… is from pages 72-73 of the 2002 Dover Publications edition of the 1896 English-language translation – The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind – of Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 La psychologie des foules:
The leader [of a crowd] has most often started as one of the led. He has himself been hypnotised by the idea, whose apostle he has since become. It has taken possession of him to such a degree that everything outside it vanishes, and that every contrary opinion appears to him an error or superstition. An example is Robespierre, hypnotised by the philosophical ideas of Rousseau, and employing the methods of the Inquisition to propagate them.
DBx: Single-minded obsessions, if not soon arrested, become justifications for the tyrannical pursuit of the object of the obsession. Individuals obsessed with eliminating all further risks of climate change are so obsessed. Also so obsessed are individuals who insist on the overriding necessity of every possible reduction in the risk of encountering the covid virus.
