Crowds

Crowds March 21, 2016

Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd was first published in 1895. It reads like something taken from today’s headlines about the crowds generated by Donald Trump’s campaign.

Le Bon argued that a crowd involved the “disappearance of conscious personality and the turning of feelings and thoughts in a definite direction, which are the primary characteristics of a crowd about to become organised, do not always involve the simultaneous presence of a number of individuals on one spot.” The most striking feature of crowd psychology was the formation of a consciousness that went beyond the consciousness of the individuals: “The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation.”

He compared it to a chemical reaction, in which several elements are combined to form “a new body possessing properties quite different from those of the bodies that have served to form it.”

Le Bon argued that crowds were less intelligent than the people who made up the crowd. In a psychoanalytic move, he suggested that the “unconscious elements which constitute the genius of a race that all the individuals belonging to it resemble each other, while it is principally in respect to the conscious elements of their character—the fruit of education, and yet more of exceptional hereditary conditions—that they differ from each other.” Thus, “these general qualities of character, governed by forces of which we are unconscious, and possessed by the majority of the normal individuals of a race in much the same degree—it is precisely these qualities, I say, that in crowds become common property.” And this is why crowds “can never accomplish acts demanding a high degree of intelligence. . . . they can only bring to bear in common on the work in hand those mediocre qualities which are the birthright of every average individual. In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated.”

He traces the stupidity of crowds to two sources: “The first is that the individual forming part of a crowd acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept under restraint. He will be the less disposed to check himself from the consideration that, a crowd being anonymous, and in consequence irresponsible, the sentiment of responsibility which always controls individuals disappears entirely. The second cause, which is contagion. . . . In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest.”

Le Bon’s elitism is evident, but he is not wrong. As we enter Holy Week, we should be reminded of the contagion of crowds. And we should realize that once gathered and energized, we no longer can predict how a crowd will behave.


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