Description
The author argues that crowds are irrational, rejecting or accepting ideas wholesale without engaging in critical discussion. What leaders tell them quickly permeates their minds, leading them to translate it into action. What is suggested to them is elevated to the status of an ideal, and they are driven, seemingly of their own volition, to self-sacrifice. They know no emotion other than intense violence; their sympathy soon becomes worship, and they are quick to hate what they initially dislike.
In a crowded state, the capacity for critical thinking diminishes, and dissent dissolves into conformity, while unconscious impulses prevail.
Even if the crowd is secular, it retains religious reflexes that lead to the worship of the leader, fear of his power, and blind obedience to his will. His words become unquestionable dogma, and the desire to generalize this dogma arises. Those who do not share the masses’ admiration for the leader’s words become the enemies; there are no masses without a leader, just as there is no leader without masses. Le Bon wrote this a century ago.
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