Candace Owens and the Psychology of Mobs: How Crowd Psychology Works
|
Time
Text
My friend, if you're going to even attempt to understand what is happening, attempt to grasp what's happening with, among other things, inter alia, Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk and that dynamic, if you want to understand that and politics and what's happening in the world, you have to understand one simple concept which is so, so critical, so important.
You must understand the context, especially when it comes to Candace and others.
But the phenomenon and why her rise, why the rise of Candace terrifies establishment media and corporate activists and the professional outrage class.
But before you do that, you have to stop pretending that politics and this kabuki-like behavior patterns is only about facts and start recognizing what philosophers and psychologists have warned about for centuries, the nature of crowds, the machinery of mass emotion, and the strange power of ideas when they are simplified and weaponized and repeated at scale.
Because long before social media and hashtags and algorithmic outrage and these weird cycles, thinkers were already mapping this terrain.
The 18th century philosopher Rousseau famously warned that we have a very imperfect knowledge of the human heart if we don't also examine it in crowds.
And in the 19th century, the French social psychologist, the man, the man, Gustave Le Bon, often called the father of crowd psychology, went even further, arguing that understanding and being familiar with crowd behavior is absolutely essential to understanding history itself.
Because as he wrote in his landmark work, The Crowd, a study of the popular mind, it is crowds rather than isolated individuals that may be induced to run the risk of death to secure the triumph of a creed or an idea or a belief that may be fired with enthusiasm for glory and honor.
And while such heroism is often unconscious, it is the raw material, the basis from which history is made.
And this insight matters today probably more than ever.
And it's critical that you understand this because what we are watching with figures like Candace and others is not simply a debate over policies.
It is a collision between centralized narrative control and decentralized mass mobilization, between managed consensus and rebellious crowds that no longer trust the usual gatekeepers.
So to understand this moment, to really grasp it, we need to revisit Le Bon's core ideas, starting with his definition of a crowd, which he described not merely as a physical gathering of people, but as a group of individuals united by a common idea or a belief or an ideology.
And crucially, this unifying idea is not chosen through careful reasoning or deep examination of the issues and the evidence.
Instead, it's absorbed emotionally and accepted superficially.
Then it's used as fuel for the action, for the reaction.
When an individual becomes part of a crowd, Le Bon argued, he undergoes a profound psychological transformation.
He ceases to operate as a fully independent person, and he becomes what Le Bon bluntly called an automaton, a robot, no longer guided by personal will,
but swept along by collective impulse, and personal goals are sacrificed to the aims of the group, and emotions and actions become contagious to such a degree that individuals will readily give up their own interests, their own identities, their own focus for the perceived good of the collective, of the crowd.
And this is why crowds can suddenly become capable of extraordinary unity, extraordinary bravery, and incredible cruelty.
And it is also why modern political movements often feel less like rational coalitions and more like secular religions.
See, this is what's going on right now.
Think about this.
Le Bon maintained repeatedly that crowds form when an influential idea unites individuals and propels them towards some common goal.
But these ideas are rarely created by the crowd itself.
They originate with strong personalities and charismatic figures or intellectual elites, yet the masses are incapable of grasping these ideas in their original complex form.
So the ideas must be simplified and compressed and transformed into slogans and symbols and emotionally charged phrases.
Le Bon wrote that ideas only become accessible to crowds after assuming a very simple shape.
And that even the greatest philosophical truths are stripped and denuded of their depth and nuance once they enter the collective mind.
Consider liberty.
A philosopher might write an 800-page treatise on freedom, all right?
Or law and responsibility, but a crowd, a crowd will rally around a two-word chant, freedom now.
Think about it.
This is not accidental.
It's structural.
This is where leaders enter the picture.
Because leaders act as translators.
They'll take a complex concept and reduce it into some digestible little ort, something easily swallowed.
These little emotional quanta packages.
And in doing so, they unite crowds and stimulate action.
And as Le Bon observed himself, the majority of people do not possess clear and reasoned ideas on most subjects, as you can probably tell by half of the people on social media.
Look at the way they act.
Look at the trolls.
Look at the groups.
Look at the likes of this.
Read the threads.
But so long as they look to leaders as guides, everything is fine.
And in the modern media, in the modern media environment is a critical, and this effect is amplified exponentially.
There's a viral clip, a short speech, a meme, a gif, or a provocative tweet, or X or whatever you want to call it.
Some little glyph can mobilize millions in hours.
This is why establishment actors fear figures like Candace Owens.
Not because she invents entirely new ideas, but because she simplifies forbidden topics.
She reframes taboo arguments.
And She communicates them in a way that resonates emotionally with large audiences who already distrust legacy narratives.
See, when a leader invokes words like freedom and justice and peace or prosperity, crowds instinctively nod along, often without even examining what these words even mean.
But they collectively get into the groove, into the samba, into the beat, into this rote kind of mechanized patella research, or reflex, I should say.
And as Le Bon warned, countless crowds have heroically faced death for beliefs and ideas and phrases they scarcely understood.
The power of vague language is precisely its ambiguity.
Le Bon described these concepts as mysterious forces, almost supernatural powers that evoke grand images while remaining undefined.
And this very vagueness actually strengthens their influence.
Why?
It's easier to understand.
Just give me a couple of ideas.
I gotta give me the feeling.
Don't worry about the words.
Because people project their own desires onto them, which is why political movements, in many cases, often feel almost religious in structure, even when they reject formal religion.
A crowd forms a quasi-religious relationship.
And it forms it in this relationship to its motivating ideas, total devotion, emotional submission, giving up, moral absolutism.
And all of that replaced rational debate.
And Le Bon also argued that a person is religious not only when worshiping a god, but whenever he devotes his entire will and his emotional energy and his fanatic intensity to a cause or a leader.
And this explains, this explains why modern political tribes behave with the same kind of intolerance and ritualistic behavior and moral purity test that once belonged to the religious sect, even atheism.
And Le Bon predicted, if adopted en masse collectively, it would develop cult-like characteristics.
And history has proven time and time again that he's absolutely and disturbingly correct.
But when crowds can achieve great things, Le Bon was also clear-eyed about their darker tendencies, but he argued that crowds are often more prone to barbarity and moral regression, not because people are inherently evil.
You know, pitchfork and torch crowds or lynch mobs, not because they're evil, but because collective anonymity dissolves personal responsibility.
Maybe the reason why you don't do this individually is because you are individual.
You don't want people to know that you believe something.
But if you belong to a crowd, you give up.
You abnegate any responsibility.
And whatever our weird internal feelings are, our destructive instincts that are inherited from these weird primitive survival mechanisms, they remain dormant for the most part in ordinary life.
You don't see this just walking around.
But because social consequences restrain them, that changes.
Because when you're inside a crowd, oh, well, where individuals feel shielded by numbers and anonymity, oh my God, those instincts re-emerge.
And the 20th century psychologist Carl Jung reinforced this idea by warning that when people form mobs, the collective psyche releases these dormant kind of repressed forces that drag individuals down to a lower moral and intellectual level beneath conscious awareness.
They don't even know it.
People are ready to erupt when activated by this mass behavior.
Just say the word and this group will turn into a lynch mob.
And that is why online mobs today behave, and maybe then too, with such viciousness.
Cancel campaigns, pile on.
Look what they're doing to Candace.
They're just coming out of nowhere.
They're just coming on in droves, like murmurations, I mentioned, like these starlings.
And they're like digital witch hunts.
And they're simply modern expressions of ancient psychological patterns.
Yet, despite these dangers, Le Bon also explained why crowds are so attractive.
Because when individuals live alone with responsibility, uncertainty, and personal failure, they often feel powerless and they feel overwhelmed and they feel insignificant.
But joining a mass movement, joining a crowd, temporarily lifts his burden, offering this emotional relief.
And it's intoxicating.
It makes wild.
This sense of belonging to something bigger, to a new group, a new friend.
It's almost like a cult, like a moving cult.
Same kind of similar ideas.
But they're belonging to something larger.
Even foolish, ignorant, or resentful individuals suddenly feel powerful and important and historically relevant.
I'm a part of the group.
How many people loved Woodstock?
Not because of the individual personalities or the performances, but being a part of the crowd.
And this emotional payoff is enormous.
And it's one reason why ideological movements to this day persist even when their real-world outcomes are complete disasters.
See, people are addicted to the feeling of this collective strength.
They love this.
And they like the identity and the purpose of the crowd.
Look at teams.
Look at teams with jerseys so tribal.
Yankees and Red Sox.
You know what I mean?
You've seen this before.
Republicans and Democrats and left versus right.
It's a crowd.
And here is where Candace Owens and the phenomenon becomes especially interesting.
Because she operates as a disruptor, a disruptor within this system.
She challenges dominant crowd narratives while simultaneously mobilizing a counter crowd, her own crowd, one that's tired of being told what to think by elite media.
Oh yeah, it's not just one crowd.
You can fight a crowd with a crowd.
People are tired of being told by the media and academic activists and these cultural big shots and panjandrums and ne'er-do-wells and bureaucrats.
Her success reveals not only her communication skills, which are incredible, to be sure, but the deeper collapse of trust in traditionally in traditional narrative authorities.
See, people are not just following Candace.
No, no, no.
They're rejecting something else.
The managed group, this weird consensus that dominated them for decades.
And this fits Le Bon's final and perhaps most important insight, that none of us, none of us are fully independent of crowd influence.
We're all shaped by ideas, absorbed socially through culture and education.
We are.
We do it in our expressions and our speech and our clothing and our style.
Complete freedom from ideological influence is impossible.
But partial independence can be achieved by consciously examining, consciously examining the beliefs that guide our behavior.
By dragging these kind of weird, unconscious assumptions into this light of reasons.
Because as Le Bon famously warned, and he's so good, the most dangerous, the most dangerous tyranny, listen, is not imposed by force, but exercised unconsciously over minds.
And it cannot be fought until it is recognized.
See, this is why modern battles over speech and censorship and narrative control matter so much.
It's simply not about who gets banned or boosted or social platforms that stovepipe you or deprogram you or demonetize you, I should say.
It's about who gets to define the ideas.
Who gets to define the ideas that the crowds adopt?
Who gets to label dissent as dangerous?
Who says she's crazy?
Who says she's a tinfoil hatter?
Who?
Who gets to decide what questions are permitted for you, what you can talk about, what you can't?
And who gets to claim moral authority and superiority over a reality itself?
The rise of independent voices like Candace Owens signals a kind of a fracture in the control system, a rebellion, which I love, against the psychological monopoly once held, remember that, by the sock puppet legacy media and political elites who thought they ran everything.
And whether one agrees with her or not, it doesn't really matter.
The larger lesson remains unavoidable.
Crowds will always exist.
Leaders will always emerge and simplified, stripped-down ideas will always circulate.
And the struggle will always center on who shapes them, who benefits from them, and whether individuals will remain passive automatons, or in fact, choose the harder path of this conscious thought.
Because let me tell you something, history is not only written by winners, it's driven by crowds and groups and mobs.
And crowds are driven by ideas.
And the future belongs not to those who silence questions, but to those who understand the machinery of mass psychology and also who refuse to be ruled by it.
This is critical.
I hope you're following this.
This is so important and so important to grasp.
And especially if you happen to be a younger person who is new to the conspiratorium, good.
Stick with me.
I'm going to be doing this from time to time.
There are some certain fundamental precepts that when you hear them, it makes you understand better.
It provides a clarity, an understanding.
Say, oh, I get it now.
This isn't by random.
And when a crowd or a group comes and amasses, or all of a sudden materializes, I should say, then you'll understand the dynamic.
That's what this is about.
And I thank you for that.
And I thank you For your joining our crowd and our group and our mob, so to speak, and our cult, our conspiratorium.
That's what we are.
Let me thank you for this.
Let me also thank you, by the way, tangentially.
Thank you so much for following my wife at Lynn's Warriors and the fight to protect our children.
You talk about a crowd?
How about the group of people right there who want to protect our children?
She's the pole star.
She's the bellwether.
She's incredible.
She's the vanguard.
Follow her on YouTube at Lynn's Warriors.
And also, my friends, thank you for this.
Please like this video.
Make sure you hit that little bell so you're subscribed and you're also notified of live streams and new videos.
And also, it's important that you subscribe to this.
Like 70% of the people who watch our videos don't even subscribe.
It's critical because these individual merit and metric, I should say, for foundations provide another crowd that we want to be a part of.
We want to be a part of the in-crowd, the HOV lane, the people who bring in new people.
We have a lot to say.
We're very important.
We're very important, very, very critical that we understand this.
And especially, I can't say this enough, to younger people who've never really had somebody speak to them like an adult, like a rational person.
And that person is I.
I thank you, my friends.
I've also got some questions in the comment section, which I want you to review.