The Behavior of Crowds Part 3

Now it is not at all the aim of this argument to try to prove that crowds are really insane. Psychoa.n.a.lysts commonly a.s.sert that the difference between the normal and the abnormal is largely one of degree and of success in adjustment. We are told that the conflict exists also in normal people, with whom, however, it is adequately repressed and "sublimated"--that is, normal people pa.s.s on out of the stages in which the libido of the neurotic becomes fixed, not by leaving them behind, but by attaching the interests which emerge in such stages to ends which are useful in future experience. The neurotic takes the solitary path of resolving the conflict between his ego and the impulses which society demands shall be repressed.

It is altogether conceivable that _another path lies open--that of occasional compromise in our mutual demands on one another_. The force of repression is then relaxed by an unconscious change in the significance of social ideas. Such a change must of course be mutual and unconscious. Compromise mechanisms will again be formed serving a purpose similar to the neurosis. As in the neurosis, thought and action will be compulsory, symbolic, stereotyped, and more or less in conflict with the demands of society as a whole, though functioning in a part of it for certain purposes. Many of the characteristics of the unconscious will then appear and will be similar in some respects to those of neurosis. It is my contention that this is what happens in the crowd, and I will now point out certain phases of crowd-behavior which are strikingly a.n.a.logous to some of the phenomena which have been described above.

IV

THE EGOISM OF THE CROWD-MIND

The unconscious egoism of the individual in the crowd appears in all forms of crowd-behavior. As in dreams and in the neurosis this self feeling is frequently though thinly disguised, and I am of the opinion that with the crowd the mechanisms of this disguise are less subtle. To use a term which Freud employs in this connection to describe the process of distortion in dreams, the "censor" is less active in the crowd than in most phases of mental life. Though the conscious thinking is carried on in abstract and impersonal formula, and though, as in the neurosis, the "compulsive" character of the mechanisms developed frequently--especially in permanent crowds--well nigh reduces the individual to an automaton, the crowd is one of the most nave devices that can be employed for enhancing one's ego consciousness. The individual has only to transfer his repressed self feeling to the idea of the crowd or group of which he is a member; he can then exalt and exhibit himself to almost any extent without shame, oblivious of the fact that the supremacy, power, praise, and glory which he claims for his crowd are really claimed for himself.

That the crowd always insists on being flattered is a fact known intuitively by every orator and editor. As a member of a crowd the individual becomes part of a public. The worship with which men regard "The Public," simply means that the personal self falls at the feet of the same self regarded as public, and likewise demands that obeisance from all. _Vox populi est vox Dei_ is obviously the apotheosis of one's own voice while speaking as crowd-man. When this "G.o.d-almightiness"

manifests itself along the solitary path of the psychoneurosis it becomes one of the common symptoms of paranoia. The crowd, in common with paranoia, uniformly shows this quality of "megalomania." Every crowd "boosts for" itself, lauds itself, gives itself airs, speaks with oracular finality, regards itself as morally superior, and will, so far as it has the power, lord it over everyone. Notice how each group and section in society, so far as it permits itself to think as crowd, claims to be "the people." To the working-cla.s.s agitator, "the cause of labor is the cause of humanity," workers are always, "innocent exploited victims, kept down by the master cla.s.s whose l.u.s.t for gain has made them enemies of Humanity and Justice." "Workers should rule because they are the only useful people; the sole creators of wealth; their dominance would mean the end of social wrong, and the coming of the millennium of peace and brotherhood, the Kingdom of Heaven on the Earth, the final triumph of Humanity!"

On the other hand, the wealthy and educated cla.s.ses speak of themselves as "the best people"; they _are_ "society." It is they who "bear the burdens of civilization, and maintain Law and Order and Decency." Racial and national crowds show the same megalomania. Hebrews are "G.o.d's chosen." "The Dutch Company is the best Company that ever came over from the Old Country." "The Irish may be ornery, and they ain't worth much, but they are a whole lot better than the ---- ---- Dutch." "Little n.i.g.g.e.r baby, black face, and shiny eye, you're just as good as the poor white trash, an' you'll git thar by and by." "He might have been a Russian or a Prussian, ... but it's greatly to his credit that he is an Englishman." The German is the happy bearer of _Kultur_ to a barbarian world. America is "The land of the free and the home of the brave," and so on, wherever a group has become sufficiently a crowd to have a propaganda of its own. Presbyterians are "the Elect," the Catholics have the "true church of G.o.d," the Christian Scientists have alone attained "Absolute Truth."

A number of years ago, when the interest in the psychology of the crowd led me to attempt a study of Mr. Sunday's revival meetings, then in their earlier stages, certain facts struck me with great force. Whatever else the revival may be, it provides the student of psychology with a delightful specimen for a.n.a.lysis. Every element of the mob or crowd-mind is present and the unconscious manifests itself with an easy navete which is probably found nowhere else, not even in the psychiatric clinic. One striking fact, which has since provided me with food for a good deal of reflection, was the place which the revival holds in what I should like to call the spiritual economy of modern democracy.

It is an interesting historical fact that each great religious revival, from Savonarola down, has immediately followed--and has been the resistance of the man in the street to--a period of intellectual awakening. Mr. Sunday's meetings undeniably provided a device whereby a certain psychic type, an element which had hitherto received scant recognition in the community, could enormously enhance his ego consciousness. It would be manifestly unfair to say that this is the sole motive of the religious revival, or that only this type of mind is active in it. But it is interesting to see whose social survival values stand out most prominently in these religious crowd-phenomena. The gambler, the drunkard, the loafer, the weak, ignorant, and unsuccessful, whose self-esteem it may be a.s.sumed had always been made to suffer in small communities, where everyone knew everyone else, had only to yield himself to the pull of the obviously worked-up mechanism of the religious crowd, and lo! all was changed. He was now the repentant sinner, the new convert, over whom there was more rejoicing in heaven, and, what was more visible, also for a brief time, in the Church, than over the ninety and nine just persons. He was "redeemed," an object now of divine love, a fact which anyone who has studied the effects of these crowd-movements scientifically will agree was at once seized upon by these converts to make their own moral dilemmas the standards of righteousness in the community, and hence secure some measure of dominance.

This self-adulation of crowds, with its accompanying will to be important, to dominate, is so constant and characteristic a feature of the crowd-mind that I doubt if any crowd can long survive which fails to perform this function for its members. Self-flattery is evident in the pride with which many people wear badges and other insignia of groups and organizations to which they belong, and in the pompous names by which fraternal orders are commonly designated. In its more "exhibitionist" types it appears in parades and in the favorite ways in which students display their "college spirit." How many school and college "yells" begin with the formula, "Who are We?" obviously designed to call general attention to the group and impress upon people its importance.

In this connection I recall my own student days, which are doubtless typical--the pranks which served the purpose of bringing certain groups of students into temporary prominence and permitted them for a brief period to regard themselves as comic heroes, the practices by which the different cla.s.ses and societies sought to get the better of one another, the "love feasts" of my society which were hardly more than mutual admiration gatherings, the "pajama" parades in which the entire student body would march in costume (the wearing of which by an isolated individual would probably have brought him before a lunacy commission) all through the town and round and round the dormitories of the women's college a mile or so away, in order to announce a victory in some intercollegiate contest or other. There was the brazenness--it seems hardly credible now--with which the victors on such occasions would permit themselves to be carried on their comrades' shoulders through the public square, also the deportment with which a delegation of students would announce their arrival in a neighboring college town and the grinning self-congratulation with which we would sit in chapel and hear a wrathful president denounce our group behavior as "boorishness and hoodlumism." There was the unanimous conviction of us all, for no other reason I imagine than that it was graced with our particular presence, that our own inst.i.tution was the most superior college in existence, and I well remember the priggishness with which at student banquets we applauded the sentiment repeated _ad nauseam_, that the great aim of education and the highest mark of excellence in our college was the development of character. What is it all but a slightly exaggerated account of the egoism of all organized crowds? Persons of student age are for the most part still in the normal "narcissus"

period, and their ego-mania is naturally less disguised than that of older groups. But even then we could never have given such open manifestation to it as isolated individuals; it required the crowd-spirit.

The egoism of the crowd commonly takes the form of the will to social dominance and it is in crowd behavior that we learn how insatiable the repressed egoism of mankind really is. Members of the crowd are always promising one another a splendid future triumph of some sort. This promise of victory, which is nearly always to be enjoyed at the expense, discomfiture, and humiliation of somebody else, is of great advantage in the work of propaganda. People have only to be persuaded that prohibition, or equal suffrage, or the single tax "is coming," and thousands whose reason could not be moved by argument, however logical it might be, will begin to look upon it with favor. The crowd is never so much at home as "on the band wagon." Each of the old political parties gains strength through the repeated prediction of victory in the presidential campaign of 1920. The Socialist finds warmth in the contemplation of the "coming dictatorship of the proletariat." The Prohibitionist intoxicates himself by looking forward to a "dry world."

So long as the German crowds expected a victorious end of the war, their morale remained unbroken, the Kaiser was popular.

When a crowd is defeated and its hope of victory fades, the individual soon abandons the unsuccessful group. The great cause, being now a forlorn hope, is seen in a different light, and the crowd character of the group vanishes. When, however, certain forces still operate to keep the crowd state of mind alive--forces such as race feeling, patriotism, religious belief, or cla.s.s consciousness--the ego consciousness of the individuals so grouped finds escape in the promise of heaven, the Judgment Day, and that "far off divine event toward which the whole creation moves." Meanwhile the hope of victory is changed into that "impotent resentment" so graphically described by Nietzsche.

Another way in which the self feeling of the crowd functions is in idealizing those who succeed in gaining its recognition. The crowd always makes a hero of the public person, living or dead. Regardless of what he really did or was, he is transformed into a symbol of what the crowd wishes to believe him to be. Certain aspects of his teaching and various incidents which would appear in his biography are glossed over, and made into supports for existing crowd-ideas and prejudices. Most of the great characters in history have suffered in this way at the hands of tradition. The secret of their greatness, their uniqueness and spiritual isolation, is in great part ignored. The crowd's own secret is subst.i.tuted. The great man now appears great because he possessed the qualities of little men. He is representative man, crowd man. Every crowd has a list of heroic names which it uses in its propaganda and in its self-laudation. The greatness which each crowd reveres and demands that all men honor is just that greatness which the crowd treasures as a symbol of itself, the sort of superiority which the members of the crowd may suck up to swell their own ego consciousness.

Thus, hero worship is unconsciously worship of the crowd itself, and the const.i.tuents thereof. The self-feeling of a crowd is always enhanced by the triumph of its leader or representative. Who, at a ball game or athletic event, has not experienced elation and added self-complacency in seeing the home team win? What other meaning has the excited cheering? Even a horse on a race track may become the representative of a crowd and lift five thousand people into the wildest joy and ecstasy by pa.s.sing under a wire a few inches ahead of a rival. We have here one of the secrets of the appeal which all such exhibitions make to people.

Nothing so easily catches general attention and creates a crowd as a contest of any kind. The crowd unconsciously identifies its members with one or the other compet.i.tor. Success enables the winning crowd to "crow over" the losers. Such an occasion becomes symbolic and is utilized by the ego to enhance its feeling of importance.

A similar psychological fact may be observed in the "jollifications" of political parties after the election of their candidates for high office. This phenomenon is also seen, if I may say so without being misunderstood, in the new spirit which characterizes a people victorious in war, and is to no small degree the basis of the honor of successful nations. It is seen again in the pride which the citizens of a small town show in the fact that the governor of the state is a native of the place. This same principle finds place in such teachings of the Church as the doctrine of the "communion of the saints," according to which the spiritual grace and superiority of the great and pure become the common property of the Church, and may be shared by all believers as a saving grace.

Every organized crowd is jealous of its dignity and honor and is bent upon keeping up appearances. Nothing is more fatal to it than a successful a.s.sault upon its prestige. Every crowd, even the casual street mob, clothes the egoistic desires of its members or partic.i.p.ants in terms of the loftiest moral motive. No crowd can afford to be laughed at. Crowd men have little sense of humor, certainly none concerning themselves and their crowd-ideas. Any laughter they indulge in is more likely to be directed at those who do not believe with them. The crowd-man resents any suspicion of irreverence or criticism of his professions, because to question them is to weaken the claim of his crowd upon the people, and to destroy in those professed ideals their function of directing his own attention away from the successful compromise of his unconscious conflicts which the crowd had enabled him to make. The crowd would perish if it lost its "ideals." It clings to its fixed ideas with the same tenacity as does the paranoiac. You can no more reason with the former than you can with the latter, and for much the same cause; the beliefs of both are not the fruit of inquiry, neither do they perform the normal intellectual function of adjustment to environment; they are mechanisms of the ego by which it keeps itself in countenance.

Much of the activity of the unconscious ego is viewed by psychologists as "compensation." Devices which serve the purpose of compensating the ego for some loss, act of self-sacrifice, or failure, are commonly revealed by both the normal and the unadjusted. The popular notion that unsatisfied desires sooner or later perish of starvation is at best but a half truth. These desires after we have ceased to attend them become transformed. They frequently find satiety in some subst.i.tute which the unconscious accepts as a symbol of its real object. Dreams of normal people contain a great deal of material of this sort. So do day-dreams, and art. Many religious beliefs also serve this purpose of compensation.

Jung follows Freud in pointing out as a cla.s.sic example of the compensation in dreams, that of Nebuchadnezzar, in the Bible.

Nebuchadnezzar at the height of his power had a dream which foretold his downfall. He dreamed of a tree which had raised its head even up to Heaven and now must be hewn down. This was a dream which is obviously a counterpoise to the exaggerated feeling of royal power.

According to Jung, we may expect to find only those things contained in the unconscious which we have not found in the conscious mind. Many conscious virtues and traits of character are thus compensations for their opposite in the unconscious.

In the case of abnormal people, the individual entirely fails to recognize the compensating influences which arise in the unconscious. He even continues to accentuate his onesidedness; this is in accord with the well-known psychological fact that the worst enemy of the wolf is the wolfhound, the greatest despiser of the negro is the mulatto, and that the biggest fanatic is the convert; for I should be a fanatic were I to attack a thing outwardly which inwardly I am obliged to concede is right.

The mentally unbalanced man tries to defend himself against his own unconscious--that is to say, he battles against his own compensating influences. In normal minds opposites of feeling and valuations lie closely a.s.sociated; the law of this a.s.sociation is called "ambivalence," about which we shall see more later. In the abnormal, the pairs are torn asunder, the resulting division, or strife, leads to disaster, for the unconscious soon begins to intrude itself violently upon the conscious processes.

An especially typical form of unconscious compensation ... is the paranoia of the alcoholic. The alcoholic loses his love for his wife; the unconscious compensation tries to lead him back again to his duty, but only partially succeeds, for it causes him to become jealous of his wife as if he still loved her. As we know, he may go so far as to kill both his wife and himself, merely out of jealousy. In other words, his love for his wife has not been entirely lost. It has simply become subliminal; but from the realm of consciousness it can now only reappear in the form of jealousy.... We see something of a similar nature in the case of the religious convert.... The new convert feels himself constrained to defend the faith he has adopted (since much of the old faith still survives in the unconscious a.s.sociations) in a more or less fanatical way. It is exactly the same in the paranoiac who feels himself constantly constrained to defend himself against all external criticism, because his delusional system is too much threatened from within.

It is not necessary for us to enter here upon a discussion of the processes by which these compensating devices are wrought out in the psychoneurosis. It is significant, though, that Jung calls attention to the likeness between religious fanaticism and paranoia. Now it is obvious that the fanaticism of the religious convert differs psychologically not at all from that of any other convert. We have already noted the fact that most religious conversions are accomplished by the crowd. Moreover the crowd everywhere tends to fanaticism. The fanatic is the crowd-man pure and simple. He is the type which it ever strives to produce. His excess of devotion, and willingness to sacrifice both himself and everyone else for the crowd's cause, always wins the admiration of his fellow crowd-members. He has given all for the crowd, is wholly swallowed by it, is "determined not to know anything save" his crowd and its propaganda. He is the martyr, the true believer, "the red-blooded loyal American" with "my country right or wrong." He is the uncompromising radical whose prison record puts to shame the less enthusiastic members of his group. He is the militant pacifist, the ever-watchful prohibitionist, and keeper of his neighbors' consciences, the belligerent moral purist, who is scandalized even at the display of lingerie in the store windows, the professional reformer who in every community succeeds in making his goodness both indispensable and unendurable.

One need not be a psychologist to suspect that the evil against which the fanatic struggles is really in large measure in himself. He has simply externalized, or "projected" the conflict in his own unconscious.

Persons who cry aloud with horror at every change in the style of women's clothing are in most cases persons whose ego is gnawed by a secret promiscuous eroticism. The scandalmonger, inhibited from doing the forbidden thing, enjoys himself by a vicarious indulgence in rottenness. The prohibition agitator, if not himself an alcoholic barely s.n.a.t.c.hed from the burning, is likely to be one who at least feels safer in a democracy where it is not necessary to resist temptation while pa.s.sing a saloon door. Notice that the fanatic or crowd-man always strives to universalize his own moral dilemmas. This is the device by which every crowd seeks dominance in the earth. A crowd's virtues and its vices are really made out of the same stuff. Each is simply the other turned upside down, the compensation for the other. They are alike and must be understood together as the expression of the type of person who const.i.tutes the membership of some particular group or crowd.

I'll never use tobacco, it is a filthy weed I'll never put it in my mouth, said little Robert Reed.

But obviously, little Robert is already obsessed with a curious interest in tobacco. His first word shows that he has already begun to think of this weed in connection with himself. Should a crowd of persons struggling with Robert's temptation succeed in dominating society, tobacco would become taboo and thus would acquire a moral significance which it does not have at present. So with all our crowd-ethics. The forbidden thing protrudes itself upon consciousness as a negation. The negation reveals what it is that is occupying the inner psyche, and is its compensation. There are certain psychoneuroses in which this negative form of compensation is very marked. Now it is a noteworthy fact that with the crowd the ethical interest always takes this negative form.

The healthy moral will is characterized by a constant restating of the problem of living in terms of richer and higher and more significant dilemmas as new possibilities of personal worth are revealed by experience. New and more daring valuations are constantly made. The whole psychic functioning is enriched. Goodness means an increase of satisfactions through a more adequate adjustment to the real--richer experience, more subtle power of appreciation and command, a self-mastery, sureness, and general personal excellence--which on occasions great and small mark the good will as a reality which counts in the sum total of things. Something is achieved because it is really desired; existence is in so far humanized, a self has been realized. As Professor Dewey says:

If our study has shown anything it is that the moral _is_ a life, not something ready-made and complete once for all. It is instinct with movement and struggle, and it is precisely the new and serious situations which call out new vigor and lift it to higher levels.

It is not so with the crowd-ethic. It is interesting to note that from the "Decalogue" to Kant's "Categorical Imperative," crowd-morals always and everywhere take the form of prohibitions, taboos, and ready-made standards, chiefly negative. Freud has made an a.n.a.lytical study of the Taboo as found in primitive society and has shown that it has a compensatory value similar to that of the taboos and compulsions of certain neurotics.

The crowd admits of no personal superiority other than that which consists in absolute conformity to its own negative standards. Except for the valuations expressed by its own dilemmas, "one man is as good as another"--an idea which it can be easily seen serves the purpose of compensation. The goodness which consists of unique personal superiority is very distasteful to the crowd. There must be only one standard of behavior, alike for all. A categorical imperative. The standard as set up is of the sort which is most congenial, possible of attainment, and even necessary for the survival of the members of some particular crowd.

It is _their_ good, the converse and compensation of their own vices, temptations, and failures. The crowd then demands that this good shall be THE GOOD, that it become the universal standard. By such means even the most incompetent and unadventurous and timid spirits may pa.s.s judgment upon all men. They may cry to the great of the earth, "We have piped unto you and you have not danced." Judged by the measure of their conformity to the standards of the small, the great may be considered no better, possibly not so good as the little spirits. The well are forced to behave like the spiritually sick. The crowd is a dog in the manger.

If eating meat maketh my brother to be scandalized, or giveth him the cramps, I shall remain a vegetarian so long as the world standeth.

Nietzsche was correct on this point. The crowd--he called it the herd--is a weapon of revenge in the hands of the weaker brother. It is a Procrustean bed on which every spiritual superiority may be lopped off to the common measure, and every little ego consciousness may be stretched to the stature of full manhood.

V

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

Probably the most telling point of likeness between the crowd-mind and the psychoneurosis--paranoia especially--is the "delusion of persecution." In cases of paranoia the notion that the patient is the victim of all sorts of intrigue and persecution is so common as to be a distinguishing symptom of this disease. Such delusions are known to be defenses, or compensation mechanisms, growing out of the patient's exaggerated feeling of self-importance. The delusion of grandeur and that of being persecuted commonly go together. The reader will recall the pa.s.sage quoted from the pamphlet given me by a typical paranoiac.

The author of the doc.u.ment mentioned feels that he has a great mission, that of exposing and reforming the conditions in hospitals for the insane. He protests his innocence. In jail he feels like Christ among his tormentors. His wife has conspired against him. The woman who owns the hotel where he was employed wishes to put him out of the way. The most fiendish methods are resorted to in order to end his life. "Some one" blocked up the stovepipe, etc., etc.

Another ill.u.s.tration of a typical case is given by Doctor Brill. I quote scattered pa.s.sages from the published notes on the case record of the patient, "E. R."

He graduated in 1898 and then took up schoolteaching.... He did not seem to get along well with his princ.i.p.al and other teachers.... He imagined that the princ.i.p.al and other teachers were trying to work up a "badger game" on him, to the effect that he had some immoral relations with his girl pupils....

In 1903 he married, after a brief courtship, and soon thereafter took a strong dislike to his brother-in-law and sister and accused them of immorality.... He also accused his wife of illicit relations with his brother and his brother-in-law, Mr. S.

Mr. S., his brother-in-law, was the arch conspirator against him. He also (while in the hospital) imagined that some women made signs to him and were in the hospital for the purpose of liberating him. Whenever he heard anybody talking he immediately referred it to himself. He interpreted every movement and expression as having some special meaning for himself....

Now and then (after his first release by order of the court) he would send mysterious letters to different persons in New York City. At that time one of his delusions was that he was a great statesman and that the United States government had appointed him amba.s.sador (to Canada), but that the "gang" in New York City had some one without ability to impersonate him so that he lost his appointment. (Later, while confined to the hospital again) he thought that the daughter of the President of the United States came to visit him....

After the patient was recommitted to Bellevue Hospital, he told me that I (Doctor Brill) was one of the "gang." I was no longer his wife in disguise (as he has previously imagined) but his enemy.

Brill's discussion of this case contains an interesting a.n.a.lysis of the several stages of "regression" and the unconscious mechanisms which characterize paranoia. He holds that such cases show a "fixation" in an earlier stage of psychos.e.xual development. The patient, an unconscious h.o.m.os.e.xual, is really in love with himself. The resulting inner conflict appears, with its defense formations, as the delusion of grandeur and as conscious hatred for the person or persons who happen to be the object of the patient's h.o.m.os.e.xual wish fancy. However this may be, the point of interest for our study is the "projection" of this hatred to others.