Penguin Active Reading 1: Theseus and the Minotaur (+ CD-ROM)

Their suggestibility is increased to the point where they cease to have any judgment or will of their own. They become very ex]citable, they lose all sense of individual or collective responsibility, they are subject to sudden accesses of rage, enthusiasm and panic. In a word, a man in a crowd behaves as though he had swallowed a large dose of some powerful intoxicant. He is a victim of what I have called "herd-poisoning." Like alcohol, herd-poison is an active, extraverted drug. The crowd-intoxicated individual escapes from responsibility, in]telligence and morality into a kind of frantic, animal mindlessness. During his long career as an agitator, Hitler had studied the effects of herd-poison and had learned how to exploit them for his own purposes. He had discovered that the orator can appeal to those "hidden forces" which motivate men's actions, much more effec]tively than can the writer. Reading is a private, not a collective activity. The writer speaks only to indi]viduals, sitting by themselves in a state of normal sobriety ...»