Crowd psychology book
Author: Gustave Le Bon
Pages: 223
Book size: 21×14
The author believes that the masses do not make sense, as they reject ideas or accept them as a whole, without being able to discuss them. What the leaders say to her invades her mind quickly, so she tends to transform it into movement and action, and what is revealed to her raises it to the ranks of the ideal and then pushes it, in a voluntary way, to self-sacrifice. She knows nothing but severe violence in her feelings, so her sympathy soon becomes worship, and she is almost alienated from something until she hastens to hate it. In the mass state, energy decreases in thinking, and the heterogeneous dissolves into the homogeneous, while the characteristics emanating from the unconscious dominate. Even if the masses are secular, they still have religious reactions that lead them to worship the leader, to fear his might, and to blind submission to his will, so that his words become a dogma that cannot be discussed, and the desire arises to generalize this dogma. As for those who do not share the masses' admiration for the words of the leader, they become the enemies. There are no masses without a leader, just as there is no leader without the masses. Le Bon wrote a century ago.