Echoes of Le Bon

The events of the Arab Spring failed to do so. And the Occupy Movement that began in New York also failed to bring back the memory. But now, with the events in Turkey, suddenly I remembered Gustave Le Bon. I must have been in college when I read him, thus at the latest about fifty years ago. His book, The Psychology of Crowds, but in English translation The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, left a deep impression in my mind—probably because it had a right mysterious flavor. Here is a quote, which I take from the Wikipedia article on the book:

An individual immersed for some length of time in a crowd soon finds himself—either in consequence of magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from some other cause of which we are ignorant—in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer.

The flavor of the nineteenth century (the book appeared in 1895) is there in those words: magnetic, hypnotized. Le Bon’s crowd, certainly as I pictured it reading his book, was of masses jammed together in a square. He did not say that the name of the square ought to start with a T, as in Tianaman, Tahrir, or Taksim (ht to Brigitte, whose middle initial is T); nor did he extend his analysis to turning that crowd into an instant settlement with plastic tents and mattresses. He was interested in the peculiar deformation of reasoning powers and judgement that come to the fore when masses gather.

I suppose that Le Bon is no longer on the curriculum. The prevailing view of the crowd has taken on a semi-religious aura over time, perhaps beginning with Woodstock. A deeper wisdom is supposed to rise from vast assemblies of like-feeling people, capable of being aroused and maintained by electronic media.

We need a new Le Bon to update the The Psychology of Crowds, which, these days, has been falsely promoted using labels like direct democracy. But would an update find a publisher today?

A Name Emerges

The nation’s editorial, headline, and slogan-forming powers overnight created a new name for what began as the Wall Street Protest. That name is OCCUPY, and the movement that it represents has now also been baptized the OCCUPY MOVEMENT. I sat down this morning wondering how many protests had taken place yesterday and began by using the search phrase “city protests.” Google then undertook to educate me. The search phrase of choice is, well, occupy. I put in that word and then a letter of the alphabet. Google now has a facility that displays a “News for occupy __________” headline followed by links. Thus:

Following this technique, I was able to build the following list:

The facility also provided content for some of the blank letters, but these were foreign or tongue in cheek. For E: Everything. For F: Frankfurt (Germany), G: Greece/Germany, I: Israel, J: Japan, Q: Qatar, R: Rome, T: Toronto, and for Y: Yourself. Only X and Z were left out in the dark. (I notice now, too late, that Vancouver really belongs in this paragraph, not in the table...)

It also appeared that the old designation, Silent Majority, has been renamed The 99 Percent. Visibly troubled spokes-types on the right tried their best to suggests that among the 99 Percent were people making as much as $500,000 a year and more, but the mood on TV news was not very open to such correctives and these were met with faint, dismissive, and sometimes contemptuous smiles.

That 99 Percent has legs, I tell you—in a season when numerical slogans like 9-9-9 have legs, in the age of Tweets, something shorter is even better. Now, it seems to me, the election campaign is turning interesting.