You're listening to the Parsley Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point

signed on Doing Philosophy for Living with Enthop Bettervit.

Our question for episode 382 is what holds a social group together?

And we read Sigmund Freud's Group Psychology and the analysis of the ego from 1921.

For more information about the text and the podcast, please see partially examined life.com.

This is Mark Linson Meyer only accomplishing my heroic deeds with the help of bees and ants in Madison, Wisconsin.

This is Seth Paskin experiencing social angst in Austin, Texas.

This is Wes Allan converging on his ego ideal in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

And this is Dylan Casey, dreading being provoked by danger or the cessation of emotional ties in Madison, Wisconsin.

All right, so we talked recently in our Royce discussion about people bonding in groups and what makes

us do that and what makes a legitimate group.

And Freud seemed, right, at least that suggested to your mind this Freud book, West, that

you had read before more than once.

Yeah.

And I was thinking in particular about something relevant to politics of our times.

And I took this book to be in large part, even though it's in large part about why it is

that groups can have such a negative effect on us, that they can lead us, for instance, to be disinhibited

in certain ways, and meaning to be susceptible to our emotions and incapable of thinking, and then

ultimately capable of great crimes at the group level that we might not be engaged in at the

individual level. Why is our conscience so compromised by groups? And so Freud will take a lot of,

you know, many, many, many various of his theories and try to apply them to that question. And then,

of course, in the course of that, he's going to try to say, well, what is it that binds groups

...