The Behavior of Crowds Part 1

The Behavior of Crowds.

by Everett Dean Martin.

FOREWORD

Since the publication of Le Bon's book, _The Crowd_, little has been added to our knowledge of the mechanisms of crowd-behavior. As a practical problem, the habit of crowd-making is daily becoming a more serious menace to civilization. Events are making it more and more clear that, pressing as are certain economic questions, the forces which threaten society are really psychological.

Interest in the economic struggle has to a large extent diverted attention from the significance of the problems of social psychology.

Social psychology is still a rather embryonic science, and this notwithstanding the fact that psychiatry has recently provided us with a method with which we may penetrate more deeply than ever before into the inner sources of motive and conduct.

The remedy which I have suggested in Chapter X deserves a much more extended treatment than I have given it. It involves one of the great mooted questions of modern philosophical discussion. It is, however, not within the province of this book to enter upon a discussion of the philosophy of Humanism. The subject has been thoroughly thrashed over in philosophical journals and in the writings of James, Schiller, Dewey, and others. It is sufficient for my purpose merely to point out the fact that the humanist way of thinking may provide us with just that educational method which will break up the logical forms in which the crowd-mind intrenches itself.

Those who expect to find a prescribed formula or ideal scheme of organization as a remedy for our social ills may feel that the solution to which I have come--namely, a new educational method--is too vague.

But the problem of the crowd is really concerned with the things of the mind. And if I am correct in my thesis that there is a necessary connection between crowd-thinking and the various traditional systems of intellectualist, absolutist, and rationalist philosophy, the way out must be through the formation of some such habits of thinking as I have suggested.

E. D. M.

NEW YORK, _October 10, 1919_.

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

I

THE CROWD AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF TO-DAY

Every one at times feels himself in the grip of social forces over which he has no control. The apparently impersonal nature of these forces has given rise to various mechanistic theories of social behavior. There are those who interpret the events of history as by-products of economic evolution. Others, more idealistic but determinists, nevertheless, see in the record of human events the working out of a preordained plan.

There is a popular notion, often shared by scholars, that the individual and society are essentially irreconcilable principles. The individual is a.s.sumed to be by nature an antisocial being. Society, on the other hand, is opposed in principle to all that is personal and private. The demands of society, its welfare and aims, are treated as if they were a tax imposed upon each and every one by something foreign to the natural will or even the happiness of all. It is as if society as "thing-in-itself"

could prosper in opposition to the individuals who collectively const.i.tute it.

It is needless to say that both the individual and the social, according to such a view, are empty abstractions. The individual is, in fact, a social ent.i.ty. Strip him of his social interests, endowments, and habits, and the very feeling of self, or "social me" as William James called it, vanishes and nothing is left but a Platonic idea and a reflex arc. The social also is nothing else than the manner in which individuals habitually react to one another. Society in the abstract, as a principle opposed to individual existence, has no more reality than that of the grin which Alice in Wonderland sees after the famous Cheshire cat has vanished. It is the mere logical concept of others in general, left leering at us after all the concrete others have been thought away.

Much social thinking is of this cat-grin sort. Having abstracted from the thought of self everything that is social, and from the idea of the social all that has to do with concrete persons, the task remains to get pure grin and pure cat together again in such a way that neither shall lose its ident.i.ty in the other. It is, of course, impossible to reconcile these mutually exclusive abstractions either in theory or in practice. It is often difficult enough, even with the aid of empirical thinking, to adjust our relations with the other people about us. But on the Cheshire-cat hypothesis, the social problem can never be solved, because it is not a real problem at all.

Since the individual is therefore a social being as such, and the social is just a way of acting together, the social problem does not grow out of a conflict between the self and an impersonal social principle. The conflicts are, in fact, clashes among certain individuals and groups of them, or else--and this is a subject to which social psychology has paid insufficient attention--the social struggle is in certain of its phases a conflict within the personal psyche itself. Suppose that the apparently impersonal element in social behavior is not impersonal in fact, but is, for the most part, the result of an impersonal manner of thinking about ourselves. Every psychic fact must really be an act of somebody. There are no ideas without thinkers to think them, no impersonal thoughts or disembodied impulses, no "independent" truths, no transcendental principles existing in themselves and outside of human heads. Life is everywhere reaction; it is nowhere a mere product or a pa.s.sive registering of impersonal forces. It is the organism's behavior in the presence of what we call environment.

Individual opinions cannot be tossed into a common hat, like small coins. Though we may each learn from the others, there is no magic by which our several thoughts can sum themselves up into a common fund of public opinion or super-personal whole which thinks itself, there being no collective head to think it. No matter how many people think and behave as I do, each of us knows only his own thought and behavior. My thought may be about you and what I judge you are thinking, but it is not the same as your thought. To each the social is _nil_ except in so far as he experiences it himself, and to each it is something unique when viewed from within. The uniformity and illusion of ident.i.ty--in short, the impersonal aspect of social thinking and activity appears only when we try to view social behavior from without--that is, as objectively manifest in the behavior of others.

What then is the secret of this impersonal view of the social? Why do we think of ourselves socially in the same impersonal or external way that we think of others? There is an interesting parallel here in the behavior of certain types of mental pathology. There are neurotics who commonly feel that certain aspects of their behavior are really not of their own authorship, but come to them as the result of influences acting from without. It was such phenomena in part that led psychologists of a generation ago to construct the theory of "multiple personality." It is known now that the psychic material which in these cases appears to be automatic, and impersonal, in the sense that it is not consciously willed, is really motivated by unconscious mechanisms.

The apparently "impersonal" behavior of the neurotic is psychologically determined, though unconsciously.

May there not be a like unconscious psychic determination of much that is called social behavior? It is my thesis that this is so, and that there are certain types of social behavior which are characterized by unconscious motivation to such a degree that they may be placed in a definite cla.s.s of psychological phenomena. This group of phenomena I have, following to some extent the terminology of Le Bon, called "The Crowd." I wish there were a more exact word, for it is very difficult to use the word crowd in its psychological sense without causing some confusion in the mind of the reader. In ordinary speech "a crowd" is any gathering of people. In the writings of Le Bon, as we shall see, the word has a special meaning, denoting not a gathering of people as such, but a gathering which behaves in a certain way which may be cla.s.sified and described psychologically as "crowd mentality." Not every gathering of people shows this crowd-mentality. It is a characteristic which appears under certain circ.u.mstances. In this discussion the word "crowd"

must be understood to mean the peculiar mental condition which sometimes occurs when people think and act together, either immediately where the members of the group are present and in close contact, or remotely, as when they affect one another in a certain way through the medium of an organization, a party or sect, the press, etc.

The crowd while it is a social phenomenon differs greatly from the social as such. People may be social--the family is an example of this--without being a crowd either in thought or action. Again a crowd--a mob is an example of this--may be distinctly antisocial, if we attach any ethical meaning to the term. Both the individual and society suffer, as we shall see, from crowd-behavior. I know of nothing which to-day so menaces not only the values of civilization, but also--it is the same thing in other words, perhaps--the achievement of personality and true knowledge of self, as the growing habit of behaving as crowds.

Our society is becoming a veritable babel of gibbering crowds. Not only are mob outbreaks and riots increasing in number, but every interest, patriotic, religious, ethical, political, economic, easily degenerates into a confusion of propagandist tongues, into extravagant partisanship, and intemperance. Whatever be the ideal to which we would attain, we find the path of self-culture too slow; we must become army worms, eating our way to the goal by sheer force of numbers. The councils of democracy are conducted on about the psychological level of commercial advertising and with about the same degree of sincerity. While it cannot be said that the habit of crowd-making is peculiar to our times--other ages, too, have indulged in it--it does seem that the tendency to crowd-mindedness has greatly increased in recent years.

Whether it is temperance, or justice, or greater freedom, moral excellence or national glory, that we desire--whether we happen to be conservatives or radicals, reformers or liberals, we must become a cult, write our philosophy of life in flaming headlines, and sell our cause in the market. No matter if we meanwhile surrender every value for which we stand, we must strive to cajole the majority into imagining itself on our side. For only with the majority with us, whoever we are, can we live. It is numbers, not values, that count--quant.i.ty not quality.

Everybody must "moral-crusade," "agitate," "press-agent," play politics.

Everyone is forced to speak as the crowd, think as the crowd, understand as the crowd. The tendency is to smother all that is unique, rare, delicate, secret. If you are to get anywhere in this progressive age you must be vulgar, you must add to your vulgarity unction. You must take sides upon dilemmas which are but half true, change the tempo of your music to ragtime, eat your spiritual food with a knife, drape yourself in the flag of the dominant party. In other words, you must be "one hundred per cent" crowd man.

The effect of all this upon the individual is that he is permitted neither to know nor to belong to himself. He becomes a mere banner toter. He must hold himself ever in readiness to wiggle-waggle in the perpetual Simon-says-thumbs-up game which his crowd is playing. He spends his days playing a part which others have written for him; loses much of his genuineness and courage, and pampers himself with imitation virtues and second-hand truths.

Upon the social peace the effect is equally bad. Unnecessary and meaningless strife is engendered. An idolatry of phrases is enthroned. A silly game of bullying and deception is carried on among contending crowds, national, religious, moral, social. The great truths of patriotism, morality, and religion become hardly more than caricatures--mere instruments of crowds for putting their rivals on the defensive, and securing obeisance from the members of the crowd itself, easily repudiated in the hour of the crowd's victory. The social harmony is menaced by numerous cliques and parties, ranging in size all the way from the nation-crowd down to the smallest sect, each setting out like a band of buccaneers bent upon nothing but its own dominance, and seeking to justify its piratical conduct by time-worn plat.i.tudes.

That which is meant by the cry of the Russian Revolution, "All power to the soviets," is peculiar neither to Russia nor to the working cla.s.s.

Such in spirit is the cry of every crowd, for every crowd is, psychologically considered, a soviet. The industrial and political danger of the soviet would amount to little or nothing, were it not for the fact that the modern world is already _spiritually sovietized_. The threatened soviet republic is hardly more than the practical result of a hundred years of crowd-thinking on almost every subject. Whether capitalist or proletarian, reformer or liberal, we have all along been behaving and thinking in soviet fashion. In almost every important matter in life we have ignored Emerson's warning that we must rely upon ourselves, and have permitted ourselves to behave and think as crowds, fastening their labels and dogmas upon our spirits and taking their shibboleths upon our tongues, thinking more of the temporary triumph of our particular sect or party than of the effect of our behavior upon ourselves and others.

There is certainly nothing new in the discovery that our social behavior is not what it ought to be. Mediaeval thinkers were as much aware of the fact as we are, but they dismissed the social problem with the simple declaration of the "sinfulness of human nature." Nineteenth-century utilitarians felt that the social problem could be solved by more enlightened and more reasonable behavior on the part of individuals.

Recent social psychology--of which the writings of Prof. William McDougall are probably the best example, has abandoned the theory that social behavior is primarily governed by reason or by considerations of utility. A better explanation of social phenomena is found in instinct.

It is held that the true motives of social behavior are pugnacity, the instinct of self-appreciation or self-debas.e.m.e.nt, of s.e.x, gregariousness, and the like. Each instinct with its "affective emotion"

becomes organized through various complex reactions to the social environment, into fairly well established "sentiments." These sentiments are held to be the controlling social forces. As McDougall says:

We may say then that directly or indirectly the instincts are the prime movers of all human activity; by the conative or impulsive force of some instinct (or of some habit derived from an instinct), every train of thought, however cold and pa.s.sionless it may seem, is borne along toward its end, and every bodily activity is initiated and sustained. The instinctive impulses determine the ends of all activities and supply the driving-power by which all mental activities are sustained; and all the complex intellectual apparatus of the most highly developed mind is but a means toward those ends, is but the instrument by which these impulses seek their satisfactions.... These impulses are the mental forces that maintain and shape all the life of individuals and societies, and in them we are confronted with the central mystery of life and mind and will.

This is all very good so far as it goes. But I confess that I am somewhat at loss to know just what it explains so far as crowd-behavior is concerned. Do these instincts and sentiments operate the same under all social conditions? Are some of them suppressed by society and forced to seek their satisfaction in roundabout ways? If so, how? Moreover, I fail to find in present-day social psychology, any more than in the writings of Herbert Spencer, Sumner, Ward, and others, any clear distinction between the characteristic behavior of crowds and other forms of social activity. Only the school of Le Bon has shown any definite appreciation of these facts. It is to Le Bon, therefore, in spite of the many and just criticisms of his work, that we must turn for a discussion of the crowd as a problem apart from social psychology in general. Le Bon saw that the mind of the crowd demanded special psychological study, but many of the psychological principles which he used in solving the problem were inadequate to the task. Certain of his conclusions were, therefore, erroneous. Since the close of the nineteenth century, however, psychology has gained much insight into the secret springs of human activity. Possibly the most significant achievement in the history of this science is Freud's work in a.n.a.lytical psychology.

So much light has been thrown upon the unconscious by Freud and other a.n.a.lytical psychologists, that psychology in all its branches is beginning to take some of Freud's discoveries into account. Strictly speaking, psychoa.n.a.lysis is a therapeutic method. It has, however, greatly enriched our knowledge of mental pathology, and thus much of its data has become indispensable to general psychology and to social psychology in particular.

In his book the _Interpretation of Dreams_, Freud has shown that there exist in the wish-fulfilling mechanisms of dream formation certain definite laws. These laws undoubtedly underlie and determine also many of our crowd-ideas, creeds, conventions, and social ideals. In his book, _Totem and Taboo_, Freud has himself led the way to the application of the a.n.a.lytical psychology to the customs and ideas of primitive groups.

I am sure that we shall find, as we proceed, that with the a.n.a.lytical method we shall gain an entirely new insight into the causes and meaning of the behavior of crowds.

II

HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED

In his well-known work on the psychology of the crowd Le Bon noted the fact that the unconscious plays a large part in determining the behavior of crowds. But he is not clear in his use of the term "unconscious." In fact, as Graham Wallas justly points out, his terminology is very loose indeed. Le Bon seems to have made little or no attempt to discover in detail the processes of this unconscious. In company with most psychologists of his time, he based his explanation upon the theory of "suggestion and imitation." He saw in the unconscious merely a sort of mystical "common humanity," from which he derived his--also mystical--idea of a common crowd-mind which each individual in the crowd in some unexplained manner shared. He says:

The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation....

It is easy to prove how much the individual forming part of a crowd differs from the isolated individual, but it is less easy to discover the causes of this difference.

To obtain, at any rate, a glimpse of them it is necessary in the first place to call to mind the truth established by modern psychology, that unconscious phenomena play an altogether preponderating part, not only in organic life, but also in the operations of intelligence.... Our conscious acts are the outcome of an unconscious substratum created in the mind in the main by heredity. This substratum consists of innumerable characteristics handed down from generation to generation which const.i.tute the genius of the race....

It is more especially with respect to those unconscious elements which const.i.tute the genius of a race that all the individuals belonging to it resemble each other.... It is precisely these general qualities of character, governed by forces of which we are unconscious and possessed by the majority of normal individuals of a race in much the same degree--it is precisely these qualities, I say, that in crowds become common property.