Introduction From ‘mass hysteria’ to ‘people power’

Abstract

Le Bon, writing in the late nineteenth century and drawing on ideas prevalent at the time, introduced a way of talking about individuals in groups that, through to the twenty-first century, has become a concept used to dismiss certain behaviours and people as being inferior, irrational and degenerate. From the idea of the mob, unruly crowd behaviour, mass hysteria, savage and primitive emotions and so forth, the concept of the mass mind as more suggestible and open to influence has underpinned the ways in which certain forms of experience have been judged and evaluated. The spontaneous actions of the ‘ordinary people’ following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, for example, were initially pathologized, the intense grief and expressions of sorrow (including the laying of flowers at Kensington Palace) being dismissed by the media as signs of irrational emotion, hysteria and ‘crowd behaviour’. The idea of the mass mind as irrational has underpinned eugenics movements believing that certain peoples have been positioned lower down the evolutionary scale, being more inferior and closer to the primitive and savage. These peoples, and those experiences we find inexplicable (such as cults), are viewed as being less able to maintain self-control and more at the whim of the seductive charms of others (including charismatic leaders).