Gustave Le Bon (1895)

The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.

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One of the most constant characteristics of beliefs is their intolerance. The stronger the belief, the greater its intolerance. Men dominated by a certitude cannot tolerate those who do not accept it.

- Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A study of the popular mind (1986)

For all those people that are living in a nation run by a demagogue that poisons the well of knowledge and fosters a following on orthodoxy based on baseless claims, beware!

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ElwoodBlues · M

Hear hear!!

bijouxbroussard · F

Just goes to show, there’s nothing new under the sun…😞

Kwek00 · 41-45, M

@bijouxbroussard Well ... no. It was Le Bons' observation about human beings acting as a "crowd".

However... Le Bon is extremely negative in his book. He might be the first guy that wrote about crowd-psychology, today psychologists that work around this subject are a bit more positive. There are also crowds that can behave in better ways then Le Bon describes.

Authoritarians sometimes use Le Bons' work for education and justification of their demagoguery.

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