“Thou Many-Headed Monster Thing” and the Madness of Crowds

“Ideas, sentiments, emotions, and beliefs possess in crowds a contagious power as intense as that of microbes.” 

Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896)

Malcolm Pollack, who sometimes pays us a visit, has an excellent essay at American Greatness on the subject of “mass formation psychosis,” or what he prefers to call simply mass formation.*  The phenomenon of mass formation strikes me as very similar to what others have called the madness of crowds, and Malcolm uses it to throw welcome light on much of the madness we see around us today.  The microbial pandemic will almost certainly abate into insignificance, but the concurrent mental pandemic of mad “ideas, sentiments, emotions, and beliefs” is probably here to stay.

Malcolm explains that even the ancients knew that crowds are susceptible to strange excitements, panics, tumults, and furies, but that it is our lamentable fate to live in an age when anxiety, atomization, and the mass and social media have grown so powerful and pervasive that we are all coalescing into vast, demented crowds.

A crowd is a mass of individuals who are not united by tradition or reason, but who are thrown together, higgledy-piggledy, in a disparate social jumble that some call a multicultural community and others call a “lonely crowd.”  The minds of the individuals in this disparate social jumble are naturally divided, or as we like to say, “diverse,” but they can be artificially unified by common fantasies, fixations, and fears. If I understand Malcolm correctly, a crowd thus artificially unified is a mass formation—it is a mass that has taken, or perhaps been given, the form of a “many-headed monster,” ravening, cruel and insane.

This is how Sir Walter Scott described the madness of a mass formation in 1810:

“Who o’er the herd would wish to reign,
Fantastic, fickle, fierce, and vain!
Vain as the leaf upon the stream,
And fickle as a changeful dream;
Fantastic as a woman’s mood,
And fierce as frenzy’s fevered blood.
Thou many-headed monster thing,
O, who would wish to be thy king!”**

This is how Le Bon described the mad mind of this “many headed monster thing.”

“The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation.”

The collective mind of a crowd differs from the isolated mind of an individual primarily in the fact that a crowd is confident and an individual is diffident.  A crowd is certain that what it thinks and does is right, whereas an individual is prey to discouragement, doubt, and even despair.  Le Bon says, “the individual forming part of a crowd acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept under restraint.”

All the traits of the “many headed monster” enumerated by Scott follow from this sense of “invincible power.”  A crowd is “fantastic, fickle, fierce, and vain” because a crowd is a “echo chamber” in which madness is applauded, enabled, and affirmed.  An isolated individual is surrounded by critics who are all too eager to “burst his bubble” and laugh, whereas an individual in a crowd is surrounded by admiring fans who do nothing but cheer him on.

* * * * *

Le Bon’s great insight was that the disparate social jumble of a crowd is an empty vessel into which almost any belief or idea can be poured.  Crowds are easily infected with mad ideas and beliefs because the diversity of the crowd has disabled the defense of traditional prejudice, and the group-think of the crowd has disabled the defense of critical thinking.  Thus, even stolid peasants and skeptical scholars can be drawn into the madness of a crowd.  As for the great mass of anxious and atomized men and women who have lost their traditional prejudices without acquiring the habit of critical thinking, they have no defense to disable.  These anomic atoms have a sort of AIDs of the mind.

* * * * *

Le Bon teaches us that pandemic madness has four key parts.  The first is that the contagious idea or belief must be launched with a fanfare of “prestige.”  It must seem to come pre-approved, either by established authorities or by a charismatic individual.  Prestige permits the idea or belief to infect the minds of that numerous class of cognitive misers who prefer not to think any more than they absolutely must.  A cognitive miser is therefore defenseless against pronouncements from “reputable sources,” “recognized authorities,” and charismatic swindlers who really “seem like they know what they are talking about.”

Here is Le Bon:

“The special characteristic of prestige is to prevent us seeing things as they are and entirely to paralyze our judgment.  Crowds always, and individuals as a rule, stand in need of ready-made opinions on all subjects.  The popularity of these opinions is . . . solely regulated by their prestige.”

Not only cognitive misers are influenced by prestige.  All of us are daily required to make choices we do not understand, and very likely cannot understand, so we necessarily place our trust in “accredited experts,” “trusted institutions,” or the dubious axiom  that “fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.”  But my point here is that prestige is the means whereby mad ideas and beliefs are first introduced into a crowd, particularly among the cognitive misers, and it is from these early cases of infection that the contagion of mad ideas and beliefs then spreads.

* * * * *

In addition to prestige, Le Bon teaches us that mad ideas and beliefs are primarily spread through crowds by “affirmation, repetition, and contagion,” and that ideas and beliefs planted in this way, be they ever so mad, will live, grow and propagate for a very long time.

“When . . . it is proposed to imbue the mind of a crowd with ideas and beliefs—with modern social theories, for instance—the leaders have recourse to different expedients.  The principle of them are three in number and clearly defined—affirmation, repetition, and contagion.  Their action is somewhat slow, but its effects, once produced, are very lasting.”

When Le Bon says affirmation, he means that a mad idea or belief should be presented to a crowd without supporting arguments or evidence, since supporting arguments and evidence imply that there are people who doubt that the idea is good, or the belief is true.  If you wish to pour your mad ideas and beliefs into the head of a crowd, you must always speak of those ideas and beliefs as if they were already common sense.

These affirmations should be repeated mercilessly, preferably in formulas, catchphrases, and slogans, since it is by repetition, and not argument, that ideas are pounded into the many heads of that “monster thing” we call a crowd.

And once you have spread your mad ideas and beliefs to the cognitive misers by sheer prestige, and to a wider circle by repetition and treating them as if they were already proven and beyond dispute, you can leave them to spread by their own natural contagious power.  This contagious power comes from the fact that it is painful for an individual to maintain a minority opinion, and from the fact that it is terrifying for and individual to believe that everyone around him has gone stark raving mad.

*) Malcolm has also posted an important addendum at his own website (which you should bookmark if you haven’t already).

**) Sir Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake (1810)