French psychologist (1841-1931)
He wrote the book that explained how crowds stop thinking like people and start thinking like something else — a claim that made him required reading for revolutionaries, dictators, and anyone trying to move a mob.
Gustave Le Bon earned his medical degree at the University of Paris in 1866 but never practiced, turning instead to writing. The Franco-Prussian War and watching the Paris Commune unfold in 1871 bent his view of human nature toward the dark. He spent years traveling Europe, Asia, and North Africa, studying peoples through the lens of anthropology and inventing a portable cephalometer along the way. In the 1890s he pivoted to psychology and sociology, publishing The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind in 1895 — the work that argued crowds form a new psychological entity shaped by what he called…
Sourced, dated quotes from Gustave Le Bon
The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.
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