I don’t expect measured analysis from Suella Braverman, but still, this time last year I was stunned to hear this she described the Palestinian solidarity demos as “hate marches”. Earlier that week I walked across Waterloo Bridge with my friends – some Jewish like me, some not – in a crowd of 500,000 others, looking west along the Thames towards parliament, while a British Muslim girl from about eight years old led hymns. a chant: “Gaza, Gaza, don’t cry / We’ll never let you die.”
In many years of attending and reporting on demonstrations, rallies, general strikes and riots, I have rarely experienced more orderly, peaceful, family-oriented mass gatherings than these protests.
And yet Braverman was not alone in her condemnation. As prime minister, Rishi Sunak warned that “population replaces democratic rule”, while Keir Starmer’s office sternly instructed his MPs and council leaders not to “under any circumstances” join the mobs calling for a ceasefire. In March this year, the “extremism advisor” John Woodcock, made the extraordinary suggestion that MPs and councilors should be prohibited from engaging with the protest organizers. Here, contrary to my experience, and that of hundreds of thousands of other peaceful protesters, was a crowd—sorry, a “mob”—that the establishment had toxically designated to be a part of.
I shouldn’t have been surprised because our politics, media and pop culture have always been filled with these myths – with people in power belittling mindless crowds, angering crowds, stomping unthinking masses, hordes and herd mentalities. All our lives we have been told that joining crowds robs us of our agency, our capacity for rational thought, and our sense of self and propriety. Violence and moral unrest spread like a contagion, overwhelming every member of the crowd. In short, we become dear.
Like the “evil mob” that appears in so many Simpsons episodes, pitchforks and flaming torches appear in our hands as if by magic – and, hypnotized and stripped of our individual humanity – we ask no questions, seek blood, and walk in lock step . with the zombie horde. “By the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd,” wrote the godfather of crowd theory, Gustave Le Bon, in 1895, “a man descends several steps in the ladder of civilization. Isolated he may be a cultured individual; in a crowd he is a barbarian.”
Le Bon’s seminal workThe Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, is one of the best-selling non-fiction books of all time; within a year of publication in France it was translated into 19 other languages. He gained fans among presidents and dictators, chiefs of police; even Sigmund Freud was an admirer. In 2024, he is still regularly quoted by columnists and politicians to condemn the mania of the mob. But there are two problems with this pervasive received wisdom about crowd psychology and behavior.
The first problem – and it’s quite a big one – is that the work is verifiable, scientific, nonsense. Le Bon was an eccentric, war-traumatized eugenicist and proto-fascist, horrified by the growing demands of the French masses for democracy and socialism, and The Crowd is fueled by fear and loathing, not research. It is no coincidence that it was adopted enthusiastically by Goebbels, by Hitler (the academic Alfred Stein claims Hitler plagiarized parts of Le Bon’s The Crowd in Mein Kampf), and by Mussolini, who liked his work so much that he and Le Bon became pen pals. There is a direct line from traditional crowd theory to the incandescent horror of the Nuremberg rallies.
The second problem with the myths of mob mentality, homogenous “herd logic” and contagious mob violence is that they are incredibly persistent – despite being false – because vilifying the mob will always serve elite power and undermine democracy. Not for nothing was the suffragette Christabel Pankhurst dubbed “the queen of the mob” by her opponents. Imagining any self-constituent group of people as both homogeneous and dangerous is as old as hierarchical power itself. After all, what is a mob? There is nothing categorically distinctive or analytically precise about it: a mob is simply a crowd you don’t like.
Fortunately, a new generation of crowd psychologists is developing fresh ideas. Detailed case studies conducted by academics such as Stephen Reicher and Clifford Stott have proven what many of us know instinctively: that joining a crowd of like-minded souls brings us relatedness, confidence, and joy—and that each crowd is a multitude of behavioral and psychological reactions. In his seminal study of the “riot” in St Paul’s, Bristol, in 1980, Reicher uncovered what can be an unsavory truth: that joy, warmth and solidarity are often experienced even while cars are being set on fire. Far from obliterating our sense of self, coming together with fellow soccer fans, music fans, or people with the same political or religious affiliations is very affirming. How else do you explain, say, moshpits? To most gig-goers they seem like deranged masochism and a shortcut to a broken ankle; for participants, they are exhilarating, life-affirming moments of collective joy – which only brings joy because of the grinning strangers who move alongside you.
Of course, this does not mean that all crowd forces are for good. While my reporting has taken me to inspiring political protests, hedonistic global carnivals and other festivals in the name of journalism, I have also borne witness to sinister crowds, such as the fascist paramilitaries of the Magyar Gárda in Budapest and a proto-Trump Tea Party rally in White Plains, New York; I’ve even been to watch Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. When I watched the racist riots in August this year with horror, I was not surprised that many anti-racists chose the classic Le Bonian interpretation: here is the deranged, mindless violence of the mob. But it does nothing to further the cause of anti-racism to apply the same baseless analysis to crowds we don’t like. When you call a violent fascist “brainless,” you not only skip a much-needed reckoning with their hateful ideology, you also let them off the hook for their conscious decisions and actions.
Were the rioters who tried to burn people alive in a Rotherham hotel simply passers-by, who suddenly “lost their heads”, succumbed to “herd mentality” and were “swept away by the crowd”? Or were they a group of highly organized and experienced fascists with a clear plan to intimidate or even kill Muslims, refugees and other migrants? Politicians prefer to dismiss riots as mob madness because a deeper investigation into their causes can provide unwanted answers – for example, it can connect a group of violent racists chanting “stop the boats” with a political class that chants exactly the same words in an election campaign only a few weeks earlier.
When those in power talk about a crowd, it is always a calculated attempt to minimize the manifold varieties of intent, behavior and personality of its members. Le Bon’s fantastic crowd theories have persisted as the default position for 130 years because they serve a purpose as old as the crowd itself. That goal is very simple: to support the powerful and delegitimize the public. If we want to refresh our democracy, our culture and our civil society, the best place to start would be by showing some overdue respect to the complex powers of the crowd.
