Olivia: Jackson, you go first. Review 'Crowds and Power' in exactly five words. Jackson: Okay… ‘Humans are weird, scary, herd animals.’ Olivia: That's… surprisingly accurate. Mine is: ‘Don't get touched. Join everyone.’ Jackson: Oh, I like that. It’s cryptic and a little creepy, which feels about right for this book. It’s not exactly a light beach read, is it? Olivia: Not in the slightest. That perfectly sets up our deep dive into Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti. And what's wild is that Canetti wasn't a sociologist or a political scientist. He was a Nobel Prize-winning novelist with a doctorate in chemistry, who became obsessed with this topic after witnessing political riots and the burning of the Palace of Justice in Vienna in 1927. Jackson: A chemist-novelist writing about mob psychology? Okay, that explains why this book feels so different. It’s not your typical academic text with footnotes and data tables. It reads more like a dark philosophical poem about humanity. Olivia: Exactly. And that’s why it’s so polarizing. Critics and readers are divided. Some find it to be a work of profound genius, while others dismiss it as unscientific speculation. But his unique perspective is what makes it so powerful. He’s looking at us like an alien anthropologist trying to figure out this bizarre species. Jackson: Well, let's get into it. Your five-word review, "Don't get touched. Join everyone." Where does that come from? It sounds like a public health announcement for the extremely lonely.

Olivia: It’s actually the absolute core of Canetti’s entire theory. He argues that one of the most fundamental, primal fears hardwired into every human is the fear of being touched by something unknown. Jackson: Hold on, the fear of being touched? More than, say, the fear of heights or public speaking or giant spiders? Olivia: He says it’s deeper than that. Think about walking alone in a dark forest. Every rustle of leaves, every branch that brushes your shoulder, makes you jump. Or even in a city, if a stranger on an empty street suddenly reaches out and touches your arm, your entire nervous system screams ‘DANGER.’ It’s a violation of your personal space, a breach of the boundary that defines you as an individual. Jackson: Okay, I can see that. The unwanted touch is deeply unsettling. It’s an intrusion. But we live in crowded cities, we pack into subways, we go to concerts. We’re constantly being touched by strangers. Olivia: And that is the paradox that fascinated Canetti! He says there is only one situation in which this primal fear completely vanishes and actually inverts into its opposite: inside a crowd. When you are pressed shoulder-to-shoulder in a dense mass of people, you are no longer afraid of being touched. Jackson: Right, because you expect it. It's part of the deal when you buy a ticket for the front row. But it’s more than just not being afraid, isn't it? Sometimes it feels… good. Like at a massive concert or a sports final, when everyone is singing the same song or cheering for the same goal. The physical contact with strangers feels like connection, not a threat. Olivia: Precisely! Canetti calls this moment the ‘discharge.’ It’s a magical point where the boundaries between individuals dissolve. All the things that separate us in normal life—our status, our wealth, our private anxieties—they all melt away. In that moment, you are not you anymore. You are part of a larger, pulsating body. The fear of the other person’s touch disappears because, for a brief time, there is no other person. There is only the crowd. And in that unity, there is a profound sense of relief and equality. Jackson: So the crowd is an escape. We’re not just escaping loneliness, we’re escaping the very fear of other people by literally merging with them. That’s a wild idea. It’s like the only way to stop being afraid of the tiger is to become the tiger. Olivia: That is a perfect way to put it. You surrender your individuality, and in return, you get a feeling of immense power and safety. You are no longer a fragile, isolated person, but a cell in an enormous, invincible organism. This is the fundamental bargain of the crowd. Jackson: It makes me think about why people join all sorts of groups, not just physical crowds. Online communities, political movements, even intense corporate cultures. Maybe they’re all offering a version of this ‘discharge’—a place where you can shed your individual fears and belong to something bigger. Olivia: Canetti would absolutely agree. He saw this dynamic everywhere. And once that crowd is formed, once we’ve made that bargain and stepped inside… it starts to behave in very strange ways. It takes on a life of its own.

Jackson: Okay, so we join the crowd to lose our fear of each other. We get this moment of ‘discharge’ and feel connected. But what happens next? Does the crowd just stand there feeling good about itself? Olivia: Not at all. And this is the next crucial step. Canetti says the crowd, once formed, stops being a collection of people and becomes an ‘it.’ A single entity. He describes it almost as a living beast with its own primal instincts. Jackson: A beast? What kind of beast? What does it want? Olivia: First and foremost, it wants to grow. A crowd’s most fundamental desire is to become larger. It wants to seize everyone and everything it can. Canetti says a crowd can never have enough people. This is why you see a small protest quickly swell as onlookers get swept up in the energy and join in. The crowd’s gravity pulls them in. Jackson: That sounds exactly like a Twitter mob or a viral trend. It starts small, but its only goal is to grow, to get more retweets, more followers, more people piling on until it dominates the entire conversation. It’s hungry. Olivia: It’s incredibly hungry. And it loves density. A crowd wants to be packed as tightly as possible, because that density enhances the feeling of unity and power. It’s also why panic is so dangerous. Canetti says panic is the disintegration of the crowd. The moment people start thinking as individuals again—‘I need to get out,’ ‘I need to save myself’—the collective beast dies, and the primal fear of being touched by others returns with a vengeance. That’s when a stampede happens. Jackson: Wow. So the crowd beast has to stay unified to survive. It needs to grow, and it needs to stay dense. What else? Does it have a brain? Olivia: It needs a direction. A crowd can’t just exist; it needs a goal, even a simple one. Marching towards a landmark, chanting a slogan, focusing on a stage at a concert. This direction gives the beast purpose and keeps it from falling apart. Without a direction, it will dissipate. Jackson: So, growth, density, and direction. It’s like a living organism. It needs to feed, it needs a strong core, and it needs to be moving somewhere. You mentioned the ‘discharge’ earlier. Is that the beast’s ultimate goal? Olivia: Yes, the discharge is the climax. It's the moment of absolute equality and release that the crowd is always striving for. It’s when the last vestiges of individuality are shed. Canetti gives this incredible example from the Shiite festival of Ashura, where participants engage in ritual mourning that builds to a frenzy of shared grief. In that moment, their personal pain becomes a collective agony, and they are all one. It’s a powerful, cathartic release that binds them together. Jackson: That’s intense. It’s a bit terrifying, too. This beast sounds powerful and liberating, but also mindless and potentially very dangerous. If it just wants to grow and move, it can probably trample anything in its path without a second thought. Olivia: Absolutely. The crowd itself is amoral. It’s a force of nature. It can be a force for revolution and liberation, or it can be a lynch mob. The beast doesn’t care. Which brings us to the most unsettling part of Canetti’s work: who holds the leash? Jackson: The leader. Olivia: The leader. The one who gives the beast its direction. And Canetti’s theory of power is perhaps the most controversial and darkest part of the entire book.

Jackson: Okay, so this powerful, unified crowd-beast is ready and waiting for orders. How does the leader actually control it? What is the secret to power, according to Canetti? Olivia: The secret is deeply disturbing. Canetti argues that the absolute core of power, its most primitive and essential element, is the desire to be the survivor. Jackson: The survivor? What do you mean? Like, winning a competition? Olivia: No. I mean literally being the last one alive. The ruler, at the most primal level, is the one who stands while others fall. Every command they give is a little death sentence that the subordinate escapes by obeying. When a general sends troops into battle, he survives while they may die. When a king sentences a man to death, the king’s power is affirmed by his own continued existence in the face of another’s annihilation. Jackson: Whoa, that is bleak. That’s a really dark way to look at leadership. Are you saying every leader, from a CEO to a prime minister, is secretly a paranoid megalomaniac who wants to be the last one standing? That sounds like a cartoon villain. Olivia: It’s a point of major controversy in the book, and many critics found it to be a reductive and sweeping generalization. Canetti is not necessarily saying your manager at work consciously wants you dead. He’s describing a deep, psychological, almost biological instinct that underpins the structure of power. Power, for him, is fundamentally about controlling life and death. The leader is the one who has the power to decide who lives and who dies, even if it’s just symbolically, like firing someone. The act of commanding reinforces the commander’s feeling of being the survivor. Jackson: So it’s a psychological high. ‘I gave an order, you obeyed, therefore I am more real, more permanent than you.’ Olivia: Exactly. And this leads to what Canetti saw as the defining characteristic of the powerful: paranoia. The ruler is obsessed with potential threats because every other person is a potential rival survivor. He draws on the famous case of Daniel Paul Schreber, a German judge whose memoirs of his own psychosis became a key text for Freud. Canetti saw Schreber’s detailed paranoid delusions—of being transformed, of being persecuted by rays, of cosmic battles—as a perfect map of the mind of the ruler. The paranoid person, like the ruler, sees threats and conspiracies everywhere, and their world is structured by commands and hidden enemies. Jackson: That’s fascinating and terrifying. It connects the dots between absolute power and a kind of madness. The more power you have, the more you have to fear, and the more you become isolated in your own survival. You’re the only one left on the throne, but you’re also completely alone. Olivia: Precisely. The ultimate survivor is ultimately alone. This is the tragic paradox of power in Canetti’s view. The leader stands apart from the crowd they command, never able to experience the joyful ‘discharge’ and release that the crowd members feel. They are forever the individual, the one who must watch, command, and, above all, survive.

Jackson: Wow. So if we trace it all the way back, it’s an incredible chain reaction. It starts with my own personal, primal fear of a stranger’s touch on a dark street. Olivia: Yes, that individual fear drives you to seek the safety of the crowd, to dissolve yourself into a larger whole. Jackson: And that crowd becomes this powerful, hungry beast that needs a direction. It’s a force of nature waiting to be aimed. Olivia: And the person who aims it, the ruler, is driven by an even deeper, darker fear: the fear of not surviving. They use commands to keep death at a distance and affirm their own existence, but it traps them in a state of permanent paranoia. Jackson: It’s a complete, self-contained ecosystem of fear. From the bottom to the top. It really makes you look at history, and even current events, through a completely different lens. It’s not about politics or economics anymore; it’s about these raw, primal, psychological drives. Olivia: That’s the genius of Crowds and Power. It’s a difficult, strange, and sometimes maddening book, but it forces you to look underneath the surface of society. Canetti gives us a language to talk about the irrational forces that shape our world, from the joy of a music festival to the horror of a totalitarian rally. Jackson: It makes you question every group you’re a part of. The office team, the political party, the online fandom. What’s the bargain I’m making? What part of myself am I giving up to belong? And what direction is this crowd taking me? Olivia: That’s the perfect question to end on. It’s a question Canetti wanted everyone to ask. So, for our listeners, here’s a final thought to take with you: What crowd have you been a part of where you felt that total loss of self, for better or for worse? Jackson: We'd love to hear your stories. Find us on our social channels and share your experience. It’s a feeling I think we’ve all had, but maybe never had the words for until now. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.