Audience is a reward for mogging. Necessarily so. To see this, let’s take a look at the etymology of ‘mog’. It derives from the noun ‘AMOG’, or Alpha Male Of the Group. The Alpha Male’s social dominance causes most interaction within a group to be focused on him. The group is, in a sense, his audience.
To understand mogging, we must first grasp that it is a transfer of status. That is, most forms of mogging attempt to raise or lower the status of individuals via game-like structures, with defined roles and a structurally predictable script. There is always a mogger, a moggee, and, crucially, an audience (which can coincide with the moggee, by design or accident). The moggee may or may not be present. So, there are at least three roles in a mog, of which the role of audience may be played by a group. This gives us three basic forms of mogging.
Two-person mogging is Autist mogging. If you attempt a mog with just one other person present, and you are only capable of gaining status if the other person loses status (as is necessary, since status is zero-sum), you get a terminally stupid situation that only Autists will attempt to enact. Note that two-person moggings with an absent moggee are really three-role moggings, so they don’t count.
In a two-person situation, you either get non-adversarial self-mogs (which reinforce existing status), or an adversarial mog. Since social proof works by majority vote, two-person adversarial mogs cannot work unless the moggee laughs at himself, accepting a loss of status. If the moggee fights back, with no neutral audience to determine status changes, you get a pointless game of one-upmanship. This is why the mog is autist. It boils down to he-said-she-said. Without an audience, there is no mogging, and there is no meaningful transfer of AMOG status.
One-person mogging is Sociopath mogging, and is psychologically more complex. It can only happen when the mogger and audience are the same person (which replaces social proof with individual judgment), and everybody else present is a moggee, often unaware that they are being mogged. Sociopath mogging often possesses push-button cruelty, in the sense of a cat-and-mouse “pushing buttons” exercise in viciousness for private pleasure, and is “objective” mogging in that sense, since the moggee’s loss of status is reflective of an “objective” fact about the world.
But mogging gets really interesting when there are more than two active participants. That gets you to Normie mogging, an engine of social status transfers.
In Normie mogging, as with Autist mogging, the status transfer comes via the judgment of somebody other than the mogger (audience != mogger != moggee). But unlike the two-person stalemate that is the norm in Autist mogging, Normie mogging usually creates clear outcomes because democratic social proof can work. The smallest meaningful Normie group is three people (including some special cases where the moggee is absent, and both mogger and audience accept the proposed status transfer, providing a 2/3 social-proof majority).
In general, the transfer of status depends entirely on the reactions of the audience. What breaks the status stalemate in groups of three is that meaningful status movements can occur. Alphas can become Betas, and Betas can become Alphas. Due to additive effects, bigger groups are even better: if three people, who collectively are all Betas, are present, then we can add up all the micro-shifts in status and get a macro-shift in status.
How does mogging create status transfers? Consider a simple three-person situation. A attempts a mog of B. Without C present, you’d get Autist dynamics. But if C is present and deems the mog successful, he bonds with the mogger and transfers status to A, in the sense that B (and C, to an extent) are now envious of A. If he frowns or otherwise indicates that the mog was in bad taste, he bonds with the moggee and transfers status in the other direction (A is now envious of B). And crucially, if he does not react, no status is transferred.
Laugh/frown votes are a powerful weapon for the passive members of any situational group. In the most extreme situation – the smallest possible group of three people – there is enormous power wielded by just one person.
Apologies to Venkat