STREET DOGS

From Gustave Le Bon’s book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895):

The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into the crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind that makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think and act were he in a state of isolation.

There are certain ideas and feelings that do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts, except in the case of individuals forming a crowd.

From the intellectual point of view, an abyss may exist between a mathematician and his bootmaker, but from the point of view of character, the difference is most often slight or non-existent. This fact that crowds possess in common ordinary qualities explains why they can never accomplish acts demanding a high degree of intelligence. The truth is they can only bring to bear in common on the work in hand those mediocre qualities which are the birthright of every average individual.

In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated. The conscious personality has entirely vanished; will and discernment are lost. All feelings and thoughts are bent in the direction determined by the crowd itself.

This disappearance of conscious personality and turning of feelings and thoughts in a different direction do not always involve the simultaneous presence of a number of individuals in one spot.

Thousands of isolated individuals may acquire at certain moments the characteristics of a psychological crowd, which might not happen in the case of hundreds of men gathered by accident.