Ben Wilson

Didn't like extreme movements from the left or from the right.

Uh, so I just can't emphasize the extent to which his book, the crowd, uh, is actually a warning against people like Hitler.

It is the ultimate irony that in writing about the dangers of crowds and, and demagogues who can take advantage of them, uh,

he sort of accidentally wrote the playbook on how to do that.

It's a little bit like COVID, actually.

Most people now agree that it leaked from a lab in Wuhan.

And why did this lab exist?

It existed

to study potential coronaviruses and and how they could mutate and become even worse and affect humanity and so they were trying to prepare for something exactly like covet and in so doing they created coven and laban basically does this exact same thing you know he says you really need to look out for these demagogues because conditions are changing in this new modern world and they could gain unprecedented power and they could gain this power but

by doing X and Y and Z. And then people like Lenin and Hitler and Mussolini go,

That sounds really interesting.

Oh, that's how you would do it if you were trying to come to power that way.

So I'm just clearing Gustav Le Bon's name.

Not a Nazi, not an extremist, not a revolutionary, though his work did end up inspiring revolutionaries across the political spectrum from the far right all the way to communist movements in the far left.

He would have disliked all of these movements, but that is just how life goes.

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