(Professor Luke O'Neill in a protective bubble. Unfortunately he escaped crying 'I am not a number, I am a free man' )
“Whatever strikes the imagination of crowds presents itself under the shape of a startling and very clear image, freed from all accessory explanation, or merely having as accompaniment a few marvellous or mysterious facts: examples in point are a great victory, a great miracle, a great crime, or a great hope. Things must be laid before the crowd as a whole, and their genesis must never be indicated. A hundred petty crimes or petty accidents will not strike the imagination of crowds in the least, whereas a single great crime or a single great accident will profoundly impress them, even though the results be infinitely less disastrous than those of the hundred small accidents put together. The epidemic of influenza, which caused the death but a few years ago of five thousand persons in Paris alone, made very little impression on the popular imagination. The reason was that this veritable hecatomb was not embodied in any visible image, but was only learnt from statistical information furnished weekly. An accident which should have caused the death of only five hundred instead of five thousand persons, but on the same day and in public, as the outcome of an accident appealing strongly to the eye, by the fall, for instance, of the Eiffel Tower, would have produced, on the contrary, an immense impression on the imagination of the crowd. The probable loss of a transatlantic steamer that was supposed, in the absence of news, to have gone down in mid-ocean profoundly impressed the imagination of the crowd for a whole week. Yet official statistics show that 850 sailing vessels and 203 steamers were lost in the year 1894 alone. The crowd, however, was never for a moment concerned by these successive losses, much more important though they were as far as regards the destruction of life and property, than the loss of the Atlantic liner in question could possibly have been.”
(from ‘The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind’ by Gustave Le Bon pub. 1895)
Le Bon was of course writing about the Russian Flu of 1889/90 which killed one million out of a world population of 1.5 billion.
As Le Bon wrote if you want to create a crowd you need proper staging . It helps if you have highly infectious images of the corona virus looking like a mini sea mine. Think of that going off inside of you! Masks and plague mavens and the absurd plastic bubble of Prof. O’Neill that could allow you to attend music gigs assist the general dread. Boosters with the suggestion of rocketry that will get you above contagion and the constant repetition of phrases such as ‘flatten the curve’, ‘save the health service’ , ‘the real plague’ (of the un-vaxxed). Yeah, Keep it going Shanie, don’t stall the digger.
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