A century ago, Gustave Le Bon wrote in his classic The Crowd: The real cause of the great upheavals which precede changes of civilisations, such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Arabian Empire, is a profound modification in the ideas of the peoples … . The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought … .The present epoch is one of these critical moments in which the thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation.17 Le Bon was speaking of his own time, the end of the nineteenth century, but what he wrote is truer
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