www.thomasnilsson.com.br
Paths for freedom and progress
   
 
   
MASS PSYCHOLGY: What is a crowd?
SOCIETY AND POWER - 11/02/2017

 Gustave Le Bon defined a crowd as a group of individuals united by a common idea, belief, or ideology. Crowds accept beliefs and ideas superficially and utilize them as fuel for revolutionary action. When an individual becomes part of a crowd, according to Le Bon, he undergoes a profound psychological transformation, ceases to operate as an individual and become an automation.


With such a psychological transformation, an individual no longer lives for himself, but instead becomes a pawn who sacrifices his own personal ends and goals in favor of those of the crowd. Feminism is an excellent example of a crowd creation where emotion dominate reason and responsibility and love for Family is surpressed by the Feminist doctrine. 


Le Bon detailed three key processes that create the psychological crowd: i) Anonymity, ii) Contagion and iii) Suggestibility.


 Anonymity provides to rational individuals a feeling of invincibility and the loss of personal responsibility. An individual becomes primitive, unreasoning and emotional.


Contagion refers to the spread in the crowd of particular behaviors and individuals sacrifice their personal interest for the collective interest.


Suggestibility is the mechanism through which the contagion is achieved. At this stage, the psychological crowd becomes homogeneous and malleable to suggestions from its strongest members


A crowd forms when an influential idea unites a number of individuals and propels them to act towards a common goal. Members of the crowd, however, never create these influential ideas. Instead, they are brought into the world by the minds of great individuals. Since those who compose a crowd are by their very nature mediocre, they are incapable of understanding these ideas in their original form. Therefore, in order for an idea to unite and influence a crowd, it must first be thoroughly simplified. For example, a great philosopher could gather the nature of liberty in an 800-page masterpiece, but the crowd, incapable of comprehending such thoughts, would require the concept of liberty to be thoroughly simplified in order for it to stimulate revolutionary action. Here is where demagogic leaders come in. For it is the carismatic leader of a crowd who communicates simplified ideas to the crowd and in doing so unites it together and stimulates it to act. Notice that television is an excellent forum for such communication. The democratic elections would not be able to realize without the electoral propaganda.

 

Today, once the words of freedom, peace, equality, solidarity or democracy are proclaimed, the members of the crowd nod their heads in blind obedience to whatever else follows from the leader’s mouth – completely ignorant as to the corrupt purposes that may be the true guide for the leader’s actions. You distinguish easy the mass movements radical stereotypes in hooligans at sport events, naked feminists making hysteric actions, black blocs and so on. But perhaps the most dangerous is the quiet TV couch potato, who join the crowd connected 24 hours to TV and Internet, accepting the propaganda and passively parroting and reacting as the mind manipulators want him to do.


While crowds are capable of acts which achieve both good and evil, Le Bon believed that more often than not crowds commit barbarous and immoral actions.  Why do crowds so often act in an immoral manner? Le Bon put forth the following explanation:  “…our savage, destructive instincts are the inheritance left dormant in all of us from the primitive ages. In the life of the isolated individual it would be dangerous for him to gratify these instincts, while his absorption in an irresponsible crowd, in which in consequence he is assured of impunity, gives him entire liberty to follow them.”


Le Bon believed he understood what motivated individuals to join a crowd. When an individual lives his life as an individual – that is, when he forced to take responsibility for his life – he is apt to feel a crushing burden and sense of impotence he cannot seem to shake. In joining a crowd or a mass movement, the individual is temporarily relieved of this responsibility and sense of impotence, and comes to feel that he is capable of shaking the foundations of the Earth. “The tyranny exercised unconsciously on men’s minds is the only real tyranny, because it cannot be fought against.”


So, when democratic leaders point the finger and damn doctrines like Fascism and Stalinism, they turn away your attention from their own mess. We are now in big troubles, under democratic leadership. If countries like North Korea, Iran, Libya, Cuba, Soviet and the Third Reich would have been in power instead America, first world nation and its second followers, the world would already reached the apocalypse, some 10-20 or 50 years ago, not true? Or should “Evil Nations” found out another solution to keep World and nature in Order? You never will have an answer on that. Soon you will know where wonderful democracy led us. Making use of the same tool as the nations of “Evil”, mass psychology.

Copyright © 2018 - Thomas Nilsson - All rights reserved - [email protected]
Views: 445475 - Atualizado: 29-03-2024