Seducing the Crowd: The Leader in Crowd Psychology

Abstract

At the end of the nineteenth century, the crowd emerged as a new political and academic subject in Europe. The invention of this concept was a response to the restructuring of modern society, which was marked by the "social question," urbanization, and the introduction of universal suffrage. Longestablished identities, based on traditional hierarchies, were questioned; still, a new democratic subject had yet to emerge. The notion of the crowd was a substitute: it attempted to describe new forms of social assemblages-forms that could be reduced neither to class, nor to ethnic identity, nor to older forms such as guilds. Anyone could become a member of the crowd; typically, crowd descriptions emphasize its heterogeneous composition. In this sense, the crowd represents a universal mode of inclusion, which was announced with universal suffrage, and came to represent a repulsive democratic subject. It was therefore not a far step for crowd theorists to denounce crowds and democracy simultaneously because of the threat they posed to the social fabric.The crowd, however, was not only a surrogate for a new, not yet fully fledged democratic subject, and the concept of the crowd was not only a reactionary right-wing polemic against the working class; crowd psychology also became a conceptual laboratory for deliberating social processes no longer rooted in traditional relations of power. While its sister discipline, sociology, was interested in determining what is social about the social, crowd

Crowd Mentality Conveys No-Oneness

“…He prevents them from making progress. Only the Crowd's Ruler-his idol, his desired self-is worthy of proper embellishment and elevation (Le Bon, 1895;Freud, 1921;Stäheli, 2011).…”

“…Spiritually, he participates in crimes or betrayals that his Ruler, the Super-one, brings about. He does not rationalize himself or his Super-one because he selfaspires to be a Ruler (Le Bon, 1895;Stäheli, 2011). He extricates rights and freedom for himself alone.…”

“…He hates and darkens his eyes upon seeing any positive change in "his equals". At the same time, he observes what others do and emulates them to avoid falling emotionally behind (Freud, 1921;Drury & Reicher, 2020;Stäheli, 2011;Maeng & Tanner, 2013).…”

“…Therefore, his confidence gets propelled by winds whose source emanates waves and sounds that keep him diminutive. He moves in the direction that the Ruler of Crowd deflates and within the lane where group power flows (Le Bon, 1895;Stäheli, 2011). The Horde requires elfin individuals, like sand particles, to produce a storm (Le Bon, 1895; Drury & Reicher, 2020; Bellomo et al, 2022).…”

“…A crowd of individuals is an assembly with physical features (e.g., space, flow rate, timespan, density pattern) or a psychological unity that might be beyond physical boundaries. The spirit (psychos) of the Crowd coexists with humans (Le Bon, 1895;Freud, 1921;Stäheli, 2011;Drury, 2014;Drury & Reicher, 2020). Collective behavior differs from individual behavior, and both depend on the setting.…”