Climate change and crowd behaviour

Not all great leaders have the unique gifts of say, the German Fuhrer. Quoting Le Bon:

The men of ardent convictions who have stirred to souls of crowds have been the Peter the Hermits, the Luthers, the Savonarolas, the men of the French Revolution, [we can add all of the above, including Ghandi and others], have only exercised their fascination after having themselves been fascinated first of all by a creed. They are able to call up in the souls of their fellows that formidable force known as faith, which renders a man the absolute slave of his dream. To endow a man with faith is to multiply his strength by ten.

It is not by the aid of the learned or of philosophers and still less sceptics, that have been built up the great religions which have swayed the world, or the vast empires which have spread from one hemisphere to the other.

In the cases just cited, we are dealing with great leaders, and they are so few in number that history can easily reckon them up. The book though mainly deals with the crowd.

The facts of history demonstrate that social organisms being every whit as complicated as those of all beings, it is in no wise in our power to force them to undergo a sudden far reaching transformation. Nature has recourse at times to radical measures, but never after our fashion, which explains how it is that nothing is more fatal to a people than a mania for great reforms, however excellent these reforms may appear theoretically. They would only be useful were it possible to change instantaneously the genius of nations.

This power however, is only possessed by time. Men are ruled by ideas, sentiments and customs - matters which are the essence of ourselves. Institutions and laws are the outward manifestation of our character, the expression of its needs. Being its outcome, institutions and laws cannot change this character.

Neither Ludwig von Mises nor FA Hayek mention Le Bon in any of their writings, yet I’m sure they would be familiar with this great European masterpiece. On page 864 of his Human Action Mises says:

The masses, the hosts of common men, do not conceive any ideas, sound or unsound. They only choose between the ideologies developed by the intellectual leaders of mankind. But their choice is final and determines the course of events. If they prefer bad doctrines nothing can prevent disaster ... The [Classical] Liberals gave the world Capitalism, a higher standard of living for a steadily increasing number of people. But the pioneers and supporters of capitalism overlooked one essential point; a social system, however beneficial, cannot work if it is not supported by public opinion ...

Is our civilisation degenerating? There are grounds to fear that this is the case, but we are not as yet in a position to be certain of it.

Summing up, discover the nature of different types of crowds, their complete lack of reason, their brutality and so on in Le Bon’s unique 232-page book: it is a great intellectual investment.

Every person who deals with society should read and understand this book. If I taught economics, I would be making my economics classes aware of it and its great value in understanding Human Action.

Civilisations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilisation involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future - all of them conditions that crowds left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realising. In consequence of the purely destructive nature of their power, crowds act like those microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies. When the structure of civilisation is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall. It is at such a juncture that their chief mission is plainly visible, and that for a while the philosophy of number seems the only philosophy of history. From Human Action by Ludwig von Mises. Page 38.

HL Mencken wrote, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamourous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. Crowds, properly worked up by skilful demagogues, are ready to believe anything, and to do anything.”

The present scare phenomenon of global warming/climate change/carbon dioxide is a perfect example of mass hysteria over an imaginary problem. In this case it is a political hysteria developed by unscrupulous power mad and money mad people.