Crowds are scary
Hypnotism is a strange mystery. Last Saturday night I watched a hypnotist, Larry Meginnis perform a comedy show at the Coach and Lantern Pub where I work. It was both funny and disturbing. For example, he told the two people who he had put into a trance that he would disappear and they began looking right through him with puzzled expressions. It’s strange to see someone give up their control to another so completely that their senses function differently. Their imagination was their primary sense. When he told them they were on a roller coaster, there was no buffer – they screamed. Hypnosis is thus a good analogy of the crowd in its unconscious, unreasoning state as described by Le Bon. Being able to control a crowd is undoubtedly a position of immense power. Cults immediately spring to mind, and it's not surprising to see that indeed crowd control can be learned through an understanding of the principles. But exposing scientolgy is one thing. Taking this line of reasoning one step further, comparing Bush to Hitler in their use of hypnotic tactics is extremely chilling. The unconscious power of the crowd is frightening because we take comfort in science and our ability to reason. Its as if humanity has only recently climbed out of the dark abyss of the unconscious onto the dry land of reason – and crowds plunge right back in. Results are unpredictable and frightening. We need to understand the behavior of crowds to not only understand history, but to perhaps be forewarned against hypnotic dictators in the future.
References:
Adler, Ronald and Rodman, George
2006: Understanding Human Communication
LeBon, Gustav
The Ideas, Reasoning Power and Imagination of Crowds.
Sevigny, Alexandre
2005: Introduction to Communication
Sevigny, Alexandre
CMST 1A03 Fall 2006 Lectures
