I keep returning to a question that feels both moral and practical: if a crowd causes harm without a single visible leader, where does responsibility sit?
Here are the core points that shape how I think about it:
- We normally fear the touch of strangers, but the crowd is the place where that fear flips into its opposite. In the crowd, the fear of touch falls away.
- Crowds are equalizing forces: inside them, social distinctions are flattened, at least for a time.
- The open crowd is “natural” and survives by growth; it exists only as long as it keeps growing, and it disintegrates when it stops.
- The closed crowd does the opposite: it trades growth for permanence and can be reassembled.
Taken together, this makes “leaderless” harm feel less mysterious. The crowd equalizes individuals, and (when open) survives by growth. When harm happens inside that movement, responsibility doesn’t disappear — it feels harder to pin to a single person because the crowd’s equality blurs individual distinction.
That doesn’t absolve anyone. It does explain why assigning blame after the fact feels slippery, and why crowds can seem both moral and monstrous in the same hour.