The Crowd
In 1895, Gustave Le Bon described how movements, even those with good intentions, are ultimately captured and used by members with their own agenda.
Massive, national movements are rarely pure. There are always some hangers-on that are pulled along with the current. Way back in 1895, Gustave Le Bon noted how certain people and groups that could not achieve notice on their own would alloy themselves with popular movements like a parasite and how the leaders of the crowd sometimes had other motives than the crowd but was able to use the momentum of the movement to propel their personal agenda forward - and then take control of the crowd (or movement).
Today’s political movements are no different.
Being familiar with Le Bon’s 1895 tome “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind”, I have been watching with interest how movements like BLM, feminism, and the Enviro drones have been taken over by Hamas and their antisemitic communist fellow travelers.
Le Bon noted:
As soon as a certain number of living beings are gathered together, whether they be animals or men, they place themselves instinctively under the authority of a chief.
In the case of human crowds the chief is often nothing more than a ringleader or agitator, but as such he plays a considerable part. His will is the nucleus around which the opinions of the crowd are grouped and attain to identity. He constitutes the first element towards the organisation of heterogeneous crowds, and paves the way for their organisation in sects; in the meantime he directs them. A crowd is a servile flock that is incapable of ever doing without a master.
The leader has most often started as one of the led. He has himself been hypnotized by the idea, whose apostle he has since become. It has taken possession of him to such a degree that everything outside it vanishes, and that every contrary opinion appears to him an error or a superstition. An example in point is Robespierre, hypnotized by the philosophical ideas of Rousseau, and employing the methods of the Inquisition to propagate them.
It’s been a while since America has seen the current level of harsh rhetoric and political violence - maybe not since the violent protests and the radicalism of the 1960’s.
Many people think of this period as the age of the Civil Rights struggle, and it was – but there was another component active as well. It was also a period during which the desires of anarchists and communists (just anti-capitalists, really) who chose to piggyback on the Civil Rights movement, were expressed – and often violently so. Groups like the Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the Youth International Party and even the ludicrous Symbionese Liberation Army (that kidnapped Patty Hearst).
The same Frankenstein’s monster of radicalism has been reanimated and walks with the undead in the new millennium. These contemporary forces are using spurious accusations of fascism, oppression, discrimination, etc. to further their aims in manners reminiscent of the protests of the “Free Love” era. As was true in the 1960’s, domestic terrorism against Pigs (the police), the Man (the established cultural mores), capitalist dogs (corporations and Wall Street) and political enemies (conservatives and Republicans) is all the rage.
Most of this agitation, radicalism and violence had ties to academia, specifically certain colleges and universities, and even today, former radicals (if there is such a thing) like Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn and Kathy Boudin are still members of that team (all are professors or retired professors). All three of whom were involved in bombings or robberies, Boudin as recently as 1981.
So it should come as no big surprise that the philosophical children of these figures are the professors of today, inciting an even more violent form of the radicalism based on even more absurd and patently false reasons.
In the 1960’s, the Republican and Democrats were allied against this radicalism as both parties of the era had seen the destructive power of both the authoritarian, socialist Nazi regime of Adolph Hitler and the rise of a dictatorial communist Russia and its pursuit of global territorial ambitions. The shine had come off communism after Walter Duranty’s sycophantic, false reporting was revealed (the revelation of the Holodomor, the Stalin directed famine in Ukraine) and that revelation subsequently earned him the nickname of “Stalin’s Apologist.”
The point of this diatribe is that we have seen this all before - with one very big and very important difference - these 60’s radicals have been inculcating kids for decades and have set the agenda for the Democrat Party.
This time, the contemporary radicals are the wholly owned subsidiary of a political party, a party hoping to use radicalism to propel them into permanent power.
This radical political party is the modern Democrat Party.
I saw it all firsthand: San Francisco State, class of ‘68, and that particular shitshow was as nothing to the one we’re in now.
The times. The perceptions.
Time: late 60s, Johnson is president and I am melding into the SDS, a sicko-phant.
That is, until the curtain was drawn aside and our funders revealed... the Young Communist A.holes USA.
I bolted for the door in disillusioned shock.
Early 70s, I heard Dr John Hospers describe a philosophy that I still hold dear ar 73.