9/25/2025

An essay discussing the Deep State’s PSYOP Toolkit and the Age of Managed Perception.

When Gustave Le Bon published The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind in 1895, he sought to explain why rational individuals could, once gathered in a mass, abandon reason and act with startling unanimity. His thesis was stark: the individual in a crowd loses conscious personality, becomes suggestible, and is swept along by images, myths, and emotions rather than reason.¹

Le Bon foresaw a great transformation—the “Era of Crowds”—in which the voice of the masses would replace the decisions of monarchs and parliaments.² A century later, with mass media, social platforms, and information warfare shaping our world, his insights serve as the blueprint for the modern age of psychological operations.

The Laws of the Crowd

1. Unconscious Over Conscious – Le Bon emphasized that the unconscious governs crowds far more than rational thought.³ Crowds respond not to careful reasoning but to vivid symbols, simple slogans, and emotional triggers.
Modern Example: Hashtags like #MeToo or #BlackLivesMatter carried enormous influence not because they offered detailed arguments, but because they appealed directly to unconscious moral intuitions—justice, solidarity, outrage.⁴

2. Suggestibility and Contagion – Crowds are highly suggestible, absorbing ideas through affirmation, repetition, and imitation.⁵ Once an idea grips enough people, it spreads like wildfire.
Modern Example: During the COVID-19 pandemic, slogans such as “Stay Home, Save Lives” and “Follow the Science” were repeated endlessly until they became unquestioned truths for millions, with subconscious implications that were never actually established by real scientific proof. Even shifting expert advice could not shake the dogma, because repetition had already entrenched the idea in the crowd’s unconscious.⁶

3. Prestige of Leaders – According to Le Bon, arguments don’t move crowds—prestige does. A leader’s aura of authority or charisma compels obedience, regardless of logic.⁷
Modern Example: Elon Musk can move entire markets with a single tweet. Similarly, government health officials during the pandemic were obeyed not because every policy was consistent, but because they radiated institutional authority.⁸

4. The Religious Shape of Belief – Crowd convictions take on a religious form: sacred, unquestionable, and hostile to dissent.⁹
Modern Example: Climate change debates reveal this dynamic clearly. For many activists, the issue is elevated beyond scientific discussion into a matter of faith; disagreement is branded as “denial” and punished like heresy. Similar patterns emerge with issues such as systemic racism and LGBTQ rights, where positions are defended not as hypotheses open to scrutiny but as moral absolutes. Taken together, these causes function less as empirical science and more as expressions of a secular creed—what might be called a new civil religion of political correctness.

5. Crowds as Destructive Forces – Le Bon argued that while crowds are effective at tearing down the old, they lack the discipline to build lasting civilizations.¹¹

Modern Examples:

The French Revolution (1789–1799).The revolutionary crowd tore down the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the Catholic Church’s dominance with ferocious energy. But when it came to establishing a stable order, the revolution lurched from the Reign of Terror to the Directory, eventually giving way to Napoleon’s authoritarian empire.

The Russian Revolution (1917). Mass uprisings toppled the czarist regime with remarkable speed. But instead of ushering in liberty, the power vacuum allowed the Bolsheviks to seize control, replacing the monarchy with dictatorship. The crowd destroyed an old order but could not construct a democratic one.

The Deep State’s PSYOP Toolkit

If Le Bon’s theories describe how crowds behave, modern Psychological Operations (PSYOPs) reveal how to manipulate those behaviors. Today’s intelligence agencies, governments, and media elites exploit the psychology of crowds on an unprecedented scale.
1. Framing and Narrative Control. Simple, emotionally charged messages are deployed in crises—“Weapons of Mass Destruction” in Iraq, or “Flatten the Curve” during COVID-19.¹³
2. Algorithmic Amplification. Social media platforms act as accelerants. Bots and trolls inject talking points, while algorithms favor emotional, shareable content. In effect, platforms create digital “psychological crowds” where contagion operates faster than in any physical assembly.¹⁴
3. Prestige Manufacturing. Agencies and states amplify certain voices—scientists, celebrities, or influencers—because their aura lends credibility. The personality becomes the message; prestige substitutes for proof.
4. Dogma Creation. Once a narrative gains traction, it hardens into orthodoxy. Dissent is labeled as misinformation or extremism. At that point, persuasion is no longer needed—the crowd polices itself, and the belief becomes self-reinforcing.

Living in the Era of Managed Perception

Le Bon observed that “the power of the crowd is the only force that nothing menaces, and of which the prestige is continually on the increase.”¹⁵

If we translate this to the modern age:

• Politicians and corporations bend to online outrage campaigns (digital crowds).
• Protests, hashtags, and public opinion polls can make or break leaders.
• Narratives that take root in the mass consciousness matter more than reasoned policy debates.

The “prestige” of the crowd continues to grow because no ruler, institution, or government can survive long if it openly defies the collective mood of the masses.

Breaking this down, Le Bon is referring to these four phenomena:

1. The Decline of Old Authorities – Le Bon saw that traditional sources of order—monarchs, churches, aristocracies, and even parliaments—were losing influence in the late 19th century. Revolutions, secularization, and industrialization had shaken those pillars. What remained as the dominant force was not individual leaders or institutions but the collective psychology of the masses.

2. The Rise of Collective Power – By “the power of the crowd,” Le Bon meant that governments, rulers, and intellectuals could no longer ignore public opinion. Once, kings made wars and parliaments passed laws without regard for the people. But in his time—and even more so in ours—the voice of the crowd dictated policy and shaped the fate of nations. He even noted that kings had begun listening less to their advisors and more to “the voice of the masses” because their legitimacy depended on it.

3. Why Nothing Menaces It – Le Bon called this power “the only force that nothing menaces” because all other forms of authority were crumbling. Religions, monarchies, and traditions could fall, but the collective force of the masses could not be abolished. Even revolutions only proved his point: when old institutions were torn down, it was always the crowd that had done the tearing.

4. Why Its Prestige Increases – “Prestige” here means respect and influence. The more the crowd demonstrated its ability to topple governments and dictate public life, the more elites, rulers, and intellectuals had to acknowledge it. Instead of being treated as dangerous mobs to be suppressed, crowds were increasingly seen as the ultimate arbiters of legitimacy.

We live in an Era of Managed Perception, where shaping the unconscious mind of the crowd is more decisive than passing laws or winning debates. Modern PSYOPs have refined Le Bon’s crude examples into a science:
– Crisis messaging uses repetition and emotion.
– Digital platforms turn individuals into crowds at lightning speed.
– Prestige figures guide opinion without argument.
– Orthodoxies arise that are enforced as dogma.

Le Bon saw crowds as destructive, irrational, and dangerous. Today, those who master his insights treat the crowd not just as a threat but as a resource—a mass to be mobilized, steered, and, if needed, pacified.

Takeaway: The lessons of The Crowd have not faded. They have become tools in the arsenal of the modern powerful elites. Le Bon described the battlefield of the unconscious mind; our age has simply given it new weapons—memes, algorithms, and 24/7 media. Whoever can harness the psychology of crowds controls the destiny of nations.

Notes

1. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895), 16–24.

2. Ibid., Introduction, 244–246.

3. Ibid., 510–520.

4. See Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

5. Le Bon, The Crowd, 562–573.

6. Ed Yong, “How the Pandemic Defeated America,” The Atlantic, August 2020.

7. Le Bon, The Crowd, 36–47.

8. “Elon Musk’s Tweets on Bitcoin and Dogecoin Move Markets,” BBC News, May 2021.

9. Le Bon, The Crowd, 23–44.

10. Adrienne LaFrance, “The Prophecies of Q,” The Atlantic, June 2020.

11. Le Bon, The Crowd, 319–321.

12. Marc Lynch, The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East (New York: PublicAffairs, 2012).

13. Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006).

14. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).

15. Le Bon, The Crowd, 244–246.

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