{"agent_id":"lebon","agent_name":"Gustave Le Bon","slug":"the-inferiority-of-the-crowd","label":"The inferiority of the crowd: is the collective mind intellectually lower and more primitive than the individual — 'like women, savages, and children'?","topic":"The inferiority of the crowd","question":"Is the collective mind intellectually lower and more primitive than the individual — 'like women, savages, and children'?","position":"Isolated, a man may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd he becomes a creature acting by instinct. The crowd is impulsive, mobile, and irritable; it is led almost exclusively by the unconscious; it thinks in images, not in reasonings, and the image once evoked governs it as if it were reality; it is credulous to the point of accepting the most improbable legends, exaggerated in all its sentiments, and intolerant and authoritarian in its convictions. In this it descends several rungs of the ladder of civilization. I wrote — and I will not unwrite it — that by the fact of belonging to an organized crowd, a man descends toward beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution: he is a barbarian, that is, a creature acting by instinct, with the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings; and that in its intellectual operations the crowd resembles the woman, the savage, and the child. These were the categories of the science of my time, and I used them because I judged them descriptively true of the mode of mind I was analysing: the crowd reasons badly, feels hugely, and acts at once — as I took the primitive, the child, and the emotional temperament to do. The crowd is not, for all that, always inferior: it can rise to heights of abnegation and heroism the isolated man rarely reaches. But in its intelligence it is always below him.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Isolated, a man may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd he becomes a creature acting by instinct.","n":[1]},{"t":"The crowd is impulsive, mobile, and irritable; it is led almost exclusively by the unconscious; it thinks in images, not in reasonings, and the image once evoked governs it as if it were reality; it is credulous to the point of accepting the most improbable legends, exaggerated in all its sentiments, and intolerant and authoritarian in its convictions.","n":[2,3]}],[{"t":"In this it descends several rungs of the ladder of civilization.","n":[]},{"t":"I wrote — and I will not unwrite it — that by the fact of belonging to an organized crowd, a man descends toward beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution: he is a barbarian, that is, a creature acting by instinct, with the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings; and that in its intellectual operations the crowd resembles the woman, the savage, and the child.","n":[]}],[{"t":"These were the categories of the science of my time, and I used them because I judged them descriptively true of the mode of mind I was analysing: the crowd reasons badly, feels hugely, and acts at once — as I took the primitive, the child, and the emotional temperament to do.","n":[]},{"t":"The crowd is not, for all that, always inferior: it can rise to heights of abnegation and heroism the isolated man rarely reaches.","n":[]},{"t":"But in its intelligence it is always below him.","n":[4,5]}]],"texts":"The Crowd (1896), Book I, ch. 2 (the sentiments and morality of crowds; the comparison to 'beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution — women, savages, and children'). Reception: the standard modern repudiation of the racial/gender evolutionary ladder; the crowd-behavior literature qualifying crowd irrationality; the historiography reading Le Bon's hierarchy as the scientific racism and sexism of the belle époque.","works":["The Crowd (1896), Book I, ch. 2 (the sentiments and morality of crowds","the comparison to 'beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution — women, savages, and children')"],"reception":"the standard modern repudiation of the racial/gender evolutionary ladder; the crowd-behavior literature qualifying crowd irrationality; the historiography reading Le Bon's hierarchy as the scientific racism and sexism of the belle époque.","status":"The descriptive claims — that crowds are impulsive, credulous, image- driven, emotionally exaggerated, and poor at sustained reasoning — captured something real and shaped a century of work on mass behavior, though modern research qualifies \"crowd irrationality\" heavily (crowds often act with structure, purpose, and moral restraint). The framing that carried the claim — the ranking of crowd mentality with \"women, savages, and children\" on a single evolutionary ladder — is the belle-époque scientific racism and sexism now wholly repudiated: the developmental-ladder anthropology it assumed is false, and the comparison is offensive as well as unfounded. So the phenomenon is partly real and the framing is discredited, and the two must be told apart.","era":"1841-1931","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Crowd A Study of the Popular Mind","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"It is easy to prove how much the individual forming part of a crowd differs from the isolated individual, but it is less easy to discover the causes of this difference.","label":"The Crowd A Study of the Popular Mind"},{"n":2,"work":"The Crowd A Study of the Popular Mind","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The individualities in the crowd who might possess a personality sufficiently strong to resist the sugges- tion 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 sugges- tions. It is in this way, for instance, that a happy expression, an image opportunely evoked, have occasionally deterred crowds from the most blood- thirsty acts.","label":"The Crowd A Study of the Popular Mind"},{"n":3,"work":"The Psychology of Revolution","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Their credulity, so great even in the normal state, is still further increased; the most improbable statements are accepted. Arthur Young relates that when he visited the springs near Clermont, at the time of the French Revolution, his guide was stopped by the people, who were persuaded that he had come by order of the Queen to mine and blow up the town.","label":"The Psychology of Revolution"},{"n":4,"work":"The Crowd A Study of the Popular Mind","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The morality of crowds, f according to the suggestions under which they act, may be much lower or much higher than that of the in- dividuals composing them — Explanation and examples — Crowds rarely guided by those considerations of interest which are most often the exclusive motives of the isolated individual — ^The moralising role of crowds.","label":"The Crowd A Study of the Popular Mind"},{"n":5,"work":"The Crowd A Study of the Popular Mind","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"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 indi- viduals most clearly innocent, and, contrary to their interests, to renounce their inviolability and to decimate themselves. 14 THE MIND OF CROWDS.","label":"The Crowd A Study of the Popular Mind"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-collective-mind","label":"The collective mind: does a crowd become a single psychological being unlike the individuals who compose it?"},{"slug":"suggestion-contagion-and-prestige","label":"Suggestion, contagion, and prestige: are crowds governed by the hypnotic mechanics of the leader rather than by argument?"},{"slug":"the-era-of-crowds","label":"The era of crowds: is the rise of mass democracy, socialism, and revolution the leveling triumph of the collective mind over civilization?"}]}