It is time, it is past time, to pull out our copies of Gustave Le Bon’s “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind”. Le Bon argued that a psychological crowd can be created at times, and that its nature was anything but the nature of a rational person. The crowd creation could occur even among dispersed individuals if they were subjected to common crowd-creating influences or stimuli.
The demonstrations in the streets of America have been called “protests”. That can’t be taken for granted as an accurate description of what they are. A thinking person does not accept media descriptions of events. The behavior we are seeing has other roots. Whatever those roots are, the phenomenon has passed into irrational crowd behavior. There are numerous people on the streets unhappy with the existing justice system, but who have little idea what to replace it with if it’s destroyed. That’s irrational. Many are not thinking of what sort of system inimical to their well-being might replace it, and that’s irrational. There are other people who crave the power to uproot the existing system and replace it with some sort of vaguely-conceived people’s socialist or communist system, run by a dominant clique. The systems they propose to institute are irrational and aim to defeat rational alternatives.
This is not to say that the system we find ourselves saddled with is totally rational and beyond improvement. It is to say that we won’t find an easy path to betterment by marching up and down the streets in unthinking crowds waving signs with silly slogans. There are other paths, such as ending the War on Drugs and ending unions of public employees.
To save time, here are quotes from Le Bon to be found here. My comments apply these quotes to the George Floyd case. They are in brackets.
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”
[A series of illusions relating to racism are at work at present. These were preceded by illusions related to a new virus and the possibility of death brought nearer to the conscious mind.]
“A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first…A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images invoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed facts….Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images.
[The video of Floyd’s death is the image that has invoked other images of pervasive racism.]
“All the civilizations we know have been created and directed by small intellectual aristocracies, never by people in the mass. The power of crowds is only to destroy.”
[Destruction by a crowd is not just property but working institutions and systems.]
“We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.”
[This suggests we look for those who are controlling the “suggestion” and whipping up the “contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction”. We may find that modern communications facilitate widespread contagion, and many people in positions of influence help spread it. And there clearly is “the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts, such as defunding police.]
“In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated.”
[Look at what the signs say.]
“One of the most constant characteristics of beliefs is their intolerance. The stronger the belief, the greater its intolerance. Men dominated by a certitude cannot tolerate those who do not accept it.”
[Certainly, antifa is a prime example. That’s for starters. What reaction would you provoke if you entered a “peaceful” crowd with a sign even saying something like “Let’s calm down, folks” much less “All lives matter” or “The country was not founded on racism”.]
9:15 am on June 8, 2020
