Actually Crowds and their irrational , savage behaviour can be unfortunately traced throughout History so the events that triggered the death of George Floyd in the United States are nothing new .
But it does not stop to amaze me the fascination that most seem to have for mass movements and the need to belong to them .
I am not a psychologist , so i lack the technical expertise that could give me a better insight in this topic , but i can not help thinking that something profoundly humiliating in an individual that by joining a crowd like a good little obedient sheep of a flock , abdicates of its own individuality follow an ideal , a movement , that left alone to its own device probably wouldn´t agree with it .
Without getting into the particular details of the Floyd case and the sheer stupidity of destroying statues which basically means destroying the memory of nations , that like the memory of people is formed of good and bad things , i think that crowds give a very poor spectacle of humans as a species that cultivate somehow this idea , however illusionary it might be, of a so called intelectual superiority over the other species .
The French Sociologist Gustave Le Bon , who wrote a series of brilliant essays about the psychology of masses , pointed out very well in his writings to the character of absolute savagery of the masses .
Le Bon was particularly keen in observing the loss of the personal conscience of the individual and the predominance of his unconscious personality submerged in the crowd turns the individual into an automaton with no longer a will of his own .
Religion and Politics are masters in this form of manipulation . The Crowd more than anything shows the profound mediocracy of the human kind.
Le Bon and also Wilhelm Reich in their writings show is very well that History is built the individuals who have the courage to stand out from the Crowd and fight for the originality of their ideas .
"At the bidding of a Peter the Hermit many millions of men swarmed to the East; the words of an hallucinated person … have created the force necessary to triumph over the Graeco-Roman world; an obscure monk like Luther set Europe ablaze and bathed in blood. The voice of a Galileo or a Newton will never have the least echo among the masses. The inventors of genius transform a civilization. The fanatics and the hallucinated create history."
Gustave Le Bon
As a human being ill never give up the treasure giving to me by nature of thinking by my own head and therefore ill always refuse to be just a member of the herd .
Gustave Le Bon : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Le_Bon
Wilhelm Reich : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich
