The Crowd Whisperer: The Psychologist Who Gave Hitler His Playbook
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What insights did Gustave Le Bon provide about crowd behavior?
I'm going to show you how great I am. I just want to say from the bottom of my heart, I'd like to take this chance to apologize to absolutely nobody.
Hello, and welcome to How to Take Over the World. This is Ben Wilson. Today's episode requires a little bit of explanation, I think. I'm working on a series about Adolf Hitler. Perhaps you've heard of him, Austrian fellow. I'm sorry it's been taking a long time. I just want to do a lot of research, cover all the angles. And one of the interesting things about Hitler is that he was so limited in so many ways. He wasn't necessarily a great strategist. He was quite lazy. He was smart, but he wasn't brilliant. And one biography points out that he was so limited in so many ways and that the one thing that he was truly exceptional at, indisputably, was his ability to speak to a crowd. He was an unbelievable public speaker.
That's how he came to power. The biography says that he, quote, literally spoke his way into power. So, of course, I wanted to see how he learned to do that. And one source that I saw mentioned multiple times is this guy, Gustav Le Bon, who did pioneering research on the behavior of crowds. And apparently Hitler studied his work. So I went through and read Le Bon's work on crowds, and I found it really, really interesting as a manual on how to really engage, persuade and motivate people in a crowd. For example, like a big speech to an auditorium or at a protest or political rally or anything like that. 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. 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
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