In 1895, French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon published a curious little book titled The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. In it, he sought to understand a new force shaping the modern world—not the individual, not the ruler, not even the nation, but the crowd.

A crowd, Le Bon argued, is not simply a gathering of people. It is a psychological phenomenon, a distinct creature governed not by reason but by suggestion, imitation, and impulse. Submerged in the crowd’s internal mimesis, the individual begins to dissolve. “He is no longer himself,” Le Bon writes, “but has become an automation who has ceased to be guided by his will.” The capacity for reflection dulls. Instincts take over. Appetite triumphs. Images overpower ideas.

The first casualty in a crowd is the self.

The second is judgment. “A crowd is closely akin to quite primitive beings,” Le Bon observes. “Its acts are far more under the influence of the spinal cord than of the brain.” Higher faculties of reason shrink to make way for reflexes and raw force. Scalpels get tossed for wrecking balls. “Crowds cannot discern truth from error, nor can they form a precise judgment on any matter. A throng knows neither doubt nor uncertainty.”

The third casualty is the will. A crowd may erupt in righteous passion, but its energy is erratic. “Though the wishes of crowds are frenzied, they are not durable. Crowds are as incapable of willing as of thinking for any length of time.” They tear down easily enough, but they cannot build. They may rise in moral fervour, but they cannot sustain moral purpose. They exalt and condemn in the same breath, mistaking myth for memory, sentiment for fact.

Le Bon’s classic text is methodical and unnervingly lucid—an autopsy of the collective mind. To read The Crowd today is to make an important descent. First, relief: Here is a diagnosis of the degeneration I’m observing in the political leaders I hold in contempt—their slavish acolytes, the chant-like predictability of their passions, the bullying spirit of their sanctimony. Then, a pause, catching an image fleeing the mirror of an age trapped in ideology: Wait. The same impulses infiltrated the progressive mind and its elite machinery over the last decade—the slogans, the purges, the spine-softening conformity. The Left, for all its pride in charting an ever more enlightened tomorrow, is susceptible to the same temptations. And then, upon further digestion, a not-so-fun recognition: The seductions of the crowd, if I’m not watchful, could suck me in too.

It is humbling to admit just how vulnerable we’ve all become to the “crowds” of our day. Many of us who read and write for Comment were formed by institutions and inheritances meant to sharpen the mind against the sway of mass sentiment: liberal arts educations that thickened the moral imagination, workplaces that welcomed spirited debate, families that taught us to attend to the conscience, faith communities that bound us to a transforming, self-burning Love.

But these guiding lights—hallmarks of both Tocquevillian democracy and, separately but interrelatedly, Christianity—are flickering. One by one, they are being drawn into the very vortex they were meant to resist. Institutions of higher learning, once bastions of intellectual rigour, now face mounting pressures—from donors, ideologues, and anxious publics—that make genuine inquiry harder to sustain. Parents surrender to the ease of letting devices raise their children. Artificial intelligence expands from occasional help to habitual crutch. Crosses are co-opted by wolves wearing Botox and a sneer—media darlings of a politicized faith, performing holiness while peddling spite. And gradually, almost imperceptibly, we drift—from discernment to conformity, from original thought to a haze of reactivity.

It has always been hard to discern what’s real apart from the crowd. So much of adolescence is suffering one’s way toward a mature understanding of the dance between the rules of communal belonging and the sparks of one’s own agency. Discernment—being able to look at something and understand what it is, to perceive its moral and spiritual character accurately—rarely shows up fully formed in a person. It is hard work, the fruit of trillions of intricate inputs and ongoing exercise.

But the formation and upkeep of one’s discerning faculties are facing new headwinds. We are oversaturated with information, opinions, and digital stimuli. Bombarded by moral urgencies built on arbitrary value systems, our minds become like crowded rooms with no exit, every crisis demanding a reaction. Actual thinking has grown harder; conviction frays into fatigue. We numb out and we outsource our judgment: to ideological checklists and package-deal politics, to silver-tongued influencers and media that feeds our worldview. And now, of course, there is artificial intelligence, ready to do the cognitive bricklaying on our baseline intuitions.

There are also some uniquely American hurdles: a wishful complacency shaped by 160 years without war on our soil, a cultural impatience more at ease with performative combat than with sustained moral reflection, a deep discomfort with silence. We like to “discern” just enough to pick a side, but rarely do we dwell in the grey long enough to remain attuned to new realities that might call into question where we’ve chosen to settle. Our metrics for the good are loud, numeric, and, well, masculine—rising and grinding, bigger audiences, more followers, a steamrolling dominance, “crushing it”—while the slow, qualitative potency of critical yeast gets overlooked.

And then there are the burdens of pluralism itself—not the fact of it, but our failure to respond with creative joy. It’s hard to see clearly when it feels like you’re doing it alone. The coherence that once came from a shared grammar of meaning has given way to interpretive free fall. We now inhabit diverging realities, shaped by competing authorities and media ecosystems—some incomplete, others dishonest, few of them shared. Scripture, tradition, even moral norms can be bent to buttress the pride of the tribe, while integrated ethical frameworks like Catholic social teaching are ignored. Our schools form strategists of self-optimization, not sages who sacrifice for the common good. We’ve grown fluent in the ways and means of achievement, but strikingly inarticulate about the hungers beneath.

This issue was born of a question: How do you awaken the heart and educate the spirit?

It’s a risky one to ask in a Reformed-inflected, upper-middlebrow journal. But it’s time. There is no shortage of intelligence today—whether human or machine. We see more college degrees walking around than at any other point in human history, and brilliance in the form of new discoveries, inventions, and sharp analysis abound.

But wise people, those who taste truth before it’s trending, who can name evil without mirroring it, who forgo fashionable opinions for a deeper attunement to the Holy Spirit and to the human person—such people are rare. Sometimes, it seems, increasingly so.

There is a rumbling afoot that our world is entering an uncharted age, what I might call a hybrid age, one where the technofuture that is assured and the medieval enchantment that is reawakening collide in unpredictable, quite possibly wild ways. If this is true, and I think there’s something to it, rational formulas are just not going to cut it. A deeper magic will be needed. A new language will be needed. Artists and prophets will be needed. Women, frankly, will be needed.

Last fall, in an encyclical titled Dilexit nos (which translates “He loved us”), Pope Francis wrote, “If we devalue the heart, we also devalue what it means to speak from the heart, to act with the heart, to cultivate and heal the heart.” Quoting Gaudium et spes from the Second Vatican Council, he continued, “The imbalances affecting the world today are in fact a symptom of a deeper imbalance rooted in the human heart.” Human beings, “by their interior life, transcend the entire material universe; they experience this deep interiority when they enter into their own heart, where God, who probes the heart, awaits them, and where they decide their own destiny in the sight of God.”

It is our own destiny in the sight of God—not the crowd’s—that this issue was designed to help you explore. For we are all—each one of us—responsible to choose wise paths. Our capacity to do so may be diminished by laxity on our part or intimidations beyond, but the responsibility remains. Stay rooted. And please also stay awake.