The Behavior of Crowds Part 7

As an ill.u.s.tration of this sort of reasoning, I give here a few pa.s.sages from a propagandist publication in which the crowd-will to dominate takes the typical American method of striving to force its cult ideas upon the community as a whole by means of restrictive moralist legislation--in this case attempt is made to prohibit the exhibition of motion pictures on Sunday. That the demand for such legislation is for the most part a pure cla.s.s-crowd phenomenon, designed to enhance the self-feeling and economic interests of the "reformers," by keeping the poor from having a good time, is I think, rather obvious. The reasoning here is interesting, as the real motive is so thinly disguised by pietistic plat.i.tudes that the two follow each other in alternate succession:

(1) Sunday Movies are not needed. The people have six days and six nights each week on which to attend the movies. Is not that plenty of time for all?

(2) Sunday Movie Theaters commercialize the Christian Sabbath.

While "the Sabbath was made for man," _yet it is G.o.d's day_. We have no right to sell it for business purposes. It is a day for rest and worship, not a day for greed and gain. Sunday would, of course, be the best day in the week financially for the movies. It would also be the best day in the week for the open saloons and horse-racing, but that is no reason why these should be allowed on Sunday. _The Sabbath must not be commercialized._

(3) _Sunday Movie Theaters destroy the rest and quiet of many people, especially those who live in the residential district_ of cities and in the neighborhood where such motion-picture theaters are located. Great crowds pour along the streets near such theaters, often breaking the Sunday quiet of that part of the city by loud and boisterous talk.

Thousands of people every year are moving away from the downtown noisy districts of the cities out into the quiet residential districts in order to have quiet Sundays. But when a motion-picture theater comes and locates next to their homes, or in their block, as has been done in many cases, and great noisy, boisterous crowds surge back and forth before their homes all Sunday afternoon and evening, going to the movies, they are being robbed of _that for which they paid their money when they bought a home in that quiet part of the city_....

(4) ... Anything that injures the Christian Sabbath injures the Christian churches, and certainly Sunday motion-picture theaters, wherever allowed, do injure the Christian Sabbath....

Dr. Wilbur F. Crafts of Washington, D. C., probably the greatest authority on the Sabbath question in this country, says, "The Sabbath-keeping nations are the strongest physically, mentally, morally, _financially_, and politically." Joseph Cook said, "It is no accident that the nations that keep the Sabbath most carefully are those where there is the most political freedom."

_Sabbath-breaking nations gradually lose their political freedom._

(5) Sunday Movie Theaters injure the Christian Sabbath and thus injure the morals of the people. _Anything that injures the morals of the people, injures the nation itself._ From a _patriotic_ standpoint, we ought to stand for strict observance of the Christian Sabbath, as past experience has shown and the testimony of many witnesses proves that a disregard of the Christian Sabbath produces crime and immorality and tends to destroy the free inst.i.tutions which have helped to make our nation great....

Fundamentally, all such vicious laws are _unconst.i.tutional_.

_Sunday Movie Theaters disregard the rights of labor_.... Canon William Sheafe Chase has aptly said, "No man has the Christ spirit who wants a better time on Sunday than he is willing to give everyone else."...

Col. Fairbanks, the famous scale manufacturer, said: "I can tell by watching the men at work Monday which spent Sunday in sport and which at home, church, or Sabbath-school. The latter _do more and better work_."

Superintendents of large factories in Milwaukee and elsewhere have said, "When our men go on a Sunday excursion, some cannot work Monday, and many who work cannot earn their wages, while _those who had no sport Sunday do their best day's work Monday_." (Italics mine.)

We need not be surprised to find that the closed ideational system which in the first instance is a refuge from the real, becomes in turn a device for imposing one's will upon his fellows. The believer's ego is served in both instances. It is interesting to note also that this self-feeling appears in crowd-thinking as its very opposite. _The greatest enemy of personality is the crowd._ The crowd does not want valuable men; it wants only useful men. Everyone must justify his existence by appealing to the not-self. One may do nothing for his own sake. He may not even strive for spiritual excellence for such a reason.

He must live for "principle," for "the great cause," for impersonal abstractions--which is to say, he must live for his crowd, and so make it easier for the other members to do the same with a good face.

The complex of ideas in which the crowd-mind as we have seen takes refuge, being necessarily made up of abstract generalizations, serves the crowd-will to social dominance through the very claim to universality which such ideas exert. Grant that an idea is an absolute truth, and it follows, of course, that it must be true on all occasions and for everyone. The crowd is justified, therefore, in sacrificing people to its ideal--itself. The idea is no longer an instrument of living; it is an imperative. It is not yours to use the idea; the idea is there to use you. You have ceased to be an end. Anything about you that does not partake of the reality of this idea has no right to be, any experience of yours which happens to be incommensurable with this idea loses its right to be; for experience as such has now only a "phenomenal existence." The crowd, by identifying its will to power with this idea, becomes _itself absolute_. Your personal self, as an end, is quite as unwelcome to the Absolute as to the crowd. There must be no private property in thought or motive. By making everybody's business my business, I have made my business everybody's business.

There may be only one standard--that of our crowd, which, because of its very universal and impersonal character is really n.o.body's.

The absolutism of the crowd-mind with its consequent hostility to conscious personality finds a perfect rationalization in the ethical philosophy of Kant. The absolutism of the idea of Duty is less skillfully elaborated in its popular crowd-manifestations, but in its essentials it is always present, as propaganda everywhere when carefully a.n.a.lyzed will show. We must not be deceived by Kant's a.s.sertion that the individual is an end. This individual is not you or I, or anyone; it is a mere logical abstraction. By declaring that everyone is equally an end, Kant ignores all personal differences, and therefore the fact of individuality as such. We are each an end in respect to those qualities only in which we are identical--namely, in that we are "rational beings." But this rational being is not a personal intelligence; it is a fiction, a bundle of mental faculties a.s.sumed _a priori_ to exist, and then treated as if it were universally and equally applicable to all actually existing intelligences.

In arguing that "I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law," Kant may be easily understood as justifying any crowd in seeking to make its peculiar maxims universal laws. Who but a Rationalist or a crowd-man presumes to have found the "universal law," who else would have the effrontery to try to legislate for every conscience in existence? But this presumption has its price. In thus universalizing my moral will, I wholly depersonalize it. He says:

It is of extreme importance to remember that we must not allow ourselves to think of deducing the reality of this principle from the particular attributes of human nature. For duty is to be a practical unconditional necessity of action; it must therefore hold for all rational beings (to whom an imperative can apply at all), and for this reason only be also a law for all human wills. On the contrary, whatever it deduces from the particular natural characteristics of humanity, from certain feelings and propensions, nay, even if possible from any particular tendency proper to human reason, and which need not necessarily hold for the will of every rational being, this may indeed supply us with a maxim but not with a law; with a subjective principle on which we may have a propension or inclination to act, but not with an objective principle on which we should be _enjoined_ to act, _even though all our propensions, inclinations, and natural dispositions were opposed_ to it. In fact, the _sublimity and intrinsic dignity_ of the command in duty _are so much the more evident the less subjective impulses favor it, and the more they oppose it_ [italics here are mine], without being able in the slightest degree to weaken the obligation of the law or to diminish its validity.

... An action done from duty derives its moral worth _not from the purpose_ which is to be attained by it, but from the maxim by which it is determined. It (this moral worth) cannot lie anywhere but in the _principle of The Will_, without regard to the ends which can be attained by such action.

This loss of the conscious self in the universal, this turning away from the empirically known, this demand that an _a priori_ principle be followed to its deadly practical conclusion _regardless of the ends_ to which it leads, is of utmost importance for our study. It is precisely what the paranoiac does after his own fashion. In crowd-thinking it is often made the instrument of wholesale destruction and human slaughter.

The mob is ever motivated by this logic of negation, and of automatic behavior. It is thus that compulsive thinking sways vast hordes of men and women, impelling them, in the very name of truth or righteousness, to actions of the most atrocious character. It is this which robs most popular movements of their intelligent purposiveness, unleashes the fanatic and the bigot, and leads men to die and to kill for a phrase.

This way of thinking points straight to Salem, Ma.s.sachusetts, to the torture-chamber, the pile of f.a.gots and the mill pond at Rosmersholm.

The habit of thinking as a crowd is so widespread that it is impossible to trace the influence of its rationalistic negations in the daily mental habits of most of us. We play out our lives as if we were but acting a part which some one had a.s.signed to us. The fact that we are ourselves realities, as inevitable as falling rain, and with the same right to be as the rocks and hills, positively startles us. We feel that we must plead extenuation, apologize for our existence, as if the end and aim of living were to serve or vindicate a Good which, being sufficient in itself and independent of us, can never be realized as actually good for anybody. We behave as if we were unprofitable servants, cringing before wrathful ideas which, though our own creations, we permit to lord it over us. Our virtues we regard not as expressions of ourselves or as habitual ways of reaching desirable goods, but as if they were demanded of us unwillingly by something not self. We should remind ourselves that these big words we idolize have no eyes to see us and no hearts to care what we do, that they are but symbols of ideas which we might find very useful if we dared to become masters of them. The most common use we make of such ideas is to beat one another and ourselves into line with them, or enforce upon ourselves and others the collection of a debt which was contracted only by our unconscious desire to cheat at cards in the game of civilization.

A conscious recognition of this desire and its more deliberate and voluntary resistance in ourselves rather than in our neighbors, a candid facing of the fact of what we really are and really want, and a mutual readjustment of our relations on this recognized basis would doubtless deliver us from the compulsion of crowd-thinking in somewhat the same way that psychoa.n.a.lysis is said to cure the neurotic by revealing to him his unconscious wish.

That some such cure is an imperative social need is evident. To-day the mob lurks just under the skin of most of us, both ignorant and educated.

The ever-increasing frequency of outbreaks of mob violence has its source in the crowd-thinking which is everywhere encouraged. The mob which may at any time engulf us is, after all, but the logical conclusion and sudden ripening of thought processes which are commonly regarded as highly respectable, idealistic, and moral.

VII

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

The crowd-mind is seen at its best and at its worst in revolution. To many minds, revolution is so essentially a crowd phenomenon that the terms revolution and crowd-rule are almost synonymous. "Hurrah, the mob rules Russia," cried certain radicals in the spring of 1917--"Let the people rule everywhere." Others, more conservative, saw in every extravagant deed and atrocity alleged to have happened in Russia only the thing logically to be expected where the mob rules. The idea of revolution is itself so commonly a crowd-idea that the thinking--if thinking it may be called--of most people on this subject depends princ.i.p.ally upon which crowd we happen to belong to, the crowd which sustains the ego-feeling of its members by the hope of revolution, or the crowd which, for similar reason, brands everything which opposes its interests, real or imaginary, as "anarchy" and "Bolshevism."

If the word "revolution" be taken to mean fundamental change in men's habits of thought, and life, and the forms of their relations to one another, then it may be said that great "revolutions may be and have been achieved with a relatively small degree of crowd-thinking and mob violence." Much of the normal development of civilization, for instance, the great scientific advance of the nineteenth century, the spread of culture, the creation of artistic values, the rise in the standard of living, is change of this sort. Such change is, however, gradual. It is brought about by countless concrete adaptations, by thinking always toward realizable ends. New and often unforeseeable results are thus reached; but they are reached, as in all organic growth and in all sound thinking, by a series of successful adjustments within the real. True progress is doubtless made up of changes of this sort. But for the course of progress to run on uninterrupted and undefeated we should have to be, both in our individual and social behavior, the reasonable beings which certain nineteenth-century utilitarians mistook us for.

It is the fool thing, the insincere thing, that more commonly happens in matters social and political. The adjustment reached is not often a solution of a social problem worked out deliberately on the "greatest-happiness" principle. It is commonly a _status quo_, or balance of power among contending crowds, each inspired by the fiction of its own importance, by self-idealization, and desire to rule. It is an unstable equilibrium usually held in place for the time by a dominant crowd. This dominant crowd may itself be composed of quarreling factions, but these parties, so long as they share enough of the supremacy to keep up their self-feeling, so long, in fact, as their members may even be able to make themselves believe that they, too, are in the upper set, or so long as they continue to hope for success in the social game as now played, unite in repeating the catchwords which justify their crowd in its supremacy. The dominant group identifies its own interests with the general welfare. And in the sense that some sort of order, or any at all, is to be preferred to social chaos, there is an element of truth in this identification.

The fact remains, however, that the dominant crowd possesses always much of the crowd-spirit which originally secured for it its enviable position. Its ideas, like those of all crowds, are devices for sustaining the self-feeling of its members, for protecting itself, for keeping the group together, for justification. They are only secondarily, if at all, instruments for dealing with new and perplexing social situations. It cannot be denied that a certain set of opinions, prejudices, mannerisms, ceremonies "go with" the social position which corresponds to them. They are the ready-made habits of the "set" or cla.s.s. They are badges by which the "gentleman" is distinguished, the evening clothes of the psyche, as it were. Many of these crowd-forms represent true values of living, some of them are useful in our dealings with reality; if this were not so, if such spiritual tattooings or ceremonial forms were wholly harmful, the crowd which performed them would be at such a disadvantage that it could not hold its own. But that considerations of utility--other than the function which such ceremonialism is known to have for the unconscious always--do not directly govern these forms of thought and behavior is seen in the fact that so many of them, as Sumner says of "folkways," are either harmful or useless in dealing with matters of fact.

The dominant crowd, therefore, in just so far as it must remain a crowd in order to secure its own position of supremacy, must strive to force all social realities into the forms of its own conflicts and dilemmas.

Inevitably the self-feeling of a great many people, who are forced by the dominant crowd to conform and labor with no compensation, is hurt.

They cannot but contrast their own lot with that of their more fortunate neighbors. Of all things, people probably resist most the feeling of inferiority. Any suggestion that the difference in social position is due to a similar difference in personal worth or in ability is hotly resented. The resentment is in no wise abated by the fact that in some cases this suggestion may be true. Compensations are at once created by the unconscious. In mediaeval times "all men were brothers and were equal before the altars of the Church and in heaven." Thus distinctions of merit, other than those which prevailed in the social order, were set up in the interest of the common man.

As the influence of the Renaissance directed general attention from the realm of the spiritual to practical affairs of earth, these compensations changed from thoughts of the future world to dreams of the future of this world. The injured self-feeling dwells upon the economic or political inequalities which flow from the dominance of the ruling crowd. The injustices and acts of exploitation, which are certainly neither new nor rare occurrences in human relations, are seized upon as if it were these things, not the a.s.sumption to superiority, which were the issue at stake.

At the time of the French Revolution the Third Estate, or Bourgeois, which showed itself quite as capable of exploiting the poor as ever were the older aristocrats, saw itself only as part of the wronged and exploited "people." The sufferings of the poor, which it was frequently even then profiting in quite as heartily, to say the least, as the t.i.tled n.o.bility, were represented as the grievance of all mankind against the hated n.o.bility. That the ideas of "liberty, equality, and fraternity" which these good tradesmen preached may easily become the sort of compensatory ideas we have been discussing is shown by the fact of the genuine astonishment and indignation of the burghers when later their employees made use of this same phrase in the struggles between labor and capital. Sans-culottism had quite as many psychological motives as economic behind it.

How pompous, hateful, and sn.o.bbish were those t.i.tled folk with their powdered wigs, carriages, fine clothes, and their exclusive social gatherings to which honest citizens, often quite as wealthy as themselves, were not invited. If the "people"--that is, the burghers themselves--only had a chance they would be just as fine ladies and gentlemen as those who merely inherited their superiority. Down with the aristocrats! All men were equal and always had been. There must be fraternity and the _carier ouvert les talents_, in other words, brotherhood and free compet.i.tion.

I am sure, from all I have ever seen or read of social revolt and unrest, that this injured self-feeling, or defense against the sense of personal inferiority, while not the only motive, is the most powerful one at work. It crops out everywhere, in the layman's hatred of the clergy during the Reformation, in that curious complex of ideas whereby the uneducated often look upon a college diploma as something little short of magical, and defend their ego against this ridiculously exaggerated mark of distinction and accompanying feeling of self-reproach by a slur at "high-brows." Few people realize how general this feeling is; the trick of making fun of the educated is one of the commonest forms of crowd-humor in America, both in vaudeville and in popular oratory. I have previously pointed out the fact that the religious revival in our day is to a great extent characterized by a popular resistance to scholars. No one can read Mr. Sunday's sermons and deny this fact. The City of New York gave the largest majority in its history to the candidate for the office of mayor who made opposition to "experts" the main issue in his campaign. Scores of times I have heard popular speakers resort to this trick to gain favor with their audiences, and I cannot remember ever having known such sentiments to fail to gain applause--I am not speaking now of strictly academic groups, but of general gatherings.

The point of interest here is that these same people have a most extravagant notion of the value of the academic training which they encourage the crowd speaker in ridiculing. I have made it a practice of talking with a great many people personally and drawing them out on this point, and I have found that this is almost uniformly the case. F. B., a cigar maker by trade, says, "Oh, if I had only had sense enough to go on to school when I had the opportunity!" E. L., a mechanic, says, "I might have been somebody, if I had been given any chance to get an education."

R., a sort of jack-of-all-trades, says, "If I only had N.'s education, I'd be a millionaire." B., a farmer with limited intellectual interests, says, "I tell you, my boys are not going to be like me; they have got to go to college." G., a waiter, says, "I don't know much," and then proceeds to impress me with the latest bit of academic information which he has picked up. C., a printer, who has been moderately successful, says: "I'd give ten thousand dollars right this minute if I knew Greek; now there is ---- and there is ----, neighbors of mine, they're highly educated. When I'm with them I'm ashamed and feel like a dub."

When, on such occasions, I repeatedly say that the average academic student really learns hardly anything at all of the cla.s.sic languages, and cite the small fruits of my own years of tedious study as an example, the effect produced is invariably comforting--until I add that one need not attend a university seven years or even four to become educated, but that nearly everyone with ability to learn and with genuine intellectual interests may achieve a remarkable degree of learning. The answer of the perplexed person is then often an extenuation. "Well, you see, a busy person or a working man is so tired after the day's work that he has no energy left for study," or it is, "Wait till the working cla.s.s have more leisure, then they, too, can be cultivated." Pa.s.sing over this extenuation, which ignores the fact that some of the best informed and clearest thinking people one meets are working people, while the average university graduate leads anything but an intellectual life, it can hardly be denied, I think, that our crowd cult of anti-"highbrowism" is really a defense mechanism against an inner feeling of inferiority. Now the interesting thing about this feeling of inferiority is the exaggerated notion of the superiority of the college-trained, which is entertained chiefly by the uneducated themselves. What appears here is in fact nothing other than a cheapening of the idea of superiority. Personal excellence is something which anyone may attain; it is not something congenital, but something to be added on; one "gets an education," possesses something of advantage, merely by a few years of conventional study of books. Anyone might do that, therefore. "I, too, if I only cared to, or had been given opportunity, might now be famous." "The difference between myself and the world's greatest genius is not a spiritual chasm which I could not myself, at least hypothetically, cross." "It is rather an 'acquired character,' a mere fruit of special opportunity--which in a few cases it doubtless may be--but it is something external; at bottom we are all equal."

Many facts may be advanced to corroborate the results of our a.n.a.lysis here. The crowd always resents the Carlyle, William James, Nietzsche, Goethe theory of genius. Genius is not congenital superiority. It is the result of hard work. The genius is not a unique personal fact, he is a "representative man." He says just what his age is thinking. The inarticulate message of his contemporaries simply becomes articulate in some one, and behold a genius. In other words, I suppose, all Vienna, messenger boys and bootblacks especially, were suddenly fascinated by Schiller's "Ode to Joy" and went about whistling improvised musical renderings of the theme of this poem, till the deaf Beethoven heard and wrote these whistlings down in the form of the Ninth Symphony.

According to the crowd, Luther did not create the Reformation, or Petrarch the Renaissance; these movements themselves created their leaders and founders; all that the genius did was to interpret and faithfully obey the People's will. Ergo, to be a genius one need only study hard enough to be able to tell the people what they already think.

The superiority of genius is therefore no different from that of any educated person; except in degree of application. Anyone of us might possess this superiority. In other words, the "intellectual sn.o.bbishness" which the crowd resents is nothing else than the crowd-man's own fiction of self-importance, projected upon those whose imagined superiority he envies. It is recognized, even exaggerated by the unlearned, because it is precisely the sort of superiority which the ignorant man himself, in his ignorance, imagines that he himself would display if he "only had the chance," and even now possesses unrecognized.

We have made the foregoing detour because I think it serves to ill.u.s.trate, in a way, the psychic processes behind much revolutionary propaganda and activity. I would not attempt to minimize the extent of the social injustice and economic slavery which a dominant crowd, whether ecclesiastical, feudal, or capitalistic, is guilty of in its dealings with its subjects. But every dominant crowd, certain sections of the "proletariat" as quickly as any other, will resort to such practices, and will alike justify them by moral catchwords the minute its supremacy over other crowds gives it opportunity. Therefore there is a certain amount of tautology in denouncing the "master cla.s.s" for its monstrous abuses. That the real point at issue between the dominant crowd and the under crowd is the a.s.sumed personal superiority of the members of the former, rather than the economic "exploitation" which it practices, is shown by the fact that the French Revolution was led by wealthy bourgeois, and that the leading revolutionary element in the working cla.s.s to-day consists, not of the "down and out" victims of capitalist exploitation, but of the members of the more highly skilled and better paid trades, also of certain intellectuals who are not "proletarians" at all.

And now we come to our point: the fiction of superiority of the dominant crowd, just as in the case of the a.s.sumed personal superiority of the intellectuals, is resented by the under crowd because it is _secretly recognized_ by the under crowd. Of course the dominant crowd, like all crowds, is obsessed by its feelings of self-importance, and this feeling is apparently vindicated by its very social position. But the fiction is recognized at its full face value, and therefore resented by the under crowds, because that is precisely the sort of personal supremacy to which they also aspire.

One commonly hears it said to-day, by those who have made the catchwords of democracy their crowd cult, that the issue in modern society is between democracy and capitalism. In a sense this may be true, but only in a superficial sense; the real issue is between the personal self as a social ent.i.ty and the crowd. Capitalism is, to my mind, the logical first fruit of so-called democracy. Capitalism is simply the social supremacy of the trader-man crowd. For a hundred years and more commercial ability--that of organizing industry and selling goods--has been rewarded out of all proportion to any other kind of ability, because, in the first place, it leads to the kind of success which the ordinary man most readily recognizes and envies--large houses, fine clothes, automobiles, exclusive clubs, etc. A Whittier may be ever so great a poet, and yet sit beside the stove in the general store of his little country village, and no one thinks he is so very wonderful. Some may envy him his fame, but few will envy and therefore be fascinated by that in him which they do not understand. But a multimillionaire in their community is understood; everyone can see and envy his success; he is at once both envied and admired.

Moreover, the commercial ability is the sort which the average man most commonly thinks he possesses in some degree. While, therefore, he grumbles at the unjust inequalities in wealth which exist in modern society, and denounces the successful business man as an exploiter and fears his power, the average man will nevertheless endure all this, much in the same spirit that a student being initiated into a fraternity will take the drubbing, knowing well that his own turn at the fun will come later. It is not until the members of the under crowd begin to suspect that their own dreams of "aping the rich" may never come true that they begin to entertain revolutionary ideas. In other words, forced to abandon the hope of joining the present dominating crowd, they begin to dream of supplanting and so dispossessing this crowd by their own crowd.

That the dominant crowd is just as much to blame for this state of affairs as the under crowd, perhaps more so, is shown by the history of every period preceding a revolutionary outbreak. I will dwell at some length on this fact later. My point here is that, first, a revolution, in the sense that the word means a violent uprising against the existing order, is a psychological crowd-phenomenon--and second, that it takes two crowds to make a revolution.