The Psychology: The Comfort of the Crowd
Most people hand over their minds long before adulthood — the ego forms, the pattern locks in, and the world teaches them to stop looking inward. By the time they reach their teens, they’ve already accepted the script, and when school ends they don’t awaken, they simply stop questioning. They call it freedom, but it’s just the moment the conditioning no longer needs supervision. This is not a personal failing; it is the intended outcome of systems designed to exhaust curiosity and reward obedience. By the time formal education ends, many individuals are so relieved to be free of pressure that they drift effortlessly into the soft gravity of the crowd.
And the crowd welcomes them. It offers ready-made opinions, pre-packaged beliefs, and a sense of belonging that requires no effort. It removes the burden of judgment. It makes thinking optional. It gives people the illusion of participation while keeping them passive.
This is the psychology of the crowd:
- It rewards laziness by offering simple answers to complex problems.
- It rewards conformity by making dissent feel dangerous or embarrassing.
- It rewards passivity by giving people something to follow.
- It rewards distraction by keeping the mind too busy to notice its own stagnation.
Most people accept this arrangement because it feels safe. They confuse comfort with clarity, and familiarity with truth. They believe that because they are no longer in school, they are free — when in reality, they have simply traded one form of structure for another, far more subtle one.
But here is the uncomfortable truth: If you feel angry at the world, it is partly because you abandoned your own development. You stopped learning. You stopped questioning. You let your mind atrophy while blaming the systems around you.
The Hurdles We Build to Protect Ourselves
The most persistent obstacles are not external. They are self-constructed — built instinctively to protect the ego from the discomfort of standing alone. The moment an individual senses the possibility of stepping outside the crowd, fear rises: fear of judgment, fear of being wrong, fear of losing belonging, fear of being seen. To avoid that fear, people create their own hurdles:
- “I’m too tired to learn.”
- “I already know enough.”
- “I don’t have time to think about this.”
- “Everyone else seems fine with it.”
These are not barriers imposed by the world. They are psychological shelters designed to keep the individual safely inside the collective.
Ancient systems understood this long before modern psychology gave it names. In Hindu tradition, Ganesha is revered as the remover of obstacles — but the deeper teaching is that the obstacles are internal. Ganesha removes the hurdles the individual has placed in their own path: fear, ignorance, inertia, ego-defensiveness. In many interpretations, he also places obstacles, not as punishment, but as catalysts for growth. The obstacle is the lesson. The removal is the transformation.
This theme appears everywhere:
- Buddhism: the hindrances arise from within.
- Taoism: the block in the path is the path.
- Stoicism: “The impediment to action advances action.”
- Advaita Vedanta: ignorance (avidya) is the only real barrier to the Self.
And in the West, the same principle appears in its most confrontational form.
Attachment as a Self-Created Barrier
Christ’s teaching, “Give up your things and follow me,” is not a call to poverty — it is a psychological instruction. He is pointing directly at attachment as one of the primary hurdles that prevents individuality. Possessions create identity. Identity creates fear. Fear keeps the individual tied to the crowd. The instruction is simple: you cannot follow truth while clinging to the things that define you.
The Essenes understood this with remarkable clarity. Their practice of collective ownership was not a political experiment; it was a method of breaking individuals free from the ego’s grip on “mine.” By removing personal possessions, they removed the illusion that identity is built from accumulation. What remained was the individual stripped of social armour — forced to confront themselves directly.
Hindu and Buddhist traditions echo the same insight. Non-attachment is not about rejecting the world; it is about refusing to let the world define you. The more a person clings to possessions, status, or roles, the more they fear losing them — and the more they retreat into the safety of the crowd. Across civilisations, the message is consistent: Attachment is a self-created hurdle, and liberation begins with loosening its grip.
It’s important to be clear: this is not an argument for communism, collectivism, or any political ideology that dissolves the individual into the group. Nor is it an endorsement of capitalism, which often mistakes accumulation for identity and consumption for freedom. What we are describing is something different — a mode of being that predates these systems and will outlast them. It has no modern label because it is not an economic structure; it is a psychological orientation. It is the recognition that freedom does not come from owning everything or owning nothing, but from not being owned by what you possess.
The Dunning–Kruger Trap
A modern expression of these self-created hurdles is the Dunning–Kruger effect — the tendency for people with limited knowledge to overestimate their understanding. Many individuals genuinely believe they are “educated enough” to hold strong opinions on subjects they have barely explored. They mistake familiarity for expertise, confidence for competence, and exposure for understanding. The less they know, the more certain they feel.
This creates a dangerous form of wilful ignorance: people assume they already know enough, so they stop learning entirely. The crowd thrives on this. It depends on individuals who have lost the habit of inquiry and replaced it with the comfort of certainty.
Because the truth is simple: Individuation is impossible for anyone who believes they already know enough. This is the psychological barrier that must be dismantled before anything deeper can begin.