Following on that essay on “mass formations” at American Greatness, Bill Valicella’s reply to it at his place, and my own follow-up post from a few days ago, JM Smith has posted a substantial contribution to the discussion over at The Orthosphere.
Professor Smith’s post brings to the conversation Gustave Le Bon’s 1896 study of crowd-madness, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Le Bon notes that an essential part of this phenomenon is “cognitive misers”: people who prefer to think no more than they absolutely have to, and find it cheaper simply to let prestigious others do it for them.
We read (I have bolded a key passage):
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.
Go and read the whole thing, here.
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“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.”
Within living memory of many of us on this blog, the technique used by many a leader of the former USSR during a speech would usually embody this very group assumption. Variations were: as everybody knows, or as we all know, or each of us has seen…
With this being said, the speaker would then launch into his fantasy world nonsense right in front of tv cameras. United Nations audiences were always a ripe target. Politicians today use this technique, Hillary Clinton being a notorious example.
Strange to think when I was young I read Pursuit of the Millennium & wondered (in the abstract) what it would have been to live during the madness of the Anabaptist rule of Muenster.
I wonder no longer.