The Crowd: A Study Of The Popular Mind By Gustave Le Bon

The book is an "an account of the characteristics of crowds".


"History tells us, that from the moment when the moral forces on which a civilisation rested have lost their strength, its final dissolution is brought about by those unconscious and brutal crowds known, justifiably enough, as barbarians.

Civilisations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds.

Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilisation involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture — all of them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realising."

"Crowds act like those microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies. When the structure of a civilisation is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall. "

Crowds cannot build civilizations. They can only destroy them.

Nature of The Crowd

"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 disappearsentirely."

"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."

"A third cause, and by far the most important, determines in the individuals of a crowd special characteristics which are quite contrary at times to those presented by the isolated individual. "

"The activity of the brain being paralysed in the case of the hypnotised subject, the latter becomes the slave of all the unconscious activities of his spinal cord, which the hypnotiser directs at will. "

"He is no longer conscious of his acts."

"special characteristics of crowds there are several — such as impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgment and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of the sentiments, and others..."

"Doubtless a crowd is often criminal, but also it is often heroic... Such heroism is without doubt somewhat unconscious, but it is of such heroism that history is made."

Leaders of Crowds

"The leaders we speak of are more frequently men of action than thinkers. They are not gifted with keen foresight, nor could they be, as this quality generally conduces to doubt and inactivity. They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous, excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness."

"Contempt and persecution do not affect them, or only serve to excite them the more."

"The arousing of faith — whether religious, political, or social, whether faith in a work, in a person, or an idea — has always been the function of the great leaders of crowds, and it is on this account that their influence is always very great. Of all the forces at the disposal of humanity, faith has always been one of the most tremendous, and the gospel rightly attributes to it the powerof moving mountains. To endow a man with faith is to multiply his strength tenfold. "

How Leaders control Crowds?

"The Means of Action of the Leaders: Affirmation, Repetition, Contagion."

"Affirmation pure and simple, kept free of all reasoning and all proof, is one of the surest means of making an idea enter the mind of crowds."

"it is necessary that the crowd should have been previously prepared by certain circumstances"

Prestige is also important. Leaders need to be seen as prestigious.

"The reason why the electors, of whom a majority are working men or peasants, so rarely choose a man from their own ranks to represent them is that such a person enjoys no prestige among them."








Tweet

Related articles

Million Dollar Habits: 10 Simple Steps to Getting Everything You Want in Life by Robert Ringer - book review

Dark Psychology and Gaslighting Manipulation: Influence Human Behavior with Mind Control Techniques: How to Camouflage, Attack and Defend Yourself by Ryan Mace

External Links