Complex ideas are “only accessible to crowds after having assumed a very simple shape,” asserted Le Bon in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, first published in 1895. “It is especially when we are dealing with somewhat lofty philosophic or scientific ideas that we see how far-reaching are the modifications they require in order to lower them to the level of the intelligence of crowds,” he wrote. McDougall sounded a similar note in The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology, published in 1920.
