entitled to override their conscience, inflicting great damage to their cause.
There is a step that follows being stuck in victimhood. It is called “overcoming” and it has two parts: acknowledging the pain associated with the problem and then purposefully moving-on. As a culture, it is time to acknowledge and purposefully move on. President Trump – election rigged? Please move on! Inequality? With purpose, move on. Gender discrimination? Purposefully move on! Immigration? Move on purposefully to fix it. It is time each of us stands up, stops the drama-filled mobs, and moves on to purposeful action.
Recently I lead a Relational Leadership session for Denominational leaders in Oklahoma. Before we started, it was announced that our meeting place was formerly Indian tribal land, and an elderly lady was asked to speak. Aided by a walker, she slowly moved forward to speak:
She said, “My name is Grace Goodeagle and I am a member of the Quapaw Nation.” She looked like someone from central casting: beautiful copper-colored skin that glowed, sculpted facial features and a quiet, warm articulate voice. She highlighted key points: “The Quapaw were doing okay but not great, their journey reaching back to her great grandmother has been hard – they were originally under the jurisdiction of the U.S. War Department. In more recent times they had to sue the U.S. government because of neglect and violation of treaty agreements – and the Quapaw won. They meet annually as a tribe in the first week of July – community is really important to them. She is a long-standing member of the church where we met.” What she said was interesting and informative. How she said it was inspiring. Strong but loving and not a single hint of malice or victim came through. With all the mistreatment and reneging on treaties (“possess the land as long as the grass grows or the water runs…”) – she was the ultimate example of leadership in a tribe – without being tribal.
Grace Goodeagle could be a Mob Star. Instead, she chooses to be a Mob-Stopper. She acknowledges the pain and the problems, but is about moving on – purposeful overcoming, including legal action. What if we and ultimately our groups, countered the distraction of destructive mobs by becoming committed Mob-Stoppers.