Le Bon would have a field day

Sigmund Freud made numerous admiring references to Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 book Psychology of Crowds. But in spite of that, that book was good.

A crowd isn’t just more than the sum of its parts, argued Le Bon, but something qualitatively different. Its principal characteristics are “impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement or the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and others”.

I loathe crowds with unmitigated passion, partly because of physical aversion and partly because I grew up in a country where individuality was discouraged to the point of being proscribed.

We were all ordered on pain of death to toe the Party’s ‘general line’ in the spirit of ‘proletarian collectivism’, to scream ourselves hoarse at rallies blessed by the appearance of whoever embodied the general line at the moment.

I left all that behind me when leaving the Soviet Union as a young man – or so I thought. I was wrong though. The inner need of some, dare I say most, people to be part of a baying throng exists independently of any political cause.

Hence it can be marshalled in support of any such cause, good, bad or something in between. One gets the impression that the desire to emulate a herd of cows all mooing at the same time lurks in most breasts, waiting for the right stimulus to come out.

That takes some predisposition, which I lack. As I grew older and wiser, my self-esteem was abating in inverse proportion. But whether it was at its apex when I was a youngster or at its nadir as I am now, I’ve always refused to share in a collective conscience. If I go to hell, I’ll do so in my own fashion, not as part of some corporate entity.

In that connection I remember a conversation I had with an older French friend some 20 years ago. During the war he had fought with the Free French, ending the war in Berlin. Serving as an army officer, he said, were the best years of his life.

I said I could never be a soldier because I hated taking orders. “I didn’t mind taking orders,” he replied, “because I liked giving them.” “That,” I said, “is something I’d dislike even more.”

This foray into the past isn’t as an exercise in solipsism, but merely an attempt to sketch a mental and psychological vantage point from which I observe with distaste or even horror the mass psychosis surrounding Donald Trump. The videos of him appearing at MAGA rallies remind me of the Walpurgisnacht I witnessed in the USSR and also of the newsreels depicting Mussolini with his black-shirted mobs.

This isn’t about any specific policies put forth by Trump. These must be analysed on merit, irrespective of the source or the mass response they elicit.

In fact, I quite like most of Trump’s policies, although not all. In fact, speaking to a virulently anti-Trump American at a party last autumn, I said (inexcusably rudely) that voting for Harris was a certifiable symptom of a mental disorder.

Some of Trump’s policies may come to grief, or they may not. Most, I believe, will produce a beneficial outcome, and none is likely to result in a disaster. But his basking in mass adulation, encouraging the herd instincts described by Le Bon, is a disaster already. Its corrupting effect is much more toxic than the failure of any policy can ever be.

Trump isn’t the threat to democracy his detractors depict him to be with hysterical spittle-sputtering that matches the eye-popping enthusiasm of MAGA crowds. But then neither is he the saviour of mankind.

Trump has been in the public eye for almost as long as I’ve been in the West, and I remember his appearances on American TV when he was a relatively young man in his late 30s, early forties. Comparing those memories with the reality of Trump today, I feel certain that since then he must have assiduously cultivated his gesticulation, facial expressions and jutting jaw in, perhaps unwitting, imitation of another mass communicator, Mussolini.

Many observers have pointed out this parallel, and Private Eye spoofed it by mislabelling the two photographs placed side by side. Most of such commentators dislike everything Trump stands for, which I don’t. But the parallel is unmistakable, as is the crowd’s reaction.

While it’s silly and disingenuous to equate Trump’s policies with Mussolini’s, I fail to see much difference between hysterical crowds screaming “Il Duce! Il Duce!” and hysterical crowds screaming “Make America great again!” And neither can I ignore the similarity of the two men’s reaction to human beings acting like a herd of dehumanised creatures.

Even when they are on their own, having a civilised conversation over a glass of something, Trump’s camp followers – far from all of them Americans, by the way – display the characteristics Le Bon identified in crowds. They may leave the crowd in body, but in spirit they remain its fragments.

People who are otherwise eminently capable of exercising critical judgement put that faculty on hold when Trump or his policies come up. Trump is beyond criticism, just as Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini were to their acolytes. That they were evil and he isn’t is true but beside the point. I’m talking about people suspending their humanity and acting on knee-jerk instinct.

Trump’s acolytes bestow the kind of adulation on their idol that Jesus Christ didn’t even demand for himself. As he put it, “And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.”

In the eyes of his supporters, Trump is entitled to the same protection against criticism as that enjoyed by the Holy Ghost but not by Christ himself. And they defend that position with the ardour of zealots worshipping a secular cult.

Any criticism of a Trump policy, even if amply supported with facts and reasoned arguments, is rejected out of hand. There is no disagreement with Trump; there is only heresy. Everything Trump does is God’s gift to mankind simply because Trump does it.

This upsets me, even though I can reiterate that I wholeheartedly support most of Trump’s initiatives. But by cultivating this kind of animalistic following he risks undoing everything good he may try to do.

Someone demanding and encouraging such a response will eventually believe his own infallibility, even if he didn’t start out with that arrogant conviction, which Trump might have done. And the leader of any great nation, whatever its politics, depends on wise and, if need be, critical counsel.

Someone with Trump’s obvious character flaws, of which narcissism takes pride of place, is likely to ignore criticism and get rid of those brazen enough to offer it. That may lead him to gross errors of judgement, to which none of us sinners is ever immune.

As for those who worship and hate him with equal uncritical passion, they relinquish the advantage of being human, a moral and cerebral agent possessing and keeping up his own individual account with truth. That upsets me because I’m a closet humanist who believes we are all supposed to be made in a certain image and likeness.