In these times of Covid and Covidology the work of Gustave Le Bon is apposite. We should all cultivate our garden, our inner Voltaire and become, if we are not already, a touch contrarian holding to the adage ‘what everybody knows is (frequently) wrong’. I have ommitted the ‘frequently’ - that leaves room for the crowd to be occasionally right. By Le Bon they have dropped rationality to the level of ‘not even wrong’ so right/wrong does not apply. Is it the case that the increased alienation, atomisation, and anomie of modern society has enhanced the natural tendency to aggregation? It is curious that a favourite American ‘genteelism’ (Fowler) is the word ‘egregious’ without reference to what herd is being surpassed. It’s just bad to do that. Odi profanum vulgus et arceo said Horace.
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.
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It is not necessary that a crowd should be numerous for the faculty of seeing what is taking place before its eyes to be destroyed and for the real facts to be replaced by hallucinations unrelated to them. As soon as a few individuals are gathered together they constitute a crowd, and, though they should be distinguished men of learning, they assume all the characteristics of crowds with regard to matters outside their speciality. The faculty of observation and the critical spirit possessed by each of them individually at once disappears.
(from ‘The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind’ by Gustave Le Bon pub. 1895)
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