Immediate Factors of Opinions and Beliefs
The remote factors discussed in the previous chapter contribute to the opinions and beliefs of people in a given location in a general sense. In psychological terms, those factors determine the character and temperament of a people and makes them more or less receptive to certain ideas. They are not firm boundaries or certain predictors, but they do have considerable influence.
However, a crowd tends to be very short-sighted, and its behavior is a response to more immediate stimuli, interpreted through simplistic logic, and acting on impulse. In this condition, more immediate factors have a stronger impact on their opinions, beliefs, and corresponding behaviors.
Images, Words, and Formulas
Le Bon suggests that the imagination of crowds is "particularly open to the impressions produced by images," but he departs this topic after saying only that images are not often available for use, and so an individual who means to influence the crowd must often rely on words and formulas. (EN: This seems perfunctory - while speakers of his day did not have slides or presentation graphics at their disposal, it might still be useful to explore the influence of imagery, but he does not.)
Words and formulas have a kind of "magic" in their ability to evoke mental imagery in an audience, which can have significant impact. The images that words evoke is entirely independent of their significance, and phrases that are ill-chosen and even nonsensical are sometimes greatly influential.
Consider that terms like democracy, equality, liberty, and others that pepper political rhetoric are often very ill-defined subjects that are not clearly defined or understood, yet those terms have a very strong impact on the emotions of those who hear them. Le Bon likens them to "the button of an electric bell." Every political party or religious denomination has at its disposal an arsenal of terms that evoke a reaction in their audiences, even when they are used in ignorance of their definition and in the context of an implausible argument.
Retuning momentarily to the remote factors: the precise words that can be used to evoke an emotional reaction are rooted in culture, tradition, beliefs, and knowledge specific to a people at a given period in time. The ideas may echo through the ages, and works translated from ancient Greek may still inspire people in a different nation centuries later, but this is coincidental - it merely reflects a common note in two different civilizations.
It's also common that a formula diminishes in power over time. A slogan is like a fashion, that is a novelty at first, wildly popular, and then abandoned. Whether it merely becomes tiresome or is taken as ironic when it is discovered the words have no meaning, a slogan has a limited span of time in which it is appealing.
He mentions the value of formulas as liberating people of "the obligation of thinking" and the manner in which simple-minded men who lack a system of beliefs often collect clever phrases that enable him to "traverse life" without the tiring necessity of having to think for themselves.
In studying language, it can be seen that the words of which a language is composed change rather slowly over the course of the ages, while the meaning attached to the words changes constantly. Dictionaries published a decade apart will demonstrate this. All of this makes communication by words a difficult matter across cultures and times:
- The translation of a work from one language to another strips it of much of its original meaning, as the words translated literally do not convey the essence of the work
- Even when a person endeavors to learn a foreign language so that he may read a work in its original form, his understanding is incomplete because the terms are translated through the filter of his own culture
- Even when a person reads in his own language, he may not fully understand what was meant by an author who wrote those words two or three centuries ago
- And even when a person reads the work of a contemporary author in his how language, he may not understand fully what the author meant - as there is a difference between the reader's and the author's interpretation of the words
In terms of the expression of ideas, words are a very imprecise instrument. In conversation, even two well-acquainted people may misunderstand one another. Though they are able to convey and receive a general sense of meaning, it is likely they never understand one another precisely.
Politicians are very clever about their use of words: when their constituents object to a bill, a politician can often change public opinion merely by changing the words by which it is described without making any change to the proposed legislation itself. For example, the word "tax" raises an automatic objection, such that consumers understand that an "import tax" will increase the price of the goods - but suggest it is a toll, tariff, or import duty that will be charged to a foreign manufacturer, and the people will support it (even though the net result to prices is exactly the same). In this way, the art of politics is in selecting the right words to make an idea palatable.
Illusions
illusion is a form of spectacle that causes confusion, the abandonment of reason, and surrender of will. For that reason, illusion is very often leveraged by religion in the form of "miracles" that cause people to feel a sense of awe and to abandon knowledge for belief. An individual who can create an illusion will, without any other qualifications, be accepted as a leader by his audience.
Illusion is also the appeal of the arts, which offer wondrous visions and ideas to the viewer. This is also a testament to the appeal of illusion: as every major civilization has had temples, museums, legends, and other works of art - whether the depiction is something entirely based in fantasy or merely the depiction of an ideal that is close to reality. Thu human heart hungers for a vision of something more pleasant than it encounters in everyday life.
Philosophy that derives from reality has not, for centuries of progress, offered the masses any idea that has been able to charm them, but the illusions of religion and the arts, however shabbily executed, never fail to gather an audience who are readily to give credence to irrational and implausible explanations for a trick or stunt.
We likewise find plausible accounts of actual events to be unsatisfactory and unengaging, but a legend or a myth holds our imagination. In this way a person may give credence to a gross exaggeration of a patent lie when he has not seen the deed performed, but has merely heard or read of it, and gives complete belief to a tale that defies all logic.
The ignorant and the desperate are eager to lace faith in anything that body promises happiness, and to surrender their will to anyone who can do something that they do not understand, but which they suspect may benefit them personally. The counsel of wise and learned men holds no charm against such a promise, however improbable.
It is in this way that illusion is a tool that has the power to seduce the masses and command their obedience, whether in the form of a long-standing institution that does so in an ongoing manner, or in a person who means to gather the immediate obedience of a crowd. Whoever can supply men with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is inevitably their victim.
Experience
Experience is regarded as "almost the only effective process by which a truth may be solidly established in the mind of the masses" thought it takes either a spectacular demonstration or a repetition of less intense ones to get the point across to a mass of people. Aside of that, there is little chance of success in shaking an erroneous opinion when it is has been accepted buy a crowd.
However, Le Bon does not develop this idea further. He alludes to the French Revolution again, stating that it required twenty years of violence to prove that a society cannot be sharped by the dictates of pure reason. He also mentions a disastrous war with Prussia, which was largely undertaken because the French people had it in their minds that their own army was invincible and the enemy's was incompetent.
Sentimentality
It's already been well established that crowds are utterly impervious to lack of logic and reason, but yet are quick to be swept away by emotion. No-one impresses a crowd or stirs it to action by a dispassionate but well-crafted argument, but with stirring speeches drenched in emotion and utterly devoid of logic.
He cites a personal experience, in which a Marshal identified only as "GP" faced off against a crowd who was demanding the immediate execution of a prisoner. To the crowd, he showed an angry disposition and proclaimed "Justice shall be done, and pitiless justice. Let the government of the National Defense conclude your inquiry. Until then, we will keep the prisoner in custody." The crowd, satisfied, dispersed - when in reality he had promised them nothing more than what was originally intended, i.e., that the prisoner would be held in custody until tried in the court.
Because a crowd is incapable of analyzing a statement to derive its meaning, the words a speaker uses are largely moot if they are spoken in a manner that feeds their emotions. One can even see parliaments, composed of attorneys and other learned men, so rapt in emotion as to cheer and applaud essentially meaningless statements that are delivered with conviction.
It is entirely regrettable that men in the aggregate are so poorly guided by reason and so quick to follow their emotions. The ideas that have caused society to progress struggle for decades or centuries to catch on, and those that cause it to revert to primitive barbarism and destruction can spread in moments.
But ultimately, this regret is bootless. We must accept men as they are, however we might wish them to be, and seek to understand rather than alter their nature.