What causes this phenomenon that characterizes people as such?

Human beings have a strong psychological need to belong to some herd. Those among them who are not sufficiently mature and developed do not overcome it. I’m currently writing a column about this.

Benjamin,
You can look at the psychoanalytic analysis Erich Fromm (a social psychologist) made of this phenomenon in his books The Art of Loving, Escape from Freedom, and Disobedience: Thoughts on the Liberation of Man. He argues that, in his view, it stems from a basic insecurity a person has about his own existence—that the person did not recover well from the separation from the mother and the protective womb (a symbiotic unity), and he seeks to return to that security by nullifying himself before the group or community. He gives as examples the fascist regimes of modern Europe, or modern factories and corporations in which the individual has no personal uniqueness but is swallowed up in a large system. A person loves his place in the herd because that way he feels protected (everything is clear, there’s no need to think or to be an independent subject).

Hello Shai,
Do you mean a chronic “illness,” an inborn defect? Is the need for that extreme sense of “protection” impossible to cure?
P.S.: At the end of the day, all human beings tend to belong to a large tribe (for example, the Jewish people); ostensibly, that kind of belonging does not harm their independent personality.

Benjamin,
You are trying with all your might to smear a public group you have a problem with, and I feel that you’re trying to drag me there and put words in my mouth. Forgive me, but I won’t cooperate with that.

Shai, you wrote, “He argues that, in his view, it stems from a basic insecurity a person has about his own existence—that the person did not recover well from the separation from the mother and the protective womb…” — I’m not trying to smear personality-less members of cults. People who want to spend their lives in self-nullification before leaders out of sadomasochistic symbiosis do not interest me at all; only the phenomenon and its influence do.

He is describing a psychological dynamic; that doesn’t necessarily mean it applies to this or that population, only that such a tendency exists in the psyche.

A reminder about the column…