}
The advantage of volunatryism is that is not a "group think". Its concept was approached by Etienne de LaBoetie who lived in the mid-1500s. Being a judge and an aristocrat, he never ceased to question what could drive humans to remain subservient to the elites. He wrote many essays that are considered today as an early influence of the anarchist thought.
However, we as voluntaryists, will definitely come together since the planet that feeds us is on the brink and take action without relying on any form of bureaucracy at all. But right now our main worry is to get rid of the Dystopia invading reality while remaining confident that the Universe is working with or/and for us.
The topic we're going to talk about today is pretty scary, especially when seeing that a vast majority still approves lockdowns and face masks, and calling the dissenters "psychopaths".
Gustave Le Bon, the author of The Crowd, had noticed that the crowds were mesmerized by their leaders and thus extremely manipulable in the end. And of course, the media's role is to help implement rulers' objectives and propaganda. And this means that there is a continuous analytical transfer between the leaders and the crowds.
Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931) was for sure a pioneer of his time and even may have influenced the work of Freud born 14 years later, in 1856. Both, Freud and Le Bon, must have represented an incredible opportunity for Edward Bernays (1891-1995) to stand out.
Le Bon, Freud... Bernays. Psychoanalysis used for scientific mass manipulation was born. Though we do believe that this knowledge has always belonged to the political classes. Le Bon may have been the first one to really write a theory about this "hypnotic/trance state" between the leadership and the crowd.
Le Bon asserts that the crowds accept ideas superficially but nonetheless use them as revolutionary actions. Such as kids trying to challenge their parents, they throw tantrums but then settle again for the same divide and conquer.
Although Le Bon could not imagine a free society, he contended that the tyranny exercised unconsciously on men's mind is the only real tyranny, because it cannot be fought against.
The crowd endorses any mainstream consensuses without much questioning at all but individuals are capable of sacrificing their own interests for that of the crowd and thus becoming irrational. This irrationality is inherently contagious. We agree with Le Bon here.
Interestingly, Le Bon recognized that an individual taken separately is always more creative and willing to understand challenging ideas. Though these challenging ideas have to be extremely simplified to be accepted by the crowd.
We definitely have a huge dilemma here because you see, corruption aside, this is what prevents politics from being transparent. It is simply impossible to reveal the whole picture when the complexity of any situation has been hidden from the start.
The political discourse needs to come within the intellectual range of the crowd and exert an influence on them, states Le Bon. Anybody understanding this would agree that politics will never lead us anywhere but further down into Dystopia!
Le Bon believed that when an individual lives as an individual, he's apt to feel a crushing burden and a sense of impotence. We've not read Le Bon's book, to be honest, but from what we know so far he didn't seem too concerned by the deliberate dumbing down of the masses. Now that we are on our way toward an unprecedented crisis, what would happen if a majority woke up from centuries of denial?
If there is any form of awakening in the cards, this is really going to be MASSIVE!
In the book, Le Bon claims that there are several characteristics of crowd psychology: "impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and others..."[1] Le Bon claimed that "an individual immersed for some length of time in a crowd soon finds himself – either in consequence of magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from some other cause of which we are ignorant – in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer."[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crowd:_A_Study_of_the_Popular_Mind
Crowd | Gustave Le Bon | *Non-fiction | Talking Book | English | 1/4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21uQ1dujSrY
ALL LIBRARY: https://archive.org/details/LeBonGustaveTheEvolutionOfMatter
