Such also is approximately the state of the individual forming part of a psychological crowd.He is no longer conscious of his acts.In his case, as in the case of the hypnotised subject, at the same time that certain faculties are destroyed, others may be brought to a high degree of exaltation.Under the influence of a suggestion, he will undertake the accomplishment of certain acts with irresistible impetuosity.This impetuosity is the more irresistible in the case of crowds than in that of the hypnotised subject, from the fact that, the suggestion being the same for all the individuals of the crowd, it gains in strength by reciprocity.The individualities in the crowd who might possess a personality sufficiently strong to resist the suggestion are too few in number to struggle against the current.At the utmost, they may be able to attempt a diversion by means of different suggestions.It is in this way, for instance, that a happy expression, an image opportunely evoked, have occasionally deterred crowds from the most bloodthirsty acts.
We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd.He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.
Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation.Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian--that is, a creature acting by instinct.
He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images--which would be entirely without action on each of the isolated individuals composing the crowd--and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits.An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.
It is for these reasons that juries are seen to deliver verdicts of which each individual juror would disapprove, that parliamentary assemblies adopt laws and measures of which each of their members would disapprove in his own person.Taken separately, the men of the Convention were enlightened citizens of peaceful habits.United in a crowd, they did not hesitate to give their adhesion to the most savage proposals, to guillotine individuals most clearly innocent, and, contrary to their interests, to renounce their inviolability and to decimate themselves.
It is not only by his acts that the individual in a crowd differs essentially from himself.Even before he has entirely lost his independence, his ideas and feelings have undergone a transformation, and the transformation is so profound as to change the miser into a spendthrift, the sceptic into a believer, the honest man into a criminal, and the coward into a hero.The renunciation of all its privileges which the nobility voted in a moment of enthusiasm during the celebrated night of August 4, 1789, would certainly never have been consented to by any of its members taken singly.
The conclusion to be drawn from what precedes is, that the crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual, but that, from the point of view of feelings and of the acts these feelings provoke, the crowd may, according to circumstances, he better or worse than the individual.All depends on the nature of the suggestion to which the crowd is exposed.This is the point that has been completely misunderstood by writers who have only studied crowds from the criminal point of view.Doubtless a crowd is often criminal, but also it is often heroic.It is crowds rather than isolated individuals that may be induced to run the risk of death to secure the triumph of a creed or an idea, that may be fired with enthusiasm for glory and honour, that are led on--almost without bread and without arms, as in the age of the Crusades--to deliver the tomb of Christ from the infidel, or, as in '93, to defend the fatherland.Such heroism is without doubt somewhat unconscious, but it is of such heroism that history is made.Were peoples only to be credited with the great actions performed in cold blood, the annals of the world would register but few of them.