Let us examine by what methods electoral crowds are to be persuaded. It will be easy to deduce their psychology from the methods that are most successful.
It is of primary importance that the candidate should possess prestige. Personal prestige can only be replaced by that resulting from wealth. Talent and even genius are not elements of success of serious importance. Of capital importance, on the other hand, is the necessity for the candidate of possessing prestige, of being able, that is, to force himself upon the electorate without discussion. The reason why the electors, of whom a majority are workingmen or peasants, so rarely choose a man from their own ranks to represent them is that such a person enjoys no prestige among them. When, by chance, they do elect a man who is their equal, it is as a rule for subsidiary reasons—for instance, to spite an eminent man or an influential employer of labor on whom the elector is in daily dependence, and whose master he has the illusion he becomes in this way for a moment.
The possession of prestige does not suffice, however, to assure the success of a candidate. The elector stickles in particular for the flattery of his greed and vanity. He must be overwhelmed with the most extravagant blandishments, and there must be no hesitation in making him the most fantastic promises. If he is a workingman, it is impossible to go too far in insulting and stigmatizing employers of labor. As for the rival candidate, an effort must be made to destroy his chance by establishing by dint of affirmation, repetition, and contagion that he is an arrant scoundrel, and that it is a matter of common knowledge that he has been guilty of several crimes. It is, of course, useless to trouble about any semblance of proof. Should the adversary be ill-acquainted with the psychology of crowds, he will try to justify himself by arguments instead of confining himself to replying to one set of affirmations by another; and he will have no chance whatever of being successful.
An orator who knows how to make use of the means of persuasion can do what he will with a crowd. Expressions such as “infamous capital,” “vile exploiters,” “the admirable workingman,” “the socialization of wealth,” etc., always produce the same effect, although already somewhat worn by use. But the candidate who hits on a new formula as devoid as possible of precise meaning, and apt in consequence to flatter the most varied aspirations, infallibly obtains success.
From The Crowd. Born in 1841, Le Bon studied medicine in Paris and wrote about travel and archaeology before developing his theory of crowd psychology, for which he would become best known. “One sometimes asks how the Romans of the time of the emperors so easily supported the wild ferocity of certain despots,” he wrote in The Psychology of Peoples. “The reason is that they, too, had traversed social struggles, civil wars, and proscriptions, and the experience had cost them their character...They put up with everything from them, because they did not know how to replace them.”
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