The Psychology of Crowd Madness

Atticus

I am as interested in, as much as I am terrified of, the madness that assumes groups.  To cite a literary example and one that resonated with me since reading the book in high school is the mob mentality that overtook the town of Maycomb when they stormed the jailhouse in which Tom Robinson was being held in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”  An additional literary example is in the Lord of the Flies and the power hungry, fatal madness that overtook the group.  Or to cite real-life examples, the city riots of 2020 or The Capital on January 6^th.  These are examples, however, that pale in comparison to the psychology of the broader group-think in which I am concerned.  There lies a fallacy that the Nazi’s of Germany or the Bolshevik’s of the USSR were countries made up of innately terrible people.  This is not true, Germany and the USSR were not innately evil people that were destined to conduct horror as they left the womb, they were simply people who fell to the psychology of crowd madness, they are you and they are me.

Ideological Capture

I had the chance recently to read and study a book that The Guardian characterized as “Possibly the most influential work of psychology ever written.”  The book that I speak of is a psychological profiling of crowds written by Gustav Le Bon entitled, “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.”  Le Bon was a French psychologist, sociologist, and physician who wrote this groundbreaking piece in 1895 and to this day serves as the most comprehensive examination of crowd and group think.  An expression that I like and that I believe rings true is, “There is nothing new under the sun,” so to think that the polarization that has been consuming this country lately is something new is incorrect, however, it definitely does feel as it its on the rise.  What inspired me to look into this phenomena is the realization of the ideological capture that has consumed our institutions, politics has corrupted systems and institutions that are put in place to be apolitical foundations of our society.  We put so much stock now in “Experts,” the belief that a select few individuals have more knowledge and wisdom than that of the remaining collective country, so how can people who are objectively intelligent turn out to be so wrong at times? The reason for this is that no one is exempt from falling into echo-chambers of confirmation biases, the contorting of information to confirm our pre-existing notions and beliefs.   

A psychological crowd, defined by Le Bon is. “Numerically strong agglomeration of individuals that carry special psychological characteristics.  These characteristics include

1. Fixed Direction and Sentiment of Ideas (No Nuance & willingness to changing of opinion)
2. The disappearance of individual personality
3. Domination by unconscious considerations (subconsciously motivated)
4. Disappearance of brain activity & predominance of medullar activity (Animal brain)
5. Lowering of intelligence and complete transformation of the sentiments which may be better or worse than those of the individuals that compose the crowd

Whether it is an active mob or an idea that consumes a massive audience, one element that gets thrown out of the window is intelligence.  This is the part of the group psychologically that most intrigues me because I have noticed in recent years, experts, otherwise brilliant people be wrong and then the crowd feeds on the information, smart people with the ability to reason suddenly rendered incapable of accessing fact from fiction and using deductive reasoning.  This is explained by the fact that in crowds, “It is stupidity, not mother-wit, that is accumulated because group regresses to the mean of average, the shared birth-right intellect.”  What this means is that a group of doctors or scientists are no less susceptible to believing and proclaiming falsehoods than a group composed of people of average intelligence, the intellect had by the individual is lost and what forms is a shared-group intelligence that hypnotizes people into abandoning their ability to reason and think logically.  The individual shuts off the part of their conscious brain and activates the unconscious, a more primitive part of us.  The individual is always more logical than the group, of any kind and of any strata of IQ.  Crowds do not operate under rules, discipline, rationality, forethought, the things that cultures rest upon, rather they are controlled by unconscious reaction where feelings and the actions they provoke are more exaggerated than how they’d act as an isolated individual.  This gets only enhanced by the feeling of anonymity and impunity that comes along with being part of the crowd.

Hypnosis

To understand how a country such as Germany can be manipulated into carrying out the worst acts this world has ever seen, it is important to recognize that Nazi’s and their sympathizers did not leave the womb as inherently evil people, rather, they fell prey to the psychology of crowds.  “The most savage of crowds can be relatively peaceful people.”  So, how does it get to that point, from normal and civilized people to agents of chaos and terror?  First you must understand that it is in our nature to want subjugation, to quote Le Bon, “The crowd demands a god before everything else.”  Using the extreme case of 1930’s Germany, they found their dictatorial “God” and he fulfilled the subconscious need humans have to be ruled, to want a leader that exhibits qualities of strength that they do not possesses themselves that rids them of the personal responsibility of thinking for themselves.  When the crowd assumes a group-think psychology there is a hypnosis that assumes the crowd, and through the powerful tool of suggestion, a leader is able to have the crowd bend to their every will.  “The conscious personality has completely vanished, will and discernment are lost.  All feelings and thoughts are bent in the direction determined by the hypnotizer.  Not aware his faculties are being destroyed by the hypnotizer.” The process of laying the ground work of subjugation of thought is very clear, it’s following 3 steps; affirmation, repetition, and contagion.

• Affirmation: Sentiments “Stated as fact, strongly.  Kept free and simple and free of all reasoning or proof.  The less evidence, the more weight it carries.  To work, it requires repetition. 
• Repetition: “Constantly repeating the affirmation until it takes hold in minds and is accepted as truth.”  The sign that the repeating of the affirmation has taken hold is when the “Enlightened” minds and upper social class starts repeating it.  Through repetition the affirmation or idea has crossed over from the conscious mind into the unconscious mind where it has taken root.
• Contagion: “When repetition of an affirmation is performed enough, a current of opinion is formed and powerful mechanism of contagium intervenes.”  When something, whether true or false, has been stated so many times that people begin to think, “Well is must be true if everyone else believes it” then the mind virus spreads, the way of a contagious disease. 

The Image

It is important to note that when stating an affirmation, the affirmation cannot be a complex idea composed of data, logic, and reason, words and information of this kind are completely useless on the crowd and fall upon deaf ears. Rather, the affirmation and the words used to describe it must be simple and broad generalizations connecting associations of dissimilar things to evoke images within the mind.  “Build Back Better” and “Make America Great Again,” two generalized expressions relating to improving the country and that are simple and sticks in the brain and yet while meaning the same thing, are very different in the minds of people. The broad generalizations bring about misrepresentations in our minds. For instance when there are talks about incorporating high taxes on corporations, we picture billionaires on yachts, throwing money around like the Wolf of Wall Street, we don’t even consider the fact that over 99% of businesses are owned by people of the middle-class. Right now on the news I am seeing that we are declaring a “State of Emergency” for monkeypox and the words that are being said about it run counter to the reality that there have been a grand total of zero monkeypox deaths in the United States and the only 5 deaths that have occurred have taken place in sub-saharan africa. The more exaggerated the sentiment, the stronger effect that it has in the minds of the populace.  Words that are the most extreme, stimulating a subconscious fear response, are the most effective. Words that are also vague and ill-defined are highly effective ones because it allows people to arrive to their own definitions, this is Orwell’s “Double speak.” For example if you notice, the most tyrannical revolutionary movements are often called “Republics” or “Liberation Army’s,” this is the changing of a definition, but not the word, through subjectivity. To use a present real life example and phrase that is popular right now, “A threat to democracy.” Depending on which side of the aisle you’re on, you either view this threat related to the events of January 6th and the trying to prevent the finalizing of the election or you view it as election fraud and an illegitimate election stolen from the people. To quote Le Bon, “Whoever can supply crowds with illusions is their master.”  Symbols are a powerful tool in the mind of crowds because a symbol is simple and yet it evokes a strong conscious and subconscious emotional response.  Whether it be positive association related to one’s faith, such as the Christian cross or the Star of David, or negatively connotated symbol such as the swastika, when seen, there is a below-the-surface of our conscious association that takes place in our minds. To take a socially relevant example, the mask during covid.  A scientific examination of the preventative effect of a cloth mask would allow you to deduce its futility, and yet, the mask evoked a powerful feeling of security, safety, and fealty to the federal government and our fellow citizen within people. The cloth mask became a signal of virtue and to even question its efficacy was to not only be anti-science but worse, a bad person in the minds of many, a blasphemer. From the opposite perspective, one of the more prominent symbols that evoked a particular conscious and subconscious association in recent years was the red Make America Great Again hat, both in favor and in opposition of. The hat as a symbol brings out specific sentiment within people. The telltale sign that an affirmation has taken root in the minds of the crowd is when there is a religious-like formation that takes place surrounding this ideal. 

Devotion

There are certain characteristics of a religious-like sentiment that assumes crowds, it is not literally religion (Although it is sometimes that too) but instead an ideal that has become so fixed within us that it is seen as an integral part of our being.  There specific religious sentiment characteristics are,

• Worship of a being or ideal as supposed superior
• Fear of the power with which the being is credited
• Blind submission to its commands
• Inability to discuss the dogmas, there is no questioning of the established opinions
• The desire to spread the ideals
• A complete intolerance and the considering of enemies of all those who do not accept the ideals or beliefs wholesale

“All political, divine, and social creeds only take root among the masses on the condition of always assuming the religious shape, a shape which obviates the danger of discussion.” 

Gustav Le Bon

Deconstruction

What I’ve just described above is a paraphrased and brief look into the information from the first section of Le Bon’s examination on crowd psychology entitled “The Mind of the Crowd.”  The remaining sections “The Opinions and Beliefs of Crowds” and “The Classification and Description of the Different Kinds of Crowds,” are filled with profound insight.  For the sake of conclusion, I want to fast forward to an area at the end of the book where Le Bon examines the patterns that are exhibited in the lifecycles of a civilizations and societies.  Following the dawn of a civilization or a society and then the development of it through struggle and sacrifice, a society reaches the point of prosperity, the peak if you will.  Once there has been a period of sustained, relative comfort and prosperity, the society begins a period of deconstruction.  When a society begins to grow is when a society adopts a shared ideal that becomes the shared common value that unites, in the case of the western world it is the Judeo-Christian belief in the individual, not the group, and the belief that society functions best when it is built around the party of one.  The ideal that a system set-up flexibly around the evolutionary trait of self-interest through private property and free markets will provide the most widespread prosperity compared to a system set up on the utopian ideal of compassion, kindness and equal outcomes which has failed miserably every single time it has been attempted.  Gustav Le Bon in his examination of civilizations claimed that there is one telltale sign that a society has entered its period of deconstruction, “This inevitable hour is always marked by the weakening of the ideal that was the mainstay of the race. In proportion as this ideal pales all the religious, political, and social structures inspired by it begin to be shaken.” In 1882 philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche made the statement, “God is Dead” and in 1966 Time magazine had their infamous cover titled, “Is God Dead?”  These statements represent more than simply the falling away from religious sentiment but in a secular sense it is the removing of the central ideal that we in the western world agreed upon and that served as the foundation of our society.  I am not stating this as a plea to return to whence we came, I am stating this to point out that for decades now we as a society have been scrambling for a shared ideal that we can build the foundation of our new age upon and without any luck in doing so.  To pull from Le Bon one last time, “With the progressive perishing of its ideal the race loses more and more the qualities that lent it its cohesion, its unity, and its strength. The personality and intelligence of the individual may increase, but at the same time this collective egoism of the race is replaced by an excessive development of the egoism of the individual, accompanied by a weakening of character and a lessening of the capacity for action. What constituted a people, a unity, a whole, becomes in the end an agglomeration of individualities lacking cohesion, and artificially held together for a time by its traditions and institutions. It is at this stage that men, divided by their interests and aspirations, and incapable any longer of self-government, require directing in their pettiest acts, and that the State exerts an absorbing influence. With the definite loss of its old ideal the genius of the race entirely disappears; it is a mere swarm of isolated individuals and returns to its original state – that of a crowd. Without consistency and without a future, it has all the transitory characteristics of crowds. Its civilisation is now without stability, and at the mercy of every chance. The populace is sovereign, and the tide of barbarism mounts. The civilisation may still seem brilliant because it possesses an outward front, the work of a long past, but it is in reality an edifice crumbling to ruin, which nothing supports, and destined to fall in at the first storm. To pass in pursuit of an ideal from the barbarous to the civilised state, and then, when this ideal has lost its virtue, to decline and die, such is the cycle of the life of a people.” 

Crisis of Meaning

I do not write these words as a plea for a return to our old traditions for those days are long past, I do not write and provide Le Bon’s words to paint some grim and depressive picture, it is futile to worry about that which we have no control.  I write these words to point out what is ravaging our society and this is a crisis of meaning.  Since the dominance of faith has evaporated, which provided people with meaning, there has been a void within us that we are attempting to fill with unstable belief structures that we are turning to for the formation of our identity, to define who we are.  Social justice, and it’s God, The State, has become the 21^st century’s new religion amongst a large swath of the millennial and the successive generations. The void of meaning being filled with politics, an entity that is as unstable as it is unwinnable. Where once religion offered the idea of utopia being found in the afterlife, we have now adopted the belief that we can bring about a world without suffering, war, and unequal outcomes as if it is not something that is the innate downside of our species since the beginning of time and forever will be the tragedy of our existence.  Through the isolating of ourselves as an individual and not a member of the group, we can check our confirmation biases that we all fall prey to, we can begin evaluating information and beliefs through a lens of objectivity, rather than clinging to whatever the accepted group-think narrative is at the time.  We can form our opinions and beliefs using the tools of logic and reason.  Logic and reason, not the comfort that comes from group conformity, is how we return to a place of cohesion and fight the powers of polarization.