_The_
BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS
_A Psychological Study_
_by_
Everett Dean Martin
_Lecturer in Social Philosophy and Director of the Cooper
Union Forum of the People's Institute of New York_
[Illustration]
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS
Copyright, 1920, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
H--W
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
FOREWORD vii
I. THE CROWD AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF TO-DAY 1
II. HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED 11
III. THE CROWD AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 51
IV. THE EGOISM OF THE CROWD-MIND 73
V. THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE 92
VI. THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD-MIND 133
VII. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS 166
VIII. THE FRUITS OF REVOLUTION--NEW CROWD-TYRANNIES
FOR OLD 219
IX. FREEDOM AND GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS 233
X. EDUCATION AS A POSSIBLE CURE FOR CROWD-THINKING 281
INDEX 305
FOREWORD
Since the publication of Le Bon's book, _The Crowd_, little has been
added to our knowledge of the mechanisms of crowd-behavior. As a
practical problem, the habit of crowd-making is daily becoming a more
serious menace to civilization. Events are making it more and more clear
that, pressing as are certain economic questions, the forces which
threaten society are really psychological.
Interest in the economic struggle has to a large extent diverted
attention from the significance of the problems of social psychology.
Social psychology is still a rather embryonic science, and this
notwithstanding the fact that psychiatry has recently provided us with a
method with which we may penetrate more deeply than ever before into the
inner sources of motive and conduct.
The remedy which I have suggested in Chapter X deserves a much more
extended treatment than I have given it. It involves one of the great
mooted questions of modern philosophical discussion. It is, however, not
within the province of this book to enter upon a discussion of the
philosophy of Humanism. The subject has been thoroughly thrashed over in
philosophical journals and in the writings of James, Schiller, Dewey,
and others. It is sufficient for my purpose merely to point out the fact
that the humanist way of thinking may provide us with just that
educational method which will break up the logical forms in which the
crowd-mind intrenches itself.
Those who expect to find a prescribed formula or ideal scheme of
organization as a remedy for our social ills may feel that the solution
to which I have come--namely, a new educational method--is too vague.
But the problem of the crowd is really concerned with the things of the
mind. And if I am correct in my thesis that there is a necessary
connection between crowd-thinking and the various traditional systems of
intellectualist, absolutist, and rationalist philosophy, the way out
must be through the formation of some such habits of thinking as I have
suggested.
E. D. M.
NEW YORK, _October 10, 1919_.
THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS
I
THE CROWD AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF TO-DAY
Every one at times feels himself in the grip of social forces over which
he has no control. The apparently impersonal nature of these forces has
given rise to various mechanistic theories of social behavior. There are
those who interpret the events of history as by-products of economic
evolution. Others, more idealistic but determinists, nevertheless, see
in the record of human events the working out of a preordained plan.
There is a popular notion, often shared by scholars, that the individual
and society are essentially irreconcilable principles. The individual is
assumed to be by nature an antisocial being. Society, on the other hand,
is opposed in principle to all that is personal and private. The demands
of society, its welfare and aims, are treated as if they were a tax
imposed upon each and every one by something foreign to the natural will
or even the happiness of all. It is as if society as "thing-in-itself"
could prosper in opposition to the individuals who collectively
constitute it.
It is needless to say that both the individual and the social, according
to such a view, are empty abstractions. The individual is, in fact, a
social entity. Strip him of his social interests, endowments, and
habits, and the very feeling of self, or "social me" as William James
called it, vanishes and nothing is left but a Platonic idea and a reflex
arc. The social also is nothing else than the manner in which
individuals habitually react to one another. Society in the abstract, as
a principle opposed to individual existence, has no more reality than
that of the grin which Alice in Wonderland sees after the famous
Cheshire cat has vanished. It is the mere logical concept of others in
general, left leering at us after all the concrete others have been
thought away.
Much social thinking is of this cat-grin sort. Having abstracted from
the thought of self everything that is social, and from the idea of the
social all that has to do with concrete persons, the task remains to get
pure grin and pure cat together again in such a way that neither shall
lose its identity in the other. It is, of course, impossible to
reconcile these mutually exclusive abstractions either in theory or in
practice. It is often difficult enough, even with the aid of empirical
thinking, to adjust our relations with the other people about us. But on
the Cheshire-cat hypothesis, the social problem can never be solved,
because it is not a real problem at all.
Since the individual is therefore a social being as such, and the social
is just a way of acting together, the social problem does not grow out
of a conflict between the self and an impersonal social principle. The
conflicts are, in fact, clashes among certain individuals and groups of
them, or else--and this is a subject to which social psychology has paid
insufficient attention--the social struggle is in certain of its phases
a conflict within the personal psyche itself. Suppose that the
apparently impersonal element in social behavior is not impersonal in
fact, but is, for the most part, the result of an impersonal manner of
thinking about ourselves. Every psychic fact must really be an act of
somebody. There are no ideas without thinkers to think them, no
impersonal thoughts or disembodied impulses, no "independent" truths, no
transcendental principles existing in themselves and outside of human
heads. Life is everywhere reaction; it is nowhere a mere product or a
passive registering of impersonal forces. It is the organism's behavior
in the presence of what we call environment.
Individual opinions cannot be tossed into a common hat, like small
coins. Though we may each learn from the others, there is no magic by
which our several thoughts can sum themselves up into a common fund of
public opinion or super-personal whole which thinks itself, there being
no collective head to think it. No matter how many people think and
behave as I do, each of us knows only his own thought and behavior. My
thought may be about you and what I judge you are thinking, but it is
not the same as your thought. To each the social is _nil_ except in so
far as he experiences it himself, and to each it is something unique
when viewed from within. The uniformity and illusion of identity--in
short, the impersonal aspect of social thinking and activity appears
only when we try to view social behavior from without--that is, as
objectively manifest in the behavior of others.
What then is the secret of this impersonal view of the social? Why do we
think of ourselves socially in the same impersonal or external way that
we think of others? There is an interesting parallel here in the
behavior of certain types of mental pathology. There are neurotics who
commonly feel that certain aspects of their behavior are really not of
their own authorship, but come to them as the result of influences
acting from without. It was such phenomena in part that led
psychologists of a generation ago to construct the theory of "multiple
personality." It is known now that the psychic material which in these
cases appears to be automatic, and impersonal, in the sense that it is
not consciously willed, is really motivated by unconscious mechanisms.
The apparently "impersonal" behavior of the neurotic is psychologically
determined, though unconsciously.
May there not be a like unconscious psychic determination of much that
is called social behavior? It is my thesis that this is so, and that
there are certain types of social behavior which are characterized by
unconscious motivation to such a degree that they may be placed in a
definite class of psychological phenomena. This group of phenomena I
have, following to some extent the terminology of Le Bon, called "The
Crowd." I wish there were a more exact word, for it is very difficult to
use the word crowd in its psychological sense without causing some
confusion in the mind of the reader. In ordinary speech "a crowd" is any
gathering of people. In the writings of Le Bon, as we shall see, the
word has a special meaning, denoting not a gathering of people as such,
but a gathering which behaves in a certain way which may be classified
and described psychologically as "crowd mentality." Not every gathering
of people shows this crowd-mentality. It is a characteristic which
appears under certain circumstances. In this discussion the word "crowd"
must be understood to mean the peculiar mental condition which sometimes
occurs when people think and act together, either immediately where the
members of the group are present and in close contact, or remotely, as
when they affect one another in a certain way through the medium of an
organization, a party or sect, the press, etc.
The crowd while it is a social phenomenon differs greatly from the
social as such. People may be social--the family is an example of
this--without being a crowd either in thought or action. Again a
crowd--a mob is an example of this--may be distinctly antisocial, if we
attach any ethical meaning to the term. Both the individual and society
suffer, as we shall see, from crowd-behavior. I know of nothing which
to-day so menaces not only the values of civilization, but also--it is
the same thing in other words, perhaps--the achievement of personality
and true knowledge of self, as the growing habit of behaving as crowds.
Our society is becoming a veritable babel of gibbering crowds. Not only
are mob outbreaks and riots increasing in number, but every interest,
patriotic, religious, ethical, political, economic, easily degenerates
into a confusion of propagandist tongues, into extravagant partisanship,
and intemperance. Whatever be the ideal to which we would attain, we
find the path of self-culture too slow; we must become army worms,
eating our way to the goal by sheer force of numbers. The councils of
democracy are conducted on about the psychological level of commercial
advertising and with about the same degree of sincerity. While it cannot
be said that the habit of crowd-making is peculiar to our times--other
ages, too, have indulged in it--it does seem that the tendency to
crowd-mindedness has greatly increased in recent years.
Whether it is temperance, or justice, or greater freedom, moral
excellence or national glory, that we desire--whether we happen to be
conservatives or radicals, reformers or liberals, we must become a cult,
write our philosophy of life in flaming headlines, and sell our cause in
the market. No matter if we meanwhile surrender every value for which we
stand, we must strive to cajole the majority into imagining itself on
our side. For only with the majority with us, whoever we are, can we
live. It is numbers, not values, that count--quantity not quality.
Everybody must "moral-crusade," "agitate," "press-agent," play politics.
Everyone is forced to speak as the crowd, think as the crowd,
understand as the crowd. The tendency is to smother all that is unique,
rare, delicate, secret. If you are to get anywhere in this progressive
age you must be vulgar, you must add to your vulgarity unction. You must
take sides upon dilemmas which are but half true, change the tempo of
your music to ragtime, eat your spiritual food with a knife, drape
yourself in the flag of the dominant party. In other words, you must be
"one hundred per cent" crowd man.
The effect of all this upon the individual is that he is permitted
neither to know nor to belong to himself. He becomes a mere banner
toter. He must hold himself ever in readiness to wiggle-waggle in the
perpetual Simon-says-thumbs-up game which his crowd is playing. He
spends his days playing a part which others have written for him; loses
much of his genuineness and courage, and pampers himself with imitation
virtues and second-hand truths.
Upon the social peace the effect is equally bad. Unnecessary and
meaningless strife is engendered. An idolatry of phrases is enthroned. A
silly game of bullying and deception is carried on among contending
crowds, national, religious, moral, social. The great truths of
patriotism, morality, and religion become hardly more than
caricatures--mere instruments of crowds for putting their rivals on the
defensive, and securing obeisance from the members of the crowd itself,
easily repudiated in the hour of the crowd's victory. The social harmony
is menaced by numerous cliques and parties, ranging in size all the way
from the nation-crowd down to the smallest sect, each setting out like a
band of buccaneers bent upon nothing but its own dominance, and seeking
to justify its piratical conduct by time-worn platitudes.
That which is meant by the cry of the Russian Revolution, "All power to
the soviets," is peculiar neither to Russia nor to the working class.
Such in spirit is the cry of every crowd, for every crowd is,
psychologically considered, a soviet. The industrial and political
danger of the soviet would amount to little or nothing, were it not for
the fact that the modern world is already _spiritually sovietized_. The
threatened soviet republic is hardly more than the practical result of a
hundred years of crowd-thinking on almost every subject. Whether
capitalist or proletarian, reformer or liberal, we have all along been
behaving and thinking in soviet fashion. In almost every important
matter in life we have ignored Emerson's warning that we must rely upon
ourselves, and have permitted ourselves to behave and think as crowds,
fastening their labels and dogmas upon our spirits and taking their
shibboleths upon our tongues, thinking more of the temporary triumph of
our particular sect or party than of the effect of our behavior upon
ourselves and others.
There is certainly nothing new in the discovery that our social behavior
is not what it ought to be. Mediæval thinkers were as much aware of the
fact as we are, but they dismissed the social problem with the simple
declaration of the "sinfulness of human nature." Nineteenth-century
utilitarians felt that the social problem could be solved by more
enlightened and more reasonable behavior on the part of individuals.
Recent social psychology--of which the writings of Prof. William
McDougall are probably the best example, has abandoned the theory that
social behavior is primarily governed by reason or by considerations of
utility. A better explanation of social phenomena is found in instinct.
It is held that the true motives of social behavior are pugnacity, the
instinct of self-appreciation or self-debasement, of sex,
gregariousness, and the like. Each instinct with its "affective emotion"
becomes organized through various complex reactions to the social
environment, into fairly well established "sentiments." These sentiments
are held to be the controlling social forces. As McDougall says:
We may say then that directly or indirectly the instincts are
the prime movers of all human activity; by the conative or
impulsive force of some instinct (or of some habit derived from
an instinct), every train of thought, however cold and
passionless it may seem, is borne along toward its end, and
every bodily activity is initiated and sustained. The
instinctive impulses determine the ends of all activities and
supply the driving-power by which all mental activities are
sustained; and all the complex intellectual apparatus of the
most highly developed mind is but a means toward those ends, is
but the instrument by which these impulses seek their
satisfactions.... These impulses are the mental forces that
maintain and shape all the life of individuals and societies,
and in them we are confronted with the central mystery of life
and mind and will.
This is all very good so far as it goes. But I confess that I am
somewhat at loss to know just what it explains so far as crowd-behavior
is concerned. Do these instincts and sentiments operate the same under
all social conditions? Are some of them suppressed by society and forced
to seek their satisfaction in roundabout ways? If so, how? Moreover, I
fail to find in present-day social psychology, any more than in the
writings of Herbert Spencer, Sumner, Ward, and others, any clear
distinction between the characteristic behavior of crowds and other
forms of social activity. Only the school of Le Bon has shown any
definite appreciation of these facts. It is to Le Bon, therefore, in
spite of the many and just criticisms of his work, that we must turn
for a discussion of the crowd as a problem apart from social psychology
in general. Le Bon saw that the mind of the crowd demanded special
psychological study, but many of the psychological principles which he
used in solving the problem were inadequate to the task. Certain of his
conclusions were, therefore, erroneous. Since the close of the
nineteenth century, however, psychology has gained much insight into the
secret springs of human activity. Possibly the most significant
achievement in the history of this science is Freud's work in analytical
psychology.
So much light has been thrown upon the unconscious by Freud and other
analytical psychologists, that psychology in all its branches is
beginning to take some of Freud's discoveries into account. Strictly
speaking, psychoanalysis is a therapeutic method. It has, however,
greatly enriched our knowledge of mental pathology, and thus much of its
data has become indispensable to general psychology and to social
psychology in particular.
In his book the _Interpretation of Dreams_, Freud has shown that there
exist in the wish-fulfilling mechanisms of dream formation certain
definite laws. These laws undoubtedly underlie and determine also many
of our crowd-ideas, creeds, conventions, and social ideals. In his book,
_Totem and Taboo_, Freud has himself led the way to the application of
the analytical psychology to the customs and ideas of primitive groups.
I am sure that we shall find, as we proceed, that with the analytical
method we shall gain an entirely new insight into the causes and meaning
of the behavior of crowds.
II
HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED
In his well-known work on the psychology of the crowd Le Bon noted the
fact that the unconscious plays a large part in determining the behavior
of crowds. But he is not clear in his use of the term "unconscious." In
fact, as Graham Wallas justly points out, his terminology is very loose
indeed. Le Bon seems to have made little or no attempt to discover in
detail the processes of this unconscious. In company with most
psychologists of his time, he based his explanation upon the theory of
"suggestion and imitation." He saw in the unconscious merely a sort of
mystical "common humanity," from which he derived his--also
mystical--idea of a common crowd-mind which each individual in the crowd
in some unexplained manner shared. He says:
The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd
is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it,
however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations,
their character or their intelligence, the fact that they have
been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort
of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a
manner quite different from that in which each individual of
them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of
isolation....
It is easy to prove how much the individual forming part of a
crowd differs from the isolated individual, but it is less easy
to discover the causes of this difference.
To obtain, at any rate, a glimpse of them it is necessary in the
first place to call to mind the truth established by modern
psychology, that unconscious phenomena play an altogether
preponderating part, not only in organic life, but also in the
operations of intelligence.... Our conscious acts are the
outcome of an unconscious substratum created in the mind in the
main by heredity. This substratum consists of innumerable
characteristics handed down from generation to generation which
constitute the genius of the race....
It is more especially with respect to those unconscious elements
which constitute the genius of a race that all the individuals
belonging to it resemble each other.... It is precisely these
general qualities of character, governed by forces of which we
are unconscious and possessed by the majority of normal
individuals of a race in much the same degree--it is precisely
these qualities, I say, that in crowds become common property.
In the collective mind the intellectual aptitudes of the
individuals, and in consequence their individuality, are
weakened. The heterogeneous is swamped in the homogeneous and
the unconscious qualities obtain the upper hand.
It may safely be said, I think, that this assumed impersonal collective
mind of the crowd has no existence in a sound psychology. People's
minds show, of course, innumerable mutual influences, but they do not
fuse and run together. They are in many respects very similar, but
similarity is not identity, even when people are crowded together. Our
author has doubtless borrowed here rather uncritically from Herbert
Spencer's organic conception of society--his later statement, not quoted
here, that the alleged merging of the heterogeneous in the homogeneous
would logically imply a regression to a lower stage in evolution, is
another bit of Spencerian jargon commonly accepted in Le Bon's day.
When, however, Graham Wallas, in _The Great Society_, states that Le Bon
is not "himself clear whether he means that crowds have no collective
consciousness, or that every individual in a crowd is completely
unconscious," it seems to me that Wallas is a little unfair. Neither Le
Bon nor the relation of the unconscious to the crowd-mind may be
dismissed in Wallas's apparently easy manner. Le Bon has established two
points which I think cannot be successfully denied: first, that the
crowd is essentially a psychological phenomenon, people behaving
differently in a crowd from the way they behave when isolated; and
second, that the unconscious has something to do with crowd-thinking and
acting.
Wallas says of Le Bon:
Tarde and Le Bon were Frenchmen brought up on vivid descriptions
of the Revolution and themselves apprehensive of the spread of
socialism. Political movements which were in large part carried
out by men conscious and thoughtful, though necessarily ill
informed, seemed therefore to them as they watched them from the
outside to be due to the blind and unconscious impulses of
masses "incapable both of reflection and of reasoning."
There is some truth in this criticism. In spite of the attempt of the
famous author of crowd-psychology to give us a really scientific
explanation of crowd-phenomena, his obviously conservative bias robs his
work of much of its power to convince. We find here, just as in the case
of Gobineau, Nietzsche, Faguet, Conway, and other supporters of the
aristocratic idea, an a priori principle of distrust of the common
people as such. In many passages Le Bon does not sufficiently
distinguish between the crowd and the masses. Class and mass are opposed
to each other as though, due to their superior reasoning powers, the
classes were somehow free from the danger of behaving as crowd. This is
of course not true. Any class may behave and think as a crowd--in fact
it usually does so in so far as its class interests are concerned.
Anyone who makes a study of the public mind in America to-day will find
that the phenomena of the crowd-mind are not at all confined to
movements within the working class or so-called common people.
It has long been the habit of conservative writers to identify the crowd
with the proletariat and then to feel that the psychology of the
situation could be summed up in the statement that the crowd was simply
the creature of passion and blind emotion. The psychology which lies
back of such a view--if it is psychology rather than class prejudice--is
the old intellectualism which sought to isolate the intellect from the
emotional nature and make the true mental life primarily a knowledge
affair. The crowd, therefore, since it was regarded as an affair of the
emotions, was held to be one among many instances of the natural mental
inferiority of the common people, and a proof of their general unfitness
for self-government.
I do not believe that this emotional theory is the true explanation of
crowd-behavior. It cannot be denied that people in a crowd become
strangely excited. But it is not only in crowds that people show
emotion. Feeling, instinct, impulse, are the dynamic of all mental life.
The crowd doubtless inhibits as many emotions as it releases. Fear is
conspicuously absent in battle, pity in a lynching mob. Crowds are
notoriously anæsthetic toward the finer values of art, music, and
poetry. It may even be argued that the feelings of the crowd are
dulled, since it is only the exaggerated, the obvious, the cheaply
sentimental, which easily moves it.
There was a time when insanity was also regarded as excessive emotion.
The insane man was one who raved, he was mad. The word "crazy" still
suggests the condition of being "out of one's mind"--that is, driven by
irrational emotion. Psychiatry would accept no such explanation to-day.
Types of insanity are distinguished, not with respect to the mere amount
of emotional excitement they display, but in accordance with the
patient's whole psychic functioning. The analyst looks for some
mechanism of controlling ideas and their relation to impulses which are
operating in the unconscious. So with our understanding of the
crowd-mind. Le Bon is correct in maintaining that the crowd is not a
mere aggregation of people. _It is a state of mind._ A peculiar psychic
change must happen to a group of people before they become a crowd. And
as this change is not merely a release of emotion, neither is it the
creation of a collective mind by means of imitation and suggestion. My
thesis is that _the crowd-mind is a phenomenon which should best be
classed with dreams, delusions, and the various forms of automatic
behavior_. The controlling ideas of the crowd are the result neither of
reflection nor of "suggestion," but are akin to what, as we shall see
later, the psychoanalysts term "complexes." The crowd-self--if I may
speak of it in this way--is analogous in many respects to "compulsion
neurosis," "somnambulism," or "paranoiac episode." Crowd ideas are
"fixations"; they are always symbolic; they are always related to
something repressed in the unconscious. They are what Doctor Adler would
call "fictitious guiding lines."
There is a sense in which all our thinking consists of symbol and
fiction. The laws, measurements, and formulas of science are all as it
were "shorthand devices"--instruments for relating ourselves to reality,
rather than copies of the real. The "truth" of these working ideas is
demonstrated in the satisfactoriness of the results to which they lead
us. If by means of them we arrive at desired and desirable adaptations
to and within our environment, we say they are verified. If, however, no
such verification is reached, or the result reached flatly contradicts
our hypothesis, the sane thinker holds his conclusions in abeyance,
revises his theories, or candidly gives them up and clings to the real
as empirically known.
Suppose now that a certain hypothesis, or "fiction," instead of being an
instrument for dealing with external reality, is unconsciously designed
as a refuge from the real. Suppose it is a symbolic compromise among
conflicting desires in the individual's unconscious of which he cannot
rid himself. Suppose it is a disguised expression of motives which the
individual as a civilized being cannot admit to his own consciousness.
Suppose it is a fiction necessary to keep up one's ego consciousness or
self-appreciative feeling without which either he or his world would
instantly become valueless. In these latter cases the fiction is not and
cannot be, without outside help, modified by the reality of experience.
The complex of ideas becomes a closed system, a world in and of itself.
Conflicting facts of experience are discounted and denied by all the
cunning of an insatiable, unconscious will. The fiction then gets itself
substituted for the true facts of experience; the individual has "lost
the function of the real." He no longer admits its disturbing elements
as correctives. He has become mentally unadjusted--pathological.
Most healthy people doubtless would on analysis reveal themselves as
nourishing fictions of this sort, more or less innocent in their
effects. It is possible that it is by means of such things that the
values of living are maintained for us all. But with the healthy these
fictions either hover about the periphery of our known world as shadowy
and elusive inhabitants of the inaccessible, or else they are socially
acceptable as religious convention, race pride, ethical values, personal
ambition, class honor, etc. The fact that so much of the ground of our
valuations, at least so far as these affect our self-appreciation, is
explicable by psychologists as "pathological" in origin need not startle
us. William James in his _Varieties of Religious Experience_, you will
remember, took the ground that in judging of matters of this kind, it is
not so much by their origins--even admitting the pathological as a
cause--but by their fruits that we shall know them. There are "fictions"
which are neither innocent nor socially acceptable in their effects on
life and character. Many of our crowd-phenomena belong, like paranoia,
to this last class.
As I shall try to show later, the common confusion of the crowd with
"society" is an error. The crowd is a social phenomenon only in the
sense that it affects a number of persons at the same time. As I have
indicated, people may be highly social without becoming a crowd. They
may meet, mingle, associate in all sorts of ways, and organize and
co-operate for the sake of common ends--in fact, the greater part of our
social life might normally have nothing in common with crowd-behavior.
Crowd-behavior is pseudo-social--if social organizations be regarded as
a means to the achievement of realizable goods. The phenomena which we
call the crowd-mind, instead of being the outgrowth of the directly
social, are social only in the sense that all mental life has social
significance; they are rather the result of forces hidden in the
personal and unconscious psyche of the members of the crowd, forces
which are merely _released_ by social gatherings of a certain sort.
Let us notice what happens in a public meeting as it develops into a
crowd, and see if we can trace some of the steps of the process. Picture
a large meeting-hall, fairly well filled with people. Notice first of
all what sort of interest it is which as a rule will most easily bring
an assemblage of people together. It need not necessarily be a matter of
great importance, but it must be something which catches and challenges
attention without great effort. It is most commonly, therefore, an
_issue_ of some sort. I have seen efforts made in New York to hold mass
meetings to discuss affairs of the very greatest importance, and I have
noted the fact that such efforts usually fail to get out more than a
handful of specially interested persons, no matter how well advertised,
if the subject to be considered happens not to be of a controversial
nature. I call especial attention to this fact because later we shall
see that it is this element of conflict, directly or indirectly, which
plays an overwhelming part in the psychology of every crowd.
It is the element of contest which makes baseball so popular. A debate
will draw a larger crowd than a lecture. One of the secrets of the large
attendance of the forum is the fact that discussion--"talking back"--is
permitted and encouraged. The evangelist Sunday undoubtedly owes the
great attendance at his meetings in no small degree to the fact that he
is regularly expected to abuse some one.
If the matter to be considered is one about which there is keen partisan
feeling and popular resentment--if it lends itself to the spectacular
personal achievement of one whose name is known, especially in the face
of opposition or difficulties--or if the occasion permits of resolutions
of protest, of the airing of wrongs, of denouncing abuse of some kind,
or of casting statements of external principles in the teeth of "enemies
of humanity," then, however trivial the occasion, we may count on it
that our assembly will be well attended. Now let us watch the
proceedings.
The next thing in importance is the speaker. Preferably he should be an
"old war horse," a victor in many battles, and this for a psychological
reason which we shall soon examine. Whoever he is, every speaker with
any skill knows just when this state of mind which we call "crowd"
begins to appear. My work has provided me with rather unusual
opportunities for observing this sort of thing. As a regular lecturer
and also as director of the forum which meets three nights a week in the
great hall of Cooper Union, I have found that the intellectual interest,
however intense, and the development of the crowd-spirit are accompanied
by wholly different mental processes. Let me add in passing that the
audiences which gather at Cooper Union are, on the whole, the most
alert, sophisticated, and reflective that I have ever known. I doubt if
in any large popular assembly in America general discussion is carried
on with such habitual seriousness. When on rare occasions the spirit of
the crowd begins to manifest itself--and one can always detect its
beginnings before the audience is consciously aware of it--I have
noticed that discussion instantly ceases and people begin merely to
repeat their creeds and hurl cant phrases at one another. All then is
changed, though subtly. There may be laughter as at first; but it is
different. Before, it was humorous and playful, now there is a note of
hostility in it. It is laughter _at_ some one or something. Even the
applause is changed. It is more frequent. It is more vigorous, and
instead of showing mere approval of some sentiment, it becomes a means
of showing the numerical strength of a group of believers of some sort.
It is as if those who applaud were unconsciously seeking to reveal to
themselves and others that there is a multitude on their side.
I have heard the most exciting and controversial subjects discussed, and
seen the discussion listened to with the intensest difference of
opinion, and all without the least crowd-phenomena--so long as the
speaker refrained from indulging in generalities or time-worn forms of
expression. So long as the matter discussed requires close and sustained
effort of attention, and the method of treatment is kept free from
anything which savors of ritual, even the favorite dogmas of popular
belief may be discussed, and though the interest be intense, it will
remain critical and the audience does not become a crowd. But let the
most trivial bit of bathos be expressed in rhythmical cadences and in
platitudinous terms, and the most intelligent audience will react as a
crowd. Crowd-making oratory is almost invariably platitudinous. In fact,
we think as a crowd only in platitudes, propaganda, ritual, dogma, and
symbol. Crowd-ideas are ready-made, they possess finality and
universality. They are fixed. They do not develop. They are ends in
themselves. Like the obsessions of the insane, there is a deadly
inevitability in the logic of them. They are "compulsions."
During the time of my connection with the Cooper Union Forum, we have
not had a crowd-demonstration in anything more than an incipient form.
The best laboratory for the study of such a phenomenon is the political
party convention, the mass meeting, or the religious revival. The
orators who commonly hold forth at such gatherings know intuitively the
functional value of bathos, ridicule, and platitude, and it is upon such
knowledge that they base the success of their careers in "getting the
crowd." The noisy "demonstrations" which it has of late become the
custom to stage as part of the rigmarole of a national party convention
have been cited as crowning examples of the stupidity and excess of
crowd enthusiasm. But this is a mistake. Anyone who has from the gallery
witnessed one or more of these mock "stampedes" will agree that they are
exhibitions of endurance rather than of genuine enthusiasm or of true
crowd-mindedness. They are so obviously manipulated and so deliberately
timed that they can hardly be regarded as true crowd-movements at all.
They are chiefly interesting as revelations of the general insincerity
of the political life of this republic.
True crowd-behavior requires an element of spontaneity--at least on the
part of the crowd. And we have abundant examples of this in public
meetings of all sorts. As the audience becomes crowd, the speaker's
cadence becomes more marked, his voice more oracular, his gestures more
emphatic. His message becomes a recital of great abstract "principles."
The purely obvious is held up as transcendental. Interest is kept upon
just those aspects of things which can be grasped with least effort by
all. Emphasis is laid upon those thought processes in which there is
greatest natural uniformity. The general, abstract, and superficial come
to be exalted at the expense of that which is unique and personal. Forms
of thought are made to stand as objects of thinking.
It is clear that such meaning as there is in those abstract names,
"Justice," "Right," "Liberty," "Peace," "Glory," "Destiny," etc., or in
such general phrases as "Brotherly Love," "Grand and Glorious," "Public
Weal," "Common Humanity," and many others, must vary with each one's
personal associations. Popular orators deal only with the greatest
common denominator of the meaning of these terms--that is, only those
elements which are common to the associations of all. Now the common
associations of words and phrases of this general nature are very
few--hardly more than the bare sound of the words, plus a vague mental
attitude or feeling of expectancy, a mere turning of the eyes of the
mind, as it were, in a certain direction into empty space. When, for
instance, I try now to leave out of the content of "justice" all my
personal associations and concrete experiences, I can discover no
remaining content beyond a sort of grand emptiness, with the intonations
of the word booming in my auditory centers like the ringing of a distant
bell. As "public property," the words are only a sort of worn banknote,
symbols of many meanings and intentions like my own, deposited in
individual minds. Interesting as these personal deposits are, and much
as we are mutually interested by them and moved to harmonious acting and
speaking, it is doubtful if more than the tiniest fragment of what we
each mean by "justice" can ever be communicated. The word is a
convenient instrument in adjusting our conduct to that of others, and
when such adjustment seems to meet with mutual satisfaction we say,
"That is just." But the just thing is always a concrete situation. And
the general term "justice" is simply a combination of sounds used to
indicate the class of things we call just. In itself it is but a form
with the content left out. And so with all other such abstractions.
Now if attention can be directed to this imaginary and vague "meaning
for everybody"--which is really the meaning for nobody--and so directed
that the associations with the unique in personal experience are
blocked, these abstractions will occupy the whole field of
consciousness. The mind will yield to any connection which is made among
them almost automatically. As conscious attention is cut away from the
psyche as a whole, the objects upon which it is centered will appear to
have a reality of their own. They become a closed system, perfectly
logical it may be in itself, but with the fatal logic commonly found in
paranoia--the fiction may become more real than life itself. It may be
substituted, while the spell is on, for the world of actual experience.
And just as the manifest content of a dream is, according to Freud, the
condensed and distorted symbol of latent dream-thoughts and desires in
the unconscious, so, in the case we are discussing, the unconscious
invests these abstract terms with its own peculiar meanings. They gain a
tremendous, though undefined, importance and an irresistible compelling
power.
Something like the process I have described occurs when the crowd
appears. People are translated to a different world--that is, a
different sense of the real. The speaker is transfigured to their
vision. His words take on a mysterious importance; something tremendous,
eternal, superhuman is at stake. Commonplace jokes become irresistibly
amusing. Ordinary truths are wildly applauded. Dilemmas stand clear with
all middle ground brushed away. No statement now needs qualification.
All thought of compromise is abhorrent. Nothing now must intervene to
rob these moments of their splendid intensity. As James once said of
drunkenness, "Everything is just utterly utter." They who are not for us
are against us.
The crowd-mind consists, therefore, first of all, of a disturbance of
the function of the real. _The crowd is the creature of Belief._ Every
crowd has its peculiar "illusions," ideals, dreams. It maintains its
existence as a crowd just so long as these crowd-ideas continue to be
held by practically all the members of the group--so long, in fact, as
such ideas continue to hold attention and assent to the exclusion of
ideas and facts which contradict them.
I am aware of the fact that we could easily be led aside at this point
into endless metaphysical problems. It is not our purpose to enter upon
a discussion of the question, what is the real world? The problem of the
real is by no means so simple as it appears "to common sense." Common
sense has, however, in practical affairs, its own criteria, and beyond
these it is not necessary for us now to stray. The "illusions" of the
crowd are almost never illusions in the psychological sense. They are
not false perceptions of the objects of sense. They are rather akin to
the delusions and fixed ideas commonly found in paranoia. The man in
the street does not ordinarily require the technique either of
metaphysics or of psychiatry in order to characterize certain
individuals as "crazy." The "crazy" man is simply unadjustable in his
speech and conduct. His ideas may be real to him, just as the
color-blind man's sensations of color may be as real as those of normal
people, but they won't work, and that is sufficient.
It is not so easy to apply this criterion of the real to our
crowd-ideas. Social realities are not so well ordered as the behavior of
the forces of nature. Things moral, religious, and political are
constantly in the making. The creative role which we all play here is
greater than elsewhere in our making of reality. When most of our
neighbors are motivated by certain ideas, those ideas become part of the
social environment to which we must adjust ourselves. In this sense they
are "real," however "crazy." Every struggle-group and faction in society
is constantly striving to establish its ideas as controlling forces in
the social reality. The conflicts among ideals are therefore in a sense
conflicts within the real. Ideas and beliefs which seek their
verification in the character of the results to which they lead, may
point to very great changes in experience, and so long as the believer
takes into account the various elements with which he has to deal, he
has not lost his hold upon reality. But when one's beliefs or principles
become ends in themselves, when by themselves they seem to constitute an
order of being which is more interesting than fact, when the believer
saves his faith only by denying or ignoring the things which contradict
him, when he strives not to verify his ideas but to "vindicate" them,
the ideas so held are pathological. The obsessions of the paranoiac are
of this sort. We shall see later that these ideas have a meaning, though
the conscious attention of the patient is systematically diverted from
that meaning. Crowd-ideas are similar. The reason why their pathology is
not more evident is the fact that they are simultaneously entertained by
so great a number of people.
There are many ideas in which our faith is sustained chiefly by the
knowledge that everyone about us also believes them. Belief on such
ground has commonly been said to be due to imitation or suggestion.
These do play a large part in determining all our thinking, but I can
see no reason why they should be more operative in causing the
crowd-mind than in other social situations. In fact, the distinctive
phenomena which I have called crowd-ideas clearly show that other causes
are at work.
Among civilized people, social relationships make severe demands upon
the individual. Primitive impulses, unchecked eroticism, tendencies to
perversions, and antisocial demands of the ego which are in us all, are
constantly inhibited, resisted, controlled and diverted to socially
acceptable ends. The savage in us is "repressed," his demands are so
habitually denied that we learn to keep him down, for the most part,
without conscious effort. We simply cease to pay attention to his
gnawing desires. We become decently respectable members of society
largely at the expense of our aboriginal nature. But the primitive in us
does not really die. It asserts itself harmlessly in dreams.
Psychoanalysis has revealed the fact that every dream is the realization
of some desire, usually hidden from our conscious thought by our
habitual repression. For this reason the dream work consists of symbols.
The great achievement of Freud is the technique which enables the
analyst to interpret this symbolism so that his own unconscious thought
and desire are made known to the subject. The dream is harmless and is
normally utilized by the unconscious ego because during sleep we cannot
move. If one actually did the things he dreamed, a thing which happens
in various somnambulisms, the dream would become anything but harmless.
Every psychosis is really a dramatized dream of this sort.