He can't be that bad, look at him! #n_n
It is very common to critique so-called 'soft sciences' on the basis of recent unreplicable findings which causes some to see the entire endeavour as illegitimate. The same thing actually happens with the theoretical aspects of 'hard sciences' such as 'Theoretical physics'(oxymoronic?) and 'Pure Mathematics'(tautological?). Rather than leaving entire areas of study and fertile fields of knowledge to agents that you do not like and that do not like you, it is probably not bad to salvage what can be salvaged and cut loose what is not needed. Simply get out your best tools and do the best work you can. If the work is unsatisfactory, then you can improve it. If you can't improve it, then you can leave it. Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind is a work worthy of examination for the kind of sociological and psychological phenomena he claims to exist. Though the work was published just before the age of the internet, 1895, and in France, a significant bulk of the points made could have, and have, been made in the Anglosphere of the internet age.
"Those people did ...". "They said that ...". These kinds of statements are made all the time, more notably in relation to all kinds of political proclamations of one sort or another. Edward Bernay's Propaganda, which is similar in subject to, and was possibly influenced by the, The Crowd, talks greatly of how the desire of "The Public" or "Consumers" can be created and directed. This work is more fundamental than Propaganda, since it talks of what kind of things like "Crowds","Masses" and "The Public" are, not just how to rear and direct them, though it does that near the end as well. In the first chapter, Le Bon distinguishes between a crowd, in the normal sense, and a psychologically crowd. The normal sense of the word being something like "a notable number of people somehow grouped together", and his psychological one being something like "The transient entity formed from the focused desires and dispositions of multiple minds". Forgive the floweriness of this second definition. You walking on a busy street, passing by hundreds of people? A crowd, but not a psychological one. The people ratioing someone on the internet? A psychological crowd.
It might seem like people in the Anglosphere, specifically North America, should be well acquainted with the idea of "psychological crowds". It was very common in elementary and secondary schools in the later decades of the 20th century and the early parts of the 21st with notions of ideas like "Peer Pressure" ... I'm shooting a bit from the hip here, but I feel that all these phenomena are intimately linked with all the post-war psychologizing done by the apparent victors. Stuff like the "Blue eyes Brown eyes exercise" people may have done in school and the "Milgram Experiment", "Stanford Prison Experiment", "Hofling Hospital Experiment" and so on. As a side note these are the kinds of memes that birthed the whole YouTube Social Experiment trend, and is probably a significant reason why people dislike Psychology and Sociology as fields. These kinds of "experiments" would imply that the Anglophonic victors of the war were more wary of the dangers of 'Mass Psychology', at least on the surface, but if these same techniques are used towards consumption(fads, "subcultures", "lifestyles", "diets", ...) rather than more direct forms of violence then ...
Le Bon says that the CROWD(Psychological crowd capitalized from now), is something distinct from the individual people themselves and even the "sum" of its parts. This "sum" part means that it doesn't matter if a CROWD is made up of the most big-brained #rational people to have ever tumbled into existence, the entity that arises with their participation will exhibit certain features that are NOT of the individuals i.e. The CROWD is not an average of its constituent individuals. He actually makes this specific point of distinction against the immensely influential, but currently unpopular, Herbert Spencer(coined "Survival of the Fittest" and he was also a kind of anarcho-Liberal-tarian guy[No surprise ðŸ¤]). Le Bon likens the creation of a CROWD to that of a chemical reaction between elements that produces an entity that is entirely different from what it is made of, with different properties and so on. The most common paintings that will pop into the minds of Anglophones are things like famous witch trials of the New and Old worlds, Nazi Germany, maybe tulpenmanie if they are more economics minded. You probably don't have to look too hard in the decade of the 2010's to find any examples of these paintings that suit your aesthetic palate. The characterstics that Le Bon ascribes to CROWDS are attributes like being active, impulsive, suggestible, unintelligent, passionate and so on. Unlike many of the numerous PSAs telling younger people to "Just say no" to potentially negative behaviour and experiences, Le Bon actually points out that a significant number of events from the past could not have come about without the mobilization of these CROWDS. He only really considers the morality of CROWDS based on the direction that they are being steered, and not on the CROWD being a CROWD.
" A [CROWD] may be guilty of murder, incendiarism, and every kind of crime, but it is also capable of very lofty acts of devotion, sacrifice, and disinterestedness, of acts much loftier indeed than those of which the isolated individual is capable.[...] How numerous are the [CROWDS] that have heroically faced death for beliefs, ideas, and phrases that they scarcely understood! The [CROWDS] that go on strike do so far more in obedience to an order than to obtain an increase of the slender salary with which they make shift. Personal interest is very rarely a powerful motive force with crowds, while it is almost the exclusive motive of the conduct of the isolated individual. It is assuredly not self-interest that has guided crowds in so many wars, incomprehensible as a rule to their intelligence--wars in which they have allowed themselves to be massacred as easily as the larks hypnotised by the mirror of the hunter."
Though Le Bon might impress on the reader as a solitary intellectual through out the work, it is clear that he doesn't particularly look down on [CROWDS], the "Group", or "Groupthink" in the same way that Anglophones have been explicitly taught to over the past few decades. If there is difficulty in thinking about what being "a part" of a CROWD is like, it may be illuminating to consider how the attraction of a single individual to another could elicit similar states of mind as outlined earlier, as well as how actions and behaviour attributable to both enraged mobs and red hot lovers. It is probably safe to say that the "pressure" or desire to perform extreme acts, like 心ä¸(Lovers' Suicide), or say extreme things for a lover's or "mass movement's" sake didn't really start in the 20th century or the 19th century Le Bon was writing in or the 18th one, which featured la Terreur that Le Bon cites and criticizes so frequently. I also have no idea when this kind of phenomenon started either, so I can't really claim that it has always been this way. It would probably be agreeable to most in saying that the derangement of love or the now called "Peer pressure" are "natural" or something like this. (I'm putting natural in quotes to sidestep the very good, but difficult discussion of what exactly that word means). My naturalistic analogy of CROWDS to romantic and/or sexual attraction, is fitting because Le Bon posits that the most determining feature of any given CROWD is its racial makeup. Le Bon actually uses the example of hypnosis, but the image "brainwashing" or "indoctrination" paints masks the suggestibility, ultimately the willingness, that is necessary on the part of the 'brainwashed' in my view.
The "Genius of the Race" is a well repeated notion in this work, and by many others around that turn of the century frankly. Names like Francis Galton, Hippolyte Taine, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herbert Spencer, Karl Pearson and many more. Basically we can call these people, "The interesting racists you've probably neglected." No offense to uninteresting racists. An interesting related "social experiment" 😉. Le Bon actually uses the second sentence of his preface to give a small definition of "Genius of the Race":
"The whole of the common characteristics with which heredity endows the individuals of a race constitute the genius of the race."
In the Anglosphere, modern American cultural weight smothers out that of both the American and British of ages past. When the word "race" is uttered, the images that are painted in the mind are formed by invisible 20th century American hands. These paintings appear to me as just other expressions of the infamous "American Exceptionalism". It is similar to those that see statues of Octavian or certain important men of the past and think that every crafted depiction, biography, sculpture or painting, must be verristic i.e. that Augustus Caesar actually looked like that. Boring race disclaimer aside, this definition is pretty tame by itself all things considered. I imagine the typical view of him would darken when it is found out that he wrote works with titles such as The Influence of Race in History as well as that he apparently invented a portable cephalometer during his numerous and wide spanning travels. Practically, there really isn't too much point in trying to "convert" anyone to a more #correct understanding of #racism, knowledge might be power, but it is impotent outside of living bodies. Basically we can roughly say that long standing stereotypes(stereotypes being another turn of the 20th C idea credited to Walter Lippmann whose work Public Opinion is also incredibly related to this one) are actually probably decent, yet rough, examples of "Genius of A Race". I understand this to be something like racial character, or peoplenality. The "passion" of the "Latins" as Le Bon calls them or "Meds". "Coldness" of the "Nords". "Gaiety" of the "Blacks". "Autism" of the "Germanics"(He would probably agree with these, I think). Why does France always seem to have riots of one kind or another in every given decade? Le Bon would push all the political, historical, economic, institutional, technological, cultural, religious and what-have-you explanations to one side and say that ultimately "The constant disorder, uprisings, riots, and all the different facets of history as well, is merely the unfolding of their character." I hope that not too much liberty has been taken by myself in giving this exaggerated answer, but I hope that, if anything, this exaggeration makes it clear how foundational he finds race to the character of any given CROWD.
He can't be that bad, look at him! #n_n
In the middle part of 2020, I was made known about Marshall McLuhan, his works and the existence of the field of Media Ecology. As it relates to the topic of this post, concepts such as "Retribalization", if I am understanding this concept correctly, some of its features are commonly mistakenly labeled as "Polarization" or "Radicalization". In the introduction to Crowds, Le Bon describes his own era as "The Era of [CROWDS]":
"Today the claims of the masses are becoming more and more sharply defined, and amount to nothing less than a determination to utterly destroy society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilization. Limitations of the hours of labour, the nationalization of mines, railways, factories, and the soil, the equal distribution of all products, the elimination of all the upper classes for the benefit of the popular classes, &c., such are these claims."
The "reality" of enacting "social change" in a "Global Village" at the press of a button is something of an insane caricature of Le Bon describing CROWDS as such:
"A [CROWD] is not merely impulsive and mobile. Like a savage, it is not prepared to admit that anything can come between its desire and the realisation of its desire."
Most people do not really care for the 'pretense' of well-reasoned oral debate any more. Or clever and highly persuasive letters. I don't say this to as a snob looking at a personally constructed past and feeling nostalgic for a place that I am not even sure exists or existed. It seems like a different kind of mind entirely. In a way it seems a more haughty kind of mind. No word-mitts to hold images and ideas with. I've always thought that the impression that sounds, moments and images leave in my mind are of way deeper than those by words alone. The spread of viral memes, prefigured in Crowds by Le Bon using the word "contagion", virological term, to describe a fundamental component in the creation of a CROWD. Take all of this with knowledge that every new piece of technology you acquire will almost necessarily connect you more and more intimately with the "Global Village"/"World".
The Media ecology/McLuhan part is kind of short and tacked on since my copy of Gutenberg Galaxy got lost in the mail and I don't want to say too much(apologies if I have) without source present, but I should receive a copy at some point. I looked at Gustave Le Bon's wiki page and it seems that "Le Bon's works were influential to such disparate figures as Theodore Roosevelt and Benito Mussolini, Sigmund Freud and José Ortega y Gasset, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin." His influences and Influenced sections have some pretty interesting names to say the least. I think that this work is worth reading on this alone.