The Behavior of Crowds Part 4

Says Brill:

The sentence, "I rather hate him" becomes transformed through projection into the sentence, "he hates (persecutes) me, which justifies my hating him."

The paranoiac's delusional system inevitably brings him in conflict with his environment, but his feeling of being persecuted is less the result of this conflict with an external situation than of his own inner conflict. He convinces himself that it is the other, or others, not he, who is the author of this hatred. He is the innocent victim of their malice.

This phenomenon of "projection and displacement" has received considerable attention in a.n.a.lytical psychology. Freud, in the book, _Totem and Taboo_, shows the role which projection plays in the primitive man's fear of demons. The demons are of course the spirits of the dead. But how comes it that primitive people fear these spirits, and attribute to them every sort of evil design against the living? To quote Freud:

When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her mother, it not infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with tormenting scruples, called "obsessive reproaches," which raise the question whether she herself has not been guilty, through carelessness or neglect, of the death of the beloved person. No recalling of the care with which she nursed the invalid, or direct refutation of the a.s.serted guilt, can put an end to the torture, which is the pathological expression of mourning and which in time slowly subsides. Psychoa.n.a.lytic investigation of such cases has made us acquainted with the secret mainspring of this affliction. We have ascertained that these obsessive reproaches are in a certain sense justified.... Not that the mourner has really been guilty of the death or that she has really been careless, as the obsessive reproach a.s.serts; but still there was something in her, a wish of which she was unaware, which was not displeased with the fact that death came, and which would have brought it about sooner had it been strong enough. The reproach now reacts against this unconscious wish after the death of the beloved person. Such hostility, hidden in the unconscious behind tender love, exists in almost all cases of intensive emotional allegiance to a particular person; indeed, it represents the cla.s.sic case, the prototype of the ambivalence of human emotions....

By a.s.suming a similar high degree of ambivalence in the emotional life of primitive races such as psychoa.n.a.lysis ascribes to persons suffering from compulsion neurosis, it becomes comprehensible that the same kind of reaction against the hostility latent in the unconscious behind the obsessive reproaches of the neurotic should also be necessary here after the painful loss has occurred. But this hostility, which is painfully felt in the unconscious in the form of satisfaction with the demise, experiences a different fate in the case of primitive man: the defense against it is accomplished by a displacement upon the object of hostility--namely, the dead. We call this defense process, frequent in both normal and diseased psychic life, a "projection."... Thus we find that taboo has grown out of the soil of an ambivalent emotional att.i.tude. The taboo of the dead also originates from the opposition between conscious grief and the unconscious satisfaction at death. If this is the origin of the resentment of spirits, it is self-evident that the nearest and formerly most beloved survivors have to feel it most. As in neurotic symptoms, the taboo regulations evince opposite feelings. Their restrictive character expresses mourning, while they also betray very clearly what they are trying to conceal--namely, the hostility toward the dead which is now motivated as self-defense....

The double feeling--tenderness and hostility--against the deceased, which we consider well-founded, endeavors to a.s.sert itself at the time of bereavement as mourning and satisfaction.

A conflict must ensue between these contrary feelings, and as one of them--namely, the hostility, is altogether, or for the greater part, unconscious, the conflict cannot result in a conscious difference in the form of hostility or tenderness, as, for instance, when we forgive an injury inflicted upon us by some one we love. The process usually adjusts itself through a special psychic mechanism which is designated in psychoa.n.a.lysis as "projection." This unknown hostility, of which we are ignorant and of which we do not wish to know, is projected from our inner perception into the outer world and is thereby detached from our own person and attributed to another. Not we, the survivors, rejoice because we are rid of the deceased, on the contrary we mourn for him; but now, curiously enough, he has become an evil demon who would rejoice in our misfortune and who seeks our death. The survivors must now defend themselves against this evil enemy; they are freed from inner oppression, but they have only succeeded in exchanging it for an affliction from without.

Totem, taboo, demon worship, etc., are clearly primitive crowd-phenomena. Freud's main argument in this book consists in showing the likeness between these phenomena and the compulsion neurosis. The projection of unconscious hostility upon demons is by no means the only sort of which crowds both primitive and modern are capable. Neither must the hostility always be unconscious. Projection is a common device whereby even normal and isolated individuals justify themselves in hating. Most of us love to think evil of our enemies and opponents. Just as two fighting schoolboys will each declare that the other "began it,"

so our dislike of people often first appears to our consciousness as a conviction that they dislike or entertain unfriendly designs upon us.

There is a common type of female neurotic whose repressed erotic wishes appear in the form of repeated accusations that various of her men acquaintances are guilty of making improper advances to her. When the "white slavery" reform movement swept over the country--an awakening of the public conscience which would have accomplished a more unmixed good if it had not been taken up in the usual crowd-spirit--it was interesting to watch the newspapers and sensational propagandist speakers as they deliberately encouraged these pathological phenomena in young people. The close psychological relation between the neurosis and the crowd-mind is shown by the fact that the two so frequently appear at the same moment, play so easily into each other's hands, and are apparently reactions to the very same social situation.

In Brill's example of paranoia, it will be remembered that the patient's delusions of persecution took the form of such statements as that the "gang" had intrigued at Washington to prevent his appointment as amba.s.sador, that certain of his relatives were in a "conspiracy against him." How commonly such phrases and ideas occur in crowd-oratory and in the crowd-newspaper is well known to all. We have already seen that the crowd in most cases identifies itself with "the people," "humanity,"

"society," etc. Listen to the crowd-orator and you will also learn that there are all sorts of abominable "conspiracies" against "the people."

"The nation is full of traitors." The Church is being "undermined by cunning heretics." "The Bolshevists are in secret league with the Germans to destroy civilization." "Socialists are planning to corrupt the morals of our youth and undermine the sacredness of the home." "The politicians' gang intends to loot the community." "Wall Street is conspiring to rob the people of their liberties." "England plans to reduce America to a British colony again." "j.a.pan is getting ready to make war on us." "German merchants are conducting a secret propaganda intending to steal our trade and pauperize our nation." "The Catholics are about to seize power and deliver us over to another Inquisition."

"The liquor interests want only to make drunkards of our sons and prost.i.tutes of our daughters." And so on and so forth, wherever any crowd can get a hearing for its propaganda. Always the public welfare is at stake; society is threatened. The "wrongs" inflicted upon an innocent humanity are rehea.r.s.ed. Bandages are taken off every social wound.

Every scar, be it as old as Cromwell's mistreatment of Ireland, is inflamed. "The people are being deceived," "kept down," "betrayed." They must rise and throw off their exploiters, or they must purge the nation of disloyalty and "anarchy."

It cannot be denied that our present social order is characterized by deep and fundamental social injustices, nor that bitter struggles between the various groups in society are inevitable. But the crowd forever ignores its own share in the responsibility for human ills, and each crowd persists in making a caricature of its enemies, real and imagined, nourishing itself in a delusion of persecution which is like nothing so much as the characteristic obsessions of the paranoiac. This suspiciousness, this habit of misrepresentation and exaggeration of every conceivable wrong, is not only a great hindrance to the conflicting groups in adjusting their differences, it makes impossible, by misrepresenting the real issue at stake, any effective struggle for ideals. As the history of all crowd movements bears witness, the real source of conflict is forgotten, the issue becomes confused with the spectacular, the unimportant, and imaginary. Energy is wasted on side issues, and the settlement finally reached, even by a clearly victorious crowd, is seldom that of the original matter in dispute. In fact, it is not at all the function of these crowd-ideas of self-pity and persecution to deal with real external situations. These ideas are propaganda. Their function is to keep the crowd together, to make converts, to serve as a defense for the egoism of the crowd-man, to justify the antic.i.p.ated tyranny which it is the unconscious desire of the individual to exercise in the moment of victory for his crowd, and, as "they who are not for us are against us," to project the crowd-man's hatred upon the intended victims of his crowd's will to universal dominion. In other words, these propaganda ideas serve much the same end as do the similar delusions of persecution in paranoia.

This likeness between the propaganda of the crowd and the delusions of paranoia is ill.u.s.trated daily in our newspapers. The following items cut from the New York _Tribune_ are typical. The first needs no further discussion, as it parallels the cases given above. The second is from the published proceedings of "a committee," appointed, as I remember it, by the a.s.sembly of the state of New York, to conduct an investigation into certain alleged seditious and anarchist activities. These articles well ill.u.s.trate the character of the propaganda to which such a committee almost inevitably lends itself. Whether the committee or the newspapers were chiefly responsible for such fabrications, I do not know, but the crowd character of much of the attempt to stamp out Bolshevism is strikingly revealed in this instance. No doubt the members of this committee, as well as the detectives and the press agents who are a.s.sociated with them, are as honestly convinced that a mysterious gang of radicals is planning to murder us all as is the paranoiac W. H.

M. fixed in his delusion that his enemies are trying to asphyxiate him.

It will be remembered that Brill's patient "E. S." interpreted "every movement and expression as having some special meaning for himself."

This kind of "interpretation" has a curious logic all its own. It is what I would call "compulsive thinking," and is characteristic of both the delusions of paranoia and the rumors of the crowd.

First clipping:

INVENTOR IS DECLARED INSANE BY A JURY.

W. H. M. declares rivals are attempting to asphyxiate him. W. H.

M., an inventor, was declared mentally incompetent yesterday by a jury in the Sheriff's court.... Alienists said M. had hallucinations about enemies who he thinks are trying to asphyxiate him. He also imagines that he is under hypnotic influences and that persons are trying to affect his body with "electrical influences."

Second clipping:

RADICALS HERE SEEK SOLDIERS FOR "RED GUARD."

Several hundred men, formerly in United States Service, signify willingness to aid in project. A "Red Guard" composed of men who have served in the American military establishment is contemplated in the elaborate revolutionary plans of Bolshevik leaders here. This was learned yesterday when operatives of the Lusk committee discovered that the radicals were making every effort to enlist the aid of the Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines Protective a.s.sociation in carrying out a plot to overthrow the government by force. As far as the detectives have been able to ascertain, the great ma.s.s of fighting men are not in sympathy with the Reds, but several hundred have signified their willingness to co-operate.

Just how far the plans of the Reds have progressed was not revealed. It is known, however, that at a convention of the Left Wing Socialists in Buffalo the movement designed to enlist the support of the Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines Protective a.s.sociation was launched. This convention was addressed by prominent Left Wingers from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Paterson. They a.s.serted that trained military men must be obtained for the organization if the plans were to be successful.

It was from this meeting, which was held in secret, that agitators were sent to various parts of the state to form soviets in the shops and factories. This phase of the radical activity, according to the investigators, has met with considerable success in some large factory districts where most of the workers are foreign-born. In some places the soviets in the shops have become so strong that the employers are alarmed and have notified the authorities of the menace. When sufficient evidence has been gathered, foreign-born agitators working to cause unrest in factories will be apprehended and recommended for deportation.

Later report:

DENIES FORMATION OF "RED GUARD" IN U. S.

Alfred Levitt, secretary of the Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines Protective a.s.sociation, yesterday emphatically denied that the organization was to be used as a "Red Guard" by the radicals when they started their contemplated revolution. He said he never had heard any of the members of the a.s.sociation discuss the formation of a "Red Guard" but admitted that many of them were radicals.

In the two instances given above, fear, suspicion, hatred, give rise in one case to a delusional system in the mind of an isolated individual, and in the other to the circulation of an unfounded rumor by men who in their right minds would, to say the least, carefully scrutinize the evidence for such a story before permitting it to be published. As several months have pa.s.sed since the publication of this story and nothing more has appeared which would involve our returned service men in any such treasonable conspiracy, I think it is safe to say that this story, like many others circulated by radicals as well as by reactionaries during the unsettled months following the war, has its origin in the unconscious mechanisms of crowd-minded people. Every sort of crowd is p.r.o.ne to give credence to rumors of this nature, and to accuse all those who can not at once give uncritical acceptance to such tales of sympathy with the enemy. Later we shall have something to say about the delusional systems which appear to be common to the crowd-mind and the paranoiac. In this connection I am interested in pointing out only the psychological relation between what I might call the "conspiracy delusion" and unconscious hatred. Commonly the former is the "projection" of the latter.

One of the differences between these two forms of "projection" is the fact that the hatred of the crowd is commonly less "rationalized" than in paranoia--that is, less successfully disguised. Like the paranoiac, every crowd is potentially if not actually homicidal in its tendencies.

But whereas with the paranoiac the murderous hostility remains for the greater part an unconscious "wish fancy," and it is the mechanisms which disguise it or serve as a defense against it which appear to consciousness, with the crowd the murder-wish will itself appear to consciousness whenever the unconscious can fabricate such defense mechanisms as will provide it with a fiction of moral justification.

Consequently, it is this fiction of justification which the crowd-man must defend.

The crowd's delusion of persecution, conspiracy, or oppression is thus a defense mechanism of this nature. The projection of this hatred on those outside the crowd serves not so much, as in paranoia, to shield the subject from the consciousness of his own hatred, as to provide him with a pretext for exercising it. Given such a pretext, most crowds will display their homicidal tendencies quite openly.

Ordinary mobs or riots would seem to need very little justification of this sort. But even these directly homicidal crowds invariably represent themselves as motivated by moral idealism and righteous indignation.

Negroes are lynched in order to protect the white womanhood of the South, also because, once accused, the negro happens to be helpless. If the colored people were in the ascendancy and the whites helpless we should doubtless see the reverse of this situation. A community rationally convinced of the culprit's guilt could well afford to trust the safety of womanhood to the justice meted out by the courts, but it is obvious that these "moral" crowds are less interested in seeing that justice is done than in running no risk of losing their victim, once he is in their power. A recent development of this spirit is the lynching in a Southern town of a juror who voted for the acquittal of a black man accused of a crime.

It may be taken as a general law of crowd-psychology that the "morality" of the crowd always demands a victim. Is it likely that one of these mobs would "call off" an interesting lynching party if at the last minute it were demonstrated that the accused was innocent? The practice of lynching has been extended, from those cases where the offense with which the accused is charged is so revolting as justly to arouse extreme indignation, to offenses which are so trivial that they merely serve as a pretext for torture and killing.

The homicidal tendencies of the crowd-mind always reveal themselves the minute the crowd becomes sufficiently developed and powerful to relax for the time being the usual social controls. Ill.u.s.trations of this may be seen in the rioting between the white and the colored races--epidemics of killing--such as occurred recently in East St.

Louis, and in the cities of Washington, Chicago, and Omaha. The same thing is evident in the "pogroms" of Russia and Poland, in the acts of revolutionary mobs of Germany and Russia, in the promptness with which the Turks took advantage of the situation created by the war to slaughter the Armenians. This hatred is the specter which forever haunts the conflict between labor and capital. It is what speedily transformed the French Revolution from the dawn of an era of "Fraternity" to a day of terror and intimidation. It is seen again in the curious interest which the public always has in a sensational murder trial. It is evident in the hostility, open or suppressed, with which any community regards the strange, the foreign, the "outlandish"--an example of which is the frequent bullying and insulting of immigrants in this country since the war. Much of the "Americanization propaganda" which we have carried on since the war unfortunately gave the typical crowd-man his opportunity.

One need only listen to the speeches or read the publications of certain "patriotic" societies to learn why it was that the exhortation to our foreign neighbors to be loyal did so much more harm than good.

The cla.s.sic example of the killing crowd is, of course, a nation at war.

There are, to be sure, wars of national self-defense which are due to political necessity rather than to crowd-thinking, but even in such cases the phenomena of the crowd are likely to appear to the detriment of the cause. At such times not only the army but the whole nation becomes a homicidal crowd. The army, at least while the soldiers are in service, probably shows the crowd-spirit in a less degree than does the civilian population. The mental processes of an entire people are transformed. Every interest--profit-seeking excepted--is subordinated to the one pa.s.sion to crush the enemy. The moment when war is declared is usually hailed with tremendous popular enthusiasm and joy. There is a general lifting of spirits. There is a sense of release, a nation-wide exultation, a sigh of relief as we feel the deadening hand of social control taken from our throats. The homicidal wish-fancy, which in peace times and in less sovereign crowds exists only as an hypothesis, can now become a reality. And though it is doubtful if more than one person in a million can ever give a rational account of just what issue is really at stake in any war, the conviction is practically unanimous that an occasion has been found which justifies, even demands, the release of all the repressed hostility in our natures. The fact that in war time this crowd hostility may, under certain circ.u.mstances, really have survival value and be both beneficial and necessary to the nation, is to my mind not a justification of crowd-making. It is rather a revelation of the need of a more competent leadership in world politics.

Unconsciously every national crowd, I mean the crowd-minded element in the nation, carries a chip on its shoulder, and swaggers and challenges its neighbors like a young town-bully on his way home from grammar school. This swaggering, which is here the "compulsive manifestation" of unconscious hostility characteristic of every crowd, appears to consciousness as "national honor." To the consciousness of the nation-crowd the quarrel for which it has been spoiling for a long time always appears to have been "forced upon it." Some nations are much more quarrelsome than others. I cannot believe that our conviction that Imperial Germany was the aggressor in the great war is due merely to patriotic conceit on our part. The difference between our national spirit and that of Imperial Prussia is obvious, but the difference in this respect, great as it is, is one of degree rather than of kind, and is due largely to the fact that the political organization of Germany permitted the Prussian patriots to hold the national mind in a permanent crowd state to a degree which is even now hardly possible in this republic. My point is that a nation becomes warlike to precisely the extent that its people may be made to think and behave as a crowd. Once a crowd, it is always "in the right" however aggressive and ruthless its behavior; every act or proposal which is calculated to involve the nation-crowd in a controversy, which gains some advantage over neighboring peoples, or intensifies hatred once it is released, is wildly applauded. Any dissent from the opinions of our particular party or group is trampled down. He who fails at such a time to be a crowd-man and our own sort of a crowd-man is a "slacker." Everyone's patriotism is put under suspicion, political heresy-hunting is the rule, any personal advantage which can be gained by denouncing as "enemy sympathizers" rival persons or groups within the nation is sure to be s.n.a.t.c.hed up by some one. The crowd-mind, even in times of peace, distorts patriotism so that it is little more than a compulsive expression and justification of repressed hostility. In war the crowd succeeds in giving rein to this hostility by first projecting it upon the enemy.

Freud in his little book, _War and Death_, regards war as a temporary "regression" in which primitive impulses which are repressed by civilization, but not eradicated, find their escape. He argues that most people live psychologically "beyond their means." Hence war could be regarded, I suppose, as a sort of "spiritual liquidation." But if the hostility which the war crowd permits to escape is simply a repressed impulse to cruelty, we should be obliged to explain a large part of crowd-behavior as "s.a.d.i.s.tic." This may be the case with crowds of a certain type, lynching mobs, for instance. But as the homicidal tendencies of paranoia are not commonly explained as sadism, I can see no reason why those of the crowd should be. Sadism is a return to an infantile s.e.x perversion, and in its direct overt forms the resulting conflicts are conscious and are between the subject and environment. It is where a tendency unacceptable to consciousness is repressed--and inadequately--that neurotic conflict ensues. This conflict being inner, develops certain mechanisms for the defense of the ego-feeling which is injured. The hatred of the paranoiac is really a defense for his own injured self-feeling. As the crowd always shows an exaggerated ego-feeling similar to the paranoiac's delusion of grandeur, and as in cases of paranoia this inner conflict is always "projected" in the form of delusions of persecution, may we not hold that the characteristic hostility of the crowd is also in some way a device for protecting this inflated self-appreciation from injury? The forms which this hatred takes certainly have all the appearance of being "compulsive" ideas and actions.

We have been discussing crowds in which hostility is present in the form of overt destructive and homicidal acts or other unmistakable expressions of hatred. But are there not also peaceable crowds, crowds devoted to religious and moral propaganda, idealist crowds? Yes, all crowds moralize, all crowds are also idealistic. But the moral enthusiasm of the crowd always demands a victim. The idealist crowd also always makes idols of its ideals and worships them with human sacrifice. The peaceable crowd is only potentially homicidal. The death-wish exists as a fancy only, or is expressed in symbols so as to be more or less unrecognizable to ordinary consciousness. I believe that _every crowd is_ "_against some one_." Almost any crowd will persecute on occasion--if sufficiently powerful and directly challenged. The crowd tends ever to carry its ideas to their deadly logical conclusion.

I have already referred to the crowd's interest in games and athletic events as an innocent symbolization of conflict. How easy it is to change this friendly rivalry into sudden riot--its real meaning--every umpire of baseball and football games knows. As an ill.u.s.tration of my point--namely, that the enthusiasm aroused by athletic contests is the suppressed hostility of the crowd, I give the following. In this letter to a New York newspaper, the writer, a loyal "fan," reveals the same mentality that we find in the sectarian fanatic, or good party man, whose "principles" have been challenged. The challenge seems in all such cases to bring the hostility into consciousness as "righteous indignation."

_To the Editor_:

SIR,--The article under the caption "Giants' Chances for Flag to be Settled in Week," on the sporting page of the _Tribune_, is doubtless intended to be humorous.

The section referring to the Cincinnati baseball public is somewhat overdrawn, to say the least, and does not leave a very favorable impression on the average Cincinnatian, such as myself. I have been a reader of your paper for some time, but if this sort of thing continues I shall feel very much like discontinuing.

W. L. D.

The extremes to which partisan hatred and jealousy can lead even members of the United States Senate, the intolerance and sectarian spirit which frequently characterize crowds, the "bigotry" of reformist crowds, are matters known to us all. Does anyone doubt that certain members of the Society for the Prevention of Vice, or of the Prohibitionists, would persecute if they had power? Have not pacifist ma.s.s meetings been known to break up in a row? The Christian religion is fundamentally a religion of love, but the Church has seldom been wholly free from the crowd-spirit, and the Church crowd will persecute as quickly as any other. In each period of its history when Christian believers have been organized as dominant crowds the Church has resorted to the severest forms of persecution. Popular religion always demands some kind of devil to stand as the permanent object of the believer's hostility. Let an editor, or lecturer, or clergyman anywhere attack some one, and he at once gains following and popularity. Evangelists and political orators are always able to "get" their crowd by resorting to abuse of some one.

Let any ma.s.s meeting become a crowd, and this note of hostility inevitably appears.

Notice the inscriptions which commonly appear on the banners carried in political or labor parades. On the day after the armistice was signed with Germany, when the most joyous and spontaneous crowds I have ever seen filled the streets of New York, I was greatly impressed with those homemade banners. Though it was the occasion of the most significant and hard-won victory in human history, there was hardly a reference to the fact. Though it was the glad moment of peace for which all had longed, I did not see ten banners bearing the word "Peace," even in the hands of the element in the city who were known to be almost unpatriotically pacifist. But within less than an hour I counted on Fifth Avenue more than a hundred banners bearing the inscription, "To h.e.l.l with the Kaiser."

That the man chiefly responsible for the horrors of the war should be the object of universal loathing is only to be expected, but the significant fact is that of all the sentiments which swept into people's minds on that occasion, this and this alone should have been immediately seized upon when the crowd spirit began to appear. I doubt if at the time there was a very clear sense of the enormity of Wilhelm's guilt in the minds of those laughing people. The Kaiser was hardly more than a symbol. The antagonist, whoever he be, was "fallen down to h.e.l.l," our own sense of triumph was magnified by the depth of his fall. Just so the Hebrew Prophet cried "Babylon is fallen," so the early Christians pictured Satan cast into the bottomless pit, so the Jacobins cried "_A bas les Aristocrats_," our own Revolutionary crowds cried "Down with George III," and the Union soldiers sang, "Hang Jeff Davis on a Sour Apple Tree." I repeat that wherever the crowd-mind appears, it will always be found to be "against" some one.

An interesting fact about the hostility of a crowd is its ability on occasion to survive the loss of its object. It may reveal the phenomenon which psychologists call "displacement." That is to say, another object may be subst.i.tuted for the original one without greatly changing the quality of the feeling. A mob in the street, driven back from the object of its attack, will loot a store or two before it disperses. Or, bent on lynching a certain negro, it may even subst.i.tute an innocent man, if robbed of its intended victim--as, for instance, the lynching of the mayor of Omaha. Such facts would seem to show that these hostile acts are really demanded by mechanisms within the psyche. Many symbolic acts of the person afflicted with compulsion neurosis show this same _trait of subst.i.tution_. If inhibited in the exercise of one mechanism of escape, the repressed wish will subst.i.tute another. Also anyone a.s.sociated by the unconscious reasoning with the hated object, or anyone who tries to defend him or prove him innocent, may suffer from this crowd's hatred. Freud has a.n.a.lyzed this phenomenon in his study of taboo. He who touches the tabooed object himself becomes taboo.