Le Bon's book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, was published in English in 1896 by Macmillan. I will use quotes from that edition in this book. In 1960, an edition of The Crowd was published by the Viking Press with a long introduction by Robert K. Merton, an important sociologist. I will discuss Merton's ideas at the end of this chapter.

Organization of The Crowd

Introduction:

The Era of Crowds

Book I

The Mind of Crowds

Chapter 1

General Characteristics of Crowds

Chapter 2

The Sentiments and Morality of Crowds

Chapter 3

The Ideas, Reasoning Power, and Imagination of Crowds

Chapter 4

A Religious Shape Assume by All the Convictions of Crowds

Book II

The Opinions and Beliefs of Crowds

Chapter 1

Remote Factors of the Opinions and Beliefs of Crowds

Chapter 2

The Immediate Factors of the Opinions of Crowds

Chapter 3

The Leaders of Crowds and Their Means of Persuasion

Chapter 4

Limitations of the Variability of the Beliefs and Opinions of Crowds

Book III

The Classification and Description of the Different Kinds of Crowds

Chapter 1

The Classification of Crowds

Chapter 2

Crowds Termed Criminal Crowds

Chapter 3

Criminal Juries

Chapter 4

Electoral Crowds

Chapter 5

Parliamentary Assemblies

We can see from this table of contents that Le Bon cast a wide net and there aren't many aspects of crowds that he did not consider. For my purposes, some material in his chapters is very important for us to consider and I offer this material in extended excerpts.

I will now discuss some of Le Bon's key ideas and quote some of the most important passages from the 1896 edition of his book.

Le Bon's Definition of Crowds

1.

Le Bon begins chapter 1 of Book I with his definition of crowds (1896: 1,2):

I can only wonder what Ortega y Gasset would have thought had he been able to observe the divisive and corrosive nature of contemporary American politics and read my book on crowds. He wrote his book in 1932, but his ideas seem oddly relevant today—in part because he recognized the problems generated by the emergence of the “multitudes” or what Le Bon would call the crowd. It was Trump's behavior—and the behavior of his angry followers who attacked the Capitol that led me to write this book. Bob Woodward and Robert Costa conclude their book, Peril, as follows (2021:418):

That is the situation we face now in America as our democratic institutions are in peril from Trump and the Republican Party, which has become an antidemocratic cult of Trump followers—or is the term “worshipers” more accurate?

This book is about the role of crowds in American society, culture, and politics. It offers a detailed description of Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (published in English in 1896 and thus in the public domain), and a discussion of Sigmund Freud's 1921 book on group psychology, among other things.

I use so much from Le Bon that it might be correct to cite him as a coauthor of this book, but I quote him because his ideas are central to my argument and I want my readers to be able to see, in some depth, what he had to say about crowds.

I also make extended use of material from Wikipedia on a variety of topics. I like Wikipedia because it offers valuable overviews and readable discussions on many topics of interest to me in this book. I recognize that some academics frown on using material from Wikipedia, but I have always found its articles extremely useful.

This book deals with some important aspects of American society, politics, and culture. It seeks to answer questions such as what do Trump's followers (his crowds) see in him and why did so many people become insurrectionists on January 6, 2021, and try to prevent the counting of the electoral votes leading to the election of Joe Biden, and attack the Capitol? I also consider crowds and cults and the role of crowds in COVID and vaccine hesitancy and opposition to vaccinations in the United States and elsewhere (Figure 1.1).

In my books, I like to use quotations from authors so that my readers can see how authors expressed themselves. Except for the material from Le Bon's book, and Wikipedia, the quotations in this book are all less than 350 words and thus qualify as fair use, and I give credit to the writers for all materials that I quote. My book has, then, something of a documentary quality about it. We can think of the quotations I use as the equivalent of statements by expert witnesses in a trial.

The classic text on crowds is Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd, first published in 1895 in French and 1896 in English. It is recognized as one of the most important social psychology studies ever published and my book is an application of Le Bon's ideas about crowds to contemporary American society, politics, and culture.

People in crowds often dress in a manner to suggest their allegiance to whatever it is that draws them together. For example, if you go to a college football game, you will often find students from the college and fans of the team are wearing the team colors and sometimes tee shirts and sweatshirts with the team colors and the name of the college or the team (Figure 5.1).

Many people are unfamiliar with semiotics so, since this chapter deals with the semiotics of crowds, let me say a few words about the science of semiotics. There are two founding fathers of semiotics, a Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (Figure 5.2), who wrote a seminal book, Course in General Linguistics that was published in 1915, and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (Figure 5.3), who wrote many books on the subject and who gave the science its name.

The term “semiotics” is based on the Greek word for sign, sēmeîon, and semiotics is the science of signs—a sign being anything that can stand for something else, anything that conveys meaning. For example, our facial expressions are signs, our hairstyles are signs, our clothes are signs, and, according to Pierce, everything is a sign.

Peirce said (cited in Sebeok, 1977, page 6), “this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.”

If Peirce is correct and everything is a sign, semiotics becomes the master science since it enables us to interpret signs, so when you learned what words mean, as a little child and when you learned to read, you began your career as a semiotician. Actually, when you were just a few months old, and your parents smiled at you, and you responded to their smiles, you started your career as a semiotician.

Maya Pines describes this process as follows (“How They Know What You Really Mean”), San Francisco Chronicle, October 13, 1982):

The question this chapter discusses involves why so many people in America refuse to get vaccinated. We find the same reluctance to be vaccinated in other countries but not to the extent that vaccine resistance exists in the United States. In the United States now, since we developed vaccines, almost all of the people dying from Covid-19 are unvaccinated (over 90%) so we must wonder whether they form some kind of death cult, made up of followers of Donald J. Trump.When the virus first appeared, Trump paid little attention to it, saying that it was like the flu. He wasted precious months getting the vaccine out to people and told his followers not to wear masks and not to get vaccinated—though he was vaccinated and that probably saved his life since he caught the disease and ended up at Walter Reed Hospital where he received special treatments. He came very close to dying.

If Angela Merkel Were in Charge in America

Germany has a population of about 83 million people and it is estimated that as of October 2021, around 94,000 Germans have died from the virus. The United States has a population of 329 million people and as of October 2021 around 770,000 Americans have died from the virus. America has approximately three times as many people as Germany.

If Germany had the same population as the United States and we multiply 83 million times three to get approximately 329 million people, around 282 thousand people would have died, so if Angela Merkel and her German colleagues had been running the United States vaccination program, instead of Trump, around 500,000 Americans would still be alive.

Some of the 777,000 deaths occurred after the vaccines were developed and distributed, which means the epidemic of Covid deaths since then are mostly from the unvaccinated (Figure 8.1).

Rationales of the Unvaccinated

One reason many people have not been vaccinated in America is that wearing masks and becoming vaccinated have become part of the hyperpoliticization that is part of the Trump program. Under Trump, everything possible has been politicized, so not wearing masks and not getting vaccinated became political statements rather than public health imperatives.

Along with 9/11 when the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed by terrorists using airplanes as missiles, 1/6 is a day of monumental importance in American history. But unlike 9/11, the terrorists attacking the Capitol building were not foreign terrorists but American ones.

The attack on the Capitol raises a question: when does a crowd become a mob? The answer would seem to be that when a crowd becomes highly motivated and excited and loses its sense of moral composure, it becomes a mob (Figure 3.2).

Le Bon has a chapter on “Crowds Termed Criminal Crowds?” in which he explains that the people who take part in these crowds/mobs are open to suggestion and believe they are acting “in obedience to a duty,” which with the 1/6 insurrection was following Trump's and several other Republican politicians’ instructions to “fight like hell” and, by implication, prevent Joe Biden, who it was said had stolen the election, from being installed as president.

Many of the members of the mob that attacked the Capitol on 1/6 have said that they believed they were acting on the orders of President Trump and that their behavior was not criminal but the behavior of true patriots.

An article, “90 Seconds of Rage on the Capitol Steps” by Dan Barry, Alan Feuer, and Matthew Rosenberg, on the first page of the Sunday edition of The New York Times, describe the behavior of seven rioters who worked in concert perpetrating violence for 90 seconds during the riot (October 17, 2021: 1):

But it may also help to slow down the video evidence, linger on those 90 seconds on the Capitol steps and trace back the roots of the violence and its perpetrators. Doing so provides a close-up view of how seemingly average citizens—duped by a political lie, goaded by their leaders, and swept up in a frenzied mob—can unite in breathtaking acts of brutality.

Scholars and writers often speculate on American exceptionalism, the notion that America differs from other countries and that because of our history, spiritual values, economic wealth, and military power, we have a special obligation to lead the world in many areas.

On September 25, 2015, David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times, had a column titled “The American Idea,” which starts off as follows:

Later in the column, he argues that the conservative Republican politicians who talk about American exceptionalism are destroying the concept by looking backwards to an imagined America, an America that was not multicultural and mixed race and that was not full of immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Africa and everyplace else.

The image of America in the minds of the Republican politicians Brooks was writing about is of a fantasied America made up primarily of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPS) living in farms and small towns and not in an America with huge cities full of people from many other countries with many skin colors and religions. It turns out that over sixty percent of Americans live in cities and only seven percent of Americans live on farms.

Anyone who has traveled to countries in Europe, Asia, and South America can tell you people in the various countries in these continents are all different from one another in many ways, such as their skin color, body shapes, the languages they speak, the food they eat, the clothes they wear, the way they have sex, their racial makeup, and the religions they practice.

The term we use for the differences we find in countries as far as personality is concerned is national character. What national character suggests is that where we are born and grow up plays an important role in the way we think and behave.

Nations differ from one another in various ways, and parts or regions of countries differ from other parts of the same country in important ways.

Freud wrote his book in 1921, many years after the publication of Le Bon’s The Crowd. Freud commented on the book in his work on group psychology since they were both, in many respects, writing about the same topic.

Freud begins his book, in his introduction, by explaining that individual psychology and group psychology are really two sides of the same coin (Figure 3.1). He explains that the mental health of individuals is almost always connected to others so that individual psychology is also, at the same time, social or group psychology.

Group psychology, he adds, deals with individuals as they are members of some component of a group, such as a race, a caste, a nation, an institution, or of a crowd of people organized for a particular purpose into a group. This leads him to a discussion of Le Bon and his notion of the group mind.

Freud asks three questions we must consider when dealing with group psychology (1922:3):

• 1. What is a group?

• 2. How does it exercise a decisive influence over the mental life of individuals?

• 3. What is the nature of the change it forces on individuals?

He mentions Le Bon's ideas about individuals in groups being affected by contagion and heightened suggestibility but does not recognize, Freud points out, that contagion is best understood as a manifestation of suggestibility. He adds that all the features of groups that Le Bon discusses can be explained by psychoanalysts: the fact that in groups people lose their individual inhibitions, demand illusions, and are as strongly influenced by what is false as what is true. After dealing with Le Bon's ideas, and saying its emphasis on unconscious aspects of mental life fits in with his thinking, Freud moves on to the theories of a psychologist, William McDougall, who wrote a book The Group Mind, that was published in 1920 and emphasizes the role of emotions in people in groups who behave like unruly children.

Freud discusses McDougall's ideas about dealing with the problems of groups by procuring for their members the characteristics of individuals, which membership in groups extinguish. This involves individuals recognizing their continuity, becoming aware of their self-consciousness, their traditions and customs, and associating with other groups.

We have already explored, indirectly, what cults are, from Le Bon's socialpsychology perspective and Freud's analytic perspective. The question I wish to resolve here is: how does a crowd become a cult? We might also ask whether all crowds eventually become cults.

Your Dictionary on the Internet offers this definition of a cult:

Cult Meaning: Best Ten Definitions of Cult (yourdictionary.com)

This definition, with its focus on raising money, seems particularly apt when it comes to dealing with Donald Trump as a cult leader and worldclass grifter. Freud talked about the significance of the erotic feelings people in crowds have for each other and their leaders, and the epigraph mentions the religious aspects of cults, so it is not too difficult to see the erotic feelings people in crowds have merging into religious attitudes. A review of a book about Trump as a cult leader by Steven Hassan offers some insights into the relationship between Trump and his followers:

Since the 2016 election, Donald Trump's behavior has become both more disturbing and yet increasingly familiar. He relies on phrases like, “fake news,” “build the wall,” and continues to spread the divisive mentality of us-vs.-them. He lies constantly, has no conscience, never admits when he is wrong, and projects all of his shortcomings onto others. He has become more authoritarian, more outrageous, and yet many of his followers remain blindly devoted. Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert and a major Trump supporter, calls him one of the most persuasive people living. His need to squash alternate information and his insistence on constant ego-stroking are all characteristics of other famous leaders—cult leaders.

In The Cult of Trump, mind control and licensed mental health expert Steven Hassan draws parallels between our current president and people like Jim Jones, David Koresh, Ron Hubbard, and Sun Myung Moon, arguing that this presidency is in many ways like a destructive cult.

List of Utopian Newspapers and Journals in Esbozo

The Life of Max Nettlau

The general view is that Max Nettlau was a vital historian of anarchism, but little is known of his life. “Obscure” might be the fairest term. That is, however, an unfair judgment. While it is true that he is not much heralded, there are more than a score of sources which provide for an adequate understanding of Nettlau's life, enough to provide quite a detailed chronology.

An Annotated Gazetteer of Nettlau’s Utopians