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The future belongs to crowds

Published 12 March 2009

The memorable events of history, wrote the psychologist Gustave Le Bon in his book The Crowd, “are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought”. Writing in 1895, less than 50 years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, he believed that the future of politics belonged to the masses, and predicted that society was on the cusp of “the era of crowds”.

Even in an age of mass political activity, 1989 stands out as a year of profound change and convulsion. This issue is dedicated to recalling some of its more dramatic crowd set pieces. “When a civilisation is rotten,” Le Bon wrote, “it is always the masses that bring about its downfall.” By 1989, the communist states of eastern Europe were corrupt and decaying; yet it was the power of crowds which pulled the Iron Curtain down during a time of extraordinary optimism.

The protests in the great cities of central and eastern Europe were starkly different from the failed rebellion of Tiananmen Square, Beijing. But that event, too, in which thousands of people were killed, ultimately changed China for the better.

Elsewhere, there were the crowds of frenzied mourners at Ayatollah Khomeini’s funeral in Tehran and, back at home, the tragic crush at the Hillsborough Stadium from which emerged the new game of football. The future belongs to crowds, wrote the novelist Don DeLillo. Not quite, but, for a time, it seemed that way in 1989.

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1 comment from readers

ConorOberstIsGo
13 March 2009 at 02:13

Somethings to be noted about Gustav le Bon:

1. He was an amateur physicist who mistakely believed he had discovered a new form of light.

2.He was - as was standard in his time - phenomenally sexist and compared women's emotionality to that of children and savages.

3. The Crowd: a Popular Study described what characteristics leaders who wanted to influence crowds would have (considering that crowds could be thought of as an irrational monster) and was read by Hitler and Mussolini and formed the basis of Freud's work in mass psychology.

4.And this is the most unusual ending to the book - he also suggested that crowds were, yes, more vicious and dangerous than individuals, but also had a far greater potential for selfless acts of heroism than any unobserved individual.

This final point is worth noting even today. The pretense of democracy in Britain is now paper thin; a PM we didn't elect, a war we protested against, the interests of Businesses and Banks taking over from those of the population. How might it be possible to truly harness the good will of crowds and structure our government to take heed? Yes we may end up with our government spending going to a Diana inquest or a Jade Goody Foundation... but it would at least then be OUR spending...