The crowd is often wrong

Or so I thought.  I began to doubt the title of this post after reading this.  Let me explain something here.  My process of thinking.  I started with the proposition in the title of this post, then challenged it by posing the opposite.  The paradox here is that they can both right and both wrong.  How is this?

I'm tempted to jump to conclusions, but rather than doing that, stay with this line of thought and see where it goes.  I've argued against conventional wisdom, for example, only to come around to a different understanding that wasn't far from it.

Anybody is capable of error, and the same goes for crowds.  The crowd is not always right.  Nor is it always wrong.  I'm persuaded that the crowd can be manipulated.  Just read about Hitler and see how he did it.  People would rather be lazy and not think a thing through.  They can also be impulsive and do dangerously destructive things like a lynch mob.  They can also vote for someone who should have never become President, such as Obama.  I write "they", but I do it too.  We are all sinners, you know.

The truth is a slippery thing indeed.  To answer the question above, I would hope that a check can be placed upon crowds before they do something that cannot be changed.  Like killing people.  Or bringing down a government (Egypt anyone?) where something better has not been groomed as its replacement, which opens the door for something much worse.