THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REVOLUTION by Gustave Le Bon -- A BOOK REVIEW

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REVOLUTION by Gustave Le Bon – A BOOK REVIEW

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© February 20, 2012

This is the third of three reviews of Le Bon’s works.  The first was, “The Psychology of Peoples” (1894), the second, “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” (1896), and now the third, “The Psychology of Revolution” (1913).

Gustave Le Bon was born on May 7, 1841 before either the American Civil War or the French Revolution.  He lived into his ninety-second year dying on December 13, 1931, after the First World War, but shortly before Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933.  The Nazi dictator used Le Bon’s psychology to hypnotize the German people to his purposes.

The Frenchman, a trained physician, followed his bliss, which was sociology and social psychology expounding on theories of crowd psychology, national traits and herd behavior.  He also pursued the hard sciences, but it was in the soft sciences that his reputation was made.  

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REVOLUTION

OVERVIEW

Gustave Le Bon does the reader a service by probing the undercurrents of social-political revolutions in psychological and historical terms.  Society is never static.  It may seem so but is evolving in imperceptible tectonic shifts not unlike the shifting plates of the earth that periodically rupture enough to produce devastating earthquakes.  In the case of social-political systems, the ruptures produce revolutions.

Writers, philosophers, historians and thinkers record these impressions and project them as omens of which none have prescient knowledge.

Ancestral influences are always pressing against current events and the rule of law and action to “disaggregate the collective personality of its mental and social contagions into the unconscious formation of new beliefs.”  Le Bon calls this phenomenon the “genesis of beliefs.”  He says, “so long as psychology regards beliefs as voluntary and rational, they will remain inexplicable.”  But he adds, “Beliefs are usually irrational and always involuntary.”

This gives rise to the fact that beliefs, which have no reason to justify them, come to be accepted by the most enlightened without difficulty.  We see this in the absurdity of the mysteries of the Christian religion, which despite the fact that they defy logic and natural law, are embraced by men of great intellect.

Logic, he says, has to be viewed therefore in terms of affective logic (feelings), collective logic (social) and mystical logic (religion) in order for it to overrule reason. 

It is precisely because of the progression of logics incomprehensible to people that they never suspect the invisible power forced upon them to act.  “They were the masters neither of their fury nor their weakness.”

When there is a violent contradiction of opinions, they invariably belong to the powers of beliefs and not to knowledge. 

Revolution is always the work of believers without the calming intervention of rational logic.  Never was this truer than in the French Revolution.  “At no period of history did men so little grasp the present, so greatly ignore the past, and so poorly divine the future.”  But the past never dies, as we all know.  It is even more truly with us than without us.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF REVOLUTION

“A revolution is not productive of results until it has sunk into the soul of the multitude.”  The multitude is the agent of revolution, but not its point of departure.  “The crowd represents an amorphous being which can do nothing, and will nothing, without a head to lead it.” 

Scientific revolutions, Le Bon claims, are the most important but the least attentive of revolutions.  It is as if these scientific wonders can be absorbed without consequences when they change the structure of society radically in a “cut and control” phenomenon. 

Science cuts existence away from the way it was into a new reality, a reality in which something is gained, but at the expense of something lost forever.  The cost benefit argument is obliterated in the fascination with the new.

Galileo’s discoveries in astronomy revolutionized our perception of the universe demonstrating that invariable laws of nature, and not the caprices of the gods, rule us.  The same is true of the evolutionary studies of Darwin in zoology and botany, Pasteur’s discoveries in medicine and Lavoisier’s in chemistry.  These men mounted revolutionary movements that have changed perceptions as well as behavior of man.  “Without them men would still be living in caves.”

REVOLUTIONS IN POLITICS & RELIGION

Beneath scientific revolutions are religious and political revolutions.  “While scientific revolutions derive solely from rational elements, political and religious beliefs are sustained almost exclusively by affective and mystic factors.” 

By the insistence of absolute truth a belief necessarily becomes intolerant.  This explains the violence, hatred and persecution that are habitually associated with the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution.

Political revolutions result from beliefs established in the minds of men.  The word discontent sums this up.  Discontent, for whatever reason, must accumulate over time to product the effects of revolution.  People can withstand a great deal of discomfort before they are willing to leave their comfort zone for something unknown.  They can be badgered and bullied, ridiculed and castigated, but if they have a modicum of comfort they will remain docile. 

Once comfort is shattered completely, Le Bon says, it is not the liberally high minded that are the most vindictive and violent, but the more conservative.  Still, revolution is not seeded until comfort at the top is shattered.  “All great revolutions come from the top, not the bottom.”  Once the top sets off the spark the people become an incendiary force.  

That said discontent is not sufficient to bring about revolution.  It is necessary for those at the top to use exaggeration to persuade the discontented that the government or the church (or whatever) is the sole cause of the people’s agony. 

Usually, it is not enough for a revolution to be triumphant.  It must reject the old laws and persecute supporters of the previous regime.  The Velvet Revolution of Czechoslovakia of 1989, led by poet Vaclav Havel, was an exception.  The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia routinely persecuted dissidents before the Velvet Revolution, but Havel and his cohorts felt no need to do so to defend their beliefs in democratic principles.

Le Bon contrasts revolutions:

“In religious revolutions no experience can reveal to the faithful that they are deceived, since they would have to go to heaven to make the discovery.  In political revolutions experience quickly demonstrates the error of a false doctrine and forces men to abandon it.”

The Protestant Reformation was first a simple struggle against abuses of the clergy.  Luther turns out to be a mild reformer compared to Calvin who was as intolerant as Robespierre in the French Revolution.  The Reformation set out to replace the sovereign dictates of the Pope in Rome.  Far from diminishing the absolution rules of the church, it exaggerated them in the new faith. 

Le Bon sees reason has little place in revolution, but leaders of the Reformation considered themselves rational men.  Yet, doctrine eclipsed rational values as the movement “overturned all Europe, and came near to ruining France, of which it made a battlefield for a period of fifty years. Never did a cause so insignificant from the rational point of view produce such great results.” 

The mind and morality of the times was more concerned with salvation than life, more in fear of the devil than any priest could allay, more aroused by passions than interested in rational logic. “Luther sough the surest means of pleasing God that he might avoid Hell.  Having commenced by denying the Pope the right to sell indulgences, he presently entirely denied the authority and that of the Church, condemned religious ceremonies, confession, and the worship of the saints, and declared that Christians should have no rules of conduct other than the Bible.  He also considered that no one could be saved without the grace of God.” 

Calvin took Luther’s vague definition of predestination to certain heights with his “elected,” which were those who excelled economically, and thus changed the course of history, leading the West by implication of the work ethic for the next five hundred years to economic, political and military and world dominance. 

Calvin rather than Luther developed the assertions of St. Augustine of an all-powerful God, which ruled a white and black world with no iota of gray.  The new faith was propagated by the influence of affirmation, repetition, mental contagion and prestige.

History is replete with the autodafes of the Inquisition, but little is written about the heroics of persecuted Protestants by the church where the condemned were burned alive “by attaching the victims to an iron chain, which enabled the executioners to plunge them into the fire and withdraw them seven times in succession.  But nothing induced the Protestants to retract, even the offer of amnesty after they had felt the fire.”

Intolerance for the new faith and violent persecution seeded the spread of Protestantism as persecution had the early Christians.  Reason is powerless to affect the brain of the convinced, whatever the religion.  It was a matter of mystic (religious) logic.  Toleration is difficult between individuals, but impossible between collectivities.

*     *     *

Historians treat political and religious revolutions separately, but they have a lot in common such as fear, paranoia and mistrust.  The massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572 ordered by Catherine de Medicis and Charles IX was based on the believed plot of Protestant leaders to topple these regimes.  Soldiers entered these leaders’ homes and killed everyone, the massacre followed. 

“Pope Gregory XIII had a medal struck to commemorate the happy event, ordered joy-fires to be lit and cannon fired, celebrated several masses, and sent for the painter Vasari to depict on the walls of the Vatican the principal scenes of the carnage.”

The Jacobins’ “Reign of Terror” of the French Revolution led by Robespierre had a mentality very like that of Gregory XIII.

The Christian religion as the Roman Catholic Church evolved to dominance over a period of 1500 years.  Now, with the Protestant Reformation, religious faith was again triumphing and in the process transforming Western civilization.

Le Bon develops an enchanting picture of how faint-hearted governments fare in revolution, no matter how violent or timid the response they invariably prove counterproductive.  When the animosity and antagonism fade, the new is customarily the reestablishment of a more autocratic theology or constitution that departs little from the previous system.  People cannot choose radically different institutions until the collective mind of has been changed.

Le Bon doesn’t have much faith in the “great man” theory.  “Bismarck singled-handed created the unity of Germany, yet his master had only to touch him with his finger and he vanished.  A man is as nothing before a principal supported by opinion.”

The directing forces of a country are its impersonal bureaucratic elements, which never seem to be affected by the changes of government.  Those who occupy the anonymous state in the invisible government are always more powerful than the official State, despite the fact that they are never seen and therefore never ridiculed.  The elected and the prominent suffer the blunt force trauma for them.

FRAGILITY OF THE COLLECTIVE MIND

The stability and malleability of the national psyche is as much in question as that of the individual.  Le Bon sees revolutions occurring when there is a collective sickness of the collective mind.  Due to internal stress and accelerating and unanticipated demands made on it by change, it is unable to cope successfully.  Sentiments, traditions and prejudices constitute this national mind, always ripe to project its missteps to others. 

When elements within society not only clash but also take on the character of half-castes, Le Bon sees the situation ungovernable and vulnerable to open rebellion. 

“From the moment when the Revolution descended from the middle to the lower classes of society, it ceased to be a domination of the instinctive by the rational and became the effort of the instinctive to overpower the rational.”

The social climate festers and boils then become increasingly chaotic and phlegmatic, but will go nowhere until it finds a leader.

Ideas, leaders, armies and crowds constitute essential elements of revolution.  Rarely does the crowd understand the revolution.  Its action is comparable to a shell penetrating an armor plate by the momentum of a force it did not create.  The crowd is unhinged from meaning.  It shouts because others are shouting, it revolts because others are revolting, it crashes into police barriers because others are, having no idea why or what caused it to be unhinged. 

Once the crowd has prevailed, the governmental ideal “is always the very simple, something very like dictatorship.  This is why, from the times of the Greeks to our own, dictatorships has always followed anarchy.”

The irony is that the crowd breaks the chains of the established order only “to see the reestablishment of an autocratic organization with an appearance of constitutionalism practically (the same as) the old system, once again.”  Le Bon adds, “A people cannot choose its institutions until it has transformed its mind.”

The predominant characteristics of the revolutionary spirit reflected in the collective personality are race, religion, traditional hatreds, customary fears, vanities, ambitions and envies.  Out of this grows the temperament of the mystic mentality that is moved by idols, fetishes, words and formulas.  It flatters itself that it alone is in possession of absolute truth and meaning.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

The French Revolution, Le Bon shows, lost its relevance as soon as the cry, “liberty, fraternity and equality,” was reduced to equality.  “Never did men speak so much to say so little; the empty verbiage and swollen emphasis swamp any truth there may be beneath their monotony and turgidity.”

The Jacobins, the party of Robespierre, had no sense of the mystical mentality that marched them onward in all sincerity, but blindly while the phantom reason was left behind.  Robespierre was like a leader of a procession of imaginary followers.  He believed beliefs could be molded to reason so there would be reason to the beliefs.

“Passion supports convictions, but hardly ever creates them.  The Jacobin is a mystic who has replaced the old divinities by new gods.  Imbued with the power of words and formulae, he attributes to these a mysterious power. . So that although the Jacobin is a great reasoner, this does not mean he is in the least guided by reason.  When he imagines he is being led by reason it is really his passions and his mysticism that lead him.  Like all those who are convinced and hemmed in by the walls of faith, he can never escape there from.”

THE REVOLUTIONARY MENTALITY

Le Bon gets inside the weak character endemic to revolutionaries who are “incapable of mastering themselves sufficiently to resist the impulses that rule them.”  The exception, he points out, is the revolutionary spirit that is sufficiently independent to be intellectually revolutionary.  Then society escapes the yoke of its entrapment and realizes real progress as in the case of the Scientific Revolution.

Even in the case of science, revolutions fail to produce their full effect until they penetrate the soul of the multitude.  The crowd is a manifestation of the mystic personality where the conscious individuality of man vanishes in the unconscious personality of the crowd.

Here the collective mind dominates the unconscious in what Le Bon calls “collective logic,” which is marked by infinite credulity, exaggerated sensibility, shortsightedness, and a capacity to slavishly respond to affirmation, contagion, repetition and prestige.  The revolutionary becomes a veritable non-person as personal characteristics vanish in the crowd.  “The miser becomes generous, the skeptic a believer, the honest man a criminal, the coward a hero.”

The crowd is on automatic pilot with unconscious forces dominating their collective soul, doing and saying what they would not say or do in other circumstances.  “A crowd is in reality inaccessible to reason; the only ideas capable of influencing it will always be sentiments evoked in the form of images.”  This is as true in any mass movement.

With this foundation, Le Bon gives the reader a detailed history of the French Revolution, its personalities, its high and low points, and the circumstances that have made it important to peoples across the globe to this day.

As in his other books reviewed here, he has a fascination with the anatomy and psychology of the crowd.  Likewise, he explores and exposes the central touchstones of instinct and reason as they relate to revolt, and how civilization invariably retrogresses to the primitive and barbaric when it launches revolution.  “In normal times, we are guided by the various forms of logic-rational affective, collective and mystic – which more or less perfectly balance one another.  During seasons of upheaval, they enter into conflict, and man is no longer himself. 

He has some harsh words to say about socialism while being committed to natural law. 

“Socialism, the modern synthesis of hope, would be a regression to lower forms of evolution, for it would paralyze the greatest sources of our activity.  By replacing individual initiative and responsibility by collective initiative and responsibility mankind would descend several steps on the scale of human values.”

Think of his final words in this volume with our current struggles:

“If we continue to shatter our cohesion by intestine struggles, party rivalries, base religious persecutions, and laws which fetter industrial development, our part in the world will soon be over.  We shall have to make room for peoples more solidly knit, who have been able to adapt themselves to natural necessities instead of pretending to turn back upon their course.  The present does not repeat the past, and the details of history are full of unforeseen consequences; but in their main lines events are conditioned by eternal laws.”

*     *     *

THE HUMAN COMEDY: POLITICS & THE ECONOMY ON PRESIDENTS' DAY

THE HUMAN COMEDY: POLITICS & THE ECONOMY VIEWED ON PRESIDENTS’ DAY

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 20, 2012

REFERENCE:

Dr. Donald Farr, a former NASA scientist and engineer, has an e-mail (Don Farr Network) audience of some 400 or so devotees who express their opinions with naked passion and unbridled enthusiasm, currently, on President Barak Obama’s leadership, the economy, and their ideological preferences.  I read them all, but seldom comment.  This is an exception.  I suspect they differ little with other Americans across this great country.

DR. FISHER WRITES:

Dr. Don,

I'm in the process of writing a review of Gustave Le Bon's THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REVOLUTION (1913), when I took a break to read e-mails from you.  They confirm that we are all card-carrying members of the human comedy.

If anyone ever understood the human comedy and the madness it invites, it was Le Bon. 

Societal madness is as endemic as personal madness.  Nassir Ghaemi confirms this in A FIRST-RATE MADNESS (2012) with profiles of several presidents who were quite mad or had a tinge of madness.  Conversely, sanity he shows rings false in a time of madness.

My problem with President Barak Obama, although I am a registered Republican who doesn’t always vote Republican, is not his madness, but his sanity, which seems out of joint with the times.  He tries to broker a consensus with a conflicting Congress and to hold together two sides of an ideological divide from the perspective of an introvert (see my, THE MYTH ABOUT INTROVERTS). 

Le Bon writes:

"Without rigidity the ancestral soul would have no fixity, and without malleability it could not adapt itself to the changes of environment resulting from the progress of civilization.  Excessive malleability of the national mind impels a people to incessant revolutions.  Excess of rigidity leads it to decadence."

We Americans currently straddle that divide, and have done so successfully through most of our history.  We haven't allowed views of the extreme -- what William L. Livingston calls "cognitive biases" -- to fester in a closed cauldron.  If we did, chances are they would surely explode and do irrevocable damage. 

The Don Farr Network provides a vehicle for diverse views to be expressed, some of which I find poignant others absurd, but nonetheless interesting because I believe them all to be honest. 

Le Bon continues:

"Stability is only acquired very slowly.  The history of a race is above all the story of its long effort to establish its mind."

The Internet has given us a connection that acts as a catalyst to that mind, and will remain a positive catalyst as long as we, in good humor, recognize that we are all part of the same human comedy, and that there is a grain or so of truth to what we all think and say. 

The role of a president is to shape these grains into a collective truth that resonates with our collective self.

Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, FDR, JFK and Reagan managed to weave threads of discord into something resembling a common fabric.  Obama has yet to demonstrate that acumen as weaver.  He seems to depend too much on what Le Bon calls the “invisible government,” those not elected but who perform administrative functions and dictate national policy.

I write about “leaderless leadership,” fearing we suffer from a derivative of "corpocracy,” where the survival of the institution takes precedence over its reason for existence.

I was reminded of this when I was having lunch today, watching a segment on the History Channel.  It was on Andrew Jackson, a president responsible for the "Trail of Tears," driving the Indians off their land in the South and to the far Northwest.  He also preserved the Union while creating the imperial presidency.  Every president has benefited since in terms of power and prestige.

Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Madison and Monroe desired to relocate the Indians, but Jackson is the devil who did it. 

Rightly or wrongly, Jackson is the only president to have an age named after him, a man who led autocratically in "the voice of the people” with the operational word, “led,” giving little sway or power to comfortably ensconced politicians or bureaucrats in Washington, DC.

Someone wrote to me saying, "You're encouraging revolution with some of your statements in these book reviews on Gustave Le Bon.” 

Nothing could be further from the truth.  My only concern, as was Le Bon’s, is that

"The multitude is the agent of a revolution, but not its point of departure.  The crowd represents an amorphous being which can do nothing, and will nothing, without a head to lead it.  It will quickly exceed the impulse once received, but it never creates it."

Jackson’s own vice president, John Calhoun, tried to organize the succession of South Carolina from the Union in 1832.  “Old Hickory” quelled that by his promise to see that every man guilty of treason in the state would hang, and he was known to keep his promises.  

Nothing is ever as it seems, and that is where the mischief grows. 

Aaron Carroll of Indiana University tells us that in 2010, residents of the 10 states ranked as "most conservative" received 21.2 percent of their income in government transfers, while the number for the 10 most "liberal states" was only 17.1 percent.  Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman points out the liberal states were also the poorest. 

You can quibble about these statistics, but even so, it is apparent big government is not simply an ideological thing.  We preach one thing and practice another.  Few Americans live within their means and this has been going on since World War Two.

I wrote an essay on this on our two hundredth national birthday (January 1, 1976) titled, “American is Dead!  Long live America!” (St. Petersburg Evening Independent). 

This essay was published again in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD: Our Chronic Culture Viewed from the 1970’s (2003).  It didn’t attract many readers, but presaged the crisis of 2008.

Jackson was not a man of words but of action.  He took federal funds out of the Bank of the United States, an independent institution, and put the funds in state banks, or into the "people's banks."  You can imagine what a brouhaha that created.  Nicholas Biddle, the bank's president, and US Senator Henry Clay, thought this was suicide for Jackson’s reelection, but he won in a landslide.  However you see Jackson, devil or saint, he was a leader.

Oil is another example of what seems to be, but isn’t.  Media tell us gasoline could rise to $4 or even $5 per gallon by this summer “because of the possible skyrocketing price per barrel of crude,” given our tension with Iran and the need for oil tankers to pass through the narrow Straits of Hormuth. 

Then explain how our largest export is gas and oil.  American oil corporations leverage the price differential between the US and Europe to their advantage. So, when gasoline is $4 a gallon in the United States, it is likely to be close to $8 a gallon in Europe.  We could have a gasolin shortage at home this summer, but this is unlikely to dissuade oil companies from exporting oil and gas abroad. 

How many are aware of this paradoxical dilemma?  In the human comedy, we flirt with the tragic and go steady with the absurd. 

All this talk about a pipeline from Canada to the southern United States as being “our savior” is likely to only feed this already well-established funnel to Europe.  Do you hear any politicians talking about this?

So much for the human comedy.

Be always well,

Jim

*     *     *

PONDERING THE WISDOM OF GUSTAVE LE BON WITH A FRIEND

PONDERING THE WISDOM OF GUSTAVE LE BON WITH A FRIEND

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 18, 2012

REFERENCE:

My friend comes from my hometown.  Like me, he has risen from humble circumstances and is a staunch believer in self-initiative, paying your own way, taking your lumps, and not groaning about it. 

Whatever he has done, or is now doing, he gives his all.  He is a strong institutional man when it comes to family, work, his beliefs, and is fanatical about his hobbies.  They include catching rattlesnakes, furnishing rocks for landscaping, volunteering five or six days a week at Operation Gratitude, packing and mailing care packages to overseas troops, teaching and mentoring grad students doing military, NASA, and industrial consulting, and this all since he retired as a Ph.D. scientist and engineer for NASA. 

While going to school, he worked full-time, drove racecars, built hot rods and custom cars, and raised a family.  He did research for the San Diego Scientific Research Institute, where he did Paranormal Psychology Research & Development, and wrote major papers on this research.  He was also instrumental at NASA during his career as one of the scientist behind all the headlines of the space program.     

This response was a further amplification of my book review of Gustave Le Bon’s THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PEOPLES (1896), where my enthusiasm for the work was seen to match the conservatism of the author.  It was not my intention, however true, but to engage the reader in thinking hard about this work against the reality of today.


DR. FISHER PONDERS:

Don,

Thank you for understanding my intention.  BB said, "There, you did it again."  She didn't expect you to understand, but I did.  I applaud you as a true Renaissance man from your vocation to your avocation, both which are quite striking.

You and I are ordinary guys from an ordinary town who expected extraordinary things from ourselves, which included the risks, the disappointments, the falling occasionally on our faces, being misunderstood, and yes, even envied, when all we were trying to do was to follow the light as we were able to appreciate the light.

Neither of us had a golden parachute or parents who could rescue us when we misstep as we came from neither power nor money.  We were instead fueled by love and the freedom it gave us.

I am all for hobbies if hobbies are an avenue of expression and projection from a base of success and dedication in a working life and not as an apologist for never having found love in work. 

I am not for hobbies as justification for never leaving our comfort zone, for falling into the trap of a job that pays the bills but has no other upside, a job we doggedly work for forty or fifty years on automatic pilot.

I am for the passion to break out of the prison of our rote education by expecting great things of ourselves and having little interest in fitting nicely into the machine, no questions asked.

I am not for us to gravitate to a safe job or for us to behave as safe hires that won’t create waves even if the status quo is wrong.

I am for confronting our bosses or management when they or it exploit us or take our good will for granted.

I am not for us being content with being paid as little as the traffic will bear or for us to behave obsequiously as if we are lucky to have a job or to be working, when it should be the other way around.  If it is not, we should move on to where we are appreciated.

I am tired of hearing we live in the land of the free and the home of the brave when our freedoms seldom include challenging the system, or when we engage in wars contractors and industrialists get rich and young people die, while the wars generally end in stalemate.

I am not for buying into the idea we should have pride in our work when our work is boring, unchallenging, repetitious, dehumanizing and has no room for our voice to improve its construction other than cosmetically.

I am for us as workers to be partners in work with the bottom of the tree getting most of the attention as that is where the answers are and where the decisions should be made.

I am not a believer that the wealth creators are those that carry money off to the bank but those in the trenches whose sweat and tears create the wealth.

“Wealth creators” have destroyed the economy through their stupidity and failure to listen to those in the know who could see it coming, but didn’t bother to mount a protest because “it was not their problem.”

I am certain Le Bon is correct that no matter how much pain the rank and file feel, no matter how much it suffers in socioeconomic terms, it is not until the elite feel the pinch that anything changes.  Then, the government bails the elite out on Wall Street and in the industrial sector and nobody sees this as welfarism written large.

I am not for redundancy exercises, reengineering, downsizing, or other such practices until those who first created the mess are made redundant, reengineered, downsized, or surplused.

I am for a capitalistic system in which all employees are shareholders who have a vote in executive compensation, outsourcing, moving, merging or consolidating operations.

I am not for executive compensation that is 300 to 500 times the average worker’s pay.

I am for a safety net to all employees if one is given to senior management.  If it cannot be afforded for all employees, then it cannot be afforded for senior management.

I am not for holding workers who are incompetent, or play the system, are pyramid climbers always campaigning for the next job, but for a system of pay that is based totally on performance, and not voodoo accounting favoring executives.

I am bemused with a system in which the GDP is dependent on consumer spending to the tune of 60 percent, on the one hand, while economists berate workers for not saving more on the other.  Were Americans to save at the rate of the Japanese, our economy would tank.  You can’t have it both ways.

I am not for buying the latest and greatest gadgets or contraptions when the one you already have works fine. 

Christopher Lasch wrote three powerful books on the subject: “The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age Of Diminishing Expectations” (1978),  “The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times” (1984), and “The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics” (1991). 

It is no accident that Lasch wore himself out in the decades of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s trying to get America’s attention without success.  We will see Alvin Toffler did the same.  Nothing changed, that is, until 2007, and then the hysterical took over.

People lost their jobs, lost their savings, lost their homes, and instead of directing anger at the causers, the unemployed and the underemployed directed their wrath at their loved ones or at themselves, when they had done nothing wrong.

*     *     *

Don, the reason Gustave Le Bon resonates with me is that nothing has changed in the last hundred years to make what he says less relevant today. 

Incidentally, psychology, as you know, is not a school but about sixty-five to seventy different schools all looking at some aspect on the elephant that fails to take in the whole elephant at all.  Le Bon took in the whole elephant and addressed this in, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PEOPLES. 

The lives of people are scripted for them from cradle to grave on what job they should expect along with the limitations to their hopes and dreams.  If they would read between the lines, as Le Bon suggests, they would see how judiciously and systematically this drama has been laid out.  I never followed the script, nor did you.

*     *     *

No man was ever under the thumb of that script more than my da.  I am a sophomore in high school, and he a seventh grade drop out.  Handicapped from the first, his mother died when he was born and his father took off never to be seen again.  He couldn't have had lower expectations for himself, but married a gritty little woman with a high school education, my mother.

One day he said, "Jimmy, it's about time you get a job and help support the family."  He never did, never could.  He was a courageous little man, physically, but a man with little moral confidence or courage when it came to confronting his boss with grievances. 

He brought his anger home.  "I've talked to my railroad buddies and they can get you a job in the roundhouse (building box cars).” 

"But da,” I said, “I'm an 'A' student.” 

"What has that got to do with the price of bread?"

Then my mother entered the fray, "Jimmy's going to go to college, Ray.”  My da nearly swallowed his cigarette. 

I suspect you had your share of opposition and support to reach your sterling heights.  We never get out of the cage most of us are born into without such support.

In my life, I’ve known a lot of brilliant people who no one ever told them they were brilliant, and when I did, they would say, “That is because you are my friend, or you like everyone (which was never true), or you want to get something from me (which was also not true).” 

Le Bon in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PEOPLES writes, “The conditions of modern industrial evolution condemn the inferior classes of civilized peoples to a highly specialized labor which, far from increasing their intelligence, merely tends to lessen it.”  

That was written 116 years ago, and over that last 116 years it has only intensified as Alvin Toffler revealed in FUTURE SHOCK (1970), then elaborated on it in THE THIRD WAVE (1980), and essentially marked the shift to professionals in POWER/SHIFT (1990). 

In Future Shock, he showed why public education was established: an industrial society needed a workforce that could read, write and make arithmetical calculations to feed that intelligence into the god that was the machine.  It was a matter of pragmatism, not altruism.

Toffler grew bolder each decade he published, more persistent, more emphatic, but nothing changed, not even education. 

We have an educational system that finds at least half the workforce under educated or with the wrong skills doing work they hate or are expected to do, finding the only respite from work some hobby.

The irony here is that most work today more resembles a hobby than anything else.  As you mention, you work harder than you ever did in your job.  I can say the same for my writing. 

Work now can be done at home, or on the fly, or wherever.  Work doesn’t have to be confined to a crystal cathedral suffocating in a cramped cubicle. 

Kahlil Gibran wrote that work was love made visible.  Hobbies have that characteristic so why not work as well? 

A provocative philosopher such as Gustave Le Bon knows that those in power are amused but not threatened by his proclamations no matter how true.  He knows the first reaction of those described as powerless, or slaves to an unjust system are to defend the powerful and the system that enslaves them. 

This is a normal reaction.  Insight into the dilemma is likely to escape their attention.  By this failure, the powerless unwittingly let the powerful off the hook, and nothing changes.  

Writers such as Toffler, Gibran and Le Bon are gatekeepers to the obvious but not change masters.  They cannot reduce the carnage or minimize the heartbreak.  They can just read the tealeaves and discern what horrors they tell. 

*     *     *

We are a reactive people.   We have watched as 75 percent of those paying into social security were gainfully employed sixty years ago, carrying the 25 percent in retirement and on social security.

We watched as that figure dropped to 60 percent thirty years ago, and could drop to 50 percent in the present decade with a projected workforce of only 25 percent supporting a social security age majority of 75 percent in another fifty years.  People now live well into their 80s, and those living to 100 or more are expected to be common by 2050.

We are looking at a bankrupt system. 

What does Congress and the President do?  They extend the unemployment compensation for another 79 weeks or into the third year, saying, “they have no choice.”  And where do they get these unsupported funds?  From the Social Security Trust.

Senator Patrick Moynihan, days before his death in 2003, unveiled a report on social security that showed it running a deficit in 2018 with a cash shortfall of more than $26 trillion.  Obviously, no one was paying attention then or now.

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My next review of a Gustave Le Bon book is THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REVOLUTION (1913).  The last thought of most Americans would be to consider our society vulnerable to revolution.  This book gives one pause as the impossible always has a way of showing up.  David Brooks of the New York Times has devoted several columns to the rupture in the national social fabric, and how America is becoming an increasingly divided tribe.

Thank you for listening to my early morning tirade, and thank you for understanding me.

Be always well,

Jim

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THE CROWD: A STUDY OF THE POPULAR MIND by Gustave Le Bon -- A BOOK REVIEW

THE CROWD: A STUDY OF THE POPULAR MIND by Gustave Le Bon – A BOOK REVIEW

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© February 16, 20012

This is the second of three reviews of Le Bon’s works.  The first was, “The Psychology of Peoples” (1894).  Reviewed here is “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” (1896).  The third will be “The Psychology of Revolution” (1913).

Gustave Le Bon was born on May 7, 1841 before either the American Civil War or the French Revolution.  He lived into his ninety-second year dying on December 13, 1931, after the First World War, but shortly before Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933.  The Nazi dictator used Le Bon’s psychology to hypnotize the German people to his purposes.

The Frenchman, a trained physician, followed his bliss, which was sociology and social psychology expounding on theories of crowd psychology, national traits and herd behavior.  He also pursued the hard sciences, but it was in the soft sciences that his reputation was made.  

THE CROWD: A STUDY OF THE POPULAR MIND

You read this book in light of the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street moment, the removal of the dictators in Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt, and the ensuing vacuum of instability and chaos that has followed, and you cannot help but realize nothing has changed regarding the crowd since the pondering of Gustave Le Bon.

He says at the outset that as mentally inferior as crowds are it is dangerous to meddle with their construction, as social organisms are as complicated as any organism making it unwise to force it, attempt to transform it, or to interfere with it.  He writes, “Nature has recourse at times to radical measures, but never after our fashion, which explains how it is that nothing is more fatal to a people than the mania for great reforms.”

The study of crowds must consider how they relate to practical reason and pure reason, and whether they take fictitious shapes or real shapes, and if they display theoretical values or practical values.  Behind these, it is important also to assist whether they are guided by visible facts or invisible causes.  Crowds are eerie in that they rise out of ancient mysterious forces such as destiny, nature and providence, as if the soul of the crowd comes from voices of the dead. 

Adding to the intrigue, Le Bon insists, the ideas that feed the frenzy of the crowd emanate from solitary minds.  He asks the rhetorical question, “Is it not the genius of the crowds that has furnished the thousands of grains of dust forming the soil in which they have sprung up?”

Behind the societal upheavals are profound modifications in the ideas of the peoples.  “The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes in human thought.” 

Fundamental to this transformation is the destruction of those religious, political and social beliefs upon which the society is rooted and has become outmoded.  This transformation is accelerated by modern scientific and industrial discoveries that upset the norms, change relationships and social contracts.  Because the old still has relevance and is not totally destroyed, and the new has not yet been firmly established, it is a dangerous and chaotic period in transition of palpable anarchy.

Evidence that society is in the “Era of the Crowd” is the crumbling of the pillars of institutional society seemingly without recourse.  Nothing menaces the crowd in its senseless spread of chaos and disruption then not to be taken seriously.

The crowd has no mind, no heart, or theoretical underpinning.  It procures its ideas in an eclectic association of disparate interests like a rebel without a cause, an amorphous configuration without a leader stumbling forward with cries of desperation.

The crowd stumbles forward with illusions of what science and economic transformation has destroyed.  It was true in Le Bon’s time as it is true today, as technological society struggles to adjust to a digital age. “Science promised us truth, or at least knowledge of such relations as our intelligence can seize.  It never promised us peace or happiness.”

The power of crowds is demonstrated in the Arab Spring, but for Le Bon, some one hundred years ago, the advent to power of the masses marked the last stages of Western civilization. 

Societies become worn out with their moral forces losing strength along with convictions.  He claims a small intellectual aristocracy, but never a crowd has always directed civilization through periods of history.  Crowds are destroyers of civilizations, which is their only power. 

The leaders of crowds who become founders of religions, political movements and ideologies have always been, according to him, unconscious psychologists possessed of an instinctive but sure knowledge of the character of the crowd. 

Mao Zedong’s “Long March” fits this description. In October 1934 over a period of 370 days and 12,500 miles, Mao marched his Red Army of the Communist Party from Jiangxi to Shaanxi, China.  This ramshackle army was on the brink of annihilation by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek’s troops, and escaped with only one-tenth of its army at the end of the march.  Mao had however formulated a strategy during this year that would unite China into a single communist nation.  The rest is history.

On the other hand, Napoleon had a marvelous understanding of the psychology of the French people, but completely misunderstood the psychology of crowds belonging to other races.  Mao did something that no previous Chinese leader had ever done.  He united a huge country with many dialects and cultures, as well as ethnicities into a nation. 

The psychology of crowds has little respect for laws and institutions, and is powerless to hold opinions other than those imposed upon them.  Given this, crowds are best led by seeking what first makes an impression and then seduces them.  Logic or rational thinking has no sway.  What may be best is to champion crowds as victims displayed in a vision of how to destroy the victimizers. 

The mind of crowds is a sacrificial personality at the start as it is driven by the unconscious.  It is a dumbing down of crowds’ collective intelligence replaced by a pervasive sentiment so that crowds, “Can be as easily heroic as criminal.”

Once the conscious personality vanishes the collective mind is formed.  This results in the crowd forming into a single being.  This finds a number of individuals accidentally side by side with dissimilar socioeconomic status, education, interests and authority taking on the character of true believers.  Thoughts and feelings are no longer theirs, but are now other-directed if a crowd is to be, but Le bon warns:

“At certain moments half a dozen men might constitute a psychological crowd, which may not happen in the case of hundreds of men gathered together by accident.” 

In the 1960s, Swiss mathematician Rudolf Starkermann expressed in mathematical physics how the psychology of a group of four or more changes, which corroborates Le Bon’s theoretical hypothesis.

Le Bon differentiates between heterogeneous and homogeneous crowds.  He sees them merging into a common collective mind, first by the nature and intensity of the exciting causes, and then the uniformity of the environment creating a consistency of characters. Ultimately, this “makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation.”  He concludes, the psychological crowd is a provisional being, “which for a moment are combined exactly as the cells which constitute a living body.”

Le Bon then suggests that none of us can escape hidden motives and that “the most eminent of men seldom surpass the standard of the most ordinary individuals.”

Ergo, crowds “can only bring to bear in common the work in hand those mediocre qualities which are the birthright of every average individual.  In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated.”

That said he adds, “An assembly of men of distinction, but specialists in different walks of life, are not sensibly superior to the decisions that would be adopted by a gathering of imbeciles.”

He makes this claim because: (1) the sentiment of responsibility that controls individuals disappears in a crowd: (2) individuals readily sacrifice their personal interests to the collective interests of the crowd; and (3) cause is a suggestive contagion that may be quite contrary to that of the individuals.

The conscious personality gone, the magnetic influence of the crowd paralyzing the brain with hypnotic zeal, behavior is reduced, zombie like, to a hypnotic trance. 

In terms of morality and sentiment, the crowd is a retreat into the primitive as it is driven by unconscious motives subject to obeying generous or cruel dispositions to action, as self-preservation no longer dominates behavior.  This finds the individual in the crowd vacillating between being a willing executioner or martyr.  Crowds move by momentum and are as incapable of willing as thinking for any length of time.

Crowds, Le Bon sees, are distinguished by feminine characteristics, but never more pronounced than among Latin peoples.  It is why women often dominate the initial phases of crowds.

Suggestibility and credulity are fundamental to crowds who are inattentive to detail and prefer easy explanations to their causes as they hover on the “borderland of unconscious,” as the improbable does not exist for a crowd. 

Le Bon calls this the “imagination of a throng,” as a crowd thinks in images.  These images are often so incoherent to reason, “that they are almost always blind to truth,” confusing these images with real events refiguring action of the imagination to invoke reality in the mind.  This amounts to “collective hallucination.”  “From the moment that they form part of a crowd the learned man and the ignoramus are equally incapable of observation.” 

Whether the feelings of a crowd are good or bad, they cannot differentiate between simplicity and exaggeration, as “a throng knows neither doubt nor uncertainty.”  Likewise, with an absence of responsible behavior going forward, there is a sense of impunity.  “In crowds the foolish, ignorant, and envious persons are freed from the sense of their insignificance and powerlessness, and are possessed instead by the notion of brutal and temporary but immense strength.”

Crowds are intolerant, dictatorial, and will not entertain, discuss, or accept any contradiction to their cause, as it is self-justified.  “The type of hero dear to crowds will always have the semblance of a Caesar.  His insignia attracts them, his authority overawes them, and his sword instills them with fear.”

Le Bon insists, however, that the crowd once abandoned to itself, weary of disorder, will instinctively gravitate to servitude, as a crowd is profoundly conservative and instinctively vulnerable to depersonalization.

Moral purpose may seed the crowd but it is too impulsive and mobile to be moral for any length of time.  A crowd may be guilty of murder but it may also be capable of lofty acts of devotion.

Le Bon takes the reader through the landscape of the ideas, reasoning power and imagination of crowds, suggesting that every civilization rose out of some kind of a crowd.  He shows how accidental and passing ideas created by the moment sometimes coalesce into a movement.  This takes the right experiences, the right climate, and the right laws of heredity, the right beliefs and biases to solidify into a magnetic cause.  It happened with Christianity, Islamism, and Judaism. 

On the other hand, “The philosophical ideas which resulted in the French Revolution took nearly a century to implant themselves in the mind of the crowd.”  It is why ideas adopted by crowds are always several generations behind when philosophers first agonized over them. 

Le Bon is emphatic in saying crowds do not reason and are not to be influenced by reasoning.  They cherry pick ideas that fit their cause being disinterested in the connections or contradictions. 

He examines remote factors that influence beliefs of crowds, systematically exploring races, traditions, the times, political, social and educational institutions, then applies these attributes to images, illusions, experience and reason. 

Le Bon’s ideas on the leadership of crowds and the nature of that persuasion have traction with our times.  Every living creature, he claims, instinctively gravitates to an authority figure or chief.  This chief is usually nothing more than a ringleader or agitator with whom the crowd can identify. 

Leaders invariably begin as complete followers totally hypnotized by the power of ideas.  Robespierre, a leader in the French Revolution, was hypnotized by the philosophical ideas of Rousseau, including the philosophers Inquisition to propagate them. 

“Leaders are men of action rather than thinkers” They “are commonly recruited from the ranks and files of those morbidly nervous, excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness.”  Psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi explores this theory in “A First-Rate Madness” (2011).  Ghaemi uncovers the links between leadership and mental illness of such leaders as Napoleon, Lincoln, Churchill, Hitler, Gandhi, FDR and JFK. 

Crowds respond to leaders who display excitable, absurd even half deranged ideas because crowds are always ready to listen to the strong willed charismatic person who instinctively posses the qualities crowds lack.

Leaders of crowds have a gift of subtle rhetoric, an instinct for flattery, a fascination with creed, if not a deep devotion to it, and an ability to create pictures with words.  “In every social sphere, from the highest to the lowest, as soon as a man ceases to be isolated he speedily falls under the influence of a leader.” 

The leader serves as the guide to the crowd to where it thinks it wants to go.  It should come as no surprise that such leaders wield despotic authority.  They understand the need of the crowd not for liberty but for servitude that is always predominant in the soul of the crowd.  “Such men are leaders who cannot exercise their function except on the condition that they be led themselves, and continually stimulated, that they have always as their beacon a man or an idea, that they follow a line of conduct clearly traced.” 

St. Paul and Mahomet typically demonstrate crowd leadership.  They understood the world belongs to the passionate with it mattering little whether the leader is intelligent or narrow-minded as long as he is persistence to the fiber of his being. 

The means of action are simple.  Le Bon sees they follow a clearly defined formula: affirmation, repetition and contagion.  Affirmation is based on a jingle that resonates.  Take the Occupy Wall Street crowd with its, “One percent dictating to the ninety nine percent.”  It doesn’t have to have initial validity but attains this after repeated repetition, ultimately becoming a contagion to the crowd.

Christianity is an established religion with prestige and dignity, but the early founders were outcasts, riff raft and considered dregs of society.  Persistence, affirmation, repetition and martyrdom found it a powerful contagion in which special interests disappeared under its constant action. 

“This is the explanation of the fact that every opinion adopted by the populace always ends in implanting itself with great vigor in the highest social strata, however obvious be the absurdity of the triumphant opinion.  This reaction of the lower upon the higher social classes is the more curious, owing to the circumstances that the beliefs of the crowd always have their origin in a greater or lesser extent in some higher idea.”

True, leaders of crowds are agitators and propagate to the masses a process of deformation of popular truths, but in the long run, once the crowd is assimilated into a new identity in the populace, intelligence shapes the destiny of the world, if indirectly.  By that time, philosophers have been shelved and people start behaving as if the new status quo has always existed.

One of the constant tragedies of leaders of crowds is backlash. 

“Every successful man, every idea that forces itself into recognition, ceases, ipso facto, to be called in question.  The proof that success is one of the principal stepping stones to prestige is that the disappearance of the one is almost always followed by the disappearance of the other.  The herd whom the crowd acclaimed yesterday is insulted today should he have been overtaken by failure.

Robespierre launched the “Reign of Terror,” putting literally thousands to death on the blade of the guillotine only to be so executed himself.  He became more regal than the fallen king, and expected to be treated as a god.  “Believers always break the statues of their former gods with every symptom of fury.”

If by this point you are intrigued with the scope and penetrating wit of Le Bon, the balance of the book will take you into the arena of politics, fixed beliefs and changeable opinions of crowds with reference to the similarity and differences between heterogeneous and homogeneous crowds.  Le Bon doesn’t dodge the problem of tranquil crowds that turn criminal, or how men of fair judgment can be seduced by the mania of the crowd despite their intelligence, breeding and education. 

We are becoming an increasingly class conscience society with a clash of peoples.  Le Bon has something sobering to say about this. 

“The power of crowds is to be dreaded, but the power of certain castes is to be dreaded yet more.  Crowds are open to conviction, castes never are”

You don’t think caste exists in these United States?  Look up the Webster’s New World College Dictionary, and read the second, third and fourth definitions of the word, and tell me you don’t fear American society is vulnerable today.

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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PEOPLES by Gustave Le Bon -- A BOOK REVIEW

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PEOPLES by Gustave Le Bon – A BOOK REVIEW

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© February 15, 20012

Were it not for reading William L. Livingston’s soon to be released, “Design for Prevention for Dummies,” I would have no idea who Gustave Le Bon was, or why important.  This is the first of three reviews of Le Bon’s works, “The Psychology of Peoples” (1894).  The second will be, “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” (1896), and the third, “The Psychology of Revolution” (1913).

Gustave Le Bon was born on May 7, 1841 before either the American Civil War or the French Revolution.  He lived into his ninety-second year dying on December 13, 1931, after the First World War, but shortly before Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933.  The Nazi dictator used Le Bon’s psychology to hypnotize the German people to his purposes.

The Frenchman, a trained physician, followed his bliss, which was sociology and social psychology expounding on theories of crowd psychology, national traits and herd behavior.  He also pursued the hard sciences, but it was in the soft sciences that his reputation was made.  

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PEOPLES

Le Bon has trouble with the idea of equality of individuals and races.  He sees this has thrown Western man into a series of convulsions over its history the end of which he sees as impossible to predict:

“People found it easy to persuade themselves that these inequalities were merely the outcome of differences of education, that all men are born equally intelligent and good, and that the sole responsibility for their perversion lies with the institutions they live under.”

The book shows the error of this mindset by examining a civilization, its arts, its institutions, and its beliefs.  Each people, he insists, possesses a mental constitution as constant as its anatomical character, a constitution that is the source of its sentiments, thoughts, institutions, beliefs and arts.

While admitting institutions have the power to control a people’s destiny, he sees them of only slight importance with regard to the evolution of a civilization. 

“They are most often effects and but very rarely causes.”

Moreover, he considers it pure folly to class Spaniards, Englishmen and Arabs into the same group.  He wonders why the distinct differences that exist between them and their histories are not apparent.  He reasons it may be the inclination to see peoples as we see ourselves, which causes the fractures between peoples. 

“It is the whole of these characteristics that form what may be called the soul of a race.”

Le Bon claims an isolated individual of a given race may seem inexact, but applied to the majority of individuals of that race a perfect description. 

“The physical and mental type of a people is identical in its essence with the method by which a naturalist classifies species.”  He goes on to say, “We are the children at once of our parents and our race.  Our country is our second mother for physiological and hereditary as well as sentimental reasons.”

This implies that to attempt to democratize a people with our culture, ideals and history is not only facetious but also counterproductive. 

“A people,” he says, “possess at once their own personal life and a collective life, that of the being of which they form the substance. . . a people is guided far more by its dead than by its living members.  It is by its dead, and by its dead alone, that a race is founded.”

A psychological species is formed of a small number of irreducible and fundamental characteristics around which is grouped accessory characteristics that can be modified and changed by environment, circumstances, and education.  But a people’s mental constitution is immutable as is its anatomical characteristics. 

Le Bon would run into strong opposition by the politically correct for his views on general psychological characteristics of races.  He divides peoples into primitive races, inferior races, average races and superior races. 

Australian aborigines are seen as a primitive race, Africans as an inferior race, Chinese, Japanese, Mongolians, Semitic peoples and Arabs as an average race, and Indo-Europeans as a superior race.

These divisions are based on:

(1)   The capacity or incapacity of a race to reason with great credulity,

(2)   The capacity or incapacity to associate ideas drawing meaningful conclusions from these associations,

(3)   The inclination to originality or imitation,

(4)   The capacity or lack of capacity for observation and foresight,

(5)   The inclination to independent resolve at all cost or retreat into servitude for survival,

(6)   The tendency to be guided by the power of reason or instinct,

(7)   The importance or lack of importance of discipline, and

(8)   The level of energy demonstrated by the people to establish the will to power, and therefore greatness.

Superior races are further differentiated by the characteristics of perseverance, self-control, morality, and respect for the rule of law.  Le Bon sees the early Greeks and Romans in this category, northern Europeans of Anglo-Saxon origin, which includes Anglo-Americans. 

Although a Frenchman of Latin origin, Le Bon finds the Nordic races superior in the superior category to the Latin peoples (i.e., Portugal, Spain, Italy, and France).  Complicating his differentiation further, he finds those of the Nordic nations as well as northern Germans superior to southern Germans.  It is as if a line could be drawn to define levels of superiority.  .

Then he says something that resonates with today:

“The conditions of modern industrial evolution condemn the inferior classes of civilized peoples to a highly specialized labor which, far from increasing their intelligence, merely tends to lessen it.” 

We know the truth of this statement.  We have moved out of modernity into post-modernity, from industrial society to the information age, yet have one hundred years of workers trained in assembly line work that no longer applies to the majority.  Le Bon continues:

“A hundred years ago, a workman was a veritable artist capable of executing all the details of any piece of mechanism, of a watch for example.  Today, he is a mere toiler, who never produces more than one specialty, who spends his life boring the same holes, polishing the same portion of an article, driving the same machine.  The result is that the atrophy of his intelligence is soon complete”

Society has created a problem that it attempts to solve now by throwing money at education rather than systematically redefining and retooling education, raising awareness and competence to the level of engineers, who direct workman, and are obliged to discover and compete in an increasingly competitive environment. 

The brain, Le Bon says, must be exercised as it conforms to the same laws of all the other organs that atrophy if not developed. 

The Psychology of Peoples is for that reason as current today as when it was written. 

Le Bon’s interest is in showing how economies, religions, political systems and ideologies of peoples have an inclination to peak then fade then die.  The peak is followed by rapid decline, which is seldom apparent despite all the indicators.  Le Bon believes it is because civilizations reach a degree of power that provides the narcotic of safety, security and a sense of affluence.  At that point, he says, military virtues decline, excesses create new needs and dependencies, and egoisms increase.  Complacency becomes the new social norm. 

Another indicator is men lose confidence in the worth of the principles that serve as their foundation.  Only leadership can right the ship of state by penetrating the soul of the multitude to eradicate its sickness.  To Le Bon this means understanding the peoples’ dreams while renouncing philosophic abstractions and speculations that compromise the will to prevail. 

Calamity is likely to follow if a people lose its initiative, energy, and capacity to mount the crises it has created, when material wants become the sole expression of the organizing ideal, when families break up and the unity of community identity is tabled, when the societal compass is lost, and commands are shallow or without direction. 

Le Bon ends by saying the greatest threat to a people is socialism as it leads to a regime of degrading slavery that ultimately destroys all initiative and independence.  He concludes:

“The life of a people and all the manifestations of its civilization are merely the reflection of its soul, the visible signs of something invisible, but very real.  Exterior events are only the apparent surface of the hidden framework by which they are determined.  It is neither chance nor exterior circumstances, and still less political institutions that play the fundamental role in the history of a people.  It is more especially the character of a people that fashions its destiny.”

In that sense, his warnings provide council for us today.  I would highly recommend anyone interested in the psychology of peoples read this book.

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