The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustav Le Bon

Le Bon's main argument is that crowds do not behave rationally; rather, they are composed of a variety of random, unconscious behaviors that give rise to emergent properties. Just like Carl Schmitt, Le Bon also hosted the belief that parliamentarianism and other democratic structures of government are mere scams. The world for him was moving towards a dominance of crowd activity and psychology, which does not exactly fit the parameters of anarchy but is not very far from it either.

Le Bon begins his book by examining the crowd's mental processes. A crowd is a group of people who display mental unity. However, not every collection of individuals constitutes a crowd; what matters is that the group be mentally cohesive. A crowd is a new thing, not the average of its members; if anything, it represents the lowest common denominator of its members.

As mass media was just starting to garner influence when Le Bon wrote this book, he did give some thought to the fact that formation of crowd does not require physical proximity. However, he could not quite predict today’s globally-interconnected world, where it is possible to psychologically unite hundreds of millions of people, all physically separated from each other, within a few hours, using propaganda dictated by our ruling class, amplified and broadcast by algorithmic social media, itself further manually curated for propaganda purposes.

A crowd does not have ideas, but ideas influence the crowd. Ideas that enthrall crowds are image-like, one after the other, they can be contradictory without having a negative impact on the audience, especially if they are delivered in a theatrical fashion. This effect is greatly magnified at present, with video spread by social media having become a key influence.

Still, the ability to build a truly global crowd is yet unattainable. It's difficult to estimate how many people are not a part of a global crowd because of the widespread censorship that prevents the dissemination of ideas that run counter to popular opinion in the West, and because we purposefully receive very little information about public opinion and activity in non-Western regions of the world.