A pathological aspect of which our science has not yet clearly pierced the mysteries or surrounded the contours

These are apparently minor pathological aspects. If one were dealing with major pathologies, psychiatry and psychoanalysis could easily have highlighted them and made them recognize them as such by the populations.However, an insidious drift of the psychic state, widespread at the scale of a population, can lead to crowd phenomena of which no one really becomes aware. This is the case of endemic neurosis, discovered by Freud more than a century ago and which everyone has heard about, but which only specialists can identify. Many other disorders can affect populations without anyone being able to characterize them or measure their impact on the course of history.

The combination of the small changes present in each individual can result in mass phenomena. We have the same kind of situation with chain reactions in a uranium bomb, or in a nuclear reactor. When the fuel rods are drawn closer, the mutual influences only increase very slightly, but this is enough for the bombardment of particles to cause a gradual warming which in turn increases the bombardment. It is enough to have a little too close to it so that the process can no longer be controlled and the reaction packs up.

Human psychism has probably been developed in such a way as to ensure a certain stability in community life, while generating group phenomena such as a common desire to hunt mammoth or harvest honey. Given the danger of these companies, it was necessary for certain impulses to warm up each other for the decision to be taken. This type of phenomenon is still current, except that the aims are generally less grounded: they are found behind all crowd movements, for example before political intervention, a trade union demonstration, a punitive expedition, or even a declaration of war.

This presupposes the exchange of signals between different individuals, subtle enough to generate group action while refreating it when the circumstances are unfavourable. Such psychological self-regulation, based on individual psyches, is easily challenged by various excitation or inhibition factors. That is why it is essential to examine what has been and can still be the causes of drifts or packs, at the origin of collective behaviors that have brought us where we are.

The ecological problem actually arises as a result of widespread behaviour. Knowing the psychic motors, conscious or unconscious, that determine them is indispensable – especially in our age of globalization. It is otherwise not possible to understand the evolution of our society towards mass phenomena such as consumerism, waste, bulimia, pollution and other causes of environmental destruction, not to mention the socio-economic imbroglios that are responsible for amplifying them.

The engines of these mass movements are obviously psychological. They can result either from natural tendencies or latent alterations, of which it is urgent to pierce mysteries and to identify contours…