masses

follower

populism

is a great judge of things, for they are in natural ignorance, which is man's true state.

is all that which sets no value on itself good or ill based on specific grounds, but which feels itself 'just like everybody,' and nevertheless is not concerned about it... is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else.

Strictly speaking, the mass, as a psychological fact, can be defined without waiting for individuals to appear in mass formation. In the presence of one individual we can decide whether he is 'mass' or not. The mass is all that which sets no value on itself good or ill based on specific grounds, but which feels itself 'just like everybody,' and nevertheless is not concerned about it... is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else. Jose Ortega y Gasset

Only a few individuals succeed in throwing off mythology in a time of a certain intellectual supremacy-- the mass never frees itself. Carl Jung

is a criminal and violent underworld generated by the unsettling dynamism of economic growth.

Arendt maintained that most of the recruits to totalitarian movements belonged to the 'masses': uprooted, disoriented people who no longer had any clear sense of reality or self-interest because the world they had inhabited had been destroyed by the upheavals of unemployment, inflation, war, and revolution. But their condition was only one facet of a more widespread experience of 'superfluousness.' If these helpless, passive people were ideally suited to mass membership of totalitarian movements, the leaders and activist came from an older group of 'superfluous' people whom Arendt calls 'the mob': a criminal and violent underworld generated by the unsettling dynamism of economic growth.34 Imperialism had exported unscrupulous adventurers like these across the globe and offered them 'infinite possibilities for crimes committed in the spirit of play.'35 This nihilism and its practices, reimported into Europe by movements seeking to emulate imperialism, was one of the sources of totalitarian violence.' (Canovan in Villa 2000: 31) . . . .'Hanna Pitkin maintains that totalitarianism-as-subject represents the first appearance in Arendt's work of what she calls 'the Blob,' a kind of monstrous force that seems to take over human beings and use them as its instruments.

is guided by the free expansion of his vital desires and his radical ingratitude towards all that has made possible the ease of his existence.

This leads us to note down in our psychological chart of the mass-man of today two fundamental traits: the free expansion of his vital desires, and, therefore, of his personality... and his radical ingratitude towards all that has made possible the ease of his existence. These traits together make up the well-known psychology of the spoilt child. Jose Ortega y Gasset

is made to make it believe itself to be omnipotent on condition that it does nothing.

RABBLE, n. In a republic, those who exercise a supreme authority tempered by fraudulent elections. The rabble is like the sacred Simurgh, of Arabian fable - omnipotent on condition that it do nothing.

Prejudices are what rule the vulgar crowd. Voltaire

is subject to compulsive behaviors and psychological projections that resemble hysteria and traumatic neuroses.

For Adorno, the masses were seen as subject to compulsive behaviors and psychological projections that resembled hysteria and traumatic neuroses.

masses, n.All

masses