1.1.
CHAPTER I.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CROWDS. — PYSCHOLOGICAL
LAW OF THEIR MENTAL UNITY.
What constitutes a crowd from the psychological point of view — A
numerically strong agglomeration of individuals does not suffice to form
a crowd — Special characteristics of psychological crowds — The turning in
a fixed direction of the ideas and sentiments of individuals composing
such a crowd, and the disappearance of their personality — The crowd is
always dominated by considerations of which it is unconscious — The
disappearance of brain activity and the predominance of medullar
activity — The lowering of the intelligence and the complete
transformation of the sentiments — The transformed sentiments may be
better or worse than those of the individuals of which the crowd is
composed — A crowd is as easily heroic as criminal.
IN its ordinary sense the word "crowd" means a gathering of individuals
of whatever nationality, profession, or sex, and whatever be the chances
that have brought them together. From the psychological point of view
the expression
"crowd" assumes quite a different signification.
Under certain given circumstances, and only under those circumstances,
an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from
those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all
the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their
conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless
transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The
gathering has thus become what, in the absence of a better expression, I
will call an organised crowd, or, if the term is considered preferable,
a psychological crowd. It forms a single being, and is subjected to the
law of the mental unity of crowds.
It is evident that it is not by the mere fact of a number of
individuals finding themselves accidentally side by side that they
acquire the character of an organised crowd. A thousand individuals
accidentally gathered in a public place without any determined object in
no way constitute a crowd from the psychological point of view. To
acquire the special characteristics of such a crowd, the influence is
necessary of certain predisposing causes of which we shall have to
determine the nature.
The disappearance of conscious personality and the turning of
feelings and thoughts in a definite
direction, which are the primary
characteristics of a crowd about to become organised, do not always
involve the simultaneous presence of a number of individuals on one
spot. Thousands of isolated individuals may acquire at certain moments,
and under the influence of certain violent emotions — such, for example,
as a great national event — the characteristics of a psychological crowd.
It will be sufficient in that case that a mere chance should bring them
together for their acts to at once assume the characteristics peculiar
to the acts of a crowd. 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. On the other hand, an
entire nation, though there may be no visible agglomeration, may become
a crowd under the action of certain influences.
A psychological crowd once constituted, it acquires certain
provisional but determinable general characteristics. To these general
characteristics there are adjoined particular characteristics which vary
according to the elements of which the crowd is composed, and may modify
its mental constitution. Psychological crowds, then, are susceptible of
classification; and when we come to occupy ourselves with this matter,
we shall see that a heterogeneous crowd — that is, a crowd composed of
dissimilar elements — presents certain characteristics
in common with
homogeneous crowds — that is, with crowds composed of elements more or
less akin (sects, castes, and classes) — and side by side with these
common characteristics particularities which permit of the two kinds of
crowds being differentiated.
But before occupying ourselves with the different categories of
crowds, we must first of all examine the characteristics common to them
all. We shall set to work like the naturalist, who begins by describing
the general characteristics common to all the members of a family before
concerning himself with the particular characteristics which allow the
differentiation of the genera and species that the family includes.
It is not easy to describe the mind of crowds with exactness,
because its organisation varies not only according to race and
composition, but also according to the nature and intensity of the exciting
causes to which crowds are subjected. The same difficulty,
however, presents itself in the psychological study of an individual.
It is only in novels that individuals are found to traverse their whole
life with an unvarying character. It is only the uniformity of the
environment that creates the apparent uniformity of characters. I have
shown elsewhere that all mental constitutions contain possibilities of
character which may be manifested in consequence of a sudden change of
environment. This explains how it was that among the most savage
members of the French Convention were to be found inoffensive citizens
who, under ordinary circumstances, would have been peaceable notaries or
virtuous magistrates. The storm past, they resumed their normal
character of quiet, law-abiding citizens. Napoleon found amongst them
his most docile servants.
It being impossible to study here all the successive degrees of
organisation of crowds, we shall concern ourselves more especially with
such crowds as have attained to the phase of complete organisation. In
this way we shall see what crowds may become, but not what they
invariably are. It is only in this advanced phase of organisation that
certain new and special characteristics are superposed on the unvarying
and dominant character of the race; then takes place that turning
already alluded to of all the feelings and thoughts of the collectivity
in an identical direction. It is only under such circumstances, too,
that what I have called above the psychological law of the mental
unity of crowds comes into play.
Among the psychological characteristics of crowds there are some
that they may present in common with isolated individuals, and others,
on the contrary, which are absolutely peculiar to them and are only to
be met with in collectivities. It is
these special characteristics
that we shall study, first of all, in order to show their importance.
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 of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of
isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into
being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of
individuals forming a crowd. The psychological crowd is a provisional
being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined,
exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their
reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from
those possessed by each of the cells singly.
Contrary to an opinion which one is astonished to find coming from
the pen of so acute a philosopher as Herbert Spencer, in the aggregate
which constitutes a crowd there is in no sort a summing-up of or an
average struck between its elements. What really takes place is a
combination followed by the creation of new characteristics, just as in
chemistry certain elements, when brought into contact — bases and
acids, for example — combine
to form a new body possessing properties quite different from those of
the bodies that have served to form it.
It is easy to prove how much the individual forming part of a crowd
differs from the isolated individual, but it is less easy to discover
the causes of this difference.
To obtain at any rate a glimpse of them it is necessary in the
first place to call to mind the truth established by modern psychology,
that unconscious phenomena play an altogether preponderating part not
only in organic life, but also in the operations of the intelligence.
The conscious life of the mind is of small importance in comparison with
its unconscious life. The most subtle analyst, the most acute observer,
is scarcely successful in discovering more than a very small number of
the unconscious motives that determine his conduct. Our conscious acts
are the outcome of an unconscious substratum created in the mind in the
main by hereditary influences. This substratum consists of the
innumerable common characteristics handed down from generation to
generation, which constitute the genius of a race. Behind the avowed
causes of our acts there undoubtedly lie secret causes that we do not
avow, but behind these secret causes there are many
others more
secret still which we ourselves ignore. The greater part of our daily
actions are the result of hidden motives which escape our observation.
It is more especially with respect to those unconscious elements
which constitute the genius of a race that all the individuals belonging
to it resemble each other, while it is principally in respect to the
conscious elements of their character — the fruit of education, and yet
more of exceptional hereditary conditions — that they differ from each
other. Men the most unlike in the matter of their intelligence possess
instincts, passions, and feelings that are very similar. In the case of
every thing that belongs to the realm of sentiment — religion, politics,
morality, the affections and antipathies, &c. — the most eminent men
seldom surpass the standard of the most ordinary individuals. From the
intellectual point of view an abyss may exist between a great
mathematician and his boot maker, but from the point of view of
character the difference is most often slight or non-existent.
It is precisely these general qualities of character, governed by
forces of which we are unconscious, and possessed by the majority of the
normal individuals of a race in much the same degree — it is precisely
these qualities, I say, that in crowds become common property. In the
collective mind the intellectual aptitudes of the individuals, and in
consequence their individuality, are weakened. The
heterogeneous is
swamped by the homogeneous, and the unconscious qualities obtain the
upper hand.
This very fact that crowds possess in common ordinary qualities
explains why they can never accomplish acts demanding a high degree of
intelligence. The decisions affecting matters of general interest come
to by 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. The truth is, they can only bring
to bear in common on 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. It is not all the world, as is
so often repeated, that has more wit than Voltaire, but assuredly
Voltaire that has more wit than all the world, if by "all the world"
crowds are to be understood.
If the individuals of a crowd confined themselves to putting in
common the ordinary qualities of which each of them has his share, there
would merely result the striking of an average, and not, as we have said
is actually the case, the creation of new characteristics. How is it
that these new characteristics are created? This is what we are now to
investigate.
Different causes determine the appearance of
these
characteristics peculiar to crowds, and not possessed by isolated
individuals. The first is that 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. He will be the
less disposed to check himself from the consideration that, a crowd
being anonymous, and in consequence irresponsible, the sentiment of
responsibility which always controls individuals disappears entirely.
The second cause, which is contagion, also intervenes to determine
the manifestation in crowds of their special characteristics, and at the
same time the trend they are to take. Contagion is a phenomenon of
which it is easy to establish the presence, but that it is not easy to
explain. It must be classed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order,
which we shall shortly study. In a crowd every sentiment and act is
contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily
sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. This is an
aptitude very contrary to his nature, and of which a man is scarcely
capable, except when he makes part of a crowd.
A third cause, and by far the most important, determines in the
individuals of a crowd special characteristics which are quite contrary
at times
to those presented by the isolated individual. I allude to
that suggestibility of which, moreover, the contagion mentioned above is
neither more nor less than an effect.
To understand this phenomenon it is necessary to bear in mind
certain recent physiological discoveries. We know to-day that by
various processes an individual may be brought into such a condition
that, having entirely lost his conscious personality, he obeys all the
suggestions of the operator who has deprived him of it, and commits acts
in utter contradiction with his character and habits. The most careful
observations seem to prove that an individual immerged for some length
of time in a crowd in action soon finds himself — either in consequence
of the magnetic influence given out by the crowd, or from some other
cause of which we are ignorant — in a special state, which much resembles
the state of fascination in which the hypnotised individual finds
himself in the hands of the hypnotiser. The activity of the brain being
paralysed in the case of the hypnotised subject, the latter becomes the
slave of all the unconscious activities of his spinal cord, which the
hypnotiser directs at will. The conscious personality has entirely
vanished; will and discernment are lost. All feelings and thoughts are
bent in the direction determined by the hypnotiser.
Such also is approximately the state of the
individual forming
part of a psychological crowd. He is no longer conscious of his acts.
In his case, as in the case of the hypnotised subject, at the same time
that certain faculties are destroyed, others may be brought to a high
degree of exaltation. Under the influence of a suggestion, he will
undertake the accomplishment of certain acts with irresistible
impetuosity. This impetuosity is the more irresistible in the case of
crowds than in that of the hypnotised subject, from the fact that, the
suggestion being the same for all the individuals of the crowd, it gains
in strength by reciprocity. The individualities in the crowd who might
possess a personality sufficiently strong to resist the suggestion are
too few in number to struggle against the current. At the utmost, they
may be able to attempt a diversion by means of different suggestions.
It is in this way, for instance, that a happy expression, an image
opportunely evoked, have occasionally deterred crowds from the most
bloodthirsty acts.
We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality,
the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of
suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical
direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas
into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the
individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but
has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.
Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised
crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation.
Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian —
that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the
spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and
heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the
facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and
images — which would be entirely without action on each of the isolated
individuals composing the crowd — and to be induced to commit acts
contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An
individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand,
which the wind stirs up at will.
It is for these reasons that juries are seen to deliver verdicts of
which each individual juror would disapprove, that parliamentary
assemblies adopt laws and measures of which each of their members would
disapprove in his own person. Taken separately, the men of the
Convention were enlightened citizens of peaceful habits. United in a
crowd, they did not hesitate to give their adhesion to the most savage
proposals, to guillotine individuals most clearly innocent, and,
contrary to their interests, to renounce their inviolability and to
decimate themselves.
It is not only by his acts that the individual in a crowd differs
essentially from himself. Even before he has entirely lost his
independence, his ideas and feelings have undergone a transformation,
and the transformation is so profound as to change the miser into a
spendthrift, the sceptic into a believer, the honest man into a
criminal, and the coward into a hero. The renunciation of all its
privileges which the nobility voted in a moment of enthusiasm during the
celebrated night of August 4, 1789, would certainly never have been
consented to by any of its members taken singly.
The conclusion to be drawn from what precedes is, that the crowd is
always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual, but that,
from the point of view of feelings and of the acts these feelings
provoke, the crowd may, according to circumstances, he better or worse
than the individual. All depends on the nature of the suggestion to
which the crowd is exposed. This is the point that has been completely
misunderstood by writers who have only studied crowds from the criminal
point of view. Doubtless a crowd is often criminal, but also it is
often heroic. It is crowds rather than isolated individuals that may be
induced to run the risk of death to secure the triumph of a creed or an
idea, that may be fired with enthusiasm for glory and honour, that are
led on — almost without bread and without arms, as in the
age of the
Crusades — to deliver the tomb of Christ from the infidel, or, as in '93,
to defend the fatherland. Such heroism is without doubt somewhat
unconscious, but it is of such heroism that history is made. Were
peoples only to be credited with the great actions performed in cold
blood, the annals of the world would register but few of them.