The Leaders of Crowds

 My reaction to reading Gustave Le Bon's classic study on group psychology, The Crowd, is very similar to my reaction to reading Pareto (who, it must be said, was influenced by Le Bon). In other words, here is yet another classic book that is often depicted in recollection as either a pioneering work of social science, or a political screed of the hue of darkest reaction. Yet, just as with Pareto, I found it to be neither. 

For one thing, Le Bon's book does not resemble anything we would accept as an empirical scientific treatise—even by the looser standards of the qualitative social sciences. He does not multiply examples, and indeed many of his assertions about crowd psychology stand alone as bare affirmations, unsupported by any examples, logical argument, or case histories (which, oddly, is exactly the same unreasoning procedure he attributes to the demagogic leaders of crowds). 

The book is plainly, therefore, much more a polemic than it is a scientific study. Yet, as polemics go, it is not nearly as reactionary as one might have been led to believe, from the book's reputation and its subsequent influence. It is a common tragedy of works in this vein (the same thing happened to Lippmann, for instance, whom Chomsky has pilloried as a great Machiavellian manipulator) that what the authors plainly intended as a critique of the methods of exploiting collective opinion gets taken by subsequent generations as a how-to manual of propaganda. 

To be sure, there is plenty in Le Bon's book that reads as very politically unsympathetic by today's standards (the work was written in 1895, after all). But Le Bon is far from the proto-fascist he is sometimes made out to be. His politics are far closer to Burke than they are to de Maistre. His political ideal seems to be the pragmatic and open-ended constitutionalism of the English monarchy in parliament. He reads more as a Whig than he does an arch-conservative. 

Pareto, despite the clear intellectual debt he owes to Le Bon (evident from the footnotes of his Rise and Fall of Elites) nonetheless mischaracterizes his politics in this regard. "Le Bon," he writes (in the Zetterberg translation), "is simply the adherent of a certain anthropological-patriotic religion, and therefore speaks with the enthusiasm of a believer. He fights against socialism because it is a rival religion." 

In reality, however, Le Bon's analysis of the "religious sentiment" reads as roughly the same as Pareto's. Anyone who thinks that Le Bon (at least, the Le Bon who wrote The Crowd—I can't speak to how his politics may have evolved subsequently) was a sort of Catholic reactionary in a proto-Action Francaise vein should take a look at his characterization of the Christian faith in this work. A "frightful absurdity," he calls it, in one passage; the "legend of a God who revenges himself for the disobedience of one of his creatures by inflicting horrible tortures on his son[.]" (Unwin trans. throughout)

Has anyone ever before as succinctly and justly summarized the baffling odiousness of the doctrine of the atonement? 

Le Bon also repeatedly acknowledges that parliamentary democracy is the best system of government we have ever yet devised, despite all its flaws. He does not advocate overthrowing it; to the contrary, he calls for preserving it on Burkean grounds. 

Indeed, in one of his most politically sympathetic passages, he denounces those who favor rule by a particular class or educated elite. He says that collectives of all kinds are prone to the same demagogic errors, whether their membership is restricted to the "educated" or not, and points out (justly) that doctors and lawyers and academicians are just as likely to have terrible and irrational ideas as everyone else.  He points, for instance, to the cases of scientists who have been hoodwinked by simple magic tricks. And history, surely, has borne Le Bon out on this point. 

The most unjust thing about the posthumous legacy of Le Bon's book, however, has to be—as I noted above—the way it has been mined by propagandists and demagogues for techniques of persuasion—when in fact, as any casual reading of the book would show—Le Bon is repulsed by demagogues. His whole point is to demonstrate how they take advantage of people and distort the truth. And if he affects a scientific neutrality and pessimistic sense of futility in the face of their evident success in doing so, it is not hard to detect the core of outraged opinion and subjective judgment behind what he writes. 

And, it has to be said, even if Le Bon leaves himself open to appropriation by demagogues, and even if many of his claims about their methods are left unsupported by evidence—he seems to be basically correct in his analysis of how demagogues succeed in manipulating crowds. 

It is inevitable in the contemporary era, of course, that we think of Trump—and how he seems most to come alive when he is in front of a crowd. Trump always thrives in a rally. And even though I doubt he's ever read or even heard of Le Bon, he seems to have a strange instinct for applying all of the psychologist's methodological insights. 

Note Trump's incessant use of "repetition"; his bombastic assertion of bald, unsubstantiated statements as if they were irrefutable; his exaggeration; his reliance on the ineffable quality of "prestige" (how often have we heard people say that Trump's "name-recognition" and celebrity X-factor have been of signal importance to his campaign?). Le Bon provides a sustained analysis of all of these methods. 

Indeed, it often seems like Trump's speeches are a kind of classroom illustration of Le Bon's claims about the techniques of demagogues. If Trump did not exist, he would have to be invented by a professor of communications somewhere, who had been reading too much Le Bon. 

Note how Trump will say something utterly false and provocative: such as that the 2020 election was stolen, or that Biden is deliberately importing undocumented immigrants in order to swing the next vote. Trump will offer no evidence or reasoning to support any of these claims. Nor will he be deterred by the fact that they are demonstrably untrue. Instead, he will simply repeat them. 

All of this is in line precisely with what Le Bon prescribes for the would-be demagogue. The effective leader of crowds always, in Le Bon's telling, makes use of "energetic affirmation—unburdened with proofs." Elsewhere, he repeats the same idea: "Affirmation, pure and simple," he writes, "kept free of all reasoning and all proof, is one of the surest means of making an idea enter the minds of crowds. The conciser an affirmation is, the more destitute of every appearance of proof or demonstration, the more weight it carries." Then, he says, one simply needs to repeat the affirmation. And "contagion" will do the rest.

Can anyone today read that passage and not instantly hear Trump's voice in their head, saying something like "they're bringing crime; they're bringing drugs" or "the election was stolen"; or "frankly, we did win this election"; or "it's a witch hunt"; or "we will build a wall, and Mexico will pay for it"; and so on, and so on, and so on. 

Le Bon, I repeat, is not saying any of this is a good thing. He would be as disgusted with Trump's lies as the rest of us are, or more so. He loathes the demagogues, and simply wishes to demonstrate to us why they are able to succeed—hopefully (though again, Le Bon affects an airy sense of aristocratic pessimism on this point) so that we might resist their influence. 

Le Bon says, to be sure, that such an attempt to resist them is hopeless. And his advice on this point rings true for many of us staring down the prospect of the 2024 election with ever-diminishing hopes that Trump can be defeated: "in the period of universal disintegration we are traversing," Le Bon writes in a footnote, "it is necessary to be resigned to living from hand to mouth without too much concern for the future we cannot control." 

The crowd is strong. The individual conscience is weak. To the extent Le Bon's book affirms these truths, it may be characterized as pessimistic, and perhaps even as politically conservative—at least in so far as "futility" always looms large in the discourse of reaction (as Albert O. Hirschman's great book on the subject points out). 

But I think that, despite all Le Bon's claims to have given up, there is a reason nonetheless why he wrote this book. For all his pretense of despair, there is a strength of intellectual resistance to be derived merely from his accurate statement of the demagogue's methods. Sometimes, as the poet James Thomson once wrote, there is "some sense of power and passion" to be found, simply, in having told the truth. 

The first step to defeating the demagogue must surely be to understand these truths—and thereby to be on the lookout for the predictable techniques of the demagogues. Only when we see what Trump is doing and why can we hope to insulate our minds from his techniques and try to persuade our compatriots not to be so easily taken in. "Affirmation, repetition, contagion," as Le Bon puts it—to be able to see this methodology on display every time Trump opens his mouth is already to have won half the battle against him. 

It also spares us the energy we currently expend trying to respond to some of his claims. Every time Trump says something currently along the lines of, say, that "Biden is emptying the prisons of Latin America to bring immigrants here," the New York Times will frame the assertion with a passage along the lines of "Trump again claimed without evidence that..." Now we know that this is hardly surprising. "Exactly," Le Bon would tell us—"for the 'leaders of crowds,' evidence is unnecessary; claiming 'without evidence' is precisely the point." 

And once we can see the danger inherent in crowds and the demagogues who lead them, perhaps we will be in a better position to heed the Biblical admonition: "Thou shalt not follow the multitude to do evil."