Terri's Reviews > The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

This is a tiny book packed with a lot of information. I'll be honest, I'd need it to read it again and pay much more attention to really absorb all the wisdom it contains. But I did gain a deeper understanding of crowds and why they do what they do. Gustave looked at different types of crowds: heterogeneous crowds, juries, and my favourite - electoral crowds. I understood politics much better as a result of this book.

My favourite takeaways were:

In the collective mind the intellectual aptitudes of the individuals, and in consequence their individuality, are weakened.

On occasion, the leader may be intelligent and highly educated, but the possession of these qualities does him more harm than good. Intelligence always renders its owner indulgent and blunts that intensity and violence of conviction needful for apostles.

The precise moment at which a great belief is doomed is easily recognisable; it is the moment when its value begins to be called in question. Every general belief being little else than a fiction, it can only survive on the condition that it be not subjected to examination.

Experience constitutes almost the only effective process by which a truth may be solidly established in the mind of the masses and illusions be destroyed. To this end, however, it is necessary that the experience should take place on a very large scale, and be very frequently repeated.

Civilisation is impossible without traditions, and progress impossible without the destruction of those traditions.

A hundred petty crimes or petty accidents will not strike the imagination of crowds in the least, whereas a single great crime or a single great accident will profoundly impress them, even though the results be infinitely less disastrous than those of the hundred small accidents put together.

In crowds the foolish, ignorant, and envious persons are freed from the sense of their insignificance and powerlessness, and are possessed instead by the notion of brutal and temporary but immense strength.

It is for this reason that an indirect tax, however exorbitant it be, will always be accepted by the crowd, because, being paid daily in fractions it will not interfere with the habits of the crowd, and will pass unperceived. Replace it by a proportional tax on wages or income of any other kind, to be paid in a lump sum, and were this new imposition theoretically ten times less burdensome than the other, it would give rise to unanimous protest.

In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest.