Internet Fueled Racism And Violence Through The Eyes Of Gustave Le Bon

I can just see Gustave Le Bon peering out his apartment window at the angry violent crowds below.  It was 1871 and the terrifying loud crowds of the Paris Commune were storming the streets of Paris like stark raving savages, ravaging hell-bent destruction.

If alive today, he would definitely experience a Deja Vue witnessing the Gilet Jaunes sabotaging the Champs Elysees.  Surely he would shake his head in despair, knowing that mankind hasn’t changed one iota. Hatred, prejudice and crowd violence are alive and well and on the rise.

Today, through modern technology, there are other angry mobs of people being formed and indoctrinated into racial or religious hatred and coaxed into violence in a more powerful and anonymous fashion.  The internet.

I thought it was well worth to revisit his theories of crowd psychology, as they are surprising as relevant today as before, perhaps even more so.   I have embellished this post with some of my own insight and observations.

Gustave Le Bon is known as the father of crowd psychology in psychological circles,  but unfortunately not to the public, thanks to Freud who harvested his theories and stole his thunder.

So who was this visionary?  Gustave Le Bon was born in May 1841 in a small village southwest of Paris near Chartres. He was considered a polymath, who went on to become professionally proficient in several disciplines.

He first went to Medical school in Paris, but never practised medicine except in the military. He then became interested in the emerging field of psychology and later immersed in anthropology, sociology and even physics, for which he was nominated a Nobel Prize.

In 1895, he published the Psychologie des Foules(crowds).  Although he noted that crowds could be good, even heroic, he felt they were more often given to barbarous acts of violence.

His theories on the stages of crowd indoctrination actually seem even more applicable to the rise of internet indoctrination and influencing the masses.

They are first, anonymity, then contagion, and lastly suggestibility.  The internet has allowed total anonymity to a vast degree, where one can easily hide invisible behind a screen with a pseudo or even multiple pseudos.

Le Bon saw the crowd as taking on immense proportions of significance and power that far outweighed the individuals making up the crowds.

He so expertly said: “An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will”.

He saw the crowd as being like a magnet.   I feel it pulls in not only like-minded ones but those on the fringe or borderline of society in need of identification.

Belonging to a group is a fundamental need for human beings, who are social animals dependent on the validation of others.

Le Bon felt those who were not able to bear personal responsibility for individualistic thought, and actions could do so in a crowd.

Of course, the first group that we belong to is our family, which influenced our thoughts, perceptions of ourselves, and others from the time we are infants past adolescence for the better or the worst.

Our herd mentality develops easily within our families, especially if our parents are strongly opinionated and dominating.  If we are unlucky enough to have parents such as these, we will be moulded to conform or pay the consequences of disobedience resulting in being disciplined, rejected and even abandoned.

I still hear some French refer to their families as my “tribu” or tribe.  As a therapist, I am always confronted with dealing with the aftermath of family dynamics that patients experienced growing up.

Racial or religious prejudice propagated by our families can set up the psychological fragile individual to be drawn in very quickly to internet hate groups for several reasons.

The groups validate their family of origin prejudices and unlike our families allows anonymity and unbridled hatred to propagate, further offering contagion to others.

Anonymity leads to a loss in personal responsibility.  It increases the individual’s sense of being invincible and practically invisible because he is so blended in within the group.

He knows that he will rarely be singled out for the wrongs committed by the group.   This increases his sense of acting out his hatred with immunity.

Contagion can be much more easily carried out by the vast numbers reached by the internet than physical crowds ever could achieve due to geographical limitations.

These can take wildfire proportion within minutes.  You have already witnessed the power of Twitter or Facebook to immediately amass thousands to a cause or to spread news, videos, etc, in lightning speed.

Recruiting others is accomplished by two things that meet basic human needs.   Validation and belonging in an exclusive group. This enables them to feel needed and special, even privileged, like a sort of country club mentality if you will.

Suggestibility is easily accomplished by group leaders to incite and promulgate whatever action or direction the group leader wants to shape the crowd.

The leader takes on almost God-like proportions. He is idealized and his thoughts and ideologies are internalized, therefore replacing those of the individual who can often be willing to fight to protect their leader.

The group members are groomed to outdo each other, rewarded and sanctified by the leader with praise and upheld as examples to follow.  Dissidents are shamed and can be expulsed.

The crowd takes on a “collective mind” that acts independently of the members making up the group, who can easily be hypnotized into being pawns and puppets.

Outsiders are seen as threatening and must be quickly dealt with by threats, bullying, denouncing and violence if needed.

“The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim”, wrote Le Bon.

All you have to do in look at some political rallies to see what Le Bon was talking about.  Firing up a crowd with blaming opponents, anger-driven taunts, lies, half-truths, stirs up the basest of human emotions.

 Le Bon wrote that:  “…our savage, destructive instincts are the inheritance left dormant in all of us from the primitive ages. In the life of the isolated individual, it would be dangerous for him to gratify these instincts, while his absorption in an irresponsible crowd, in which in consequence he is assured of impunity, gives him entire liberty to follow them.”

The herd mentality then takes over. Personal reflection or reason ceases to exist, personal responsibility goes out the window and self-restraint that might ordinarily be in place if alone is extinguished by the fury of emotion.

Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Lenin all were said to have been influenced by Gustave Le Bon’s book, as several political leaders too.

“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.”  Gustave Le Bon.

Racism, prejudice and violence starts in our hearts and it is up to us to do something about it.   Those of us committed to a more peaceful and harmonious world, cannot allow our hearts to be filled with such poison.

It is up to us to individually and collectively to promote the ideology that each human being, regardless of race, religion, or nationality is deserving of our respect and to be treated with dignity and kindness.