Page 181 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Gustave le Bon: The Crowd - A Study of the Popular Mind 1895.
This was the first detailed study of the psychology of crowds. It embodied an analysis - that the crowd only understands ideas stripped of their complexity and rendered in simple repetitive formats - that has been utilised effectively by the dictators and populist leaders of the 20th and 21st centuries - most recently and opportunely by Donald Trump, so still of direct relevance in our times. The polymathic Le Bon was drawing upon his personal experiences in the Franco-Prussian war and its consequences in the Paris Commune of 1871: “by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian — that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images — which would be entirely without action on each of the isolated individuals composing the crowd — and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.”
Le Bon's work forms an essential first step in the understanding of modern political, religious, fundamentalist and populist propaganda, and is probably even more relevant in this age of Tweets and simplistic short txt messages and instagrams than it was in the 1930s, when Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini adopted Le Bon's message. These lessons - the central lessons of le Bon's book, in essence were very simple: keep your message short; and repeat it as often as possible - in every medium that you can. Trump's 'America First!' is a recent example, and Theresa May’s meaningless 'Brexit Means Brexit', Obama's 'Yes We Can' another. If you can get this message iterated and remediated across country - or the world - by viral messaging, mass-media advertising, podcasts, viral videos, with sound-bites, or social media propagation, or simply by saying it as often as possible on public media platforms - real or engineered - and you've actually got something to sell - then you stand a fair chance of succeeding.