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One of the crowd

A crowd in demonstration
Thieme, Wolfgang/Bundesarchiv
/
Wikipedia
A crowd in demonstration

Years ago, I had a small bookstore in London in an area where many refugees from the war had settled. It was full of writers, artists and intellectuals of one kind or another, so my customers tended to be interesting. One of them was a quiet gentleman, Dr. Canetti, who I assumed was Italian but was in fact Bulgarian, who ordered all his books from me. They were dauntingly intellectual, mostly in German, but I usually found them in the end, with the aid of a German book importer and a dictionary.

I should have known, but didn’t, that my polite customer was a famous man in the intellectual world, a formidable thinker and author of distinguished books, plays and poems, one of whose books actually earned him a Nobel Laureate. The title in English was Crowds and Power.

A few years later, I witnessed, as everyone did, a period of radical politics that included a lot of very visible and sometimes violent crowd behavior in cities all over the world. Unfortunately, I could be no more than a spectator at these riots because I have a strong dislike of crowds. Psychologists call it demophobia (demos meaning people and phobia meaning phobia). You won’t find me jammed into the stands at a football match or squeezed into the mass of fans at a Taylor Swift concert. We are a sociable species and celebrate the fact in sports stadiums, pop concerts, mega-churches, conventions, giant cruise ships, vast cities and political rallies. But not everyone loves a crowd. I don’t, and prefer to learn about crowd behavior in books.

Dr. Canetti’s book Crowds and Power was a study of the political importance of crowds: how they gather, what they do, and how they influence events. He had direct experience of the rallies in Frankfurt in the 1920s during Hitler's rise to power, and he concluded, not surprisingly, that one attraction of crowds is simply togetherness - it is reassuring to be in a mass of so many people. In the mass we achieve a kind of rough equality, and we also gain a sense of impunity, not responsible for whatever the crowd does.

Crowds are also great magnifiers of emotions, good and bad. Whatever your feelings, pleasure at a music concert, or rage at a political rally, being in a crowd will make those feelings much stronger – more enjoyable on the one hand, more dangerous on the other.

Dr. Canetti thought that crowd behavior was the key to politics, and indeed, crowds have been a tool of politicians ever since ancient Rome. Crowds and Power was published 50 years ago, and if the author could see us now, he might conclude that nothing much has changed.

But something has changed. The balance between reality and illusion has shifted. Television has made the physical crowd almost unnecessary because it is so easy to fake. A small protest of, say, thirty or forty people can be narrowly photographed so that the screen will not show how small it is. It can easily look like an angry mass, and only when and if the camera pulls back do we get a proper perspective.

So maybe the big angry crowds are nothing to worry about. They don’t really exist. Like so much else in 2024 they are just an optical illusion.

David began as a print journalist in London and taught at a British university for almost 20 years. He joined WSHU as a weekly commentator in 1992, becoming host of Sunday Matinee in 1996.