Ben Wilson

Right.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler says, quote, every great movement in this world owes its growth to great speakers, not to great writers.

Okay, great speakers.

He really emphasized that, that a great movement can only come from the mystical connection that materializes when a great speaker engages with the masses.

And even though Hitler was obviously wrong about a lot of things, I think he is right about this.

You should probably doubt Hitler's judgment on just about everything.

However,

His ability to build a mass movement is not one of them.

He is one of the foremost experts of all time on that.

And Hitler did speak to crowds better than perhaps anyone in modern times.

So we'll be discussing exactly how he did that in those Hitler episodes.

And in this episode, we will look at what Gustav Le Bon had to say about crowds and what Hitler might have learned from his work.

Now, before I get started, I do have to clear Le Bon's name a little bit.

I want people to listen to this, so I'm going to give it some clickbaity title, right?

Like, I don't know what I'm going to name it, but like Hitler's Secret Mentor or something like that.

And Hitler apparently did learn a lot about how to engage a crowd from Gustav Le Bon, from his work.

The irony is, Gustav Le Bon wrote his work on the crowd as a warning against demagogues and extreme political movements.

He was already old and out of the spotlight by the time Nazism rose, so we don't have any direct comments on how he felt about Nazism, but he was almost certainly opposed to it.

He was an old aristocratic reactionary with a very kind of pessimistic and scientific worldview.

sort of a conservative in the most basic sense of the word of like not wanting things to change.