The crowd is always a deceiver. No one expressed this more concisely than Simone Weil, when she said, “conscience is deceived by the social.” Conscience is individual, social is collective, and the two are at odds. Likewise, sanity is individual and mania is collective.
Within the crowd, malice appears as duty, honor, order and justice. To reside in the crowd is to be deceived; the only question is how much.