Philosophy
The Masses and Power
CevvelaPhilosophy
The Masses and Power
Elias Canetti · Ayrıntı Yayınları · 1960
7
Cevvela Score
7.3 (3.616 oy)
Reader Score
Summary
A massive sociological study examining how crowds form, the psychology of crowds, and how those in power—driven by the instinct for survival—manipulate and exploit the crowd.
Quotes from Cevvela
“The holder of power proves his strength through the pleasure he takes in the death of others.”
“A person who joins the crowd loses their own face and becomes only a single cell of the crowd.”
“A command is an invisible arrow shot at the one who receives it, and it always leaves a wound in the soul.”
“The surviving leader’s greatest fear is that those around him will one day stop being victims.”
“Fear is the strongest — yet the most rotten — cement holding the crowd together.”
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Reader Score: 7.3 / 10(3.616 votes)
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Canetti shatters the notion that power is, in essence, nothing more than a paranoid desire for "survival." The book shows how authority turns everyone around it into a victim just to stay afloat, and how it transforms this into an arrow of violence through orders. Cevvela’s conflict with that unjust system finds its full echo here. The leader’s power rises on the corpses of his subordinates. You come to realize how, while carrying out the orders given to you, you are actually killing your own sense of self—and that you are nothing more than an ordinary pawn in the leader’s paranoid game of survival.