Dr. Mattias Desmet, of the University of Ghent, teaches Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895) and how crowd psychology explains totalitarian movements.
But even he didn’t see, right away, how “mass-formation” (his Le Bonian theory) explains the madness of the coronavirus pandemic.
I am still processing Desmet’s ideas, having caught parts of his Pandemic Podcast interview, but judge them important enough to pass on.
Le Bon’s main conjecture was that crowds, in certain conditions, form a “group mind,” the “psychological crowd” quite distinct from the individuals inside it in their normal course of life. Desmet, expanding on this, says that when key conditions are met, alarming developments can occur. When people suffer from
1. social isolation, with
2. lack of ‘sense making,’
3. free-floating anxiety, and
4. and general discontent,
they can become unhinged.
Into this situation comes the hinge to hang it all on: a demagogue, a revolutionary political party, or . . . news purveyors pressing one theme relentlessly. In the current pandemic, politicians, bureaucrats, and mainstream media offered a focusing issue and a means of alleviating it: mask-wearing, lockdowns, and subsidized, rushed-to-market vaccines.
And then mandates galore.
This sort of crowd can get really ugly, lashing out at newly created “enemies” (the unvaccinated!) to set up a social system easily exploited by the unscrupulous, the connected, and the fanatical.
Desmet has been studying socialism and fascism, and has a book in the works. He says that about a third of today’s population is caught up in this “mass hypnosis.”
Hitler used Le Bon’s book as a how-to. We should use it as a how-not-to.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
4 replies on “The Unhinging of the World Mind”
I cannot really tell what portion of the population has gone mad, but the estimate of a third seems optimistically low to me. Why haven’t the other two thirds acted more effectively to make themselves heard?
He actually says 25-30% are fully hypnotized, 50% go along with the flow and are too scared/lazy/resigned to contest, with the remaining minority resisting and needing to voice opposition. That said, some theories say that 10% of highly motivated can topple the system so here’s hoping!
Saul Alinsky said it in just a few words: never let a crisis go to waste.
Politicians, bureaucrats and news media took advantage of our fears at the outset of the pandemic to accumulate more power and we let them.
Thank you for posting the interview with Dr. Mattias Desmet, discussing the idea of Gustave LeBon from his 1895 book, “The Crowd.” This is very important for thinking about the coronavirus panic, with the mandated masks and the mandated vaccines, as rituals for this Mass Behavior toward the authoritarian State.