The Beliefs of Cyclones
Don’t we shudder when we think that in a time of popular emotion all it takes is a word, just one word imprudently spoken without hatred by an honest man, to provoke so horrible a murder?
EUGÈNE SUE, THE WANDERING JEW
The most illuminating book ever written about social media was published in 1895. It is called La Psychologie des foules — or, in the English translation that appeared a year later, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. The book is a work of social science that reads like the work of a seer.
“A crowd in the process of formation does not always imply the simultaneous presence of several individuals in one place. Thousands of separated individuals can, at a given moment, under the influence of certain violent emotions…. acquire the characteristic of a psychological crowd. Some chance event uniting them then suffices for their behavior to take on the special form of the acts of crowds.” The author of those sentences was Gustave Le Bon, and he was a kind of political Jules Verne or H.G. Wells. He foresaw many things — for example, that education is no impediment to participation in the crowd mind: “From the time they are part of a crowd, the ignorant and the learned become equally incapable of observation.” As he acidly noted, “a gathering of scholars and artists, by the sole fact that they are gathered together, does not render judgments on general subjects markedly different from those of an assembly of bricklayers or grocers.” And he foresaw, without an inkling of the enabling technology, the entire phenomenon of social media-induced conspiracy theories. QAnon, Pizzagate, criminal murders that are turned into political assassinations, the lie of a stolen presidential election, all the proliferating garbage of our twisted era — the wildfire spread of ideas with no value and no basis in fact — all these dark characteristics of our society are illuminated by what Le Bon intuited and described.
I turned to Le Bon because I needed him. Some time ago I wrote a piece for the New York Times criticizing the anti-Biden stances taken by the Democratic Socialists of America and other progressives. My son, wiser in the ways of the web than me, assured me that the objects of my criticism would not take it lightly, and that he was preparing to defend me. I shrugged it off. After all, these were my comrades. My son was right, of course. Within minutes of the article’s appearance I was being battered on Twitter. This was not simply a matter of the shelter provided by anonymity or the ease with which one can retweet or “like” a negative tweet and bury its subject in invective. There was more at play here, I thought. The venom was spreading with a baffling and sickening rapidity. It was as if the act of reading a tweet caused an uncontrollable desire to spread it further. The fury of one person set off the fury of another, like a virus passing through the population, and there was no herd immunity. There was only a herd.
The malice reached frightening proportions, and looking to understand the spread of this rage, its speed and its virulence, I turned back to Le Bon’s book. In the century after his book was published he was reviled and mocked — as he is more recently in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson’s entertaining book on Twitter mobs — but on reading him again I discovered that when we remove our ideological blinkers (no easy task!) he has far more to say about historical and current developments than his outsider status would lead one to believe.
Le Bon was born Nogent-le-Rorou, in France, in 1841 and died in the Parisian suburb of Marnes-la-Coquette in 1931. He wrote on a dizzying array of subjects. He studied medicine but never practiced it, so we find among his publications a treatise on illnesses of the genitourinary organs, a volume charmingly titled Apparent Deaths and Premature Burials, and a collection of slides for a conference on anatomy and histology. He was also the author of volumes on smoking, on Annamite — or ancient Indochinese — archaeology, on travels to Nepal, on equestrian-ism and its principles. But politics and society were the heart of his work, and the only part of lasting interest.
Le Bon was very much a conservative of his time and place, with a profoundly pessimistic vision of the lifespan of civilizations in the spirit of Gobineau and the later Spengler. Which is to say, there is much in Le Bon to dislike. Hatred of socialism and democracy, of women’s rights and universal education, feature prominently in his writings. His stress on the concept of “nationality” and race, and his contempt for non-white races, are not at all hidden. All this explains his banishment to the sidelines of modern social thought. But Le Bon expresses a big idea that we must not ignore. His central and lasting intuition was that once a person becomes a member of a crowd, he ceases to exist as an individual. He is as if “hypnotized” and is “no longer conscious of his acts.” With the fading of the conscious personality as he joins the crowd, the unconscious personality predominates, “orient[ed] through suggestion and the contagion of feelings and ideas in the same direction” as those around him. “Isolated, he was perhaps a cultivated individual; in a crowd he becomes someone driven by instincts, consequently a barbarian.” Any act becomes possible.
Le Bon’s ominous vision of the crowd was strongly influenced by two events he lived through: the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Boulangist movement of the late 1880s. The Paris Commune, the first working-class government in history, was established at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, in which Le Bon had served as head of the army’s ambulance corps, receiving the Légion d’Honneur for his services. The onerous conditions imposed on Parisians by the victorious Prussians, and the newly formed Second Republic’s attempt to seize cannons paid for by the workers of Montmartre, led to an uprising that established a democratically elected government in Paris in opposition to the official French government in Versailles. A person with Le Bon’s politics could not but look askance on this rebellion, particularly the acts of destruction carried out by supporters of the Commune in its dying days, with the Tuileries, the Louvre, and the Hotel de Ville set aflame and hostages executed in response to the killing of captured communards. The crowd that he witnessed on the streets of Paris did not look to him like men and women fighting for their rights. What he saw was strictly and solely a destructive force.
A later experience of the behavior of the crowd, which he incorporated into his theories, was the short-lived Boulangist movement, which followed the Commune by almost two decades. Boulangism was a diffuse movement that marched behind General Georges Boulanger, a popular figure in the army who was elected to the French Chamber of Deputies in 1887. Behind a vague program that appealed to both the right and the left, to Jews and to anti-Semites, the movement grew by leaps and bounds, until in January 1889 a mass political hysteria swept the country and Boulanger was implored to seize power through a coup d’état. The general refused to do so, the movement faded quickly, and Boulanger fled to Belgium, where he committed suicide on the grave of his mistress in 1891. “What a place in history he would have assumed,” Le Bon wrote, “had his character been strong enough to even slightly support his legend.” The dangers of the crowd were not, for Le Bon, only a matter of history or theory, but also of lived reality. He was witnessing the birth of what came to be called mass politics.
French history was full of examples that he used to support his theories. The bloodiest events of the French Revolution, which of course Le Bon despised, such as the September Massacres of 1792, when prisoners of the Revolution were slaughtered in prisons all over Paris based on ground-less rumors, were the result of a murderous madness that converted ordinary individuals into a blood-lusting crowd. “The crimes of crowds generally have a powerful suggestion as their motive,” he observed, “and the individuals who took part are afterwards persuaded that they obeyed an obligation.”
Both the vicious and the disinterested acts of legislators, whom he also considered a type of crowd, along with juries; and criminal crowds, which he defined as the mobs that carried out the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the killings on the day the Bastille was seized, and the Paris Commune; and voters — all are the result of the crowd mentality. Again citing the French Revolution, he pointed out that among the “most ferocious members of the Convention could be found inoffensive bourgeois who in ordinary circumstances would have been peaceful notaries or virtuous magistrates.” Under the influence of events, however, and gathered as a crowd, “they did not hesitate to approve the most ferocious proposals…. And, contrary to their own interests, renounced their inviolability and decimated themselves.” The surrender of the privileges of the nobility on August 4, 1789 “would certainly never have been accepted by any of its members in isolation.”
It is especially discouraging to think of legislatures, which are supposed to deliberate rationally and decently, as another variety of the herd. Yet even in our own legislatures, in times much less turbulent than revolutionary France but turbulent enough, we have evidence of the truth of Le Bon’s observation that “all mental constitutions contain possibilities of character that can manifest themselves when the environment changes abruptly.” After September 11, swept along by a mass tide, Congress quickly and almost unanimously passed a Patriot Act that few if any had read. And what was Congress during the Trump years if not a majority gone berserk? And with Trump’s defeat, does it not now retain a considerable number of the berserk? As Le Bon said, “The individual in a crowd is a grain of sand among other grains of sand, which the wind blows where it will.”
Though there are sometimes leaderless crowds, as the Black Lives Matter protests demonstrated, crowds generally hunger for leaders, and Le Bon speculated on the qualities of a successful one. Boulangism was a perfect example of the crowd and its leader in action, since people voted for, marched for, and offered power to someone who was the object of almost religious devotion. “One cannot fully understand… certain historical events… unless one has taken into account the religious form the convictions of crowds end up taking.” Boulanger — and history certainly provides no shortage of examples of such courageous or opportunistic figures — was proof for Le Bon that for the crowd “one must be a god for them or nothing.” Even though modern crowds have turned their backs on the words “divinity and religion,” Le Bon shrewdly noted that the Boulangist movement showed “with what ease the religious instincts are ready to be reborn.” The devotion of Trump crowds, where people lined up for hours before the rally was to begin decked out in Trump-themed attire while risking exposure to a deadly virus, bears out Le Bon’s observations. As a black preacher named Jesse Lee Patterson said of Trump in Tulsa, “He is God.” In words that prefigure the personality cults of Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, and other populist authoritarians, as well as the totalitarian idolatries that preceded them, Le Bon remarks that “the power to remedy all injustices, all evils was attributed to him, and thousands of people would have given their lives for him.”
The success of the countless falsehoods and the impoverished language of authoritarian leaders past and present are explained by Le Bon, who observed, “Pure and simple affirmation, freed of any reasoning or proof, constitutes a sure method to have an idea penetrate the mind of the crowd. The more concise, and free of proof and demonstration, it is, the more authority it has. [This affirmation] nevertheless only acquires real influence on condition that it is constantly repeated and, insofar as possible, in the same terms.” Repetition is indeed one of the primary techniques of demagoguery, notably on social media. The horror of this degradation of speech is expressed with great beauty by Yeats in his poem “The Leaders of Crowds”:
They must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of a base intent;
Pull down established honour; hawk for news Whatever their loose fantasy invent
And murmur it with bated breath, as though The abounding gutter had been Helicon
Or calumny a song…
The crowd, in its fanatical belief in its leader and his bromides, has a crude epistemology. “Having no doubts about what it believes to be truth or error and possessing a clear idea of its strength,” Le Bon writes, “the crowd is as authoritarian as it is intolerant.” And he adds, in cautionary words that apply also to digital life, “An individual can accept contradiction and discussion; a crowd, never.” The futility of arguing with members of any crowd is obvious, for in the psychology of crowds what is clear is “the impotence of reason upon them. The ideas capable of influencing crowds are not rational ideas but feelings expressed in the form of ideas.” Or, more poetically, “One no more argues the beliefs of crowds than of cyclones.” What confers its ferocity upon the cyclone is the triumph of emotion over thought. Ideas do not at bottom matter to crowds. “People who seem to be fighting for ideas are really fighting for feelings from which the ideas are derived,” he wrote in a later book on the nature of opinions and beliefs.
And there is another characteristic feature of the crowd for Le Bon: it guarantees social fragmentation, the descent into schism and sectarianism — into what we call polarization. “The tables of the law are no longer the same for all the tribes of Israel.” People come to prefer “ready-made opinions,” which are shorthand for entire identities. “One moment of conversation with an individual suffices for one to know what he reads, his usual occupations, and the environment in which he lives.” Political and social debates consist in the playing-out of these identity packages. “The mere fact of being a monarchist inevitably led…. to certain definite ideas, and the fact of being a republican conferred ideas that were precisely the opposite. A monarchist knew for certain that man did not descend from monkeys, and a republican knew just as certainly that he did.” This made discussion worthless, for “to debate rationally a mystical or affective belief serves only to exalt it.”
Dissolve now to the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021. The events of that day, with its echoes of the March on Rome, the Beer Hall Putsch, and, most appositely, the anti-parliamentary far-right riot of February 6, 1934 in front of the National Assembly in Paris, took Trump supporters’ vision of their leader as a deific figure to its highest (or lowest) level and, almost point by point, bore out nearly all of Le Bon’s theses on the nature of the crowd, which, on that date, was truly “as authoritarian as it [was] intolerant.” Impervious to reason, they celebrated absurd and provably false claims of electoral victory as unimpeachable truth because they issued from the mouth of their god, whose departure meant the ruin of the republic. And because they were called upon to do so by their deity, they marched on the Capitol to destroy the republic in order to save it. Every act carried out by the putschists at the Capitol stands as evidence of the mass mind at work, of its infectious nature, of its religious devotion, of its submissiveness to its leader.
Le Bon’s theories were the fruit of observation, eschewing statistical analysis or any attempt to ground his observations in scientific theories. His ideas would be elaborated upon by others, who filled in the lacunae in Le Bon’s work, and thereby established the subject of group psychology and the “group mind.” Intended as sociological and psychological description, Le Bon’s ideas were used also prescriptively: Mussolini read him closely, as did Goebbels and perhaps even Hitler. Certainly Le Bon’s most famous student on the subject of group psychology was Sigmund Freud. But there were many students — for example, Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, the father of Ameri-can public relations, who made full use of Le Bon’s analysis of the crowd in order to bend it to advertisers’ needs. His book Propaganda, which appeared in 1928, is not only an application of Le Bon’s ideas to modern capitalism but also an essential text for understanding modern America.
The crowd, of course, was not a modern invention, and Le Bon was not the first to regard it as a psychological phenomenon. In 1852, the English lawyer Charles Mackay published a popular two-volume work called Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The work is an entertaining trip through mass fads and manias, from the Tulip Craze to the South Sea Bubble to mesmerism and all the way back to the Crusades. So widespread is mass delusion that Mackay asserted that his two volumes could barely touch on the subject, that even “fifty would scarcely suffice to detail their history.” “Religious matters,” he added, “have been purposely excluded as incompatible with the limits prescribed to the present work; a mere list of them alone would be sufficient to occupy a volume.” McKay explained his controlling assumption in his preface: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” He noted that money was often at the heart of the delusions he chronicled, but he was not much interested in the complicated questions of causality: he was writing a book aimed at a wide audience, a “miscellany” more than a history, and certainly not a theoretical treatise.
This was certainly not the case with Gabriel Tarde, an early and once-influential sociologist and social psychologist whose work has in recent decades enjoyed a bit of a comeback in France. In 1890 he published The Laws of Imitation, his most renowned work, in which he argued that the engine of social psychology is imitation. Tarde defined it as an “imprint of inter-spiritual photography, willed or not, passive or active. If we observe that wherever there is any form of social relationship between two living beings there is, in this sense, imitation.” For Tarde, imitation or counter-imitation, “doing exactly like or exactly the contrary of a model,” were at the heart of man’s actions in society. In the preface to the second edition of his book, published in 1895, the same year as Le Bon’s classic, he addressed the matter of working-class militancy in these terms: “There is no demonstration that goes about recruiting demonstrators that fails to provoke the formation of a group of counter-demonstrators.”
Since he gave counter-imitation a role coequal with imitation, Tarde saw something positive in the herd mentality. “Every strong assertion, at the same time that it drags along middling and sheep-like sprits, somewhere gives rise to a diametrically opposed negation of a nearly equal force in a mind born rebellious, which does not mean born inventive.” There was no such thing as an original position: everything social was action and reaction, as in chemistry, with positive and negative consequences. Tarde regularly used the term “contagion,” now in vogue among many social scientists, to describe the work of imitation and its force, which he applied to art, to hunger and thirst, even to the spread of alcoholism. Le Bon would learn from and modify Tarde’s vision. Though Le Bon’s ideas stressed the psychological aspects of the crowd mentality, the source of the psychological functions that moved the crowd were left largely unelucidated. “Contagion is a phenomenon easy to take note of, but as yet unexplained and which must be connected to phenomena of a hypnotic order,” he wrote. Unconscious drives motivate the crowd, he insisted, but what kind of drives?
The story of this idea leads now to Vienna, Berggasse 19, where Freud, enormously impressed with Le Bon’s work, set to deepen his analysis, and in 1921 published Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Freud accepted Le Bon’s premise “that an individual in a group is subjected through its influence to what is often a profound alteration in his mental activity.” He agreed that man’s intellectual ability is reduced when in a crowd and his emotions are intensified “in the direction of an approximation to the other individuals in the group.” Freud’s brief treatise sought to provide a psychological explanation for this mental change, moving the discussion beyond the barebones explanation of the “unconscious mind.”
Freud insisted, not surprisingly, that the concept of the libido provides the key to understanding group psychology. “Love relationships (or, to use a more neutral expression, emotional ties) also constitute the essence of the group mind.” If the group is held together by some force, “to what power could this feat be better ascribed than to Eros, who holds together everything in the world?” If an individual surrenders his self and becomes the plaything of suggestion provided by the crowd, “it gives one the impression that he does it because he feels the need of being in harmony with them rather than in opposition to them — so that perhaps after all he does it ‘ihnen zuliebe’.” This idea that it is love that holds the crowd together makes the crowd seem like a community. But the consequences of this shared warmth are not heartening. Given the basic qualities of the crowd, “the weakness of intellectual ability, the lack of emotional restraint, the incapacity for moderation and delay, the inclination to exceed every limit in the expression of emotion and to work it off completely in the form of action,” Freud endorses Le Bon’s notion that its mental activity regresses to “an earlier stage such as we are not surprised to find among savages or children.”
Freud’s acceptance and elaboration of Le Bon’s description of the nature of the crowd provided him also with an opportunity to apply his wildly speculative theories on leader-ship. In Group Psychology and The Analysis of The Ego he reverts to his theories in Totem and Taboo, which he admits are only a hypothesis. To get to the crux of the matter of leadership of a crowd, indeed of leadership tout court, he proposes that the primitive form of human society was the horde, and that this has “left indestructible traces upon the history of human descent.” Not only is the group the “revival” of this primal horde, but in the same way that each individual bears within him primitive man, “so the primal horde may arise once more out of any random crowd.” This sense of atavism must have been confirmed for him by the mass politics of his day.
Leaders, too, are a product of this primitive state, according to Freud, for the primal “father” was totally free, “and his will needed no reinforcement from others.” Narcissism was the constitutive element of his being, as “he loved no one but himself, or other people only insofar as they served his needs.” This is an analytical step forward from Le Bon’s simplistic psychological analysis of leaders, which claimed that they were “recruited among those neurotics, those hotheads, the half-mad who live on the edge of madness.” The historical confirmation of Freud’s formula hardly needs stressing. “The leader of the group is still the dreaded primal father,” Freud continued. “The group still wishes to be governed by unrestricted force; it has an extreme passion for authority; in Le Bon’s phrase, it has a thirst for obedience. The primal father is the group ideal, which governs the ego in the place of the ego ideal.” The crowd, in other words, performs upon each of its members a kind of inner usurpation, in which the self and its struggle for autonomy is replaced by a collective that demands conformity.
In 1951, on the other side of the greatest catastrophe of group psychology in history, Theodor Adorno wrote an essay called “Freudian Theory and Fascist Propaganda.” In it, he examined Freud’s work on mass psychology in light of his own studies of the authoritarian personality and the rise of fascism. It was intended as an analysis of American fascists, figures such as Father Coughlin and Gerald L.K. Smith, setting them along-side the experience of fascism in Germany. Adorno’s update of Freud’s update of Le Bon further complicates the story. Adorno is not entirely won over by Le Bon, praising Freud for his “dynamic interpretation” of Le Bon’s descriptive text and for his critique of the “magic words” used by Le Bon, which he dismissed for being treated “as though they were keys for some startling phenomena.” Freud is also credited with being free of “the traditional contempt for the masses which is the thema probandum of most of the older psychologists.” Adorno, after all, admired — even as he also feared — the revolutionary masses as much as he reviled the reactionary masses. His idiosyncratic form of leftist thought led him to work with Max Horkheimer on a proposed New Communist Manifesto, but he was later also the victim of vicious attacks by left-wing students, who would write on his classroom blackboard: “If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease.” Adorno knew the misdeeds of the crowd in both its right- and left-wing forms.
Adorno refused to accept that “archaic, pre-individual instincts survive” in “the children of a liberal, competitive, and individualistic society, and conditioned to maintain themselves as independent society.” How then, he wonders, can these same enlightened moderns revert in a crowd to “patterns of behavior which flagrantly contradict their own rational level and the present stage of enlightened technological civilization?” He praises Freud for looking further than simple atavism and explaining the surrender of the individual to the mass as being of a libidinal nature, a surrender to the pleasure principle. Adorno regards Freud’s refinement of Le Bon as an important advance, because by crediting the libidinal nature of surrender to the crowd “the traits generally ascribed to masses lose the deceptively primordial and irreducible character reflected by the arbitrary construct of specific mass or herd instincts.” In doing so, Freud “does justice to the simple fact that those who become submerged in masses are not primitive men [which was Le Bon’s claim] but display primitive attitudes contradictory to their normal rational behavior.”
Though there is a certain injustice to Le Bon in this, who went no further than the concepts available to him in his time, this notion of the crowd as a contradiction provides an important link in the causal chain of crowd formation and action. What Adorno adds to Freud applies to most political crowds in thrall to a leader: he relates Freud’s vision of a leader’s hold, derived from the idealization of the leader, to a “narcissistic libido overflow.” Explicating Freud, Adorno sees the leader as a paternal figure, but takes this further, seeing him as “a means of satisfying our narcissism.”
Adorno’s application of Freud’s psychological construction of the leader, though based on Hitler, fits another, later, and significantly less diabolical American leader to a startling degree, and is Adorno’s great addition to the study of the crowd: “The leader has to himself appear to be absolutely narcissistic.” The leader has no need for learned study in order to become adept at crowd manipulation. (Adorno dismisses the standard claim that Hitler studied Le Bon, granting him at best cursory readings of popularizations of the work, while Goebbels, a failed intellectual, was not likely to have mastered modern depth psychology.) Instead, the authoritarian leader has a gift: he “can guess the wants and needs of those susceptible to his propaganda because he resembles them psycho-logically, and is distinguished from them by a capacity to express without inhibitions what is latent in them… The leaders are general oral character types, with a compulsion to speak incessantly and to fool others…Language itself, devoid of its rational significance, functions in a magical way and furthers those archaic regressions which reduce individuals to members of crowds.” Words do not signify, they signal; and the crowd awaits the signal.
The vision of the philosopher Gunther Anders, Adorno’s contemporary and fellow exile from Hitler’s Germany, was far more pessimistic than that of Adorno and was formed in opposition to Le Bon. For Anders, modern life rendered Le Bon’s ideas “obsolete.” As he pointedly observed in 1956 in his (still untranslated) masterpiece The Obsolescence of Man, “leading the masses in the style of Hitler is no longer necessary.” Anders asserted that it was now the case that it is not just in the crowd that the individual loses his identity: “The erasure of the personality and the degradation of intelligence are completed before man even leaves his house.…All submit separately to the process of ‘conditioning,’ which functions every bit as well in the cages in which individuals are now confined, despite their solitude, despite their millions of solitudes.” For Anders, physical and social circumstances are no longer a necessary condition for massification. “If one wants to depersonalize man (and even see to it that he be proud to not have a personality) there is no longer any need to drown him in the river of the masses or to seal him in the cement of the mass.” Demagogues and crowds are replaced by a cultural conditioning, facilitated by technology, that passes for being “fun, since it hides from its victim the sacrifice it demands from him; since it leaves the illusion of a private life, or at least a private space, it acts with total discretion.” An insidious ideology that demobilizes the intelligence, spread by television and radio, are the modern methods for the negation of the individual’s person-ality. “The erasure, the degradation of man as man are all the more successful in that they appear to continue to guarantee personal freedom and the rights of the individual.”
Very much a thinker of the 1950s in this regard, Anders seems to dismiss even the possibility of the resurgence of the crowd guided by the psychological states first laid out by Le Bon. It has now been replaced by an atomized, decerebrated mass. But still to come was a further complication, a further twist, in our own time: this atomized mass now coexists in a new variety of the crowd mind. The monads traverse a digital ether to form a herd. They link, and link up, and link in. Physical apartness has been resolved in a new version of nearness, with no loss of inflammation. In this crowd they are apart and they are together, thinking and amplifying the same thoughts.
There is a tension in Max Weber’s writings on leaders and crowds. His description of the crowd in Economy and Society, published posthumously in 1922, does not stray far from Le Bon, whom he cites only once. He accepts that “it is well-known that the actions of the individual are strongly influenced by the mere fact that he is a member of a crowd confined within a limited space.” Following Le Bon, he also proposes that physical proximity is not required for the formation of the crowd — anticipating Anders’ argument, he importantly notes that a crowd can exist in a dispersed state, “influenced simultaneously or successively by a source of influence operating similarly on all individuals, as by means of the press.” And eventually by means of more than the press: when Weber made his far-seeing observation, Silicon Valley was just an agricultural paradise known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight.
But Weber does not follow Le Bon to the end. Though accepting that “some types of reaction are only made possible by the mere fact that the individual acts as part of the crowd,” he adds that “others become more difficult under these conditions.” Certain emotions, such as “gaiety, anger, enthusiasm, despair, and passions of all sorts” would not arise “if the individual were alone.” Yet Weber has a sturdier sense of the individual’s ability to withstand the seductions of the mass. “But for [these emotions] to happen there need not, at least in many cases, be any meaningful relationship between the behavior of the individual and the fact that he is a member of a crowd.” It is possible not to be swept away by the crowd, though Weber does not elaborate on the means of resistance.
Weber’s later and famous description of the “charismatic” leader has only a distant relationship to Le Bon’s deific leader. His charismatic leader has instead a “vocation” for politics. For Weber, the leader “is held to have an ‘inner calling’ to lead, and people accept his rule not because of customs or laws but because they believe in him.” The peoples’ devotion is directed at the leader, “disciples and followers and party members are devoted to him as a person, his personal qualities.” Weber describes charismatic political rule as resembling that of “a nonhereditary warlord, a ruler elected by the people, or nowadays a great demagogue or leader of political parties.” That is a diverse range of political types and political systems; but in Weber’s hands, charisma is less toxic and less archaic, and is compatible with democracy. Yet Weber was perhaps too optimistic about the constructive uses of charisma — perhaps too certain that this leader will live for his cause, and that he does so “if he is more than a vain and narrow-minded upstart.” As history has since shown, a charismatic leader guided by vanity, narrow-mindedness, and narcissism can be just as powerful and dominant as one motivated by altruism. In fact, they are more the rule than the exception.
Weber does, however, issue a stern warning. He accepts that vanity is an “occupational hazard” of politics, that a “lust for power” is necessary for any politician — a “normal attribute.” “The sin of his calling,” he continues, “begins when the politician’s lust for power is no longer grounded in objective reality and instead simply intoxicates the politician personally.” But how to secure a society’s commitment to “objective reality”? We are wrestling with this perplexity now. Le Bon’s jaundiced vision at least accounts for the prevalence of this ill, since for Le Bon the objective reality of which Weber speaks counts for little in the world created by the interaction between the leader and his crowd.
On July 15, 1927, when the newspapers in Vienna announced a verdict of not guilty in the trial of a group of men accused of killing a number of workers, crowds gathered spontaneously around the city and then converged on the Palace of Justice and set it aflame. The police fired on the crowd and ninety people were killed. Elias Canetti, the polyglot Bulgarian Jewish writer then living in Vienna, was in that crowd, and its actions that day would have lasting effects on his intellectual life. He wrote decades later that it “may have been the most crucial day of my life after my father’s death.” This event would be the motivating force behind a thirty-year process that would result in his renowned study of the crowd and the crowd mind, Crowds and Power, which appeared in 1960.
His description in his memoirs of his experience on that day could have come straight from the pages of Le Bon. “I became a part of the crowd, I fully dissolved in it, I did not feel the slightest resistance to what the crowd was doing.” Reading about an event like the storming of the Bastille was henceforth superfluous for him: he had lived it almost a century and a half later and half a continent away. Crowds and Power is five hundred dense pages on crowds around the world and throughout history, with excursions to Australia, to American Indian lands, to the settlements of Maori tribesmen. As the fine Hungarian critic László F. Földenyí wrote in an essay about the book, for Canetti “a crowd does not simply mean that many people have gathered together; rather that life within the crowd is inseparable from existence itself. The crowd is the condition humaine.”
No larger claim for the crowd was ever made. Though Canetti bases his work on studies by sociologists and anthropologists, he ignores Le Bon, Weber, and Freud. The core of his book is made up of his own conclusions and statements drawn from eccentric readings of his sources. These are often brilliant, and often too brilliant: they disintegrate quickly under scrutiny. And there is a certain slipperiness in Canetti’s methodology. The book begins with a section titled “The Fear of Being Touched,” which includes the statement that “it is only in a crowd that man can free himself of this fear of being touched.” This observation, presented with no source, can in fact be found in Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego in almost the same terms, with Freud even quoting the source of his observation: “According to Schopenhauer’s famous simile of the freezing porcupines, no one can tolerate a too intimate approach to his neighbor. …. But the whole of this intolerance vanishes, temporarily or permanently, as the result of the formation of a group, and in a group.”
To be sure, Canetti’s description of the four key attributes of the crowd are straightforward: “The crowd always wants to grow… Within the crowd there is equality. The crowd loves density…The crowd needs direction.” But these attributes, described just pages into the book, all of them rather obvious, give way to a typology of crowds that is absurdly broad and farfetched. There are “invisible crowds,” “baiting crowds” “flight crowds,” “prohibition crowds,” “reversal crowds,” “feast crowds.” Crowds of the living and crowds of the dead; crowds of men and crowds of women; crowds at theaters and crowds at sporting events and crowds of warriors. And when Canetti is through with his taxonomy of crowds, he presents a taxonomy of packs. His classificatory promiscuity is in stark contrast to Le Bon, who insisted that “the fact that many individuals accidentally find themselves side by side does not confer up in them the characteristics of an organized crowd.”
And finally, in his intellectually self-congratulatory way, he goes off the rails. In his section on crowd symbols, for example, Canetti introduces “collective units which do not consist of men, but which are still felt to be crowds.” Corn, forests, rain, wind, sand, fire and the sea are included under this heading. Who has ever considered corn to be a crowd? Who has ever gone to the beach to romp in the crowd, or to have crowd kicked in their face? About the sea: “Put your hand into water, lift it out and watch the drops slipping singly and impotently down it. The pity you feel for them is as though they were human beings, hopelessly separated.” Has anyone ever felt pity for drops of sea water? “Men readily see their own equality before death in the image of corn.” How readily, exactly?
Such pseudo-brilliant nonsense is relatively harmless, but not all of Canetti’s leaps of fancy are so innocent. For Canetti, inflation served as a model for the fate of the Jews under Nazism, their treatment an echo of the experience of inflation in the Weimar Republic. “First they were attacked as wicked and dangerous, as enemies; then they were more and more depreciated; then, there not being enough in Germany itself, those in the conquered territories were gathered in; and finally they were treated literally as vermin, to be destroyed with impunity by the million.” Germans would perhaps not have been brought to participate in this genocide “had they not been through an inflation during which the Mark fell to a billionth of its former value.” Returning to the matter of crowds, Canetti concludes that “it was this inflation, as a crowd experience, which they shifted on to the Jews.” Numbers, numbers, numbers: has the faith in quantification ever been more perverse? Canetti can be as inhumane as the crowd ever was.
Which brings us to our own golden age of quantification and its contribution to the theory of the crowd. In its neglect of its predecessor, Crowds and Power was a retort to The Psychology of Crowds. We may consider it representative of the high end of the anti-Le Bon tradition of thinking about mobs. But James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, a bestseller fifteen years ago, its very title a shot across Le Bon’s bow, is quite something else. We know this to be the case because, unlike Canetti, he establishes his vision as being in opposition to Le Bon’s in his introduction. For Surowiecki, “Le Bon had things exactly backward. If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to ‘make decisions affecting matters of general interest,’ that group’s decisions will, over time, be intellectually [superior] to the isolated individual, no matter how smart or well-informed he is.”
The phenomenon to which Surowiecki refers is sometimes called “many-mindedness,” or the view that the more minds that are applied to a problem, the more likely (and justifiable) its solution will be. Never mind that a consensus of many minds can still be disastrously wrong. The Wisdom of Crowds provides a large number of case studies that, in its author’s opinion, prove that crowds differ from Le Bon’s negative portrayal of them. The crowd is instead a mild, useful, even beatific presence in our lives. Its primary expression is data. We are presented with edifying tales of stock market investors, football coaches, NASA decision makers, scientific researchers, nineteenth-century builders of plank roads, and so on — everything but the spontaneous psychological crowd, the momentous mobs of history, that worried Le Bon and the others. Surowiecki is not worried. This is a book that could only have been written before Trumpism and the mainstreaming of the alt-right, though the long history of crowds and their consequences provides ample enough not to have required the contemporary experience of an event like Charlottesville. How can anyone even remotely familiar with that history speak of the crowd’s “wisdom”?
Like Canetti, Surowiecki treats almost any assembly of human beings as a crowd, and deploys his expanded definition as a weapon against Le Bon. Worse, he attributes decision-making to the crowd. If by decision-making we mean some kind of rational deliberation and reasoned exchange of views, this is the very antithesis of what a crowd does. Marketers know this, of course, which is why they welcome such books: the manipulability of masses of people is their business. They quiver to learn of the “tipping point” at which people will start buying chinos or cellphones. What Bernays called “propaganda,” we call advertising. But all this benign behavior — all this shopping — has nothing to do with social and political action, where the stakes are higher and evil may play a part. The crowd at the guillotine is not like the crowd at the Apple store.
In one case there is an overlap between Surowiecki and Le Bon: the case of juries. Surowiecki mocks his predecessor’s claim that juries deliver verdicts “of which each individual juror would disapprove.” Yet in the chapter in which he discusses juries, he admits that decades of experimental studies have demonstrated that their deliberations are not, as one would imagine, “a recipe for rationality and moderation.” Are juries crowds? Anyone who has seen Twelve Angry Men knows that the answer is yes and no. Where there is persuasion, there is demagoguery. But the likelihood of genuine persuasion is greater in a room of twelve than in a town square of thousands. Surowiecki ignores the hard cases, the dangerous cases. He prefers to find wisdom in groups of ants, starlings, and monkeys, as if cooperation is the most significant attribute of a crowd. But cooperation is value-neutral; what matters is its purpose. And what is the decision-making capacity of an ant? (As Charlie Kaufman points out in his novel Antkind, even if ants are wise as a group, they are pretty stupid as individuals). The Wisdom of Crowds is written for and about a comfortable materialistic society in which the most salient choices are consumer choices. By concentrating on decisions made at this safe level, Surowiecki does not refute Le Bon, he merely avoids the issues that Le Bon raises, and all the mass unwisdom that made Le Bon and the others desperately concerned to understand the crowd.
Gustave Le Bon thought that civilization was on the verge of collapse, a “worm-eaten edifice supported by nothing that will not collapse at the first storm.” He warned that “what formed a people, a unit, a bloc, ends up becoming an agglomeration of individuals lacking cohesion and which, for a time, artificially maintains traditions and institutions.” The “race,” as he called it, though in context this meant the French nation, “is no longer anything but dust made up of isolated individuals and becomes again what it was at its beginning: a crowd.” His suggestion that there is a relation between the isolation of the individual and the ecstasy of the crowd was profound. I would like to believe that his pessimism was wrong, but the social and political civilization that remains standing resembles the nightmare world that he described in too many ways for us to be smug about its perdurability, or to assume that the fate he described has been avoided once and for all.
