Le Bonian Crowd Psychology and Its Military Applications

Mar 22, 2023

The history of modern imperial theory and practice of crowd psychology begins with French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931). Le Bon authored four works on social psychology, the most influential of which were The Psychology of Peoples (1894) and The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895). The latter work contains theories, principles, and applications that were quickly absorbed into imperial military thought and practice, including, most notably, Le Bon’s postulate of the law of the mental unity of crowds.

Importantly, Le Bon identifies the unconscious as the locus of this law:

Crowds, doubtless, are always unconscious, but this very unconsciousness is perhaps one of the secrets of their strength…. Reason is attributed of humanity of too recent date and still too imperfect to reveal to us the laws of the unconscious, and still more to take its place. The part played by the unconscious in all our acts is immense, and that played by reason very small. The unconscious acts like a force still unknown.

The French pioneer of social psychology had a premonition that the world was undergoing an epochal transition into what he described as an Era of Crowds. The Era of Crowds was displacing what Le Bon deemed a more noble era during which “the councils of princes” and “divine right of kings” had guided humanity toward a higher stage of civilization. Le Bon was therefore interested in analyzing crowd behavior as a measure toward preventing civilization’s “final dissolution” by “unconscious and brutal crowds,” whose rule is “always tantamount to a barbarian phase.” He contended that to counteract barbaric crowd formations, interventions could and should be developed targeting the social unconscious.

*Crowd* by DaintyStain: https://www.deviantart.com/daintystain/art/AS-Level-Art-Crowd-440119398

In short, Le Bon was concerned with the question of how crowds can be manipulated:

A knowledge of the psychology of crowds is to-day the last resource of the statesman who wishes not to govern them – that is becoming a very difficult mater – but at any rate not to be too much governed by them.
It is only by obtaining some sort of insight into the psychology of crowds that it can be understood how slight is the action upon them of laws and institutions, how powerless they are to hold any opinions other than those which are imposed upon them, and that it is not with rules based on theories of pure equity that they are to be led, but by seeking what produces an impression on them and what seduces them.1

Herein are reflected two manipulable traits of the social unconscious in Le Bon’s influential theory: mass hypnotism and suggestibility. Other traits include impulsivity, irritability, vacillation, irrationality, susceptibility to images and social contagions, dogmatism, intolerance and a tyrannical disposition. Le Bon and his intellectual heirs wondered how they might harness these unconscious forces to their advantage. Their interests included how to trigger crowd formations within civilian populations; how to implement policies and laws to exploit crowd traits; and how to socially engineer resilient fighting units or, conversely, a demoralized adversary.

In all cases, the primacy of the unconscious and the law of the mental unity of crowds were foundational. Le Bon offers a description of the law of the mental unity of crowds:

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 a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which 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 which do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a crowd. The psychological crowd is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly…. What really takes place is a combination followed by the creation of new characteristics, just as in chemistry certain elements, when brought into contact – bases and acids, for example – combine to form a new body possessing properties quite different from those of the bodies that have served to form it.2

Thus crowd engineering is for Le Bon a kind of population alchemy. As a provisionally unified being, the “collective mind” can be acted upon as a medium through which new “properties” may be created – thoughts, feelings, behaviors – according to the will of the alchemist who knows the proper mixtures of seductive impressions and suggestions to apply.

In addition to having been studied by Hitler, Mussolini, Georges Sorels, Sigmund Freud and Theodore Roosevelt, Le Bon’s ideas penetrated deeply into university and War College classrooms, think tanks, classified documents, pamphlets and training manuals of the French military and even more the American military-industrial-complex.3

In U.S. military thought and practice, Le Bonian crowd psychology was initially applied to two fundamental (and conceptually related) objectives: the cultivation of crowd cohesion within imperial battalions, such that panic would be averted and clear thinking retained, and conversely, the development of techniques for triggering panic in adversarial populations so as to render them maximally susceptible to manipulation.

Underlying this twofold objective was a racist-eugenicist ideology.

Questions of how to “mold and discipline” rank and file conscripts, who were depicted by military leaders in Le Bonian terms as “the crowd,” permeated military literature, and were raised in the starkest racializing terms. Categorizing races according to the instincts that “science” stipulated were inherent to each race – Latins were said to be effeminate, Anglo-Saxons confident and independent, Africans docile, for example – military success came to be regarded as primarily dependent not upon superior strategy and weaponry, but upon a superior knowledge of how to manipulate human instinct and collective behavior. Thus, from the decades leading to the outbreak of WWI through WWII, military leaders received and passed on training in “collective behavior and biologically based racial psychology.”

Joseph Bendersky highlights the central role of science and medicine in imperial ideology and military education in the United States:

And leading the way in this racial education were the authoritative men of science and medicine – military surgeons. Through the Association of Military Surgeons and its journal Military Surgeon, they spoke ex cathedra of the necessity of defending racial homogeneity against the degeneracy threatened by the lower races at home and abroad. To them, national security, even the future of civilization itself, were inextricably interrelated with the racial question…. So pervasive were such attitudes that in official reports many officers could for decades, with true conviction, proclaim that their positions reflected not bias, but established scientific fact.4

It was also during this period that the American Psychological Association (APA), the National Research Council (NRC), and the Military Intelligence Division (MID) formed a coalition that would become foundational for modern theory and practice of warfare. The MID:

added a Psychological Subsection, thereafter incorporating the “psychological” as one of its four basic factors in estimating an enemy country’s war effort (together with military, economic, and political indices). And exploiting its claim of substantial contribution to winning the war, psychology acquired enormous national popularity into the 1920s “as advertising, business, and education quickly seized upon its techniques for purposes of evaluation, manipulation, and control.” Military Intelligence had in 1920-1922 developed a major project to psychologically analyze the nations of the world. MID sought to compose a manual on the psychology of every nation that could be employed to manipulate these nations to advance U.S. foreign policy.5

Modern psychological warfare was thus born of a twofold military concern: the disciplining of soldiers for the formation of effective fighting units, and the manipulation of the enemy’s mind. Le Bon’s racial prejudices and law of the mental unity of crowds were applied to both objectives.

The Twenty-First Century: PSYOP and Mind Control

The legacy of Le Bon is far from over as these two concerns continue to motivate joint public-private research and development of theories, practices, projects and weapons of imperial psychological warfare.

In a 2016 study, Military Psychology: Concepts, Trends and Interventions, Maheshwari and Kumar emphasize that “psychology and its closely associated disciplines are critical to success in contemporary war, and…this need will generate paradigm-shifting changes in the science and profession of psychology.” They state unequivocally that “psychology is the science that will determine who wins and who loses the wars of the 21^st century.” Notably, their definition of military psychology has not fundamentally changed since the early days of Le Bon’s influence:

Military psychology is a discipline which is concerned with recruiting, training, socializing, assigning, employing, deploying, motivating, rewarding, managing, integrating, retaining, transitioning, supporting, counseling and healing military members…. It is also defined as the application of research techniques and principles of psychology to the resolution of problems to either optimize the behavioral capabilities of one’s own military forces or minimize the enemies’ behavioral capabilities to conduct war.

Consistent with the first definition, in 2008 the U.S. military established the Directorate of Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF). Created to harness “the signature strengths of soldiers to the benefit of the organization,” the CSF program “is the largest application of psychological science in military history.” Consistent with the second definition, military personnel – and especially special forces trained in PSYOP – adapt research and development in the psychological sciences to “understanding and manipulating social processes and cultural systems” through “human engineering,” “cultural engineering,” “cognitive engineering,” and “culture-machine systems analysis.”6

PSYOP research and development in the twenty-first century is still based on two founding interests and applications: persuasion and mind control.

Persuasion is a form of low-intensity psychological warfare that is the provenance of special PSYOP divisions such as those coordinated in the U.S. by the Central Intelligence Agency. The “media factor” is the most important factor of PSYOP, and the battlescape for this mode of warfare is the “Information Theatre.” The Information Theatre is invaded, captured, and weaponized to weaken mass resistance by transforming it into a Theatre of Terror in and through which effects of mass paranoia, fear, apathy and the destruction of morale and motivation are systematically pursued. As observed by Johar and Kumar (2016), information and knowledge in contemporary PSYOP are specifically deployed “for destruction and immobilization of the enemy.”

Mind control entails the pursuit of these same objectives but by means other than persuasion. If persuasion relies on representations and images carefully crafted by specialized units, then mind control can be said to bypass representation in order to act directly on biological and neurological human “hardware.” Ultrasonic brainwave clusters, nanoparticles, satellite-delivered extra low-frequency (ELF) waves that grant access to an individual’s thoughts without their knowledge, electromagnetic field (EMF) waves used to track electronic currents in human bodies, ultrasonic sound streams and internal voice transmissions used for brainwashing are all representative of contemporary military technologies of mind control.7

A full profiling of mind control weaponry is beyond the scope of this briefing. My aim has been to identify general military and specific PSYOP/MindWar R&D interests and applications as they relate to the work of social psychologist Gustave Le Bon. Averting and triggering crowd panic, producing new thoughts and behaviors through population alchemy, persuasion and mind control are among the main interests and applications of modern military psychological R&D stemming from Le Bon’s work. Following Le Bon, imperial militaries have long perceived the social unconscious as a key battleground. It is therefore at the social unconscious that MindWar arsenals are arrayed and aimed as those who wield them seek to advance toward total mind control.

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