Gustave Le Bon

Gustave Le Bon is a French sociologist who was interested in crowd theories and their unconscious mind. Despite publishing various works detailing his observations and analysis, he was not popular among the scholarly world due to his nature of writings. With the intention to confirm Le Bon’s theories, this paper will explore the parallels and differences between my personal experience and the theories laid out by Gustave Le Bon. An example of a crowd I experience most commonly is in religious settings; while the most “moving” part of being in a crowd occurs during the recitation of Buddhism sutras. As a bit of background knowledge, the idea of recitation is to gather “merits,” whether for oneself, others, or the spirits; and these merits are

Crowds are inferior, as in the collective of each individual act in the form of pre-evolutioned humans who relies on instincts, tend to be impulsive and irritable, as well as lacking the ability to reason. Le Bon relates this to the freedom of “In crowds the foolish, ignorant, and envious persons are freed from the sense of their insignificance and powerlessness.” Crowds are unconscious because they seem to be in a hypnotized state, with or without a hypnotizer, such that the individuals are made to see what is, in fact, not there. One example Le Bon brought up is the news about the death of a little girl who was wrongly identified by a group of family members and friends due to the initial exclaims made by the supposed mother. Le Bon believes that crowds cannot reason nor can they perceive future consequences of their current actions. However, Le Bon was not able to present a concrete example of such, instead he drew this characteristic of a crowd with that of political decision in tax. He stated that crowds would prefer direct tax, instead of the proportional tax, because they were not able to calculate the lump sum cost after the proportional tax, despite that proportional tax actually cost people less than direct tax. Le Bon portrays his observations of the crowds very elaborately, provides logical reasonings behind his observations, and effectively imprints

I agree with Le Bon, as an individual outside the crowd, I would not necessary believe in or think about the “merit system,” not-to-mention actually reciting the sutras on my own, which is what a faithful follower is supposed to complete; yet, every time I am reciting the sutras with the crowd, I would feel this sense of power within me, such that I am helping the receiver of my sutra transcending. Furthermore, Le Bon describes the crowd as primitives who act impulsively, irrationally, and incapable of foresight. I perceive religion, as an atheist, as a very primitive thoughts, such that people were blindly following a supreme being by attributing any unknown encounters to the god. However, in the case of sutra recitation, not much of actions are happening due to the nature of Buddhism teachings, each individuals are very orderly and uniform; also, the fact that reciters are taking actions toward their after life is, perhaps, as foresight as most people can possibly think about. The nature of religion