Richard Bellamy's Psychology Of Crowds

Bellamy Essay Richard Bellamy has compiled numerous explanations and theories explaining the complex dynamics of crowds and how they are essentially a living resource for politicians and democracy. He goes in depth on the behavioral discoveries that explain why humans act differently in large groups, how they adopt a sort of “hive mentality”. There are interesting conflicts between philosophers wanting governments to operate a certain way, but it ultimately fails due to human nature unable to work properly in enormous herds. The three features of this mass condition include the understanding of how masses work and what drives their decision making, secondly the implementation of social organization by controlling masses in and out of their workplaces, and …show more content…
The political actor would utilize masses to create demonstrations. The masses preferred things that were mass produced because they were designed with mass appeal in mind, leading to a divide between the 99% and the elite. Bellamy states that Le Bon’s Psychology of Crowds is a compilation of ideas from several others, including Victor-Alfred Espinas, Gabriel Trade and Scipio Sighele (Bellamy 74). Crowds resulted from the destruction of families and the forced merging of strangers into densely populated cities (Bellamy 76). Both Sighele and Tarde were criminologists who were credited for their ideas in Le Bon’s Psychology of Crowds as they pioneered crowd psychology by studying mass behavior after their transition into densely populated areas. Tarde formed a reputation as a social scientist and criminologist (Bellamy 77). When he was creating his thesis in The Laws of Imitation, Tarde theorized that hypnotism could be the link between psychology and sociology (Bellamy 77). His thesis argued that crowds become autonomous, the larger the mass, the more hypnotized they become with following each other. Tard strongly believed that any individual was