Sánchez and herd mentality: Le Bon's old recipe

Sánchez and herd mentality: Le Bon's old recipe

The resignation that never was from Pedro Sánchez has brought an old manual back to the table: that of crowd psychology. In the days before his public appearance, Spain's prime minister fed the suspense with a public letter and a spiritual retreat that many read as an exercise in social engineering. The question is not whether it worked, but why it works. The answer lies in an 1895 book in which Gustave Le Bon set out to explain how an anonymous crowd can turn a rational citizen into an emotional automaton. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind has not expired: it applies just as well to a political rally, a financial bubble or a wildebeest stampede in the Serengeti.

The herd instinct: from wildebeest to the Running of the Bulls

Herd behavior is not a metaphor. It is biology. Evolutionary biologist William Donald Hamilton argued in his paper Geometry for the Selfish Herd that each individual in a herd reduces their personal risk by moving toward the center of the group. The herd seems to act as a single unit, but its function emerges from uncoordinated decisions by individuals seeking their own wellbeing. The same happens with the wildebeest that each year hurl themselves into a crocodile-filled river: it is not the smartest ones who go first, but simply whoever peine to be there. Those behind push those in front and there is no turning back. Thousands drown or are crushed to death, but the corpses cushion the fall of those that trinc. Enough survive that the bad decision never gets corrected.

That pattern repeats itself in human crowds. At the San Fermín festival in Pamplona, healthy young men run in front of fighting bulls that, in their natural environment, behave peacefully almost all the time. The pleasure lies not in the risk, but in the chance that someone else gets gored. At demonstrations, in stadiums, at religious gatherings and in speculative bubbles, the individual dissolves into a mass that responds to impulses, not to reasons. Research into decision-making in large groups points to an uncomfortable fact: in groups of 200 people or more, just 5% of informed individuals is enough to steer the rest. And the larger the group, the smaller the proportion of people who actually know what they are doing.

Nietzsche, the Übermensch and herd sarracena

Friedrich Nietzsche gave a name to what he saw: herd sarracena. A submissive, unreflective human behavior that accepts the dominant values of civilization without questioning them. For the German philosopher, there were two kinds of life: one anesthetized, sickly and fragile, and another brimming with joy, healthy and strong. The first is the life of habit; the second, that of the individual ethos. Some argue that much of the modern left, which claims Nietzsche as its own, reproduces exactly what Nietzsche despised: submission to a collective narrative imposed from above.

Some argue that socialism seeks to keep people employed so that their freedom remains conditional, because whoever employs you dominates you. The great dominator would be the State. In Cuba, self-employment was banned and persecuted for years; today there is some room for it, but under state control so that the example does not spread. What socialists find uncomfortable is people's freedom, however much they claim otherwise. Imposed identity replaces chosen identity.

The cobi19 as a rehearsal for the deconstruction of the individual

Behind the cobi19 plot, according to part of the critical analysis, lies the imposition of a new model of society: deconstructing the individual to turn them into part of the mass. It is nothing new in history. Religions have always been a factor of cohesion: a code of behavior, rituals of solidarity and the persecution of dissenters. Durkheim studied it; Trotter attributed it to the herd instinct, one of the four instincts that shape human life alongside self-preservation, nutrition and sens.

In that context, some argue that the absence of a control group in the mass vaccination campaign became the central argument of the critics. Without a control group there is no valid scientific experiment, and without one it is impossible to compare whether health problems appear in the vaccinated or the unvaccinated. The suspicion, not confirmed by health authorities, is that the unvaccinated population could have acted as a natural control. The scientific community rejects that reading: the clinical trials prior to authorization did include control groups. The debate, in any case, remains open on the margins of the official narrative.

The leader who does not know the route

In chimpanzee herds, once they have eaten their fill, it may be an infant or a lower-ranking individual who starts the march. It is not the smartest or the strongest: it is the one in the biggest hurry. Something similar happens in human groups. The leader does not always know the way; sometimes he just walks faster. And the mass, which cannot turn back, trinc him to the cliff's edge.

Sánchez's resignation that never came fits that pattern. A leader who withdraws for a few days, plays dead, and returns as if resurrected. The liturgy is no accident: it fills the empty niche left by religious faith. Social engineers know syncretism well. Masses are easy to domesticate when you give them a narrative, an enemy and a ritual. The problem is that, like the wildebeest, those at the back push those in front. And those in front, sometimes, can no longer stop.

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The analysis stalls here. Crowd psychology explains the mechanism, but not why it remains so effective. Perhaps because, as Buddha said, happiness is the absence of pain, and the mass promises exactly that: the absence of the responsibility to decide.