Donald Trump recently, and in all apparent sincerity, suggested putting homeless and indigent people in forced governmental housing—a 21st-century concentration camp, really. A lot of people have focused attention on the barbarity of the suggestion. But from the viewpoint of group polarization, something more may be communicated here.
Homelessness is an exposure and indictment of capitalism, a system that promises riches to those who try hard enough. In the orthodoxy, all failures in capitalism are individual failures, not systemic or structural ones; but plenty of people suffer generational poverty, and other factors can be identified that do not begin or reside inside the individual.
For a capitalist, to see a homeless person is to be reminded of these inherent flaws or weaknesses; and this creates extreme discomfort, which can boil over into anger. Witness the increasing number of attacks on homeless persons, especially by those who possess right-wing (economically conservative / libertarian free-market laissez-faire) ideology. Those attackers cannot stand to see reminders of their ideology’s failure.
But what Trump communicated may go further. His words may signal just how threatened these capitalists feel. They may “know”—either explicitly or instinctively—that polarization helps drive naive populations to follow the behavior of the dominant group. There may be so few in that fabled 1% (or whatever slice is measured of monied elites) that they feel that to drive the masses they must demonstrate even more intolerance of indicators of capitalism’s failures.
They must realize on some level that they cannot leave opinion to chance, because, in the absence of polarization, groups/individuals naïve to a directive may lessen the stampede toward the previously pre-established goal (that is, maximum profit-seeking as a master goal). Enough of that naïve wandering toward alternative goals would lead to a dissipation of overall impetus toward that master goal, scattering the power base of the monied elites and eventually leading to the consideration of other master or guiding goals. Capitalism—greed—would not be the central organizing scheme of society.
See this DW documentary, “Group intelligence—how people behave en masse”:
(cue to 18:06)
Voiceover: Fish can be used to demonstrate how democratic decision-making takes place en masse, and how important minorities are in that context, too.
A few fish are trained to go to the yellow food source; others, to go to the blue. But the fish that were set on the yellow food source were much more dominant, because they had been trained for a longer period. In the end, all the fish followed them.
Iain Couzin: What we found is, if we put 5 or 10 untrained, uninformed individuals that you may think wouldn’t influence the decisions at all, into the group, we could completely reverse that behavior. And now the weakly opinionated majority will dominate.
Voiceover: That means good decisions are based on diversity, not conformity.
So this Trump-proposed “policy”—this fantasy of state-driven sadism and nonconsensuality—is really a way to buoy and reinforce the orthodoxy of capitalism, to create even more impetus toward rewarding greed through the mechanism of punishing those who expose the Potemkin village of the economic structure of Adam Smith.
The takeaway here is that uninitiated masses are due to drift away from capitalism, and in time a new paradigm would emerge through a truly open arena of ideas. But this is not an option in a society where the monied control the means of idea production, where nearly everything in society is built to reflect the legitimacy of the economic system by which profit itself is created. Profit doesn’t always equal prosperity.