I Don’t expect measured analysis from Suella Braverman, yet I was surprised this time last year when I heard she had described Palestinian solidarity demos as “hate marches”. Earlier in the week I had walked with my friends – some Jewish like me, some not – in a crowd of 500,000 others across Waterloo Bridge, looking west down the Thames towards Parliament as a British Muslim girl of about eight led chanters through. a loudspeaker: “Gaza, Gaza, don’t cry / We will never let you die.”
In years of participating in and reporting on protests, demonstrations, general strikes and riots, I have rarely experienced more orderly, peaceful, family-oriented mass gatherings than these demonstrations.
And yet Braverman was not alone in his condemnation. As Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak warned that “mob rule is replacing democratic rule”, while Keir Starmer’s office sternly instructed his MPs and councilors not “under any circumstances” to join the crowds calling for a ceasefire. In March this year, “extremism adviser” John Woodcock made the extraordinary proposal that MPs and councilors be banned from engaging with the protest organizers. Here, contrary to my experience, and that of hundreds of thousands of other peaceful protesters, was a crowd – sorry, a “mob” – that the establishment singled out as toxic to be a part of.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, because our politics, media, and pop culture have always been stacked with these myths—with those in power condemning mindless crowds, maddened crowds, mindless masses, stampeding hordes, and pack mentalities. All our lives we have been told that joining crowds robs us of our agency, our ability for rational thought, and our sense of self and propriety. Violence and moral unrest spread like a contagion, drowning out every crowd. In short, we become bestial.
Like the “angry mob” that appears in so many Simpsons episodes, pitchforks and flaming torches appear in our hands as if by magic – and hypnotized and stripped of our individual humanity – we ask no questions, seek blood and lock step. with the zombie horde. “By the mere fact of being part of an organized crowd,” wrote the godfather of crowd theory, Gustave Le Bon, in 1895, “a man rises several steps on the ladder of civilization. Isolated he may be a cultured individual; in a crowd is he a barbarian.”
Le Bon’s seminal work, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, is one of the best-selling non-fiction books of all time; within a year of its publication in France, it was translated into 19 other languages. He gained fans among presidents and dictators, police chiefs; even Sigmund Freud was an admirer. He is still regularly quoted by columnists and politicians in 2024 to denounce mob mania. But there are two problems with this pervasive received wisdom about crowd psychology and behavior.
The first problem – and it’s a pretty big one – is that the work is provable, scientific, nonsense. Le Bon was an eccentric, war-traumatized eugenicist and proto-fascist, terrified by the growing demands of the French masses for democracy and socialism, and The Crowd is driven by fear and loathing, not research. It is no accident that it was adopted with enthusiasm by Goebbels, by Hitler (the academic Alfred Stein claims that Hitler plagiarized parts of Le Bon’s The Crowd in Mein Kampf), and by Mussolini, who liked his work so much that he and Le Bon became pen pals. There is a direct line from traditional crowd theory to the incandescent horror of the Nuremberg rallies.
The other problem with the myths of mob mentality, homogenous “herd logic” and contagious mob violence is that they are incredibly persistent – despite being false – because vilification of the crowd will always serve elite power and undermine democracy. Not for nothing was the suffragette Christabel Pankhurst dubbed “queen of the mob” by her opponents. Presenting any self-collecting group of people as both homogeneous and dangerous is as old as hierarchical power itself. After all, what is a mob? There is nothing categorically distinctive or analytically precise about it: a mob is simply a crowd you don’t like.
Fortunately, a new generation of crowd psychologists is developing fresh ideas. Detailed case studies by academics such as Stephen Reicher and Clifford Stott have proven what many of us know instinctively: that joining a crowd of like-minded souls brings us kinship, confidence, and joy—and that any crowd contains a wealth of behaviors and psychological reactions. Reicher revealed what could be an unpalatable truth in his seminal investigation of the “riot” in St. Paul’s, Bristol, in 1980: that joy, warmth and solidarity are often experienced, even while cars are being set on fire. Far from erasing our sense of self, coming together with other football fans, music fans or people of the same political or religious affiliation is largely affirming. How else do you explain, for example, moshpits? To most concertgoers, they look like deranged masochism and a shortcut to a broken ankle; for the participants, they are electrifying, life-affirming moments of collective joy—bringing joy only because of the laughing strangers mashing with you.
Of course, this does not mean that all crowds are forces for good. While my reporting has taken me to inspiring political protests, hedonistic global carnivals and other festivals in the name of journalism, I’ve also witnessed sinister crowds, such as the fascist paramilitaries of the Magyar Gárda in Budapest and a proto-Trump Tea Party rally in White Plains , New York; I’ve even been to see Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. When I watched with horror the racist riots of August this year, I was not surprised that many anti-racists chose the classic Le Bonian interpretation: here is the confused, brainless violence of the mob. But applying the same baseless analysis to crowds we dislike does nothing to further the cause of anti-racism. When you call a violent fascist “brainless”, you not only skip a much-needed reckoning with their hateful ideology, you also absolve them of their conscious decisions and actions.
Were the rioters who tried to burn people alive in a Rotherham hotel just bystanders who suddenly “lost their heads”, succumbed to “herd mentality” and were “swept away by the crowd”? Or were they a group of largely organized and experienced fascists with a clear plan to intimidate or even murder Muslims, refugees and other migrants? Politicians prefer to dismiss riots as mob frenzy because a deeper examination of their causes can yield unwanted answers – for example, it might link a group of violent racists shouting “stop the boats” to a political class that had shouted exactly the same words in a election campaign only a few weeks earlier.
When those in power speak of a crowd, it is always a calculated attempt to diminish the diverse intentions, behaviors and personalities of its members. Le Bon’s fantastic crowd theories have endured as the standard position for 130 years because they serve a purpose as old as the crowd itself. That purpose is very simple: to support the powerful and delegitimize the public. If we want to refresh our democracy, our culture and our civil society, the best place to start would be to show some respect for the complex forces of the crowd.