by Tang Huyen

Crashed persons evolve in the opposite direction from Buddhist
cultivation. Buddhist cultivation aims at wholeness; crashed
persons aim at fragmenting themselves further and further.

I am interested in the phenomenon of midlife crashes — or
post-midlife crises — because of a topical outbreak on
these boards over the years. Let me follow your example
in picking away at this topic, in no particular order. All
of the following is anecdotal and none of it is scientific.

The crashes are spectacular. The first thing they do to
their owners — recipients, victims — is to rob them of
self-awareness and self-consciousness, so that they turn
them into zombies who don't know who they are and what
they do. Their owners become unreachable, and to point
out to them that something has changed in them brings a
panic reaction and massive, frontal denial — and that's
just telling them that something has changed, not even
that something bad has happened.

They then evolve in the opposite direction from Buddhist
cultivation. Buddhist cultivation aims at wholeness;
crashed persons aim at fragmenting themselves further
and further, disjoining themselves further and further,
dissociating themselves further and further. Not that
they do it intentionally — the crash proceeds on its own,
inexorably, even as its owners deny that anything is
happening.

Some of them post on these boards and insist on posting
right through their crash, as it is going on, so that we can
watch them break up in slow motion, with bits and pieces
falling off one at a time. The crashed people are gross
caricatures of the very same pre-crash people. They are
fearful, paranoid, angry, bitter, don't know who they are
and what they do, and have to grab something as their
identity — so on one hand they grab somebody to be their
leader (for their positive identity), and on the other they
grab somebody to be their enemy (for their negative
identity). They make a herd with the former and chase the
latter around and around constantly, in uncontrollable
rage, for months or years.

As to the somebody that they choose to make a herd with:
they altogether get carried away on a cloud of mutually
affirming enthusiasm, since they all die for some positive
identity and stroking. And to fortify that enthusiasm —
in the Greek sense of being indwelt by God — they are
intransigent and belligerent towards the somebody whom
they choose as their enemy, though this somebody could
have been a friend prior to their crash.

What is interesting, and this is largely speculative, is
that some such people who are drawn to a herd by a
crash can be drawn to a herd before their crash. That
some people are drawn to a herd after their crash should
be self-evident. That some are drawn to a herd before
their crash is more interesting. The incubation of a crash
can take years, and during that time the level of anger
and energy — usually visible as bashing energy — increases
markedly, and its owner will draw to a herd as his cause
and expend his energy doing the bashing on behalf of
the herd, perhaps as compensation as he feels his identity
weaken. When the crash comes, his energy depletes itself,
often quickly, and on top of this loss of energy — which
by itself can be traumatic enough — there can be a chain
reaction that evacuates much from him: perhaps his
reality testing, perhaps his social skills, perhaps even
his intelligence.

Whether the drawing to a herd precedes or follows the
crash, during and after their crash, it all happens as if
they died and somebody else inherited their computers,
read their postings and email, and tried clumsily to
mimic their style. Since I read the postings of such
people, and may correspond with them in email, before
their crash, I get to know them reasonably well — and
boom, they crash and become almost completely
different people.

One very interesting phenomenon related to the above
is that in such herd cases, hierarchy is determined by
energy. Those who are crashed tend first to associate
with people with lots of energy and charisma, so that
they can derive energy and identity from the latter. It
can happen that the irrational behaviour of such a
leader — as fortified by the crashed people who elect
to bond with and support him or her — leads him or
her to such frenzy that he or she ends up with his or
her own crash, by which he or she loses energy and
much else, including intelligence. Then the former
followers, who still have whatever energy they have,
suddenly emerge as the leader, and turn around to
whack the former leader pitilessly. The whole group
has no sense of proportions and limits — just as they
whack their supposed enemies with unlimited anger
and bitterness, they can turn on each other with
unlimited anger and bitterness, too. The former leader
then has to kiss up to the former followers to make up.
They still get carried away on a cloud of mutually
affirming enthusiasm, but now, with an altered hierarchy
dictated by a different constellation of energy, they
are obliged to participate in unforeseen practices to
maintain identity within the group — namely, the
reversal of the pecking order. Which can be very ironic.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on January 17, 2005, in response to a post by Chris Degnen on herd instinct and the difference between adaptive and maladaptive group behaviour. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

Tang Huyen is writing phenomenology drawn from years of newsgroup observation. The crash he describes is a psychological event visible in slow motion through public posting — a disintegration of the self that proceeds in the opposite direction from Buddhist cultivation (which aims at wholeness, not fragmentation). His central observation is that the herd provides substitute identity for those whose internal identity has collapsed: a herd-leader for positive identity, an enemy for negative identity. The energy hierarchy is a separate and subtle observation: hierarchy in such groups tracks energy levels, not merit or wisdom, which means it is subject to sudden inversion when the leader's energy depletes. The former followers become the new enforcers, and the reversal of the pecking order becomes the unforeseen price of group membership.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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