The Crowd, Gustave le Bon [read ebook pdf .TXT] 📗

>share, there would merely result the striking of an average, and

not, as we have said is actually the case, the creation of new

characteristics. How is it that these new characteristics are

created? This is what we are now to investigate.

 

Different causes determine the appearance of these

characteristics peculiar to crowds, and not possessed by isolated

individuals. 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, also intervenes to

determine the manifestation in crowds of their special

characteristics, and at the same time the trend they are to take.

Contagion is a phenomenon of which it is easy to establish the

presence, but that it is not easy to explain. It must be classed

among those phenomena of a hypnotic order, which we shall shortly

study. 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. This is an

aptitude very contrary to his nature, and of which a man is

scarcely capable, except when he makes part of a crowd.

 

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.

I allude to that suggestibility of which, moreover, the contagion

mentioned above is neither more nor less than an effect.

 

To understand this phenomenon it is necessary to bear in mind

certain recent physiological discoveries. We know to-day that by

various processes an individual may be brought into such a

condition that, having entirely lost his conscious personality,

he obeys all the suggestions of the operator who has deprived him

of it, and commits acts in utter contradiction with his character

and habits. The most careful observations seem to prove that an

individual immerged for some length of time in a crowd in action

soon finds himself—either in consequence of the magnetic

influence given out by the crowd, or from some other cause of

which we are ignorant—in a special state, which much resembles

the state of fascination in which the hypnotised individual finds

himself in the hands of the hypnotiser. 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. The conscious

personality has entirely vanished; will and discernment are lost.

All feelings and thoughts are bent in the direction determined by

the hypnotiser.

 

Such also is approximately the state of the individual forming

part of a psychological crowd. He is no longer conscious of his

acts. In his case, as in the case of the hypnotised subject, at

the same time that certain faculties are destroyed, others may be

brought to a high degree of exaltation. Under the influence of a

suggestion, he will undertake the accomplishment of certain acts

with irresistible impetuosity. This impetuosity is the more

irresistible in the case of crowds than in that of the hypnotised

subject, from the fact that, the suggestion being the same for

all the individuals of the crowd, it gains in strength by

reciprocity. The individualities in the crowd who might possess

a personality sufficiently strong to resist the suggestion are

too few in number to struggle against the current. At the

utmost, they may be able to attempt a diversion by means of

different suggestions. It is in this way, for instance, that a

happy expression, an image opportunely evoked, have occasionally

deterred crowds from the most bloodthirsty acts.

 

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.

 

Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised

crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of

civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a

crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct.

He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and

also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he

further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows

himself to be impressed by words and images—which would be

entirely without action on each of the isolated individuals

composing the crowd—and to be induced to commit acts contrary to

his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An

individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of

sand, which the wind stirs up at will.

 

It is for these reasons that juries are seen to deliver verdicts

of which each individual juror would disapprove, that

parliamentary assemblies adopt laws and measures of which each of

their members would disapprove in his own person. Taken

separately, the men of the Convention were enlightened citizens

of peaceful habits. United in a crowd, they did not hesitate to

give their adhesion to the most savage proposals, to guillotine

individuals most clearly innocent, and, contrary to their

interests, to renounce their inviolability and to decimate

themselves.

 

It is not only by his acts that the individual in a crowd differs

essentially from himself. Even before he has entirely lost his

independence, his ideas and feelings have undergone a

transformation, and the transformation is so profound as to

change the miser into a spendthrift, the sceptic into a believer,

the honest man into a criminal, and the coward into a hero. The

renunciation of all its privileges which the nobility voted in a

moment of enthusiasm during the celebrated night of August 4,

1789, would certainly never have been consented to by any of its

members taken singly.

 

The conclusion to be drawn from what precedes is, that the crowd

is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual, but

that, from the point of view of feelings and of the acts these

feelings provoke, the crowd may, according to circumstances, he

better or worse than the individual. All depends on the nature

of the suggestion to which the crowd is exposed. This is the

point that has been completely misunderstood by writers who have

only studied crowds from the criminal point of view. Doubtless a

crowd is often criminal, but also it is often heroic. It is

crowds rather than isolated individuals that may be induced to

run the risk of death to secure the triumph of a creed or an

idea, that may be fired with enthusiasm for glory and honour,

that are led on—almost without bread and without arms, as in the

age of the Crusades—to deliver the tomb of Christ from the

infidel, or, as in ‘93, to defend the fatherland. Such heroism

is without doubt somewhat unconscious, but it is of such heroism

that history is made. Were peoples only to be credited with the

great actions performed in cold blood, the annals of the world

would register but few of them.