6 ideas
A crowd truly forms at the moment of discharge, when its members shed their differences of rank, property and distance and feel themselves equal. This release from the burden of distinction is the crowd's central pleasure. It is also why crowds are driven to keep growing, since the feeling of equality lasts only as long as the crowd persists.
Every command has two parts: an impulse that forces the recipient to act, and a sting that stays behind in the one who obeys. The sting remains unchanged, sometimes for decades, until the person can pass an identical command on to someone else and so rid themselves of it. Obedience therefore builds up hidden pressures that later come out as reversals, revenge or cruelty toward those below.
The most basic experience of power is surviving: standing alive among the dead, especially those one has killed. The ruler seeks to repeat and pile up this feeling, surviving more and more others. That is why power tends toward mass death and why rulers fear anyone who might outlive them.
Canetti reads Schreber's paranoid delusions as a pure form of the ruler's mentality. Both feel surrounded by hostile crowds, want to be the only one left standing, and turn the whole world into a system of conspiracies that only they can see through. From this angle, despotic power looks like a political form of paranoia, and paranoia like a private form of despotism.
Before large crowds existed, humans gathered in small packs of four kinds: the hunting pack, the war pack, the lamenting pack and the increase pack. Each is organized around a shared purpose, and each stays small because only a few people are available to join it, not because of a fixed limit. Canetti observes that one pack can pass over into another, as when a lament for the dead turns into a war for revenge.
Crowds are represented by natural crowd symbols such as fire, the sea, rain, forests, corn and heaps of treasure, which share the crowd's density, growth or sameness. Each nation understands itself through a particular symbol, for example the Germans through the marching army as a forest, or the English through the sea. How a people behaves collectively can be read from the crowd symbol it identifies with.