The intelligence of large groups, when asked to decide, usually falls to the level of its lowest element. There is no aggregating effect, according to Mr. Le Bon.
And when you see the results of the actions of mobs, crowds and other human groupings, you might wonder if he had a point.
There are individual human beings with some measure of intelligence, but when they come together into groups their collective level of intelligence declines -- the greater the number of people the less their intelligence. The human race, taken as a whole, is about as intelligent as a bug. Societies in upheaval resemble a disturbed beetle rushing to-and-fro in panic until it winds up on its back with its legs waving in all directions.
The major problem from which the beetle suffers is its inability to handle information adequately. The beetle's eyesight and other sensory equipment are too primitive for the beetle to perceive clearly the child touching its back with a twig. Its nervous system is likewise too primitive to interpret adequately the reports of its senses to the organization of its body. It is misleading to think of the beetle as an individual. It is more fruitful to think of it as a group of millions of essentially identical cells held together within a carapace. These cells are more or less interchangeable; transfer an eye cell to the leg and it becomes a leg cell, and vice versa. The beetle has little in the way of a brain, and its nervous system is too primitive and poorly organized to permit higher order thought. It must make its way through the world by means of a limited array of pre-programmed responses to stimuli; these responses have a very limited capacity to be modified by experience. When it is touched by the twig, it experiences a cascade of pre-programmed, nested reactions, extending all the way up from the cellular level to the macroscopic organs of its body. Its nervous system participates in this cascade and distributes the integrated product to the various organs of the body by means of electrical and chemical signals. When we see the beetle rush crazily about, flip on its back, and wave its feet in all directions, we are witnessing the nearly simultaneous and random release of a significant subset of its array of pre-programmed responses. [The evolutionary rationale for this is that amongst unknown dangers, if you try all the responses in your repertoire, there is a significant chance that at least one of them will increase your chances of survival]
Comparisons are obvious between the plight of the beetle and human responses to 911, Katrina, the mess in Iraq and, on a larger scale, the phenomena of World Wars One and Two. A city may be regarded as a mass of nearly identical living units, held together by certain material and functional structures. Each unit, in general, may take on the functions of any other unit -- an airport traffic controller may wind up as a taxi driver, and vice versa. Humans in the mass have little or nothing comparable to a brain : a system which registers experience, organizes it, and employs it to enhance the life of the organism and protect it from destruction. You have governments and economic structures, religious and educational institutions, and voluntary organizations. We see how well they work!
Humans in the mass have very little ability to learn from experience; the most modest advances in human organization are normally marked by unbelievable suffering. The continued development of the metaphor is, I think, obvious.
One may compare the rudimentary nervous system of the beetle to modern methods of communication: radio, television, the internet. A notable difference between the two is that in the case of the beetle [and indeed in the case of the individual human organism] no advantage arises to the organism or any of its parts if the reports of the nervous system are inaccurate or false -- rather the opposite. In the case of humanity, many social elements may reap temporary benefits by the circulation of false or misleading reports, even at the cost of harming the viability of the human species as a whole. In this respect, the beetle and humanity are not identical; the beetle is superior.
