Disclaimer: This post was originally written in Chinese and translated into English by GPT-5.2.
Note: This was an on-site timed assigned essay.
Le Bon’s The Crowd is an important work recognized worldwide; later researchers of social public psychology have, without exception, had to study it. The book was completed in the nineteenth century, constrained by the limitations of history; like other classic works, it too inevitably possesses many defects and regrets. Such defects and regrets are reflected in the material. Le Bon says: “We think we are rational; we think that our every move has its reasons. But in fact, the vast majority of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives that we ourselves are fundamentally unable to understand.” This sentence suffers from a lack of logical rigor and cannot withstand scrutiny. Hegel believed that “what is real is rational,” that is to say, the existence of all things has its reason; in the world there is no existence without reason. On the one hand, Le Bon points out “the result of hidden motives”; on the other hand, he implies that our every move is not, as we think, “all with its reasons.” The contradiction in his own words is self-evident.
Researchers criticize The Crowd for vague wording and unclear logic; this can already be seen above. Although Le Bon has stated in letters that the mind formed by a gathering of people is strange, unstable, irrational, extremely hard to grasp and not easy to analyze, still, as a rational researcher, he has the obligation to write a paper and submit an answer sheet in accurate, crisp language and prose. This is precisely the basic stance of this article’s writing.
Of course, the basic meaning expressed in Le Bon’s words, I support with both hands. He points out: 1) the psychology of the crowd is non-conscious. 2) The formation mechanism of this psychology has its origins, yet is hidden and difficult to understand. For this, we can borrow the theories of Freud and his student Jung for elucidation. In Freud’s view, our consciousness is like an iceberg: the one-eighth that is exposed we can perceive, the conscious; while the seven-eighths hidden underwater we cannot perceive, the unconscious. It is precisely the unconscious that controls the vast majority of our daily activities. As for the formation of the unconscious, Jung believed it to be a product of time and reality, not unique to one person but a collective commonality; he named it the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious, plainly speaking, is instinctive consciousness—the instinct of humans in the domain of consciousness. Since writing about the formation of the crowd directly originates from a latent crowding psychology, and this crowding psychology belongs to the collective unconscious, then the key to the problem lies in the emergence of the crowd phenomenon.
Engels surveyed the works of sociologists such as Morgan and profoundly pointed out: the reason humans live in groups is for physiological safety and psychological loneliness. In the remote ancient times when productive forces were extremely backward, humans were but a drop in the ocean; in the face of powerful natural forces, their strength was weak. Thus, for survival, choosing to live in groups was as natural as water flowing downward, an inevitable trend. After group living came into being, codes of conduct and organizational structures arose accordingly. Under such conditions, the power of the group grew ever stronger—strong enough to contend with the mighty forces of nature. From this gradual development, society and the state came into being. Human life, too, arose in this process. The problem of survival forced humans to gather and live together, making it inevitable that people would harbor a psychology of dependence upon one another. Yet when survival ceased to be a problem, problems of living instead stood out. While life lets people taste the sweetness of living in groups, it also etches the sense of loneliness deep into the heart; the dependence generated from this is even greater than that generated by the problem of survival.
Though the crowd is large, we might as well narrow our gaze and, from the perspective of the individual, explore this profound sense of dependence. Though the gaze is small, it suffices to illustrate the large. American writer Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes tells the story of a boy suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who shoots and kills people at school. The boy is not good at communicating with others by nature and is bullied by other classmates, because in others’ eyes he does not fit in. A boy who does not fit in lives from childhood to adulthood under the soft moral knives of family, school, and society, unable to change the situation of not fitting in, to the point that he develops post-traumatic stress disorder and impulsively kills. This story prompted the following reflections of mine:
We originally thought that people who do not fit in are innately solitary and do not want to fit in—completely wrong. So-called people who do not fit in, whether unconsciously or subconsciously, in fact in their psychology all think about how to fit in. Unconscious not fitting in, like the boy above: the psychological disorder he suffers from is precisely the manifestation of his inability to fit in despite wanting to. Subconscious not fitting in has the aim of standing out from the crowd; how, then, can it be said that they do not want to fit in?
Lu Xun once spoke of a certain shameless mentality of the crowd: within a group, if the group obtains some kind of glory, then since I am one of them, naturally I also have face; however, conversely, if the group collectively loses face, then as one of them, it is not as if I have no face at all.
Therefore we can say accurately: the crowd arises from a psychology of dependence. This dependence is dependence on group living.