Virtue-Signalling Outrage Mobs

Note: Source for snapshot above is the entry for the film, 1984, at the Internet Movie Database--and this entry is found at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087803

When tyrants want to dominate over people, enriching themselves with money and power while lowering overall living standards of their own nation--they find different ways to stoke hate in the population, dividing the country so that it can be harshly ruled.

Such a "divide-&-conquer" strategy prevents unified resistance to the harsh rule which they plan to use in order to amass personal riches and power.

In Orwell's 1984--as depicted by the movie scene above--there were public events called "Two Minutes Hate" and the citizen-subjects were indoctrinated to express hate when "enemies of the government" were viewed on screen.

In the early 1900s, a Dada counter-culture movement was inculcated--inspired by nihilist themes from surrealist artists*--and then utilized in order to give rise to concentrated fascism throughout Europe, leading us into two World Wars.

In the 1960s in China, 20 million high-school and college students (2.5% of the population) were indoctrinated with hate toward the "enemies of communism."

These youths, known as the Red Guard, then went on a moral rampage against their fellow citizens, murdering a million of them and using organized harassment and persecution (even physical torture) on millions more.

They even took the son of Deng Xiaoping--the secretary-general of the Chinese Communist Party (and a rival politician to Mao Zedong)--and threw him off of a roof, paralyzing him for life.

In the USA, tyrants tried to create an American version of the Red Guard with the hippie/Beatnik movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

This attempt--to use indoctrinated youths in order to destroy constitutional rule of law--was not as successful in the USA when compared to attempts elsewhere and all throughout history.

Even so, it did lead to a vast erosion of individual rights, especially property rights, in the USA from the late 1960s going forward--and this hampered the rise in US living standards, especially from the 1970s going forward.

Currently, groups like Antifa are the most likely candidates to be used in order to further the goals of predatory tyrants who still reside in the USA. A general term for a concept of these kinds of groups may be "virtue-signalling outrage mobs", or V-SOMs ("vee-soms"), for short.

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*Examples of such artists are Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Salvador Dali. In the First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), Andre Breton describes the kind of noncognitive fist-shaking and existentialist nihilism which is promoted by such art, in his definition of surrealism:

"to express ... the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic and moral preoccupations."