impulses, it is to be expected that the unconscious would on certain
occasions make use of this same social in order to realize its primitive
desires. There are certain mental abnormalities, such as dementia
præcox, in which the individual behaves in a wholly antisocial manner,
simply withdrawing into himself. _In the crowd the primitive ego
achieves its wish by actually gaining the assent and support of a
section of society. The immediate social environment is all pulled in
the same direction as the unconscious desire._ A similar unconscious
impulse motivates each member of the crowd. It is as if all at once an
unspoken agreement were entered into whereby each member might let
himself go, on condition that he approved the same thing in all the
rest. Of course such a thing cannot happen consciously. Our normal
social consciousness would cause us each to resist, let us say, an
exhibition of cruelty--in our neighbors, and also in ourselves. The
impulse must therefore be disguised.
The term "unconscious" in the psychology of the crowd does not, of
course, imply that the people in the crowd are not aware of the fact
that they are lynching a negro or demanding the humiliation or
extermination of certain of their fellows. Everybody is perfectly aware
of what is being said and done; only _the moral significance_ of the
thing is changed. The deed or sentiment, instead of being disapproved,
appears to be demanded, by moral principle, by the social welfare, by
the glory of the state, etc. What is unconscious is the fact that the
social is actually being twisted around into giving approval of the
things which it normally forbids. Every crowd considers that it is
vindicating some sacred principle. The more bloody and destructive the
acts to which it is impelled, the more moral are its professions. Under
the spell of the crowd's logic certain abstract principles lead
inevitably to the characteristic forms of crowd-behavior. They seem to
glorify such acts, to make heroes and martyrs of those who lead in their
performance.
The attention of everyone is first centered on the abstract and
universal, as I have indicated. The repressed wish then unconsciously
gives to the formulas which the crowd professes a meaning different from
that which appears, yet unconsciously associated with it. This
unconscious meaning is of course an impulse to act. But the motive
professed is not the real motive.
Normally our acts and ideas are corrected by our social environment. But
in a crowd our test of the real fails us, because, since the attention
of all near us is directed in the same way as our own, the social
environment for the time fails to check us. As William James said:
The sense that anything we think is unreal can only come when
that thing is contradicted by some other thing of which we
think. Any object which remains uncontradicted is _ipso facto_
believed and posited as "absolute reality."
Our immediate social environment is all slipping along with us. It no
longer contradicts the thing we want to believe, and, unconsciously,
want to do. As the uncontradicted idea is, for the time, reality, so is
it a motor impulse. The only normal reason why we do not act immediately
upon any one of our ideas is that action is inhibited by ideas of a
contradictory nature. As crowd, therefore, we find ourselves moving in a
fictitious system of ideas uncritically accepted as real--not as in
dreams realizing our hidden wishes, merely in imagination, but also
impelled to act them out in much the way that the psychoeurotic is
impelled to act out the fixed ideas which are really the symbols of his
suppressed wish. In other words, _a crowd is a device for indulging
ourselves in a kind of temporary insanity by all going crazy together_.
Of the several kinds of crowds, I have selected for our discussion the
mass meeting, because we are primarily interested in the _ideas_ which
dominate the crowd. The same essential psychological elements are also
found in the street crowd or mob. Serious mob outbreaks seldom occur
without mass meetings, oratory, and propaganda. Sometimes, as in the
case of the French Revolution and of the rise of the Soviets in Russia,
the mass meetings are held in streets and public places. Sometimes, as,
for instance, the crowds in Berlin when Germany precipitated the World
War, a long period of deliberate cultivation of such crowd-ideas as
happen to be advantageous to the state precedes. There are instances,
such as the Frank case, which brought unenviable fame to Georgia, when
no mass meeting seems to have been held. It is possible that in this
instance, however, certain newspapers, and also the trial--which, as I
remember, was held in a theater and gave an ambitious prosecuting
attorney opportunity to play the role of mob leader--served the purpose
of the mass meeting.
The series of outbreaks in New York and other cities, shortly after the
War, between the socialists and certain returned soldiers, seem to have
first occurred quite unexpectedly, as do the customary negro lynchings
in the South. In each case I think it will be found that the complex of
crowd-ideas had been previously built up in the unconscious. A
deep-seated antagonism had been unconsciously associated with the
self-appreciative feelings of a number of individuals, all of which
found justification in the consciousness of these persons in the form
of devotion to principle, loyalty, moral enthusiasm, etc. I suspect that
under many of our professed principles there lurk elements of
unconscious sadism and masochism. All that is then required is an
occasion, some casual incident which will so direct the attention of a
number of these persons that they provide one another temporarily with a
congenial social environment. In the South this mob complex is doubtless
formed out of race pride, a certain unconscious eroticism, and will to
power, which unfortunately has too abundant opportunity to justify
itself as moral indignation. With the returned soldiers the unconscious
desires were often rather thinly disguised--primitive impulses to
violence which had been aroused and hardly satisfied by the war, a wish
to exhibit themselves which found its opportunity in the knowledge that
their lawlessness would be applauded in certain influential quarters, a
dislike of the nonconformist, the foreign, and the unknown, which took
the outward form of a not wholly unjustifiable resentment toward the
party which had to all appearances unpatriotically opposed our entrance
into the war.
Given a psychic situation of this nature, the steps by which it leads to
mob violence are much alike in all cases. All together they simply
amount to a process of like direction of the attention of a sufficient
number of persons so affected as to produce a temporary social
environment in which the unconscious impulses may be released with
mutual approval. The presence of the disliked object or person gains
general attention. At first there is only curiosity; then amusement;
there is a bantering of crude witticisms; then ridicule. Soon the joking
turns to insults. There are angry exclamations. A blow is struck. There
is a sudden rush. The blow, being the act which the members of the crowd
each unconsciously wished to do, gains general approval, "it is a blow
for righteousness"; a "cause" appears. Casually associated persons at
once become a group, brought together, of course, by their interest in
vindicating the principles at stake. The mob finds itself suddenly doing
things which its members did not know they had ever dreamed of.
Different as this process apparently is from that by which a meeting is
turned into a crowd by an orator, I think it will be seen that the two
are essentially alike.
Thus far we have been considering crowd-movements which are local and
temporary--casual gatherings, which, having no abiding reason for
continued association, soon dissolve into their individual elements.
Frequently, after participating in such a movement, the individual, on
returning to his habitual relations, "comes to." He wonders what the
affair was all about. In the light of his re-established control
ideas--he will call it "reason"--the unconscious impulses are again
repressed; he may look with shame and loathing upon yesterday's orgy.
Acts which he would ordinarily disapprove in his neighbors, he now
disapproves in himself. If the behavior of the crowd has not been
particularly atrocious and inexcusable to ordinary consciousness, the
reaction is less strong. The voter after the political campaign merely
"loses interest." The convert in the revival "backslides." The striker
returns to work and is soon absorbed by the daily routine of his task.
The fiery patriot, after the war, is surprised to find that his hatred
of the enemy is gradually waning. Electors who have been swept by a wave
of enthusiasm for "reform" and have voted for a piece of ill-considered
restrictive legislation easily lapse into indifference, and soon look
with unconcern or amusement upon open violations of their own
enactments. There is a common saying that the public has a short memory.
Pick up an old newspaper and read about the great movements and causes
which were only a short time ago stirring the public mind, many of them
are now dead issues. But they were not answered by argument; we simply
"got over" them.
Not all crowd-movements, however, are local and temporary. There are
passing moments of crowd-experience which are often too sweet to lose.
The lapse into everyday realism is like "falling from grace." The crowd
state of mind strives often to keep itself in countenance by
perpetuating the peculiar social-psychic conditions in which it can
operate. There are certain forms of the ego consciousness which are best
served by the fictions of the crowd. An analogy here is found in
paranoia, where the individual's morbid fixed ideas are really devices
for the protection of his self-esteem. The repressed infantile psyche
which exists in us all, and in certain neurotics turns back and attaches
itself to the image of the parent, finds also in the crowd a path for
expression. It provides a perpetual interest in keeping the crowd-state
alive. Notice how invariably former students form alumni associations,
and returned soldiers at once effect permanent organizations; persons
who have been converted in one of Mr. Sunday's religious campaigns do
the same thing--indeed there are associations of all sorts growing out
of these exciting moments in people's common past experience, the
purpose of which is mutually to recall the old days and aid one another
in keeping alive the enlarged self-feeling.
In addition to this, society is filled with what might be called
"struggle groups" organized for the survival and dominance of similarly
constituted or situated people. Each group has its peculiar interests,
economic, spiritual, racial, etc., and each such interest is a mixture
of conscious and unconscious purposes. These groups become sects, cults,
partisan movements, class struggles. They develop propaganda, ritual,
orthodoxies, dogma, all of which are hardly anything more than
stereotyped systems of crowd-ideas. These systems differ from those of
the neurosis in that the former are less idiosyncratic, but they
undoubtedly perform much the same function. The primary aim of every
such crowd is to keep itself together as a crowd. Hardly less important
is the desire of its members to dominate over all outsiders. The
professed purpose is to serve some cause or principle of universal
import. Thus the crowd idealizes itself as an end, makes sanctities of
its own survival values, and holds up its ideals to all men, demanding
that every knee shall bow and every tongue confess--which is to say,
that the crowd believes in its own future supremacy, the members of the
group knowing that such a belief has survival value. This principle is
used by every politician in predicting that his party is bound to win at
the next election.
Hence the crowd is a device by which the individual's "right" may be
baptized "righteousness" in general, and this personality by putting on
impersonality may rise again to new levels of self-appreciation. He
"belongs to something," something "glorious" and deathless. He himself
may be but a miserable clod, but the glory of his crowd reflects upon
him. Its expected triumph he already shares. It gives him back his lost
sense of security. As a good crowd man, true believer, loyal citizen,
devoted member, he has regained something of his early innocence. In
other members he has new brothers and sisters. In the finality of his
crowd-faith there is escape from responsibility and further search. He
is willing to be commanded. He is a child again. He has transferred his
repressed infantilism from the lost family circle to the crowd. There is
a very real sense in which the crowd stands to his emotional life _in
loco parentis_.
It is to be expected, therefore, that wherever possible the crowd-state
of mind will be perpetuated. Every sort of device will be used to keep
the members of the crowd from coming to. In almost every organization
and social relationship there will be a tendency on part of the
unconscious to behave as crowd. Thus permanent crowds exist on every
hand--especially wherever political, moral, or religious ideas are
concerned. The general and abstract character of these ideas makes them
easily accessible instruments for justifying and screening the
unconscious purpose. Moreover it is in just those aspects of our social
life where repression is greatest that crowd-thinking is most common,
for it is by means of such thinking and behavior that the unconscious
seeks evasions and finds its necessary compensations.
The modern man has in the printing press a wonderfully effective means
for perpetuating crowd-movements and keeping great masses of people
constantly under the sway of certain crowd-ideas. Every crowd-group has
its magazines, press agents, and special "literature" with which it
continually harangues its members and possible converts. Many books, and
especially certain works of fiction of the "best-seller" type, are
clearly reading-mob phenomena.
But the leader in crowd-thinking _par excellence_ is the daily
newspaper. With few exceptions our journals emit hardly anything but
crowd-ideas. These great "molders of public opinion," reveal every
characteristic of the vulgar mob orator. The character of the writing
commonly has the standards and prejudices of the "man in the street."
And lest this man's ego consciousness be offended by the sight
of anything "highbrow"--that is, anything indicating that there
may be a superior intelligence or finer appreciation than his
own--newspaper-democracy demands that everything more exalted than the
level of the lowest cranial altitude be left out. The average result is
a deluge of sensational scandal, class prejudice, and special pleading
clumsily disguised with a saccharine smear of the cheapest moral
platitude. Consequently, the thinking of most of us is carried on
chiefly in the form of crowd-ideas. A sort of public-meeting self is
developed in the consciousness of the individual which dominates the
personality of all but the reflective few. We editorialize and
press-agent ourselves in our inmost musings. Public opinion is
manufactured just as brick are made. Possibly a slightly better
knowledge of mechanical engineering is required for making public
opinion, but the process is the same. Both can be stamped out in the
quantity required, and delivered anywhere to order. Our thinking on most
important subjects to-day is as little original as the mental processes
of the men who write and the machines which print the pages we read and
repeat as our own opinions.
Thomas Carlyle was never more sound than when railing at this "paper
age." And paper, he wisely asked us to remember, "is made of old rags."
Older writers who saw the ragged throngs in the streets were led to
identify the mob or crowd with the tattered, illiterate populace. Our
mob to-day is no longer merely tramping the streets. We have it at the
breakfast table, in the subway, alike in shop and boudoir, and
office--wherever, in fact, the newspaper goes. And the raggedness is not
exterior, nor is the mob confined to the class of the ill-clad and the
poor. The raggedness, and tawdriness have now become spiritual, a
universal presence entering into the fabric of nearly all our mental
processes.
We have now reached a point from which we can look back over the ground
we have traversed and note the points of difference between our view and
the well-known theory of Le Bon. The argument of the latter is as
follows: (1) From the standpoint of psychology, the crowd, as the term
is here defined, is not merely a group of people, it is the appearance
within such a group of a special mental condition, or crowd-mind. (2)
The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one
and the same direction. (3) Conscious personality vanishes. (4) A
collective mind is formed: This is Le Bon's "Law of the mental unity of
crowds." (5) This collective mind consists in the main of "general
qualities of character" which are our common racial inheritance. It is
an "unconscious substratum" which in the crowd becomes uppermost,
dominating over the unique personal consciousness. (6) Three causes
determine the characteristics of the crowd-mind, (a) From purely
numerical considerations, the individual acquires a sentiment of
invincible power which encourages him in an unrestrained yielding to his
instincts, (b) Contagion, or imitation, and (c) hypnotic suggestion
cause the individuals in the crowd to become "slaves of all the
unconscious activities of the spinal cord." (7) The resulting
characteristics of the crowd are (a) a descent of several rungs in the
ladder of civilization, (b) a general intellectual inferiority as
compared with the isolated individual, (c) loss of moral responsibility,
(d) impulsiveness, (e) credulity, (f) exaggeration, (g) intolerance, (h)
blind obedience to the leader of the crowd, (i) a mystical emotionalism.
(8) The crowd is finally and somewhat inconsistently treated by Le Bon
as being identical with the masses, the common people, the herd.
Without pausing to review the criticisms of this argument which were
made at the beginning of our discussion, our own view may be summarized
as follows: (1) The crowd is not the same as the masses, or any class or
gathering of people as such, but is a certain mental condition which may
occur simultaneously to people in any gathering or association. (2) This
condition is not a "collective mind." It is a release of repressed
impulses which is made possible because certain controlling ideas have
ceased to function in the immediate social environment. (3) This
modification in the immediate social environment is the result of mutual
concessions on the part of persons whose unconscious impulses to do a
certain forbidden thing are similarly disguised as sentiments which meet
with conscious moral approval. (4) Such a general disguising of the real
motive is a characteristic phenomenon of dreams and of mental pathology,
and occurs in the crowd by fixing the attention of all present upon the
abstract and general. Attention is thus held diverted from the
individual's personal associations, permitting these associations and
their accompanying impulses to function unconsciously. (5) The abstract
ideas so entertained become symbols of meanings which are unrecognized;
they form a closed system, like the obsessions of the paranoiac, and as
the whole group are thus moved in the same direction, the "compulsory"
logic of these ideas moves forward without those social checks which
normally keep us within bounds of the real. Hence, acting and thinking
in the crowd become stereotyped and "ceremonial." Individuals move
together like automatons. (6) As the unconscious chiefly consists of
that part of our nature which is habitually repressed by the social, and
as there is always, therefore, an unconscious resistance to this
repressive force, it follows that the crowd state, like the neurosis,
is a mechanism of escape and of compensation. It also follows that the
crowd-spirit will occur most commonly in reference to just those social
forms where repression is greatest--in matters political, religious, and
moral. (7) The crowd-mind is then not a mere excess of emotion on the
part of people who have abandoned "reason"; crowd-behavior is in a sense
psychopathic and has many elements in common with somnambulism, the
compulsion neurosis, and even paranoia. (8) Crowds may be either
temporary or permanent in their existence. Permanent crowds, with the
aid of the press, determine in greater or less degree the mental habits
of nearly everyone. The individual moves through his social world like a
popular freshman on a college campus, who is to be "spiked" by one or
another fraternity competing for his membership. A host of crowds
standing for every conceivable "cause" and "ideal" hover constantly
about him, ceaselessly screaming their propaganda into his ears,
bullying and cajoling him, pushing and crowding and denouncing one
another, and forcing all willy-nilly to line up and take sides with them
upon issues and dilemmas which represent the real convictions of
nobody.
III
THE CROWD AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
Throughout the discussion thus far I have been making repeated reference
to the psychology of the unconscious, without going into detail any more
than was necessary. Let us now take a closer look at some of Freud's
discoveries. In this way, what Brill would call the "psychogenesis" of
certain characteristic ideas and practices of crowds will be, I think,
made clear. Up to this point we have dealt generally with those mental
processes by which the crowd is formed. There are certain traits,
tendencies, ways of thinking which crowds so uniformly display that one
is justified, in want of other explanation, in assuming them to be
unconsciously determined. The remarkable blindness of organized crowds
to the most obvious of their own performances is so common as to be the
regularly expected thing--that is, of crowds other than our own. Long
and extensive operations may be carried on for years by crowds whose
members repeatedly declare that such things are not being done. The way
in which a nation will carefully prepare for war, gradually organizing
its whole life on a military basis with tremendous cost and effort, all
the while declaring that it is interested only in peace, denying its
warlike intentions, and even in the moment of picking a quarrel with its
neighbors declare to all the world that it had been wantonly and
unexpectedly attacked, is all a matter of general comment. The American
colonists, during the decade before the signing of the Declaration of
Independence, of course had no conscious thought of separating from
Great Britain. Almost to the very last they professed their loyalty to
the King; but looking back now it is clear that Independence was the
motive all along, and doubtless could not have been achieved more
opportunely or with greater finesse if it had been deliberately planned
from the start. The Hebrew Scriptures contain a story which illustrates
this aspect of crowd-behavior everywhere. The Children of Israel in
bondage in Egypt merely wished to go out in the wilderness for a day or
so to worship their God. All they asked was religious liberty. How
unjust of the authorities to assume they were planning to run away
from their masters! You will remember that at the last moment they
incidentally borrow some jewelry from their Egyptian neighbors. Of
course they will pay it back after their little religious holiday,
but ... later a most unforeseen thing happens to that jewelry, a
scandalous thing--it is made into an idol. Does it require that one be a
psychologist to infer that it was the unconscious intention all along to
use this metal for just that, the first good chance they had--and that,
too, notwithstanding repeated prohibitions of idolatry? The motive for
borrowing the jewelry is evident.