Up next for #bookstr is Gustave Le Bon’s “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind”.
An excellent book from which I took a great deal. Le Bon’s writing from 130 years ago was incredibly prescient, foreseeing how socialism and populism would be wielded to ultimately erode Western societies.
I want to relay some specific points that made this such a worthwhile read.
First, Le Bon discusses how concepts in language can be wielded to focus a crowd toward particular ends. He identifies words like “democracy,” “liberty,” and “freedom” which, being somewhat nebulous, allow crowds to project their own meanings onto movements. He also notes how these words mean completely different things in different epochs, and how easy it is to project our present understanding onto the past when reading, thus arriving at flawed interpretations.
His discussion of “race” should be understood in this context, and I found it incredibly compelling - acknowledging the cultural inheritance from our ancestors and how that shapes each people as much as any other factor. This is the kind of pragmatism we rarely find in modern discourse; it’s partly how and why we ignore the entire narrative of the West being “the good guys” in the post-WWII consensus.
Le Bon categorises crowd beliefs into two overarching types: great permanent beliefs (e.g., feudalism, Christianity, and Protestantism) and transitory opinions, which are generally born and die within a lifetime.
I found this particularly interesting as he identifies not only the difficulty of implanting the former but also what it takes for them to be uprooted.
Finally, his discussion of “Prestige,” to which he dedicates Chapter III, was the highlight for me. Incredibly perceptive and set my mind racing down numerous rabbit holes including what “prestige” could and should mean amongst #Bitcoiners
I’m glad I finally got around to this one. It’s not a long book, and while it covers many metaphysical ideas, it does so in a succinct and compelling way.
