problem of living in terms of richer and higher and more significant
dilemmas as new possibilities of personal worth are revealed by
experience. New and more daring valuations are constantly made. The
whole psychic functioning is enriched. Goodness means an increase of
satisfactions through a more adequate adjustment to the real--richer
experience, more subtle power of appreciation and command, a
self-mastery, sureness, and general personal excellence--which on
occasions great and small mark the good will as a reality which counts
in the sum total of things. Something is achieved because it is really
desired; existence is in so far humanized, a self has been realized. As
Professor Dewey says:
If our study has shown anything it is that the moral _is_ a
life, not something ready-made and complete once for all. It is
instinct with movement and struggle, and it is precisely the
new and serious situations which call out new vigor and lift it
to higher levels.
It is not so with the crowd-ethic. It is interesting to note that from
the "Decalogue" to Kant's "Categorical Imperative," crowd-morals always
and everywhere take the form of prohibitions, taboos, and ready-made
standards, chiefly negative. Freud has made an analytical study of the
Taboo as found in primitive society and has shown that it has a
compensatory value similar to that of the taboos and compulsions of
certain neurotics.
The crowd admits of no personal superiority other than that which
consists in absolute conformity to its own negative standards. Except
for the valuations expressed by its own dilemmas, "one man is as good as
another"--an idea which it can be easily seen serves the purpose of
compensation. The goodness which consists of unique personal superiority
is very distasteful to the crowd. There must be only one standard of
behavior, alike for all. A categorical imperative. The standard as set
up is of the sort which is most congenial, possible of attainment, and
even necessary for the survival of the members of some particular crowd.
It is _their_ good, the converse and compensation of their own vices,
temptations, and failures. The crowd then demands that this good shall
be THE GOOD, that it become the universal standard. By such means even
the most incompetent and unadventurous and timid spirits may pass
judgment upon all men. They may cry to the great of the earth, "We have
piped unto you and you have not danced." Judged by the measure of their
conformity to the standards of the small, the great may be considered no
better, possibly not so good as the little spirits. The well are forced
to behave like the spiritually sick. The crowd is a dog in the manger.
If eating meat maketh my brother to be scandalized, or giveth him the
cramps, I shall remain a vegetarian so long as the world standeth.
Nietzsche was correct on this point. The crowd--he called it the
herd--is a weapon of revenge in the hands of the weaker brother. It is a
Procrustean bed on which every spiritual superiority may be lopped off
to the common measure, and every little ego consciousness may be
stretched to the stature of full manhood.
V
THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE
Probably the most telling point of likeness between the crowd-mind and
the psychoneurosis--paranoia especially--is the "delusion of
persecution." In cases of paranoia the notion that the patient is the
victim of all sorts of intrigue and persecution is so common as to be a
distinguishing symptom of this disease. Such delusions are known to be
defenses, or compensation mechanisms, growing out of the patient's
exaggerated feeling of self-importance. The delusion of grandeur and
that of being persecuted commonly go together. The reader will recall
the passage quoted from the pamphlet given me by a typical paranoiac.
The author of the document mentioned feels that he has a great mission,
that of exposing and reforming the conditions in hospitals for the
insane. He protests his innocence. In jail he feels like Christ among
his tormentors. His wife has conspired against him. The woman who owns
the hotel where he was employed wishes to put him out of the way. The
most fiendish methods are resorted to in order to end his life. "Some
one" blocked up the stovepipe, etc., etc.
Another illustration of a typical case is given by Doctor Brill. I quote
scattered passages from the published notes on the case record of the
patient, "E. R."
He graduated in 1898 and then took up schoolteaching.... He did
not seem to get along well with his principal and other
teachers.... He imagined that the principal and other teachers
were trying to work up a "badger game" on him, to the effect
that he had some immoral relations with his girl pupils....
In 1903 he married, after a brief courtship, and soon thereafter
took a strong dislike to his brother-in-law and sister and
accused them of immorality.... He also accused his wife of
illicit relations with his brother and his brother-in-law, Mr. S.
Mr. S., his brother-in-law, was the arch conspirator against
him. He also (while in the hospital) imagined that some women
made signs to him and were in the hospital for the purpose of
liberating him. Whenever he heard anybody talking he immediately
referred it to himself. He interpreted every movement and
expression as having some special meaning for himself....
Now and then (after his first release by order of the court) he
would send mysterious letters to different persons in New York
City. At that time one of his delusions was that he was a great
statesman and that the United States government had appointed
him ambassador (to Canada), but that the "gang" in New York City
had some one without ability to impersonate him so that he lost
his appointment. (Later, while confined to the hospital again)
he thought that the daughter of the President of the United
States came to visit him....
After the patient was recommitted to Bellevue Hospital, he told
me that I (Doctor Brill) was one of the "gang." I was no longer
his wife in disguise (as he has previously imagined) but his
enemy.
Brill's discussion of this case contains an interesting analysis of the
several stages of "regression" and the unconscious mechanisms which
characterize paranoia. He holds that such cases show a "fixation" in an
earlier stage of psychosexual development. The patient, an unconscious
homosexual, is really in love with himself. The resulting inner conflict
appears, with its defense formations, as the delusion of grandeur and as
conscious hatred for the person or persons who happen to be the object
of the patient's homosexual wish fancy. However this may be, the point
of interest for our study is the "projection" of this hatred to others.
Says Brill:
The sentence, "I rather hate him" becomes transformed through
projection into the sentence, "he hates (persecutes) me, which
justifies my hating him."
The paranoiac's delusional system inevitably brings him in conflict with
his environment, but his feeling of being persecuted is less the result
of this conflict with an external situation than of his own inner
conflict. He convinces himself that it is the other, or others, not he,
who is the author of this hatred. He is the innocent victim of their
malice.
This phenomenon of "projection and displacement" has received
considerable attention in analytical psychology. Freud, in the book,
_Totem and Taboo_, shows the role which projection plays in the
primitive man's fear of demons. The demons are of course the spirits of
the dead. But how comes it that primitive people fear these spirits, and
attribute to them every sort of evil design against the living? To quote
Freud:
When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her mother, it not
infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with
tormenting scruples, called "obsessive reproaches," which raise
the question whether she herself has not been guilty, through
carelessness or neglect, of the death of the beloved person. No
recalling of the care with which she nursed the invalid, or
direct refutation of the asserted guilt, can put an end to the
torture, which is the pathological expression of mourning and
which in time slowly subsides. Psychoanalytic investigation of
such cases has made us acquainted with the secret mainspring of
this affliction. We have ascertained that these obsessive
reproaches are in a certain sense justified.... Not that the
mourner has really been guilty of the death or that she has
really been careless, as the obsessive reproach asserts; but
still there was something in her, a wish of which she was
unaware, which was not displeased with the fact that death came,
and which would have brought it about sooner had it been strong
enough. The reproach now reacts against this unconscious wish
after the death of the beloved person. Such hostility, hidden in
the unconscious behind tender love, exists in almost all cases
of intensive emotional allegiance to a particular person;
indeed, it represents the classic case, the prototype of the
ambivalence of human emotions....
By assuming a similar high degree of ambivalence in the
emotional life of primitive races such as psychoanalysis
ascribes to persons suffering from compulsion neurosis, it
becomes comprehensible that the same kind of reaction against
the hostility latent in the unconscious behind the obsessive
reproaches of the neurotic should also be necessary here after
the painful loss has occurred. But this hostility, which is
painfully felt in the unconscious in the form of satisfaction
with the demise, experiences a different fate in the case of
primitive man: the defense against it is accomplished by a
displacement upon the object of hostility--namely, the dead. We
call this defense process, frequent in both normal and diseased
psychic life, a "projection."... Thus we find that taboo has
grown out of the soil of an ambivalent emotional attitude. The
taboo of the dead also originates from the opposition between
conscious grief and the unconscious satisfaction at death. If
this is the origin of the resentment of spirits, it is
self-evident that the nearest and formerly most beloved
survivors have to feel it most. As in neurotic symptoms, the
taboo regulations evince opposite feelings. Their restrictive
character expresses mourning, while they also betray very
clearly what they are trying to conceal--namely, the hostility
toward the dead which is now motivated as self-defense....
The double feeling--tenderness and hostility--against the
deceased, which we consider well-founded, endeavors to assert
itself at the time of bereavement as mourning and satisfaction.
A conflict must ensue between these contrary feelings, and as
one of them--namely, the hostility, is altogether, or for the
greater part, unconscious, the conflict cannot result in a
conscious difference in the form of hostility or tenderness, as,
for instance, when we forgive an injury inflicted upon us by
some one we love. The process usually adjusts itself through a
special psychic mechanism which is designated in psychoanalysis
as "projection." This unknown hostility, of which we are
ignorant and of which we do not wish to know, is projected from
our inner perception into the outer world and is thereby
detached from our own person and attributed to another. Not we,
the survivors, rejoice because we are rid of the deceased, on
the contrary we mourn for him; but now, curiously enough, he has
become an evil demon who would rejoice in our misfortune and who
seeks our death. The survivors must now defend themselves
against this evil enemy; they are freed from inner oppression,
but they have only succeeded in exchanging it for an affliction
from without.
Totem, taboo, demon worship, etc., are clearly primitive
crowd-phenomena. Freud's main argument in this book consists in showing
the likeness between these phenomena and the compulsion neurosis. The
projection of unconscious hostility upon demons is by no means the only
sort of which crowds both primitive and modern are capable. Neither must
the hostility always be unconscious. Projection is a common device
whereby even normal and isolated individuals justify themselves in
hating. Most of us love to think evil of our enemies and opponents. Just
as two fighting schoolboys will each declare that the other "began it,"
so our dislike of people often first appears to our consciousness as a
conviction that they dislike or entertain unfriendly designs upon us.
There is a common type of female neurotic whose repressed erotic wishes
appear in the form of repeated accusations that various of her men
acquaintances are guilty of making improper advances to her. When the
"white slavery" reform movement swept over the country--an awakening of
the public conscience which would have accomplished a more unmixed good
if it had not been taken up in the usual crowd-spirit--it was
interesting to watch the newspapers and sensational propagandist
speakers as they deliberately encouraged these pathological phenomena in
young people. The close psychological relation between the neurosis and
the crowd-mind is shown by the fact that the two so frequently appear at
the same moment, play so easily into each other's hands, and are
apparently reactions to the very same social situation.
In Brill's example of paranoia, it will be remembered that the patient's
delusions of persecution took the form of such statements as that the
"gang" had intrigued at Washington to prevent his appointment as
ambassador, that certain of his relatives were in a "conspiracy against
him." How commonly such phrases and ideas occur in crowd-oratory and in
the crowd-newspaper is well known to all. We have already seen that the
crowd in most cases identifies itself with "the people," "humanity,"
"society," etc. Listen to the crowd-orator and you will also learn that
there are all sorts of abominable "conspiracies" against "the people."
"The nation is full of traitors." The Church is being "undermined by
cunning heretics." "The Bolshevists are in secret league with the
Germans to destroy civilization." "Socialists are planning to corrupt
the morals of our youth and undermine the sacredness of the home." "The
politicians' gang intends to loot the community." "Wall Street is
conspiring to rob the people of their liberties." "England plans to
reduce America to a British colony again." "Japan is getting ready to
make war on us." "German merchants are conducting a secret propaganda
intending to steal our trade and pauperize our nation." "The Catholics
are about to seize power and deliver us over to another Inquisition."
"The liquor interests want only to make drunkards of our sons and
prostitutes of our daughters." And so on and so forth, wherever any
crowd can get a hearing for its propaganda. Always the public welfare is
at stake; society is threatened. The "wrongs" inflicted upon an innocent
humanity are rehearsed. Bandages are taken off every social wound.
Every scar, be it as old as Cromwell's mistreatment of Ireland, is
inflamed. "The people are being deceived," "kept down," "betrayed." They
must rise and throw off their exploiters, or they must purge the nation
of disloyalty and "anarchy."
It cannot be denied that our present social order is characterized by
deep and fundamental social injustices, nor that bitter struggles
between the various groups in society are inevitable. But the crowd
forever ignores its own share in the responsibility for human ills, and
each crowd persists in making a caricature of its enemies, real and
imagined, nourishing itself in a delusion of persecution which is like
nothing so much as the characteristic obsessions of the paranoiac. This
suspiciousness, this habit of misrepresentation and exaggeration of
every conceivable wrong, is not only a great hindrance to the
conflicting groups in adjusting their differences, it makes impossible,
by misrepresenting the real issue at stake, any effective struggle for
ideals. As the history of all crowd movements bears witness, the real
source of conflict is forgotten, the issue becomes confused with the
spectacular, the unimportant, and imaginary. Energy is wasted on side
issues, and the settlement finally reached, even by a clearly victorious
crowd, is seldom that of the original matter in dispute. In fact, it is
not at all the function of these crowd-ideas of self-pity and
persecution to deal with real external situations. These ideas are
propaganda. Their function is to keep the crowd together, to make
converts, to serve as a defense for the egoism of the crowd-man, to
justify the anticipated tyranny which it is the unconscious desire of
the individual to exercise in the moment of victory for his crowd, and,
as "they who are not for us are against us," to project the crowd-man's
hatred upon the intended victims of his crowd's will to universal
dominion. In other words, these propaganda ideas serve much the same end
as do the similar delusions of persecution in paranoia.
This likeness between the propaganda of the crowd and the delusions of
paranoia is illustrated daily in our newspapers. The following items cut
from the New York _Tribune_ are typical. The first needs no further
discussion, as it parallels the cases given above. The second is from
the published proceedings of "a committee," appointed, as I remember it,
by the assembly of the state of New York, to conduct an investigation
into certain alleged seditious and anarchist activities. These articles
well illustrate the character of the propaganda to which such a
committee almost inevitably lends itself. Whether the committee or the
newspapers were chiefly responsible for such fabrications, I do not
know, but the crowd character of much of the attempt to stamp out
Bolshevism is strikingly revealed in this instance. No doubt the members
of this committee, as well as the detectives and the press agents who
are associated with them, are as honestly convinced that a mysterious
gang of radicals is planning to murder us all as is the paranoiac W. H.
M. fixed in his delusion that his enemies are trying to asphyxiate him.
It will be remembered that Brill's patient "E. S." interpreted "every
movement and expression as having some special meaning for himself."
This kind of "interpretation" has a curious logic all its own. It is
what I would call "compulsive thinking," and is characteristic of both
the delusions of paranoia and the rumors of the crowd.
First clipping:
INVENTOR IS DECLARED INSANE BY A JURY.
W. H. M. declares rivals are attempting to asphyxiate him. W. H.
M., an inventor, was declared mentally incompetent yesterday by
a jury in the Sheriff's court.... Alienists said M. had
hallucinations about enemies who he thinks are trying to
asphyxiate him. He also imagines that he is under hypnotic
influences and that persons are trying to affect his body with
"electrical influences."
Second clipping:
RADICALS HERE SEEK SOLDIERS FOR "RED GUARD."
Several hundred men, formerly in United States Service, signify
willingness to aid in project. A "Red Guard" composed of men who
have served in the American military establishment is
contemplated in the elaborate revolutionary plans of Bolshevik
leaders here. This was learned yesterday when operatives of the
Lusk committee discovered that the radicals were making every
effort to enlist the aid of the Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines
Protective Association in carrying out a plot to overthrow the
government by force. As far as the detectives have been able to
ascertain, the great mass of fighting men are not in sympathy
with the Reds, but several hundred have signified their
willingness to co-operate.
Just how far the plans of the Reds have progressed was not
revealed. It is known, however, that at a convention of the Left
Wing Socialists in Buffalo the movement designed to enlist the
support of the Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines Protective
Association was launched. This convention was addressed by
prominent Left Wingers from Boston, New York, Philadelphia,
Pittsburgh, and Paterson. They asserted that trained military
men must be obtained for the organization if the plans were to
be successful.
It was from this meeting, which was held in secret, that
agitators were sent to various parts of the state to form
soviets in the shops and factories. This phase of the radical
activity, according to the investigators, has met with
considerable success in some large factory districts where most
of the workers are foreign-born. In some places the soviets in
the shops have become so strong that the employers are alarmed
and have notified the authorities of the menace. When sufficient
evidence has been gathered, foreign-born agitators working to
cause unrest in factories will be apprehended and recommended
for deportation.
Later report:
DENIES FORMATION OF "RED GUARD" IN U. S.
Alfred Levitt, secretary of the Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines
Protective Association, yesterday emphatically denied that the
organization was to be used as a "Red Guard" by the radicals
when they started their contemplated revolution. He said he
never had heard any of the members of the association discuss
the formation of a "Red Guard" but admitted that many of them
were radicals.
In the two instances given above, fear, suspicion, hatred, give rise in
one case to a delusional system in the mind of an isolated individual,
and in the other to the circulation of an unfounded rumor by men who in
their right minds would, to say the least, carefully scrutinize the
evidence for such a story before permitting it to be published. As
several months have passed since the publication of this story and
nothing more has appeared which would involve our returned service men
in any such treasonable conspiracy, I think it is safe to say that this
story, like many others circulated by radicals as well as by
reactionaries during the unsettled months following the war, has its
origin in the unconscious mechanisms of crowd-minded people. Every sort
of crowd is prone to give credence to rumors of this nature, and to
accuse all those who can not at once give uncritical acceptance to such
tales of sympathy with the enemy. Later we shall have something to say
about the delusional systems which appear to be common to the crowd-mind
and the paranoiac. In this connection I am interested in pointing out
only the psychological relation between what I might call the
"conspiracy delusion" and unconscious hatred. Commonly the former is the
"projection" of the latter.
One of the differences between these two forms of "projection" is the
fact that the hatred of the crowd is commonly less "rationalized" than
in paranoia--that is, less successfully disguised. Like the paranoiac,
every crowd is potentially if not actually homicidal in its tendencies.
But whereas with the paranoiac the murderous hostility remains for the
greater part an unconscious "wish fancy," and it is the mechanisms which
disguise it or serve as a defense against it which appear to
consciousness, with the crowd the murder-wish will itself appear to
consciousness whenever the unconscious can fabricate such defense
mechanisms as will provide it with a fiction of moral justification.
Consequently, it is this fiction of justification which the crowd-man
must defend.
The crowd's delusion of persecution, conspiracy, or oppression is thus a
defense mechanism of this nature. The projection of this hatred on those
outside the crowd serves not so much, as in paranoia, to shield the
subject from the consciousness of his own hatred, as to provide him with
a pretext for exercising it. Given such a pretext, most crowds will
display their homicidal tendencies quite openly.