This book comes from this link.
Today's excerpt begins on page 39 .
Crowds are only cognisant of simple and extreme sentiments; the opinions, ideas, and beliefs suggested to them are accepted or rejected as a whole, and considered as absolute truths or as not less absolute errors.
This is always the case with beliefs induced by a process of suggestion instead of engendered by reasoning.
Every one is aware of the intolerance that accompanies religious beliefs, and of the despotic empire they exercise on men's minds.
Being in doubt as to what constitutes truth or error, and having, on the other hand, a clear notion of its strength, a crowd is as disposed to give authoritative effect to its inspirations as it is intolerant.
An individual may accept contradiction and discussion; a crowd will never do so.
At public meetings the slightest contradiction on the part of an orator is immediately received with howls of fury and violent invective, soon followed by blows, and expulsion should the orator stick to his point.
Without the restraining presence of the representatives of authority the contradictor, indeed, would often be done to death.
Dictatorialness and intolerance are common to all categories of crowds, but they are met with in a varying degree of intensity.
Here, once more, reappears that fundamental notion of race which dominates all the feelings and all the thoughts of men.
It is more especially in Latin crowds that authoritativeness and intolerance are found developed in the highest measure.
In fact, their development is such in crowds of Latin origin that they have entirely destroyed that sentiment of the independence of the individual so powerful in the Anglo-Saxon.
Latin crowds are only concerned with the collective independence of the sect to which they belong, and the characteristic feature of their conception of independence is the need they experience of bringing those who are in disagreement with themselves into immediate and violent subjection to their beliefs.
Among the Latin races the Jacobins of every epoch, from those of the Inquisition downwards, have never been able to attain to a different conception of liberty.
Authoritativeness and intolerance are sentiments of which crowds have a very clear notion, which they easily conceive and which they entertain as readily as they put them in practice when once they are imposed upon them.
Crowds exhibit a docile respect for force, and are but slightly impressed by kindness, which for them is scarcely other than a form of weakness.
Their sympathies have never been bestowed on easy-going masters, but on tyrants who vigorously oppressed them.
It is to these latter that they always erect the loftiest statues.
It is true that they willingly trample on the despot whom they have stripped of his power, but it is because, having lost his strength, he has resumed his place among the feeble, who are to be despised because they are not to be feared.
The type of hero dear to crowds will always have the semblance of a Caesar.
His insignia attracts them, his authority overawes them, and his sword instills them with fear.
A crowd is always ready to revolt against a feeble, and to bow down servilely before a strong authority.
Should the strength of an authority be intermittent, the crowd, always obedient to its extreme sentiments, passes alternately from anarchy to servitude, and from servitude to anarchy.
However, to believe in the predominance among crowds of revolutionary instincts would be to entirely misconstrue their psychology.
It is merely their tendency to violence that deceives us on this point.
Their rebellious and destructive outbursts are always very transitory.
Crowds are too much governed by unconscious considerations, and too much subject in consequence to secular hereditary influences not to be extremely conservative.
Abandoned to themselves, they soon weary of disorder, and instinctively turn to servitude.
It was the proudest and most untractable of the Jacobins who acclaimed Bonaparte with greatest energy when he suppressed all liberty and made his hand of iron severely felt.
It is difficult to understand history, and popular revolutions in particular, if one does not take sufficiently into account the profoundly conservative instincts of crowds.
They may be desirous, it is true, of changing the names of their institutions, and to obtain these changes they accomplish at times even violent revolutions, but the essence of these institutions is too much the expression of the hereditary needs of the race for them not invariably to abide by it.
Their incessant mobility only exerts its influence on quite superficial matters.
In fact they possess conservative instincts as indestructible as those of all primitive beings.
Their fetish-like respect for all traditions is absolute; their unconscious horror of all novelty capable of changing the essential conditions of their existence is very deeply rooted.
Had democracies possessed the power they wield to-day at the time of the invention of mechanical looms or of the introduction of steam-power and of railways, the realisation of these inventions would have been impossible, or would have been achieved at the cost of revolutions and repeated massacres.
It is fortunate for the progress of Civilisation that the power of crowds only began to exist when the great discoveries of science and industry had already been effected.
This series of posts will insure that these free thinkers' works live on in living memory.
If only a few.
There is a reason these books are not taught in the modern skools.
Setting rewards to burn only burns the author portion of the payout.
If you think this type of content should be eligible for author rewards, make your voice heard in this community:
created/hive-104940