Me. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

Episode 82. Oh, oh, oh, oh. And give me a better. Following the French Revolution, academics and rulers and politicians and

philosophers they were all really, really concerned with how easily it seemed

that civilization could just, in an instant, fall away and the citizens of a city gather

and then become angry, angry mobs. And lots of people in positions of power

were eager to learn how to keep their heads off of pikes in the future, and with the revolution still fresh in everyone's mind and the

after effects still being sorted out, the 1800s became a time in which the nature of crowds

became a subject of much debate.

One person emerged from all of that debate and discussion with a book, one that tried to explain what happens to a person subsumed by a collective.

His name, Gustav Laban, the year 1895, and he was one of the first sociologists.

He wrote The Crowd, a pre-scientific book of hypotheses and observations of things that he had seen himself or had heard of from others in a time period of great flux following a great revolution and as such he was somewhat obsessed with understanding how people could

be manipulated by a charismatic leader. Basically he said crowds are dumb And if you can sufficiently blow their minds,

you can get them to do anything you want.

It was a very popular book, very, very popular.

Reprent it for 25 years, translated into 17 languages used by the Nazis and

linen and Stalin as a guide and by the early psychologists

as a starting point for how to study people in groups. And even today this is how people on the left and right think about people who don't believe the things that they do.

And Gustav Laban is invoked in modern debates, modern arguments about the nature of crowds, about the idea that crowds are

irrational subhuman automatons, a mass of people ready to be programmed

and they never program themselves.

An outside force is telling large groups of people what to do and what to think.

And that outside force is more effective if its message is general and chock full of ideas like

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