A 1958 Disney “True-Life Adventure” nature documentary titled White Wilderness is infamous for its scene depicting a mass migration of lemmings, small tundra-dwelling rodents, that ends with the furry creatures committing mass suicide by following each other over a cliff where they subsequently drown in the Arctic Ocean.
Virtually nothing about this part of the documentary is true. The entire scene was staged using a handful of lemmings—from a species that does not usually migrate anywhere—that were herded by the film crew after being spun around on turntables, and then physically pushed over a cliff into a river in Alberta. It wasn’t until the airing of an early 1980s news program about animal cruelty that the deception became widely known to the public. But by that time, lemmings had become a metaphor.
And a creature that would mindlessly follow its comrades over the cliff makes for really good metaphor. Mass conformity is a defining attribute of a modern lifestyle, and there is much about the collective self-destructive behavior of civilized humans that is closely analogous with the frenetic mass suicide migrations of mythical lemmings.
Add to that the numerous cases of actual mass suicide (e.g., the 913 folks who drank the Jonestown Kool Aid; the 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult who killed themselves to meet the mothership hiding behind a comet; the 500 members of a Ugandan Doomsday sect and the 70 Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas who incinerated themselves).
As a metaphor for the pointless commotion of contemporary consumer society, however, the real story offers a far better analog than does the myth. We seem to have much more in common with the actual rodents used in the staged documentary than with their legendary counterparts. The lemmings in the film were not blindly following each other into oblivion, they were desperately trying to escape the terrifying situation that had been forced upon them. They were intentionally disoriented—spun on turntables—in order to make their behavior consistent with the story being told by their captors. They were forcefully shoved off the cliff. In the end, they were given no option but to follow each other into the icy waters and swim to their deaths.
Similarly, much of our own mass-conforming behavior reflects desperate attempts to escape the reality of our situation. We are chronically disoriented and kept in a perpetual state of distraction so that we remain docile and receptive to the demands of our corporate captors. We work to consume, and consume because we are given no choice. Our self-destructive conformity is not being driven by some collective unconscious death instinct. It is the result of countless specific acts of coercion, and it is maintained through structures of power and control that are underwritten by lethal violence. In the end, we have been given no option but to follow each other into the icy inhuman waters of industrial mass society and swim to our deaths.