‘I Cry Quietly’: A Soldier Describes the Toll of Russia’s War/The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind – Gustave Le Bon

“Young boys die. They haven’t seen life yet. It’s difficult for me to see that. Sometimes I cry quietly. I don’t know what this war is for.”

“How numerous are the crowds that have heroically faced death for beliefs, ideas, and phrases that they scarcely understood!”(The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind – Gustave Le Bon)

The nature of crowds has long been a topic of interest in philosophy. However, the 18th and 19th centuries were a time when an increased emphasis was placed on understanding the psychology of crowds. For example,  the 18th century philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau proclaimed that  “…we have a very imperfect knowledge of the human heart if we do not also examine it in crowds.”

Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), a French social psychologist, is often seen as the father of the study of crowd psychology. Le Bon believed an understanding of crowd psychology was essential for a proper understanding of the both history and the nature of man. As he wrote in his classic and highly influential work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind:

“It is crowds rather than isolated individuals that may be induced to run the risk of death to secure the triumph of a creed or an idea, that may be fired with enthusiasm for glory and honour… Such heroism is without doubt somewhat unconscious, but it is of such heroism that history is made.”(The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind – Gustave Le Bon)

Referring to the ideas which leaders manipulate in order to govern and control crowds, Le Bon wrote:

“By many they are considered as natural forces, as supernatural powers. They evoke grandiose and vague images in men’s minds, but this very vagueness that wraps them in obscurity augments their mysterious power. They are the mysterious divinities hidden behind the tabernacle, which the devout only approach in fear and trembling.”(The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind – Gustave Le Bon)

Approaching these simplified, and therefore gravely misunderstood ideas as mysterious divinities, a crowd always forms a  religious relationship to the ideas which motivate them to action. This being the case even when the ideas have no explicitly religious component:  “A person is not religious solely when he worships a divinity, but when he puts all the resources of his mind, the complete submission of his will, and the whole-souled ardour of fanaticism at the service of a cause or an individual who becomes the goal and guide of his thoughts and actions.”

Along this line of reasoning Le Bon continued:

“Were it possible to induce the masses to adopt atheism, disbelief would exhibit all the intolerant ardour of a religious sentiment, and in its exterior forms would soon become a cult.”(The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind – Gustave Le Bon)

While crowds are capable of acts which achieve both good and evil, Le Bon believed that more often than not  crowds commit barbarous and immoral actions.  Why do crowds so often act in an immoral manner?

Le Bon put forth the following explanation:  “…our savage, destructive instincts are the inheritance left dormant in all of us from the primitive ages. In the life of the isolated individual it would be dangerous for him to gratify these instincts, while his absorption in an irresponsible crowd, in which in consequence he is assured of impunity, gives him entire liberty to follow them.”

The 20th century  psychologist Carl Jung reiterated this idea:

“…if people crowd together and form a mob, then the dynamisms of the collective man are let loose – beasts or demons that lie dormant in every person until he is part of a mob. Man in the mass sinks unconsciously to an inferior moral and intellectual level, to that level which is always there, below the threshold of consciousness, ready to break forth as soon as it is activated by the formation of a mass.” (Carl Jung)

Nonetheless, Le Bon believed he understood what motivated individuals to join a crowd.

When an individual lives his life as an individual – that is, when he forced to take responsibility for his life – he is apt to feel a crushing burden and sense of impotence he can’t seem to shake.

In joining a crowd or a mass movement, the individual is temporarily relieved of this responsibility and sense of impotence, and comes to feel that he is capable of shaking the foundations of the earth:

“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.”(The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind – Gustave Le Bon)

“In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.” – Orwell 1984

“All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to” That primitive patriotism constitutes that heroism  “Such heroism is without doubt somewhat unconscious, but it is of such heroism that history is made.”. Just like this Soldier said:”I don’t know what this war is for.” it just confirms what Le bon said:“How numerous are the crowds that have heroically faced death for beliefs, ideas, and phrases that they scarcely understood!”

Blind patriotism is a form of faith. Society and state becomes the anchor of human existence, a sort of hero system.

“Society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning. Every society thus is a “religion” whether it thinks so or not: Soviet “religion” and Maoist “religion” are as truly religious as are scientific and consumer “religion,” no matter how much they may try to disguise themselves by omitting religious and spiritual ideas from their lives.” (Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death)

Just like any religion, the religion of one’s society becomes easier to believe in, the greater the number of people who worship it. And this is why the nonconformists are so feared by the masses, the unique individuals plant seeds of doubt into the minds of the conformists regarding the significance of their social roles, and thus the significance of their very existence. Therefore, the masses actively discourage the cultivation of one’s uniqueness, ridicule and ostracize nonconformists, and try and pressure them back to conformity – something they must do given that their existential significance is on the line.