In order to explain the individual’s behavior with the audience, the “Outside the Text” program sheds light on the book The Psychology of the Masses by its owner Gustave Le Bon, in which he presents a psychological and social study that monitors the changes that occur to the individual when he is part of a particular audience.
Le Bon is considered one of the most prominent philosophers who laid the foundation stone for the psychology of the masses. He tried to study the phenomenon of the rise of the masses on the European political stage in a scientific way based on the experience of the French Revolution.
Among what was stated in Le Bon's book, "Today we notice that the demands of the masses have become more and more clear, and tend to destroy the current society and turn it high and low, in order to bring it back to that primitive communism that represented the natural state of all human groups before the dawn of civilization."
The first part of his book was devoted to talking about what he called the spirit of the masses, and he meant the mental unity that is formed when a number of individuals gather in a certain circumstance, as he considered them a mass whose members fused into one spirit that lowers the level of their mental faculties.
And about the transformation of the individual when he becomes a part of the public, Le Bon says in his book, “Whatever the type of individuals they constitute, and whatever their lifestyle is similar or different, as well as their interest, mood or intelligence, just turning them into an audience provides them with a kind of public spirit.”
He added that among the basic characteristics of the individual involved in the public is "the fading of the conscious personality, the dominance of the unconscious personality, the orientation of everyone within the same line by incitement and contagion of emotions and thoughts, and the tendency to transform the instigated ideas into direct action and practice."
revolution of the masses
To explain the purpose of Le Bon’s study of the masses, Muhammad Suleiman Fares, professor of social psychology at Mardin University, explained that what called Le Bon to study this mass movement in a psychological way and to derive laws in which leaders can deal with the masses is his bourgeois situation.
Faris saw that Le Bon wanted to understand the reason for the revolution of the masses in order to control and control them and lead him to the direction desired by the ruling class.
About this book, a professor of social psychology at Taiz University said that it is dangerous to deal with the book without analysis or criticism by people who she described as having cultural illiteracy.
In turn, Noureddine Bakis, a researcher in political sociology at the University of Algiers, said that peoples always have a mystery that cannot be explained, and there is a constant need for a kind of passion and comprehensiveness in the interpretation of phenomena, and therefore the book remains valid to fill these gaps for which many did not find an answer based on the mobility of societies Which produces a lot of societal phenomena.