the nonconformist, the "traitor." I have sometimes thought that to the
crowd-mind there is only one sin, heresy. Every sort of crowd,
political, religious, moral, has an ax ready for the person who in
renouncing its ideas and leaving it threatens to break it up. The bitter
partisan hatred of crowds is nothing compared to their hatred for the
renegade. To the crowd of true believers, the heretic or schismatic is
"worse than the infidel." The moral crowd will "bear with" the worst
_roué_ if only he strives to keep up appearances, has a guilty
conscience, asks forgiveness, and professes firm belief in the
conventions against which he offends; one may be forgiven his inability
to "live up to his principles" if only his professed principles are the
same as the crowd's. But let a Nietzsche, though his life be that of an
ascetic, openly challenge and repudiate the values of popular morality,
and his name is anathema.
As an example of the hatred of the political crowd for one who, having
once put his hand to the plow and turned back, henceforth is no longer
fit for the "kingdom," I quote the following from an ultraradical paper.
It is hard to believe that this passage was written by a man who, in his
right mind, is really intelligent and kind-hearted, but such is the
case:
AN EXPLANATION.--Owing to a failure of editorial supervision we
published an advertisement of John Spargo's book on Bolshevism.
We have returned the money we received for it, and canceled the
contract for its future appearances. We do not pretend to
protect our readers against patent-medicine swindlers,
real-estate sharpers, canned goods prevaricators, ptomaine
poisoners, fairy bond-sellers, picaroon nickel-pickers, subway
ticket speculators, postage-stamp forgers, pie and pancake
counterfeiters, plagiary burglars, lecherous pornographers, and
pictorial back-porch climbers, plundering buccaneer blackmailers
and defaulting matrimonial agents, journalistic poachers,
foragers, pickpockets, thimbleriggers, lick-sauce publicity men,
notoriety hunters, typographical body-snatchers, blackletter
assassins, and promulgators of licentious meters in free verse.
Against these natural phenomena we offer no guarantee to our
readers, but we never intended to advertise John Spargo's book
on Bolshevism.
Here again, it seems, the reason for hatred is "self-defense." One
important difference between the crowd-mind and the psychosis is the
fact that while the psychic mechanisms of the latter serve to disguise
the inadequately repressed wish, those of the crowd-mind permit the
escape of the repressed impulse by relaxing the force which demands the
repression--namely, the immediate social environment. This relaxation is
accomplished by a general fixation of attention which changes for those
who share it the moral significance of the social demand. The repressed
wish then appears to consciousness in a form which meets with the mutual
approval of the individuals so affected. Or, as I have said, the social
environment, instead of acting as a check upon the realization of the
wish-fancy, slips along in the same direction with it. Hence the will to
believe the same, so characteristic of every crowd. As soon as this
mutuality is broken the habitual criteria of the real again become
operative. Every individual who "comes to" weakens the hold of the
crowd-ideas upon all the others to just the extent that his word must be
taken into account. The crowd resorts to all sorts of devices to bind
its members together permanently in a common faith. It resists
disintegration as the worst conceivable evil. Disintegration means that
crowd-men must lose their pet fiction--which is to say, their "faith."
The whole system elaborated by the unconscious fails to function; its
value for compensation, defense, or justification vanishes as in waking
out of a dream.
Strong spirits can stand this disillusionment. They have the power to
create new, more workable ideals. They become capable of self-analysis.
They learn to be legislators of value and to revise their beliefs for
themselves. Their faiths become not refuges, but instruments for meeting
and mastering the facts of experience and giving them meaning. The
strong are capable of making their lives spiritual adventures in a real
world. The "truths" of such persons are not compulsive ideas, they are
working hypotheses which they are ready, as occasion may demand, to
verify at great personal risk, or to discard when proved false. Such
persons sustain themselves in their sense of personal worth less by
defense mechanisms than by the effort of will which they can make.
As William James said:
If the searching of our heart and reins be the purpose of this
human drama, then what is sought seems to be what effort we can
make. He who can make none is but a shadow; he who can make much
is a hero. The huge world that girdles us about puts all sorts
of questions to us, and tests us in all sorts of ways. Some of
the tests we meet by actions that are easy, and some of the
questions we answer in articulately formulated words. But the
deepest question that is ever asked admits of no reply but the
dumb turning of the will and tightening of our heartstrings as
we say, "Yes, I will even have it so!" When a dreadful object is
presented, or when life as a whole turns up its dark abysses to
our view, then the worthless ones among us lose their hold on
the situation altogether, and either escape from its
difficulties by averting their attention, or, if they cannot do
that, collapse into yielding masses of plaintiveness and fear.
The effort required for facing and consenting to such objects is
beyond their power to make. But the heroic mind does
differently. To it, too, the objects are sinister and dreadful,
unwelcome, incompatible with wished-for things. But it can face
them if necessary without losing its hold upon the rest of life.
The world thus finds in the heroic man its worthy match and
mate.... He can _stand_ this Universe.
Indeed the path for all who would make of living a reality rather than
an imitation leads along what James used to call "the perilous edge."
Every personal history that is a history, and not a mere fiction,
contains in it something unique, a fraction for which there is no common
denominator. It requires just that effort of attention to concrete
reality and the fact of self which in the crowd we always seek to escape
by diverting attention to congenial abstractions and ready-made
universals. We "find ourselves" only as we "get over" one after another
of our crowd-compulsions, until finally we are strong enough, as Ibsen
would say, "to stand alone."
Timid spirits seldom voluntarily succeed in getting closer to reality
than the "philosophy of '_as if_'" which characterizes the thinking both
of the crowd and the psychoneurosis. What indeed is the crowd but a
fiction of upholding ourselves by all leaning on one another, an "escape
from difficulties by averting attention," a spiritual safety-first or
"fool-proof" mechanism by which we bear up one another's collapsing
ego-consciousness lest it dash its foot against a stone?
The crowd-man can, when his fiction is challenged, save himself from
spiritual bankruptcy, preserve his defenses, keep his crowd from going
to pieces, only by a demur. Anyone who challenges the crowd's fictions
must be ruled out of court. He must not be permitted to speak. As a
witness to contrary values his testimony must be discounted. The worth
of his evidence must be discredited by belittling the disturbing
witness. "He is a bad man; the crowd must not listen to him." His
motives must be evil; he "is bought up"; he is an immoral character; he
tells lies; he is insincere or he "has not the courage to take a stand"
or "there is nothing new in what he says." Ibsen's "Enemy of the
People," illustrates this point very well. The crowd votes that Doctor
Stockman may not speak about the baths, the real point at issue. Indeed,
the mayor takes the floor and officially announces that the doctor's
statement that the water is bad is "unreliable and exaggerated." Then
the president of the Householder's Association makes an address accusing
the doctor of secretly "_aiming at revolution_." When finally Doctor
Stockman speaks and tells his fellow citizens the real meaning of their
conduct, and utters a few plain truths about "the compact majority," the
crowd saves its face, not by proving the doctor false, but by howling
him down, voting him an "enemy of the people," and throwing stones
through his windows.
A crowd is like an unsound banking institution. People are induced to
carry their deposits of faith in it, and so long as there is no unusual
withdrawing of accounts the insolvent condition may be covered up. Many
uneasy depositors would like to get their money out if they could do so
secretly, or without incurring the displeasure of the others. Meanwhile
all insist that the bank is perfectly safe and each does all he can to
compel the others to stay in. The thing they all most fear is that some
one will "start a run on the bank," force it to liquidate, and everyone
will lose. So the crowd functions in its way just so long as its members
may be cajoled into an appearance of continued confidence in its ideals
and values. The spiritual capital of each depends on the confidence of
the others. As a consequence they all spend most of their time exhorting
one another to be good crowd-men, fearing and hating no one so much as
the person who dares raise the question whether the crowd could really
meet its obligations.
The classic illustration of the manner in which the crowd is led to
discredit the witness to values contrary to its own, is the oration of
Mark Antony in Shakespeare's "Julius Cæsar." It is by this means alone
that Antony is able to turn the minds of the Roman citizens into the
crowd state. It will be remembered that the address of Brutus, just
before this, while not at all a bit of crowd-oratory, left a favorable
impression. The citizens are convinced that "This Cæsar was a tyrant."
When Antony goes up to speak, he thanks them "for Brutus' sake." They
say, "'Twere best he speak no harm of Brutus here." He can never make
them his crowd unless he can destroy Brutus' influence. This is
precisely what he proceeds gradually to do.
At first with great courtesy--"The noble Brutus hath told you Cæsar was
ambitious; if it were so it was a grievous fault ... for Brutus is an
honorable man, so are they all, all honorable men." This sentence is
repeated four times in the first section; Cæsar was a good faithful
friend to Antony, "But ... and Brutus is an honorable man." Again Cæsar
refused the crown, but "Brutus is an honorable man." Cæsar wept when the
poor cried, "sure, Brutus is an honorable man, I speak not to disprove
what he says" but "men have lost their reason" and "my heart is in the
coffin there with Cæsar." The citizens are sorry for the weeping Antony;
they listen more intently now. Again--"If I were disposed to stir your
hearts and minds to mutiny and rage"--but that would be to wrong Brutus
and Cassius, "Who you all know are honorable men"--this time said with
more marked irony. Rather than wrong such honorable men, Antony prefers
to "wrong the dead, to wrong myself--and you." That sentence sets Brutus
squarely in opposition to the speaker and his audience. Cæsar's will is
mentioned--if only the commons knew what was in it, but Antony will not
read it, "you are not wood, you are not stones, but men." The speaker
now resists their demand to hear the will, he ought not have mentioned
it. He fears he has, after all, wronged "the honorable men whose daggers
have stabbed Cæsar." The citizens have caught the note of irony now; the
honorable men are "traitors," "villains," "murderers."
From this point on the speaker's task is easy; they have become a crowd.
They think only of revenge, of killing everyone of the conspirators, and
burning the house of Brutus. Antony has even to remind them of the
existence of the will. The mischief is set afloat the moment Brutus is
successfully discredited.
The development of the thought in this oration is typical. Analysis of
almost any propagandist speech will reveal some, if not all, the steps
by which Brutus is made an object of hatred. _The crowd hates in order
that it may believe in itself._
VI
THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD-MIND
Wherever conscious thinking is determined by unconscious mechanisms, and
all thinking is more or less so, it is dogmatic in character. Beliefs
which serve an unconscious purpose do not require the support of
evidence. They persist because they are demanded. This is a common
symptom of various forms of psychoneurosis. Ideas "haunt the mind" of
the patient; he cannot rid himself of them. He may know they are
foolish, but he is compelled to think them. In severe cases, he may hear
voices or experience other hallucinations which are symbolic of the
obsessive ideas. Or his psychic life may be so absorbed by his one fixed
idea that it degenerates into the ceaseless repetition of a gesture or a
phrase expressive of this idea.
In paranoia the fixed ideas are organized into a system. Brill says:
I know a number of paranoiacs who went through a stormy period
lasting for years, but who now live contentedly as if in another
world. Such transformations of the world are common in paranoia.
They do not care for anything, as nothing is real to them. They
have withdrawn their sum of libido from the persons of their
environment and the outer world. The end of the world is the
projection of this internal catastrophe. Their subjective world
came to an end since they withdrew their love from it. By a
secondary rationalization, the patients then explain whatever
obtrudes itself upon them as something intangible and fit it in
with their own system. Thus one of my patients who considers
himself a sort of Messiah denies the reality of his own parents
by saying that they are only shadows made by his enemy, the
devil, whom he has not yet wholly subdued. Another paranoiac in
the Central Islip State Hospital, who represented himself as a
second Christ, spends most of his time sewing out on cloth crude
scenes containing many buildings, interspersed with pictures of
the doctors. He explained all this very minutely as the _new
world system_.... Thus the paranoiac builds up again with his
delusions a new world in which he can live.... (Italics mine.)
However, a withdrawal of libido is not an exclusive occurrence
in paranoia, nor is its occurrence anywhere necessarily followed
by disastrous consequences. Indeed, in normal life there is a
constant withdrawal of libido from persons and objects without
resulting in paranoia or other neuroses. It merely causes a
special psychic mood. The withdrawal of the libido as such
cannot therefore be considered as pathogenic of paranoia. It
requires a special character to distinguish the paranoiac
withdrawal of libido from other kinds of the same process. This
is readily found when we follow the further utilization of the
libido thus withdrawn. Normally, we immediately seek a
substitute for the suspended attachment, and until one is found
the libido floats freely in the psyche and causes tensions which
influence our moods. In hysteria the freed sum of libido
becomes transformed into bodily innervations of fear. Clinical
indications teach us that in paranoia a special use is made of
the libido which is withdrawn from its object ... the freed
libido in paranoia is thrown back on the ego and serves to
magnify it.
Note the fact that there is a necessary relation between the fixed ideal
system of the paranoiac and his withdrawal of interest in the outside
world. The system gains the function of reality for him in the same
measure that, loving not the world nor the things that are in the world,
he has rendered our common human world unreal. His love thrown back upon
himself causes him to create another world, a world of "pure reason," so
to speak, which is more congenial to him than the world of empirical
fact. In this system he takes refuge and finds peace at last. Now we see
the function, at least so far as paranoia is concerned, of the ideal
system. As Brill says, it is a curative process of a mind which has
suffered "regression" or turning back of its interest from the affairs
of ordinary men and women, to the attachments of an earlier stage in its
history. To use a philosophical term, the paranoiac is the Simon-pure
"solipsist." And as _a priori_ thinking tends, as Schiller has shown,
ever to solipsism, we see here the grain of truth in G. K. Chesterton's
witty comparison of rationalism and lunacy.
"Regression," or withdrawal of the libido, is present to some degree I
believe in all forms of the neurosis. But we are informed that a
withdrawal of the libido may, and frequently does, occur also in normal
people. Knowledge of the neurosis here, as elsewhere, serves to throw
light on certain thought processes of people who are considered normal.
Brill says that "normally we seek a substitute for the suspended
attachment." New interests and new affections in time take the places of
the objects from which the feelings have been torn. In analytical
psychology the process by which this is achieved is called a
"transference."
Now the crowd is in a sense a "transference phenomenon." In the
temporary crowd or mob this transference is too transitory to be very
evident, though even here I believe there will generally be found a
certain _esprit de corps_. In permanent crowds there is often a marked
transference to the other members of the group. This is evident in the
joy of the new convert or the newly initiated, also in such terms of
affection as "comrade" and "brother." I doubt, however, if this
affection, so far as it is genuine among individuals of a certain crowd,
is very different from the good will and affection which may spring up
anywhere among individuals who are more or less closely associated, or
that it ever really extends beyond the small circle of personal friends
that everyone normally gains through his daily relations with others.
But to the crowd-mind this transference is supposed to extend to all the
members of the group; they are comrades and brothers not because we like
them and know them intimately, but because they are fellow members. In
other words, this transference, so far as it is a crowd phenomenon as
such, is not to other individuals, but to the idea of the crowd itself.
It is not enough for the good citizen to love his neighbors in so far as
he finds them lovable; he must love his country. To the churchman the
Church herself is an object of faith and adoration. One does not become
a humanitarian by being a good fellow; he must love "humanity"--which is
to say, the bare abstract idea of everybody. I remember once asking a
missionary who was on his way to China what it was that impelled him to
go so far in order to minister to suffering humanity. He answered, "It
is love." I asked again, "Do you really mean to say that you care so
much as that for Chinese, not one of whom you have ever seen?" He
answered, "Well, I--you see, I love them through Jesus Christ." So in a
sense it is with the crowd-man always; he _loves through the crowd_.
The crowd idealized as something sacred, as end in itself, as something
which it is an honor to belong to, is to some extent a disguised object
of our self-love. But the idea of the crowd disguises more than
self-love. Like most of the symbols through which the unconscious
functions, it can serve more than one purpose at a time. The idea of the
crowd also serves to disguise the parental image, and our own imaginary
identification or reunion with it. The nation is to the crowd-man the
"Fatherland," the "mother country," "Uncle Sam"--a figure which serves
to do more than personalize for cartoonists the initials U. S. Uncle Sam
is also the father-image thinly disguised. The Church is "the Mother,"
again the "Bride." Such religious symbols as "the Heavenly Father" and
the "Holy Mother" also have the value of standing for the parent image.
For a detailed discussion of these symbols, the reader is referred to
Jung's _Psychology of the Unconscious_.
In another connection I have referred to the fact that the crowd stands
to the member _in loco parentis_. Here I wish to point out the fact that
such a return to the parent image is commonly found in the
psychoneurosis and is what is meant by "regression." I have also dwelt
at some length on the fact that it is by securing a modification in the
immediate social environment, ideally or actually, that the crowd
permits the escape of the repressed wish. Such a modification in the
social at once sets the members of the crowd off as a "peculiar people."
Interest tends to withdraw from the social as a whole and center in the
group who have become a crowd. The Church is "in the world but not of
it." The nation is an end in itself, so is every crowd. Transference to
the idea of the crowd differs then from the normal substitutes which we
find for the object from which affection is withdrawn. It is itself a
kind of regression. In the psychoneurosis--in paranoia most clearly--the
patient's attempt to rationalize this shifting of interest gives rise to
the closed systems and ideal reconstructions of the world mentioned in
the passage quoted from Brill.
Does the crowd's thinking commonly show a like tendency to construct an
imaginary world of thought-forms and then take refuge in its ideal
system? As we saw at the beginning of our discussion, it does. The
focusing of general attention upon the abstract and universal is a
necessary step in the development of the crowd-mind.
The crowd does not think in order to solve problems. To the crowd-mind,
as such, there are no problems. It has closed its case beforehand. This
accounts for what Le Bon termed the "credulity" of the crowd. But the
crowd believes only what it wants to believe and nothing else. Anyone
who has been in the position of a public teacher knows how almost
universal is the habit of thinking in the manner of the crowd and how
difficult it is to get people to think for themselves. One frequently
hears it said that the people do not think, that they do not want to
know the truth.
Ibsen makes his Doctor Stockman say:
What sort of truths are they that the majority usually supports?
They are truths that are of such advanced age that they are
beginning to break up.... These "majority truths" are like last
year's cured meat--like rancid tainted ham; and they are the
origin of the moral scurvy that is rampant in our
communities.... The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom
among us is the compact majority, yes, the damned compact
liberal majority ... the majority has might on its side
unfortunately, but _right_ it has never.
It is not really because so many are ignorant, but because so few are
able to resist the appeal which the peculiar logic of crowd-thinking
makes to the unconscious, that the cheap, the tawdry, the half-true
almost exclusively gain popular acceptance. The average man is a
dogmatist. He thinks what he thinks others think he is thinking. He is
so used to propaganda that he can hardly think of any matter in other
terms. It is almost impossible to keep the consideration of any subject
of general interest above the dilemmas of partisan crowds. People will
wherever possible change the discussion of a mooted question into an
antiphonal chorus of howling mobs, each chanting its ritual as ultimate
truth, and hurling its shibboleths in the faces of the others. Pursuit
of truth with most people consists in repeating their creed. Nearly
every movement is immediately made into a cult. Theology supplants
religion in the churches. In popular ethics a dead formalism puts an end
to moral advance. Straight thinking on political subjects is
subordinated to partisan ends. Catch-phrases and magic formulas become
substituted for scientific information. Even the Socialists, who feel
that they are the intellectually elect--and I cite them here as an
example in no unfair spirit, but just because so many of them are really
well-informed and "advanced" in their thinking--have been unable to save
themselves from a doctrinaire economic orthodoxy of spirit which is
often more dogmatic and intolerant than that of the "religious folks" to
whose alleged "narrow-mindedness" every Socialist, even while repeating
his daily chapter from the Marxian Koran, feels himself superior.