Why is everything a large group of people do collectively called a 'mob' these days, for everything? Is no one allowed to do things together anymore without being chastised?
>Why is everything a large group of people do collectively called a 'mob' these days?
These days? It's always been thus.
The Roman Poet Juvenal who said:
"It is all too easy to fall from power – like Sejanus. The mob follows Fortuna and cares for nothing but bread and circuses." (Circuses can also be games, or in modern times TV, Games, Netflix, Reddit, etc...).
You ever see Gladiator?
Lucilla: "The gods have spared you. Today I saw a slave become more powerful than the Emperor of Rome."
Maximus: "The gods have spared me? I am at their mercy, with the power only to amuse a mob!"
Lucilla: "That is power. The mob is Rome. And while Commodus controls them he controls everything."
We have a literal cult controlling at least 40% of the minds of the USA (QAnon). A literal mob almost led a successful insurrection. (If they were more organized, they would've had a higher body count).
A literal mob, possibly manipulated by finance majors orchestrated a pump-and-dump under the guise of "stick it to the man", just disrupted wallstreet in a pretty spectacular way. Sure, they did stick it to the man, for a bit - but I'm sure a lot of people also lost their ass on this.
In a mob there's a bunch of people who basically just are following a fluid current in history, most are unaware as to why and the best answer is probably: "I wasn't doing anything else, so why not?", or "So and so told me, and I trust them" and often that trust is mis-placed, like believing a highschool dropout's opinion on climate change instead of the consensus by 90%+ of the leading scientists across the globe.
40% say that Trump won the election.
It will take a couple of years to see how many people are QAnon/Trump zealots and how many are Republicans held hostage while waiting for someone to viably step up.
But for now, it's 40% that's a mix of cultists and people who act like cultists for the time being.
