The Crowd, Gustave le Bon [read ebook pdf .TXT] 📗
- Author: Gustave le Bon
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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.
THE SENTIMENTS AND MORALITY OF CROWDS
1. IMPULSIVENESS, MOBILITY, AND IRRITABILITY OF CROWDS.
The crowd is at the mercy of all exterior exciting causes, and
reflects their incessant variations—The impulses which the crowd
obeys are so imperious as to annihilate the feeling of personal
interest— Premeditation is absent from crowds—Racial influence.
2. CROWDS ARE CREDULOUS AND READILY INFLUENCED BY
SUGGESTION. The obedience of crowds to suggestions—The images
evoked in the mind of crowds are accepted by them as
realities—Why these images are identical for all the individuals
composing a crowd—The equality of the educated and the ignorant
man in a crowd—Various examples of the illusions to which the
individuals in a crowd are subject—The impossibility of
according belief to the testimony of crowds—The unanimity of
numerous witnesses is one of the worst proofs that can be invoked
to establish a fact—The slight value of works of history.
3. THE EXAGGERATION AND INGENUOUSNESS OF THE SENTIMENTS OF
CROWDS. Crowds do not admit doubt or uncertainty, and always go
to extremes—Their sentiments always excessive. 4. THE
INTOLERANCE, DICTATORIALNESS, AND CONSERVATISM OF CROWDS. The
reasons of these sentiments—The servility of crowds in the face
of a strong authority—The momentary revolutionary instincts of
crowds do not prevent them from being extremely
conservative—Crowds instinctively hostile to changes and
progress. 5. THE MORALITY OF CROWDS. The morality of
crowds, according to the suggestions under which they act, may be
much lower or much higher than that of the individuals composing
them—Explanation and examples— Crowds rarely guided by those
considerations of interest which are most often the exclusive
motives of the isolated individual—The moralising role of
crowds.
Having indicated in a general way the principal characteristics
of crowds, it remains to study these characteristics in detail.
It will be remarked that among the 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
besides—which are almost always observed in beings belonging to
inferior forms of evolution—in women, savages, and children, for
instance. However, I merely indicate this analogy in passing;
its demonstration is outside the scope of this work. It would,
moreover, be useless for persons acquainted with the psychology
of primitive beings, and would scarcely carry conviction to those
in ignorance of this matter.
I now proceed to the successive consideration of the different
characteristics that may be observed in the majority of crowds.
1. IMPULSIVENESS, MOBILITY, AND IRRITABILITY OF CROWDS.
When studying the fundamental characteristics of a crowd we
stated that it is guided almost exclusively by unconscious
motives. Its acts are far more under the influence of the spinal
cord than of the brain. In this respect a crowd is closely akin
to quite primitive beings. The acts performed may be perfect so
far as their execution is concerned, but as they are not directed
by the brain, the individual conducts himself according as the
exciting causes to which he is submitted may happen to decide. A
crowd is at the mercy of all external exciting causes, and
reflects their incessant variations. It is the slave of the
impulses which it receives. The isolated individual may be
submitted to the same exciting causes as the man in a crowd, but
as his brain shows him the inadvisability of yielding to them, he
refrains from yielding. This truth may be physiologically
expressed by saying that the isolated individual possesses the
capacity of dominating his reflex actions, while a crowd is
devoid of this capacity.
The varying impulses to which crowds obey may be, according to
their exciting causes, generous or cruel, heroic or cowardly, but
they will always be so imperious that the interest of the
individual, even the interest of self-preservation, will not
dominate them. The exciting causes that may act on crowds being
so varied, and crowds always obeying them, crowds are in
consequence extremely mobile. This explains how it is that we
see them pass in a moment from the most bloodthirsty ferocity to
the most extreme generosity and heroism. A crowd may easily
enact the part of an executioner, but not less easily that of a
martyr. It is crowds that have furnished the torrents of blood
requisite for the triumph
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