WHAT if the people who make up the crowd that gathers to welcome Jesus into Jerusalem are not the same people who form the crowd that shouts “Crucify him!” a few days later? I suppose this is quite possible. After all, modern life is full of conflicting pressure groups who cheer and hiss in different circumstances according to their prejudices. But it seems to me that this question, which I was asked this week on a radio programme, misses an important point.
What confronts us during the liturgy of Holy Week is a consideration of the fickleness of crowds and, by extrapolation, the inconstancy of our individual behaviour. This is not just a theological question: it has resonances in contemporary life, as Rishi Sunak will testify, having gone from Hero to Zero — or, should we say, Dishy Rishi to Fishy Rishi — in a similar period of time.
Crowds are a particular litmus here, because they magnify our instinctual behaviour. So argued the French polymath Gustave Le Bon, who, in 1895, wrote The Crowd: A study of the popular mind. Le Bon suggested that people in a crowd do not create a collective consciousness so much as a collective unconsciousness. We submerge our individuality into the group, in which a combination of anonymity, and a contagious suggestibility, create something less than the sum of our parts.
The crowd generates a lack of self-restraint, allowing us to yield to our baser instincts. When we join a crowd, we “descend several rungs in the ladder of civilisation”, Le Bon suggests; for anonymity diminishes our sense of personal responsibility and creates an irrational feeling of invincibility. Perhaps he should have added infallibility.
Nowadays, you don’t have to be physically in a throng to join a mob. Social media allow us to indulge in the same psychological dynamic sitting on our own at home —and, from there, comfortably join in the righteous indignation of the group against some hapless scapegoat.
In so far as crowds have any reasoning power, Le Bon asserts, it is of a very inferior order. Crowds think in images, and these image-like ideas “are not connected by any logical bond”. Instead, they “take each other’s place like the slides of a magic-lantern”. Crowds, therefore, have no ability to conceive of anything like a hierarchy of values. The mind of the mob is Manichaean. Worse still, crowds can simultaneously hold together contradictory ideas. Our name is Legion; for we are many.
It also explains, to go back to the hapless Mr Sunak, why this relatively inexperienced politician has tried to deal with the non-dom/green-card saga with a series of logical steps that reveal no understanding of the intuitive psychology of the crowd. As a result, he has managed to make his position worse with every move that he has made.
At the end of the radio programme, I was asked which crowd I saw myself in: the Palm Sunday cheerers or the Good Friday jeerers. The point that the Gospels are making, of course, is that we should all see ourselves in both. What Le Bon teaches us is that, when we find ourselves in a multitude, we must each be more aware of our own potential for perfidy.