Sublime

Crowds always, and individuals as a rule, stand in need of ready-made opinions on all subjects. The popularity of these opinions is independent of the measure of truth or error they contain, and is solely regulated by their prestige.

A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images evoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed fact.

The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes

“Crowds have always undergone the influence of illusions,” he wrote, “Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master. Whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”

Le Bon’s 1895 book The Crowd might be one of the most influential in history—not because of how many read it, but because of who read it. Hitler, Lenin, and especially Mussolini were all heavily influenced by his study of mass psychology, explicitly so.

“In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated,” Gustave Le Bon noted in his 1895 classic on crowd psychology.

The crowd demands a god before everything else.