Humans are idolaters. Or at least most are when pressured. What we're seeing now is an expression of idolatry and dogma. And bear in mind that the proudly anti-religious are often the most idolatrous and dogmatic.

Whenever people are getting whipped up for a cause – any cause – that's the right time to step away. And if they start chanting, move away quickly. I'll forgo the long explanation, but joining the pack slays reason, and for as long as you remain in the pack.

And this really is idolatry, because whatever we place above reason… whatever we place above open questioning… has become our god.

The crowd is always a deceiver. No one expressed this more concisely than Simone Weil, when she said, "conscience is deceived by the social." Conscience is individual, social is collective, and the two are forever at odds. Likewise, sanity is individual and mania is collective.

Within the crowd, malice appears as duty, honor, order and justice. To reside in the crowd is to be deceived; the only question is how much.

Just a few specifics:

Any time you surrender your decision-making to outsiders, you are making an error. (And yes, that means that authority is fundamentally bad.)

The more intimidated you are, the less your better functions can operate.

Moral courage is far, far more important than physical courage.

To make the point simply: The mob is the enemy of what's best in you. Separate from it at your first opportunity.

Civilization is not a function of systems, it's a function of what's in us. We are the primaries; all systems, good, bad or indifferent, are derivatives.

The great error of the democratic era, certainly true over my now-fairly-considerable lifetime, was that people believed Democracy would solve all their problems, and would by itself assure civilization. That, however, has always been a false dream. What matters is what we are as individuals. 

No institution is to be taken as anything more than a blunt tool. The civilization we hold in ourselves is what ties the world to sanity, and nothing else can, no matter how it is advertised.