Dominique Perregaux's Reviews > The Crowd

This book is a must read to understand the past, current and future revolutions. Analyzing the psychology of crowds, Le Bon explains in details two fundamental elements that everybody should know and assimilate:

1) A crowd is a crowd. Whatever it is composed of idiots or savants, a crowd is an anonymous mass, a shapeless monster that brings to the surface the most basic, primal and violent instincts of its members. The impunity that being among others attribute is the basis of the danger of a crowd.

2) Revolutions (provoked my crowds) happen when a situation is no more in phase with the reality. This disconnection can last years but at some point the difference between the tyrant(s)' s reality and the one from the people they control is not sustainable anymore; becomes too hard to bear. The friction becomes so intense that the system (totalitarian) implodes with the crowd emerging as an unstoppable destructive (of the old order) force. What Le Bon highlights is that this new reality (the new reality brought by the revolution) is a period of chaos. A period of transition between the old system and the new order to come.

This gives further perspective to the world events we can currently witness.