YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Hancox

lines on the record: 47
first: 2024-11-24
most recent: 2024-11-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't know whether I can predict whether that particular populist turn is sort of on its way out or not. But I can say that unless we sort of provide more space and more energy for kind of oat free and open and democratic crowds unless we extol the virtues of these sorts of liberatory crowds and the bonds and the kind of new connections and the sort of But he's worshipping the dear leader will only benefit from that. So I think my closing argument would be if we want to sort of stem the tide of despot worshiping populist authoritarian crowds, then the best way to do that is combat it with the messy anarchic, joy-filled open crowd.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly a reasonable amount of populism. There's quite a lot of forces sort of pushing back against that from more sort of established political currents as well. But the idea of sort of identifying with a dear leader who embodies all of your desires, your angers and your resentments. And Donald Trump has actually sort of pretty much put this idea perfectly into words, actually. He said He said at some point, I am your retribution, which is a perfect example of how despot or would be despot in this case embodies the desires and the angers and the resentment. It's exactly what happened in the 1930s. I'm not saying that they are exactly alike in any other ways, but that sort of grievance-driven populism is certainly visible in Leeds Like Trump and and others, Erdogan's another example in Turkey.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, like political leaders to disperse a crowd before it is formed. And that is something that they're always very keen to do. One of the key things about the future of clouds is that cities are going to continue to become more densely populated. So there's no getting around the fact that Crowderi will be extremely important to the 21st century. We've passed the mark now where more than the half the world's population lives in cities. And that proportion is only going to increase, particularly as we have sort of climate impacts on migration and food and water crises. We're going to see more mass migration to the cities around the world. Probably less so ones in the West, in fact, in the first instance, as climate impacts the sort of the global south. As you say, we're in an age of kind of”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I kind of come to the book at a certain point that as soon as people were allowed back into the public square, in fact, before they were allowed back into the public square during the COVID lockdowns, they rushed back even though it was dangerous for them to do so. Many of them knew it was dangerous to do so. So you had the Black Load Matter protests, most notably, but there were extinction rebellion kind of climate protests that took place as well. As soon as sort of football matches started in Britain, people emerged back into the public square for that as well. There's a deep sort of deep lying desire to be part of a crowd and to live life publicly. That I think will always override any sort of attempts by changing social mores.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, gosh, they're so well said. It's a fascinating challenge, and it's one that we can't shirk from. I mean, I think the overriding thing about the future of crowds and their relationship with political change is that they aren't going away. There's been a lot of, you know, handwringing and I understand why about crises of loneliness and atomization that particularly in the West, in sort of cities that you could be surrounded by people but never have felt more alone people are working from home more often and a lot of the bonding kind of community agents of perhaps mass work in a factory and trade union membership and community organizations, churches and so on, you can take your pick from the sort of different decayed institutions that used to bring us together. There are many absences there.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For their actions. And it's analytically inaccurate. As I say, to assume that somebody would turn up outside an asylum seeker. Hindu sort of fundamentalists lynching Muslims in India in recent years, what we see there is absolutely shocking and it's absolutely the worst of proud behavior, but it is entirely unhelpful to and inaccurate to describe that behavior as deranged or brainless because actually it is driven by a very brainful ideology and it's one that needs a reckoning.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But ultimately, my line on the fascist riots in Britain in August this year has been that it doesn't help anybody and its analytically incorrect to describe those people as a mad mob, as a deranged mob who've lost their heads. The word mob is I've banned from my lexicon except to explain how kind of analytically unhelpful it is. A mob is simply a crowd that you don't like, essentially. It's probably violent, but I would argue a mob is a crowd that you don't like. And for people who, like myself on the sort of progressive left, who are horrified by these far right attempts to sort of burn down asylum seekers' hotels, I've been telling other anti-racists, you know, it does not help to call these people a mob or a deranged mob because apart from anything else, you're letting them off the hook.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Convictions for fascist membership of prescribed far right parties for violence and have served time for it. So I think the particular components, the individuals who comprise a particular crowd and their previous history often explain some of that behavior.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go and storm the capital right now. Trump ends his speech by saying we're going to go march down to the capital and we're going to take back, I can't remember the exact wording, but it's pretty much like let's go and storm the capital now is the message of that rally. Now, I don't think the people involved in the Proud Boys demonstration and attempts on the Capitol were brainwashed at all. And I think there have been fascist riots in Britain this summer that I've had to grapple with since finishing the book. But when they occurred, I sort of immediately was like, well, okay, if I was my crowd theory of what's going on here. And a lot of the participants in those far right races riots in which some people were attempting to burn down hotels with refugees in really, really terrifying and horrifying sight. A lot of those people have previous.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On Rome in 1922, and Hitler's beer haul puts in 1923 in that you have a relatively small cadre of well-organized, well drilled, often ex-military men usually, and that those men are inured to violence and used to using weapons because they're ex-military or they might be, you know, there was a lot of, there are a lot of off-duty cops and ex-military people in the January the 6th kind of, particularly at the forefront in the vanguard of that attempt to storm the capital. So again, there's a very specific set of characteristics, that crowd that help explain its behavior, I think. And then they are immediately fired up by the rally that takes place on January the 6th that is sort of headlined by Trump, but also Azri Giuliani and several other people saying effectively.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And read about the day. But actually, there were people being busted in by the Republican Party and by Turning Point USA this sort of alt-right organization. So to begin with, that crowd has been marshalled to an extent. It's been given a particular ideological direction from the very top, from Trump through conspiratorial thinking and propaganda about the idea that the election has been unfairly stolen in spite of the fact that that has now been disproven in numerous American courts. And you have a quasi-military organization at the front of the Proud Boys, and that is a critical part of it again. You know, when you have, when you look back into the 20th century history, there are some really striking commonalities between what happened on January the 6th and Mussolini's march.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, well, so they have scary and sort of anti-democratic a crowd can be, but one that sort of differs, I would argue, from your average sort of open crowd of self-assembled peaceful protesters. One of the things that was really important characteristic on January the 6th was the sort of preordained rationale. So the stop the steal kind of rhetoric that Trump and his outriders are using in the sort of months ahead of the day of the inauguration that they're trying to prevent in January, that rhetoric is all leading up to that moment and there's also a reasonable degree of organization of this crowd. So it appears quite open. It appears to evolve fairly organically if you sort of watch the footage.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's definitely a key part of the history of crowds and it's one that I couldn't avoid in spite of being a broadly kind of cocedimist about human behavior in what are often quite dark times. So, you know, I was very much seeking to rescue some of that optimism, particularly as we moved out of the pandemic. But there are key moments even outside of the age of dictators of the 1930s that show that, yeah, it's absolutely the case that not all crowds are good and behave in ways that are sort of compassionate or wise or indeed non-violent. One of the examples that I grappled with was the January 6th march on the Capitol, which is a really, really good example of how”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When a crowd self police it, you know, it says, Look, our social norms, our norms here are we are writing because of racist police violence and we are fighting with the police occasionally here, but that car belongs to someone else who lives here. They haven't done anything wrong. You do not touch that car. And the adults won and the teenagers corrected and schooled in sort of... Anyway, I think that's quite enough for distinctions for now. But yeah, that should give you a sense of some of that complexity and plurality that you get within a crowd.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Completely anarchic and without any social rules actually is governed by a lot of social rules. The Stephen Reischer's seminal study that kind of helped turn the tide in sort of how we think about cryopsychology was of the St. Paul's riot in Bristol in 1980. And a few years later, he did a study of this, interviewed loads of the participants. And he found that throughout the riots in Bristol, that there was, I think the phrases restraint and selectivity, the two things that characterized the behavior there, by which you meant there was an example of two teenage boys who were about to start breaking into a car, a private car that was owned by a local resident. And everyone of the adults who are participating in this riot and sort of milling around immediately intervene and do what is regarded like called by a crowd psychologist self-policing.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are distributed from doing things that we want to do, and that gives us feelings of great warmth and kind of comfort. And that's entirely backed up by the sort of work that people like Stephen Reischer, Clifford Stott and John Drury, to name three among many of this sort of new generation of cloud psychologists have been discovering. They've been finding even that participants in riots kind of experience, and this is an unpalatable truth, like for a lot of people, but that they experience joy a lot of the time because there is a catharsis there to realizing that you're disgruntlement that you've been holding on your own isolated, atomized at home in your house, that there are other people who feel a similar grievance. Doesn't mean riot, sir. A good thing that we need more of, but it's a real corrective to the idea that something that appears to be”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anonymizing in the sense that you are, you could be moving comfortably and freely without actual close friends and you could, you know, as a friend of mine said to me the other day about one of these Palestine demos that he went on his own and he stayed on his own for the entire three hours. He could have tried to find some friends but didn't make much of an effort to do so and had and felt it was a very different experience and actually a much more powerful one because he was sort of anonymous and alone but very far from it at the same time because he was paying attention to everyone that was around him rather than having a catch-up chat with an old friend while walking on the demo route. So in that respect I think my argument is that we are disinhibited from sort of becoming more truly ourselves and getting more in touch with actually our true feelings.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we become more truly ourselves, that we feel a boost to our confidence, to our happiness. I feel great when I sing Wimbledon songs surrounded by Wimbledon fans. I feel great when I'm chanting a political demo with people who agree with me that, for example, there should be a ceasefire in Israel-Palestine, other crowd formations that I've joined recently to do that. There's something very affirming about, I mean, particularly this, I'll just remind you, and this is that, you know, this emerged out of the pandemic in part, where we were estranged from groups of strangers that we, this did very strange things to all of our psychology that I think we're all still trying to work out. But one of the things that it really brought home to me was that I needed to be part of a crowd of strangers sometimes and that this is simultaneously”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do with great enthusiasm when a member of the crown. That is all about the level of social identification. That doesn't mean that where the rest of the Wimbledon crowd starts throwing bricks through windows, I would do it. That is not one of the norms of our behavior as a group of football fans, the same with Lancam, you know, the idea, you know, if Lancam started leading a far-right political charm, I wouldn't join in. They wouldn't do that. They're a left-wing band. There are norms that are set for every social group and you can be disinhibited from taking part in things that you already wanted to do by your participation. I would argue that is not losing your sense of self. That's kind of quite the opposite, actually, and what the social identification model shows us is that in disinhibiting us from doing things we wanted to do, but would never do alone.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here are people like me around me that's great. Because of that high level of social identification I'm feeling in those moments, I will do things with that in that crowd that I wouldn't do walking alone down the street, right? So I wouldn't sing one of Lancombe's best songs as I walked down my local high street on my own. I'd look like a weirdo. I would feel very self-conscious. People would look at me and ask if I was okay. And likewise, I wouldn't walk down my local street in South London on my own, arms aloft, singing, singing a song about how great ASD Wimbledon are and how they're the greatest team the world's ever seen. Again, I would look weird. I wouldn't have the confidence to do that. It's not the right place for it. But having felt that social identification, that warmth of the fellow crowd members around me with whom I share something in common, those two activities, activities that I...”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As I say, that violence is not contagious, immorality is not contagious, as LeBon believed. You don't just start doing the thing that the person next to you is standing next to you is doing. What emerges instead of the 1980s, 70s and 80s is something called the social identity model, which is the much more clever and sophisticated and interesting version of LeBon's theory. It's quite different from it. And this, it says as follows, if we have a sense of social identification with the other members of the crowd, if we feel affirmed in who we are already, so for me, that could be joining a football crowd of fellow supporters of my football team, AFC Wimbledon, Tiny William in Southwest London, or it could be joining a concert for one of my favorite bands. I would see Lancam on Saturday, or amazing. And I felt immediately like, oh.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there are different methodologies that go into this, but the point is that people have really tried to get down to the granular detail of behavior and feeling in a crowd. And what they begun to find is that”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of LeBond's key ideas is crowd contagion, right? That if we stand next to a man who is throwing a brick through a window, even though we have never thrown a brick through a window nor wanted to, that will suddenly seem appealing because of the emotional kind of fervor, the sense of, you know, you've been released from your normal social bonds that would stop you throwing a brick through a window. And here's, you know, here's your opportunity. Here's someone showing you the lead, making it feel okay. You're sort of anonymized. You're probably surrounded by loads of other people. You won't even be seen doing it. Here's your chance. And so you do it. You throw the brick through the window as well. There's no evidence that that actually takes place that somebody who was never disposed to a particular behavior, like throwing a brick through a window.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's really well put. Yeah, it's really fascinating to unpick, particularly for anyone who's ever been part of a crowd and has found themselves sort of, but the idea of losing oneself in a crowd is as old as the crowd itself. There's a magnificent Edgar Allan Poe short story called The Man of the Crowd, which was written actually again, I think, before LeBon in the early 19th century, but is a great example of this concern, this anxiety about what lay out there among the crowd and whether we lose our sense of self when we enter it, particularly as the cities are growing in the 19th century.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Violent methods like driving cars or vehicles into the crowd. These are things that examples that were seen in sort of colonial outposts and then return back to the metropole, back to London, back to Paris and are used against the populations of the sort of colonizing country as well. So there's something called the colonial boomerang. It's how it's often talked about. particular techniques for crowd policing are tried out on colonial populations and then they're brought back home. And through that, that is the thread whereby you get from Le Bon in the 1870s witnessing the Paris Commune to actually some of his techniques that emerge out of that way of viewing the crowd as a homogenous mass that is always prone to violence are still things that I've experienced while reporting on demos in London in the 2010s.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There to be pacified through force if necessary. I mean, that actually goes back to before LeBon arguably to the Peterloo massacre of the early 19th century, because there's a direct relationship between the Peter Lou massacre, which was a sort of rally for calling for democratic enfranchisement, was met with violence in that directly leads to the creation of the police force in Britain, the first metropolitan police. So there's this relationship between how the crown is thought about and policing that goes on through the 20th century from the 19th. And though some of those techniques that are used, which I would describe as Lebonian crowd control techniques, so riot police with shields and visors down who look very forbidding hemming people in, perhaps using methods.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To that in due course, you know, the second half of my book is essentially arguing for the diversity and pluralism and the fact that people really do Who did not leaders of fascist dictatorships in the 1930s also had empires of Britain and France in particular, you see examples of LeBong's theories being used for policing the colonial subjects of the height of empire, basically, the early 20th century and the end of the 19th. And so things like the Amritsar massacre in India and the policing of colonial Hong Kong by the British In particular are examples of where sort of a similar sense of collective punishment and collective responsibility is the norm that you police crowds of dissenting protesters with violence essentially, the crowd is something that is there to be controlled.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The creation of what you see in sort of Lenny Riefenstah's triumph of the will, the sort of films of the Nuremberg rallies of the 1930s, is this homogenized crowd. Everybody looks exactly the same. They're sea kiling in the same direction. It is about pattern repetition from the Colonadid's backdrop to the tanks and the flypasts and so on. displays a military prowess, they're about that certain type of idea of a crowd which looks a lot like a military. So even the civilian population in attendance are perfectly symmetrical. They'll look exactly the same. in how they're positioned, in how they're seeking. And, you know, that, as I say, is an outgrowth of the idea that everybody within the crowd behaves the same and thinks the same once they join the crowd. That's not the case, but we'll...”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's a reference in the crowd to the Caesar figure. And so that idea that there is a relationship to be had there between the dictator, particularly a fascist dictator, though there are some definitely some links with kind of some of the crowd spectacles you see under Stalin and Mao as well here. So any dictator really is thought to be a good fit for a gullible passive crowd. And so I think there's a line there really from the original crowd theory of Gustav Le Bon directly to the Nuremberg rallies, which is an argument that I make in my book, this is something this work by Gustav Bomb was studied directly by the fascist leaders because they and they approved of it a great deal. I mean, Mussolini and Le Bonne became pen pals, they wrote letters to each other, you know, about his work.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Vietnam library where Hitler wrote a lot of Mein Kanf. It's worth, I think, spelling out exactly how you get from an analysis of crowd behavior that says people lose their heads, go crazy and become bestial animals. How you get from that to fascism? What was the interest for people like Mussolini? And the answer to that is that for Gustav LeBon, the way you respond to what he perceived as the madness of crowds and the propensity for completely irrational behavior within them is to put the right kind of leader in front of a crowd to marshal them, to lead these sort of gullible childlike creatures that are crowd members in the right direction, i.e. towards the maintenance of traditional hierarchical power and order.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's the tendrils, that's exactly the right way of putting it. It was, as I say, phenomenally successful book and was widely read as soon as it came out in the 1890s. It was read by presidents and politicians around the world from Japan to the US. And significantly in the first instance, it was read by Benito Mussolini, the soon-to-be fascist leader of Italy. It was read by Joseph Goebbels, the architects of Nazi propaganda. And it was almost certainly read by Hitler himself. There's a German academic who argues that Hitler's Mein Kampf actually plagiarizes the crowd directly. I don't read German. I've not been able to verify that. This is a sort of leading German academic has sort of found enough kind of threads between the two. And there was definitely a copy, we know.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Civilized of men upon joining a crowd becomes a barbarian. And that is the cornerstone of his crowd theory, and it's something this idea of the madness of crowds, the idea that violence is contagious and spreads even amongst people who might otherwise have their wits about them and be fine upstanding members of society. That is the essence of what is called traditional crowd theory. It's the essence of Le Bonne's theory. And it has gone on to influence, as I hope we'll discuss, everything from Mussolini and Hitler to the policing of protests in the 20th century.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Identified as the founder of crowd theory as a thing, as an intellectual discipline. Unfortunately, his work of crowd theory, the crowd, a study of the popular mind published first in French, immediately translated into 19 different languages. So it really spreads like wildfire is without any kind of empirical work or justification at all. I mean, clearly seeing the Paris commune, seeing these palaces set on fire by the people of the Paris commune, it drives them kind of crazy and he's determined to explain it, but he doesn't actually sort of, he doesn't interview anybody who was there. He doesn't really describe it in any detail. He simply reasons that anybody who has joined this crowd has become a barbarian, essentially, that even I think the quotas, even the most”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of Paris set on fire during the Paris Commune And this sort of all crystallizes for him, you know, the currents of the day discussing what are we to do with all of these new masked kind of huddled pour of the major cities. Well, they're now setting things on fire, and the only possible explanation for this is that they have gone completely mad. Like that is, in essence, the kind of the core of the Le Bonne argument on crowds. He turns it into a book called The Crowd, a study of the popular mind, which was published sort of 15 or so years later in the 1890s. And that book goes on to be arguably the best-selling work of social psychology of all time. So, you know, LeBon's name is still thrown around today in 2024, approvingly, you know, without by people who I think don't really know a great deal about him. But he's the guy who founded crowd theory, and he is the guy that is usually.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Intellectual sort of current of the late 19th century, Gustav Lebon himself, as a young man, as you say, in his twenties, had been an ambulanceman in the Franco Prussian War and seemed presumably completely horrendous and unimaginably gory things. The Franco-Prussian war finished in 1870 and the siege of Paris began, which led directly to the Paris commune, this sort of revolutionary uprising, an attempt to sort of finish the 1789 revolution that had been still incomplete. And Gustav Le Bon witnessed the Paris Commune, you know, he's just, he barely over the trauma of the Franco-Prussian War would be my thesis, and returns to his beloved Paris thinking, okay, well, we've lost the war, but maybe things can return to normal mail and seize the palaces of the rich and powerful, of the Ancient regime.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great political ferment. And there was a great deal of concern from people on the sort of conservative right like Gustav Le Bon about just what these new huddled masses yearning to be free were going to get up to if they were denied that a free term. It was a source of grave concern. And so people were investing, you know, people in the sort of intellectual elite like Gustav Le Bon were investigating the behavior and psychology of crowds in a way that overlaps a lot with criminology. So there's a lot of skull measuring going on at this particular moment in history. There is an idea that there is such a thing as a criminal mind that the working poor or indeed the non-working poor there's something mentally defective there. I mean it's all extremely sort of dodgy, discredited sort of stuff, but this is posed as part of the”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But he also studied horses. Anything that caught his imagination, he would sort of develop into a sort of very in-depth study. Crowds were something that were of great interest in the late 19th century in Europe in particular because for the very simple reason the cities were exploding in size. So cities like London and Paris, but also Chicago and New York as the sort of West Industrialized at an extraordinary rate, it required hundreds of thousands millions even of new workers to come to the cities and they often live in very overcrowded slum-like conditions and unhappy with their lot and demanding things like democracy and in some cases socialism have a rising feminist movement at this point as well. You have trade unions beginning to form. It's a moment of”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's the sort of the pantomime villain of my book, but also someone who's completely fascinating. And I think really underrated in terms of the reach of his work, both in the early 20th century but on into the present day, he was a polymath, Gustav Lebon. He was somebody who really aspired to be part of the French intellectual elite in the late 19th century. He was constantly trying to get accepted into the Academy of Sciences and never quite made it, but he conducted a number of really wide-ranging studies of everything from sort of, I mean, he was very interested in skulls and phrenology and eugenics and other discredited pseudosciences that Dobtell savvy very much with fascism, sort of forerunners, really, for a lot of fascist thinking.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That crowd, and you're much more likely to follow a set of expected behavioral patterns, you know, clapping at the right time. It's their concert audience. Like you would never stand up and start singing an England football song in the middle of a classical music concert. That is not the social norm of that group. Everybody would look at you as scunts and you would be thrown out. And yeah, that's about the type of crowd in terms of open and closed as well as the fact that they have very different interests.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're going to have a high level of security. The security you're going to be looking out for maybe opponents of that political leader looking to disrupt them. There's going to be, you know, it will be bounded in the way that a football stadium or sports stadium is such that there is a limit to the number of people. It's finite, the size of that crowd. It can't just keep sort of unfurling and sort of spreading out into the surrounding streets. Once you're in, you sit down and you pay attention and you stand when you are instructed to stand by the person on the podium or when it's the social norm to stand up and to give a standing ovation and you have may have access to toilets and sort of basic bar and cafe facilities. Everything is sort of much more straightened, I would say, in terms of the options available to you as a member of.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Body of any kind and crucially there's a lot about the physicality of the crowd here. It's not, it shouldn't be bounded by the edges. I mean, an open crowd is what it sounds like. People come and go as they please, they behave in a manner that is sort of determined collectively, but it's not handed down from above. So there might be social norms to that crowd. You're in the England football crowd celebrating. Well, you're probably going to sing songs about England. You might be drinking beer. You know, there are certain common behavioural patterns that you might have your face painted with a flag. So there are certain things that will repeat throughout that, and yet it is much more unruly and much less well-behaved, I suppose, and much less polite in how it comports itself. The difference between that and a closed crowd, let's say you've got a political rally in a taking place in a sports stadium.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a really great distinction, I think, in terms of understanding kind of the power of a crowd and its level its level of orderliness. I mean, it will often tell us so much about the sort of behavior and psychology of that crowd. So the open crowd is sort of the freely assembling, one that has not been summoned perhaps by anyone in a position of power or authority, something that forms very organically. Let's say the England football team has just won the World Cup, a hypothesis that nobody below the age of about 60 will remember. But the instinct would be, I think, for a lot of people in this hypothetical eventuality to rush to the center of the city to celebrate. That would be an open crowd. It would be something that has not been is not official, has not been summoned by”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or a political demo, or a football match. So there are two types of crowd ultimately is one way of reducing it, a psychological crowd where they are bonded together by some shared purpose or interest, and then a physical crowd, which is just being in the same place at the same time. Sometimes these things overlap, you know, as at a football match. You can have one without the other. You could argue that a psychological crowd could be formed online by supporters of the same political candidate sharing ideas and links and sort of supporting one another, but they're not bonded together physically in the same space. And it's really where the nexus of those two things meet that I'm really interested in. It's the sort of particularly the powerful feelings, the sense of validation and the things it does to our sense of self to be in physical space for people that we share something in common.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“University based crowd psychology is between a physical and a psychological crowd. So if you have, say, 500 people moving through a major intercity train station at rush hour like Penn Station in New York or Victoria Station in London, those people are a physical crowd. They are obviously gathered in the same place, but they are all moving sort of not as a flock of birds but sort of a much messier kind of congregation of people all streaming in different directions and crucially they're not bonded by a unifying set of ideas or purpose or a political ideology or even a passion for the same form of music that would bond people together socially in the context of say a rock festival.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's been sort of part of that journey has been categorizing and how you define and categorize the different varieties of crowd and their behavior. One crucial distinction that I discovered quite early on from the field of, you know,”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Family, but that there was something else that had been denied to us that felt really important, and that thing was strangers. It was the congregation of strangers and the way that... We feel differently in large crowds, or indeed even in small crowds, particularly if there is something that connects us to that crowd. So I embarked on a journey from that point that took me deep into crowd psychology and sort of the history of how we've thought about gatherings of strangers. And the really fascinating politics of that history as well.”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's been quite an interesting journey to get to this point. I mean, I've been a freelance writer for 15 or 20 years at this point, reporting on protests, often sort of riots and sort of more. Contestational protests both in Spain and in the UK. Done a lot of my reporting from Spain. I was also a music journalist for many years. I often describe myself as a recovering music journalist. I've sort of left the floor a little bit to some younger writers now in that regard. But attending large music festivals with hundreds of thousands of people or Notting Hill Carnival where it's up to a million people a day, I encountered crowds on a regular basis in their many and varied forms. I was there on Tottenham High Street in North London when the riots of 2011 broke out and I saw a iconic London double-decker bus set on fire, some quite shocking, striking and indeed historic scenes. And I realized at a certain point during the first months of the COVID lockdown in 2020 that I was not only missing my dear friends and”
2024-11-24 · Intelligence Squared · How Crowd Psychology Made the Modern World, with Dan Hancox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT