The Behavior of Crowds Part 5

I have said that the hostility of the crowd is a sort of "defense mechanism." That this is so in certain cases, I think can be easily demonstrated. The following news item is an example of the manner in which such hostility may serve as a "defense mechanism" compensating the self-feeling for certain losses and serving to enhance the feeling of self-importance:

CHARGES BAKER HAD 57 BRANDS OF ARMY OBJECTOR.

----, OF MINNESOTA, DEFENDING MARINES FATHERS' a.s.sOCIATION PROTEST; a.s.sAILS FREEING OF "SLACKERS."

WASHINGTON, _July 23_.--A bitter partisan quarrel developed in the House today when Representative ----, of Minnesota, attacked Secretary Baker and the President for the government's policy toward conscientious objectors. The attack was the result of protests by the Marines Fathers' a.s.sociation of Minneapolis, Minnesota, representing between 500 and 600 young marines now in France, all from the Minneapolis high schools and the University of Minnesota, and many in the famous 6th Regiment of Marines that took a big part in stopping the Germans at Chateau Thierry.

Upon learning of the treatment accorded conscientious objectors in this country while their sons were dying in France, the a.s.sociation asked Representative ---- to fix the responsibility for the government's policy. Representative ---- fixed it today as that of Secretary Baker and President Wilson, charging that they extended the definition of those to be exempted from military service laid down by Congress in an act of May 17, 1917.

"One variety of conscientious objector was not enough for Mr.

Baker," declared Representative ----. "He had 57 kinds...."

Representative ----, of Arizona, defended Secretary Baker, a.s.serting that of 20,000 men who were certified as conscientious objectors, 16,000 ultimately went to war. The case of Sergt.

Alvin C. York, the Tennessee hero, who had conscientious objections at first, but soon changed his mind, was cited in defense of the War Department's policy.

Let us pa.s.s over the obviously partisan element in this Congressional debate--a crowd phenomenon in itself, by the way--and consider the mental state of this Fathers' a.s.sociation.

In spite of the fact that the treatment of those who refused military service in this country was so much more severe than the manner with which the British government is reported to have dealt with this cla.s.s of persons, that many people, including the Secretary of War, whose loyalty except to partisan minds was above suspicion, sought in the name of humanity to alleviate some of the conditions in our military prisons, it was not severe enough to satisfy these "fathers." It is doubtful if anything short of an _auto da fe_ would have met their approval. Now no one believes that these simple farmers from the Northwest are such s.a.d.i.s.ts at heart that they enjoy cruelty for its own sake. I imagine that the processes at work here are somewhat as follows:

The telltale phrase here is that these farmers' sons "were dying in France." Patriotic motives rightly demanded that fathers yield their sons to the hardship and danger of battle, and while the sacrifice was made consciously, with willingness and even with pride in having done their painful duty, it was not accomplished without struggle--the unconscious resisted it. It could not be reconciled to so great a demand. In other words, these fathers, and probably many of their sons also, were unconsciously "conscientious objectors." Unconsciously they longed to evade this painful duty, but these longings were put aside, "repressed" as shameful and cowardly--that is, as unacceptable to conscious self-feeling. It was necessary to defend the ego against these longings. Compensation was demanded and found in the nation-wide recognition of the value of this patriotic sacrifice. Expressions of patriotic sentiment on the part of others, therefore, compensated the individual and enhanced his self-feeling.

Successful refusal anywhere to recognize the duty which consciously motivated this sacrifice strengthened the unconscious desire to evade it. The unconscious reasoning was something like this: "If those men got out of this thing, why should not we? Since we had to bear this loss, they must also. We have suffered for duty's sake. By making them suffer also, they will be forced to recognize this 'duty' with which we defend ourselves against our sense of loss and desire to escape it." As a witness to the values against which the ego of these fathers has to struggle, the existence of the conscientious objector, in a less degree of suffering than their own, is as intolerable as their own "shameful and cowardly" unconscious longings. Hostility to the conscientious objector is thus a "projection" of their own inner conflict. By becoming a crowd, the members of this "Fathers' a.s.sociation" make it mutually possible to represent their hostility to conscientious objectors as something highly patriotic. Secretary Baker's alleged leniency to these hated persons is now not only an affront to these fathers, it is an affront to the entire nation.

Another and somewhat different example of the function of hatred in the service of the self-feeling is the following item, which throws some light on the motives of the race riots in Washington. This is, of course, a defense of but one of the crowds involved, but it is interesting psychologically.

NEGRO EDITOR BLAMES WHITES FOR RACE RIOTS.

Dr. W. F. B. DuBois, of 70 Fifth Avenue, editor of _The Crisis_, a magazine published in connection with the work of the National a.s.sociation for the Advancement of the Colored People, yesterday attributed the race riots in Washington to the irritability of all people and the unsettling of many ideas caused by the war, to the influx of a large number of Southerners into Washington, and to the _presence in that city of many of the representatives of the educated, well-dressed cla.s.s of negroes_ which white racial antagonists dislike.

Washington policemen are notoriously unfriendly to the colored people, he added. Time and time again they stand by and witness a dispute between a white man and a negro, and when it is over and the negro has been beaten they arrest the negro, and not the white man who caused the trouble in the first place.

The colored editor pointed out the similarity between the present riots in Washington and the Atlanta riots which occurred about twelve years ago. In both places, he said, white hoodlums began rioting and killing negroes. When the latter became aroused and began to retaliate, the authorities stepped in and the rioting stopped.

Major J. E. Spingarn, acting treasurer of the National a.s.sociation for the Advancement of the Colored People, said the _soldiers and sailors who have been taking part in the rioting in Washington resent the new att.i.tude of self-respect which the negro has a.s.sumed because of the part he played in the war_.

"The soldiers," he said, "instead of fighting the negroes because the latter think better of themselves for having fought in the war, should respect them for having proved themselves such good fighters." (The italics are mine.)

It is quite possible that in most communities where such race riots occur certain members of the colored race are responsible to the extent that they have made themselves conspicuously offensive to their white neighbors.

But such individual cases, even where they exist, do not justify attacks upon hundreds of innocent people. And it must be said that in general the kind of people whose feelings of personal superiority can find no other social support than the mere fact that they happen to belong to the white race--and I think it will be found that the mobs who attack negroes are uniformly made of people who belong to this element--naturally find their self-feeling injured "if a n.i.g.g.e.r puts on airs." Their fiction is challenged; to accept the challenge would force upon the consciousness of such people a correct estimate of their own worth. Such an idea is unacceptable to consciousness. The presumptuous negroes who serve as such unpleasant reminders "must be put in their proper place"--that is, so completely under the feet of the white element in the community that the mere fact of being a white man may serve as a defense mechanism for just those members of our n.o.ble race who approach more closely to the social position of the colored element in our midst.

As the moral standards of the community will not permit even this element of the white race to play the hoodlum with self-approval, some disguise or "displacement" for this motive must be found whereby the acts to which it prompts may appear to the consciousness of their perpetrators as justifiable. A misdeed is committed by a black man; instantly this element of the white race becomes a crowd. The deed provides the whites with just the pretext they want. They may now justify themselves and one another in an a.s.sault on the whole colored community. Here I believe we have the explanation of much that is called "race prejudice." The hatred between the races, like all crowd-hatred, is a "defense mechanism" designed to protect the ego in its conflict with ideas unacceptable to consciousness.

The intensest hatred of the crowd is that directed toward the heretic, the nonconformist, the "traitor." I have sometimes thought that to the crowd-mind there is only one sin, heresy. Every sort of crowd, political, religious, moral, has an ax ready for the person who in renouncing its ideas and leaving it threatens to break it up. The bitter partisan hatred of crowds is nothing compared to their hatred for the renegade. To the crowd of true believers, the heretic or schismatic is "worse than the infidel." The moral crowd will "bear with" the worst _roue_ if only he strives to keep up appearances, has a guilty conscience, asks forgiveness, and professes firm belief in the conventions against which he offends; one may be forgiven his inability to "live up to his principles" if only his professed principles are the same as the crowd's. But let a Nietzsche, though his life be that of an ascetic, openly challenge and repudiate the values of popular morality, and his name is anathema.

As an example of the hatred of the political crowd for one who, having once put his hand to the plow and turned back, henceforth is no longer fit for the "kingdom," I quote the following from an ultraradical paper.

It is hard to believe that this pa.s.sage was written by a man who, in his right mind, is really intelligent and kind-hearted, but such is the case:

AN EXPLANATION.--Owing to a failure of editorial supervision we published an advertis.e.m.e.nt of John Spargo's book on Bolshevism.

We have returned the money we received for it, and canceled the contract for its future appearances. We do not pretend to protect our readers against patent-medicine swindlers, real-estate sharpers, canned goods prevaricators, ptomaine poisoners, fairy bond-sellers, picaroon nickel-pickers, subway ticket speculators, postage-stamp forgers, pie and pancake counterfeiters, plagiary burglars, lecherous p.o.r.nographers, and pictorial back-porch climbers, plundering buccaneer blackmailers and defaulting matrimonial agents, journalistic poachers, foragers, pickpockets, thimbleriggers, lick-sauce publicity men, notoriety hunters, typographical body-s.n.a.t.c.hers, blackletter a.s.sa.s.sins, and promulgators of licentious meters in free verse.

Against these natural phenomena we offer no guarantee to our readers, but we never intended to advertise John Spargo's book on Bolshevism.

Here again, it seems, the reason for hatred is "self-defense." One important difference between the crowd-mind and the psychosis is the fact that while the psychic mechanisms of the latter serve to disguise the inadequately repressed wish, those of the crowd-mind permit the escape of the repressed impulse by relaxing the force which demands the repression--namely, the immediate social environment. This relaxation is accomplished by a general fixation of attention which changes for those who share it the moral significance of the social demand. The repressed wish then appears to consciousness in a form which meets with the mutual approval of the individuals so affected. Or, as I have said, the social environment, instead of acting as a check upon the realization of the wish-fancy, slips along in the same direction with it. Hence the will to believe the same, so characteristic of every crowd. As soon as this mutuality is broken the habitual criteria of the real again become operative. Every individual who "comes to" weakens the hold of the crowd-ideas upon all the others to just the extent that his word must be taken into account. The crowd resorts to all sorts of devices to bind its members together permanently in a common faith. It resists disintegration as the worst conceivable evil. Disintegration means that crowd-men must lose their pet fiction--which is to say, their "faith."

The whole system elaborated by the unconscious fails to function; its value for compensation, defense, or justification vanishes as in waking out of a dream.

Strong spirits can stand this disillusionment. They have the power to create new, more workable ideals. They become capable of self-a.n.a.lysis.

They learn to be legislators of value and to revise their beliefs for themselves. Their faiths become not refuges, but instruments for meeting and mastering the facts of experience and giving them meaning. The strong are capable of making their lives spiritual adventures in a real world. The "truths" of such persons are not compulsive ideas, they are working hypotheses which they are ready, as occasion may demand, to verify at great personal risk, or to discard when proved false. Such persons sustain themselves in their sense of personal worth less by defense mechanisms than by the effort of will which they can make.

As William James said:

If the searching of our heart and reins be the purpose of this human drama, then what is sought seems to be what effort we can make. He who can make none is but a shadow; he who can make much is a hero. The huge world that girdles us about puts all sorts of questions to us, and tests us in all sorts of ways. Some of the tests we meet by actions that are easy, and some of the questions we answer in articulately formulated words. But the deepest question that is ever asked admits of no reply but the dumb turning of the will and tightening of our heartstrings as we say, "Yes, I will even have it so!" When a dreadful object is presented, or when life as a whole turns up its dark abysses to our view, then the worthless ones among us lose their hold on the situation altogether, and either escape from its difficulties by averting their attention, or, if they cannot do that, collapse into yielding ma.s.ses of plaintiveness and fear.

The effort required for facing and consenting to such objects is beyond their power to make. But the heroic mind does differently. To it, too, the objects are sinister and dreadful, unwelcome, incompatible with wished-for things. But it can face them if necessary without losing its hold upon the rest of life.

The world thus finds in the heroic man its worthy match and mate.... He can _stand_ this Universe.

Indeed the path for all who would make of living a reality rather than an imitation leads along what James used to call "the perilous edge."

Every personal history that is a history, and not a mere fiction, contains in it something unique, a fraction for which there is no common denominator. It requires just that effort of attention to concrete reality and the fact of self which in the crowd we always seek to escape by diverting attention to congenial abstractions and ready-made universals. We "find ourselves" only as we "get over" one after another of our crowd-compulsions, until finally we are strong enough, as Ibsen would say, "to stand alone."

Timid spirits seldom voluntarily succeed in getting closer to reality than the "philosophy of '_as if_'" which characterizes the thinking both of the crowd and the psychoneurosis. What indeed is the crowd but a fiction of upholding ourselves by all leaning on one another, an "escape from difficulties by averting attention," a spiritual safety-first or "fool-proof" mechanism by which we bear up one another's collapsing ego-consciousness lest it dash its foot against a stone?

The crowd-man can, when his fiction is challenged, save himself from spiritual bankruptcy, preserve his defenses, keep his crowd from going to pieces, only by a demur. Anyone who challenges the crowd's fictions must be ruled out of court. He must not be permitted to speak. As a witness to contrary values his testimony must be discounted. The worth of his evidence must be discredited by belittling the disturbing witness. "He is a bad man; the crowd must not listen to him." His motives must be evil; he "is bought up"; he is an immoral character; he tells lies; he is insincere or he "has not the courage to take a stand"

or "there is nothing new in what he says." Ibsen's "Enemy of the People," ill.u.s.trates this point very well. The crowd votes that Doctor Stockman may not speak about the baths, the real point at issue. Indeed, the mayor takes the floor and officially announces that the doctor's statement that the water is bad is "unreliable and exaggerated." Then the president of the Householder's a.s.sociation makes an address accusing the doctor of secretly "_aiming at revolution_." When finally Doctor Stockman speaks and tells his fellow citizens the real meaning of their conduct, and utters a few plain truths about "the compact majority," the crowd saves its face, not by proving the doctor false, but by howling him down, voting him an "enemy of the people," and throwing stones through his windows.

A crowd is like an unsound banking inst.i.tution. People are induced to carry their deposits of faith in it, and so long as there is no unusual withdrawing of accounts the insolvent condition may be covered up. Many uneasy depositors would like to get their money out if they could do so secretly, or without incurring the displeasure of the others. Meanwhile all insist that the bank is perfectly safe and each does all he can to compel the others to stay in. The thing they all most fear is that some one will "start a run on the bank," force it to liquidate, and everyone will lose. So the crowd functions in its way just so long as its members may be cajoled into an appearance of continued confidence in its ideals and values. The spiritual capital of each depends on the confidence of the others. As a consequence they all spend most of their time exhorting one another to be good crowd-men, fearing and hating no one so much as the person who dares raise the question whether the crowd could really meet its obligations.

The cla.s.sic ill.u.s.tration of the manner in which the crowd is led to discredit the witness to values contrary to its own, is the oration of Mark Antony in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar." It is by this means alone that Antony is able to turn the minds of the Roman citizens into the crowd state. It will be remembered that the address of Brutus, just before this, while not at all a bit of crowd-oratory, left a favorable impression. The citizens are convinced that "This Caesar was a tyrant."

When Antony goes up to speak, he thanks them "for Brutus' sake." They say, "'Twere best he speak no harm of Brutus here." He can never make them his crowd unless he can destroy Brutus' influence. This is precisely what he proceeds gradually to do.

At first with great courtesy--"The n.o.ble Brutus hath told you Caesar was ambitious; if it were so it was a grievous fault ... for Brutus is an honorable man, so are they all, all honorable men." This sentence is repeated four times in the first section; Caesar was a good faithful friend to Antony, "But ... and Brutus is an honorable man." Again Caesar refused the crown, but "Brutus is an honorable man." Caesar wept when the poor cried, "sure, Brutus is an honorable man, I speak not to disprove what he says" but "men have lost their reason" and "my heart is in the coffin there with Caesar." The citizens are sorry for the weeping Antony; they listen more intently now. Again--"If I were disposed to stir your hearts and minds to mutiny and rage"--but that would be to wrong Brutus and Ca.s.sius, "Who you all know are honorable men"--this time said with more marked irony. Rather than wrong such honorable men, Antony prefers to "wrong the dead, to wrong myself--and you." That sentence sets Brutus squarely in opposition to the speaker and his audience. Caesar's will is mentioned--if only the commons knew what was in it, but Antony will not read it, "you are not wood, you are not stones, but men." The speaker now resists their demand to hear the will, he ought not have mentioned it. He fears he has, after all, wronged "the honorable men whose daggers have stabbed Caesar." The citizens have caught the note of irony now; the honorable men are "traitors," "villains," "murderers."

From this point on the speaker's task is easy; they have become a crowd.

They think only of revenge, of killing everyone of the conspirators, and burning the house of Brutus. Antony has even to remind them of the existence of the will. The mischief is set afloat the moment Brutus is successfully discredited.

The development of the thought in this oration is typical. a.n.a.lysis of almost any propagandist speech will reveal some, if not all, the steps by which Brutus is made an object of hatred. _The crowd hates in order that it may believe in itself._

VI

THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD-MIND

Wherever conscious thinking is determined by unconscious mechanisms, and all thinking is more or less so, it is dogmatic in character. Beliefs which serve an unconscious purpose do not require the support of evidence. They persist because they are demanded. This is a common symptom of various forms of psychoneurosis. Ideas "haunt the mind" of the patient; he cannot rid himself of them. He may know they are foolish, but he is compelled to think them. In severe cases, he may hear voices or experience other hallucinations which are symbolic of the obsessive ideas. Or his psychic life may be so absorbed by his one fixed idea that it degenerates into the ceaseless repet.i.tion of a gesture or a phrase expressive of this idea.

In paranoia the fixed ideas are organized into a system. Brill says:

I know a number of paranoiacs who went through a stormy period lasting for years, but who now live contentedly as if in another world. Such transformations of the world are common in paranoia.

They do not care for anything, as nothing is real to them. They have withdrawn their sum of libido from the persons of their environment and the outer world. The end of the world is the projection of this internal catastrophe. Their subjective world came to an end since they withdrew their love from it. By a secondary rationalization, the patients then explain whatever obtrudes itself upon them as something intangible and fit it in with their own system. Thus one of my patients who considers himself a sort of Messiah denies the reality of his own parents by saying that they are only shadows made by his enemy, the devil, whom he has not yet wholly subdued. Another paranoiac in the Central Islip State Hospital, who represented himself as a second Christ, spends most of his time sewing out on cloth crude scenes containing many buildings, interspersed with pictures of the doctors. He explained all this very minutely as the _new world system_.... Thus the paranoiac builds up again with his delusions a new world in which he can live.... (Italics mine.)