Madness of Crowds and Money
The Leonardos of the Cinquecento had their patrons. That patronage system is long gone; we’ve replaced it with popularity contests on a grand scale. What does this mean for entrepreneurs? It means entrepreneurs need to understand “crowd psychology” more than ever.
Gustave Le Bon
The trail of interest in “crowd psychology” goes back to ancient Greece where there was a great deal of worry about the “tyranny of the masses (demos).” This trail of fascination with the madness of crowds has been meandering through the years. The trail reached a prominent point in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gustave Le Bon’s “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” is a good popularization of the attitudes of the period.
We’ve now made it through the twentieth century, stopped worrying about the madness and started loving it. The madness of crowds can make us money.
