Gustave Le Bon, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Crowds are not to be convinced; they are to be moved. Reasoning has no hold on them; the orator who would sway a crowd must strike its imagination, speak in images, affirm without proof, and repeat until the affirmation, by contagion, has entered the unconscious of every member as a settled belief. Affirmation, repetition, contagion: these are the means by which ideas are propagated in crowds, not demonstration.
And above these stands prestige — the mysterious domination exercised by a man, a work, or a doctrine, which paralyses the critical faculty and fills the soul with astonishment and respect. The leader (the meneur) rules by prestige; he is himself possessed by the idea he propagates, and it is his conviction, contagious as a fever, more than any argument, that gives him his power.
He gives the crowd not truth but the illusions it craves, for whoever can supply a crowd with illusions is easily its master, and whoever tries to destroy its illusions is always its victim. This is not a recipe I invented; it is the mechanism I observed. That it can be used for good or ill is not the psychologist's concern; his task is to describe how, in fact, crowds are led.1234
No, no! No need of these exceptionar persona,lities. It is only a few years since we saw an obscure general, with no greater merits than plenty of audacity, the prestige of his uniform, and the beauty of his horse, reach the very verge of supreme power, a limit which he dared not cross. A Caesar without laurels and without faith, he recoiled before the Rubicon.The Psychology of Socialism, p. 413
Become a popular truth the idea returns, as it were, to its source and exerts an influence on the upper classes of a nation. In the long run it is intelligence that shapes the destiny of the world, but very indirectly. The philosophers who evolve ideas have long since returned to dust, when, as the result of the process I have just described, the fruit of their reflection ends by triumphing. 3. Prestige.The Crowd A Study of the Popular Mind
Contagion is the cause of the contempt in which, at a given period, certain works are held — the example of "Tannhauser " may be cited — which, a few years later, for the same THE LEADERS OF CROWDS. 131 reason are admired by those who were foremost in criticising them.The Crowd A Study of the Popular Mind
The essential elements of the mechanism of persuasion must not be sought for in the value of a demonstration. Ideas can be enforced either by the prestige of the promulgator or by an appeal to the passions, but no influence is exerted by appealing solely to the reason.The Psychology of Peoples
This is Le Bon's most influential and most secure practical legacy. The analysis of crowd persuasion by affirmation, repetition, and contagion, and of leadership by prestige and contagious conviction, founded the modern understanding of propaganda, advertising, public relations, and charismatic mass leadership; Edward Bernays and the propaganda theorists built on it, and it runs parallel to Weber's concept of charisma. Its notoriety is that the same analysis served as a working manual for twentieth-century propagandists and dictators. Modern social-influence and persuasion research confirms much of the mechanism (repetition effects, source credibility, emotional and image-based appeals, social contagion) while embedding it in a more differentiated psychology. The mechanism stands; its moral neutrality is exactly what makes it dangerous.