Petrarch the Renaissance; these movements themselves created their
leaders and founders; all that the genius did was to interpret and
faithfully obey the People's will. Ergo, to be a genius one need only
study hard enough to be able to tell the people what they already think.
The superiority of genius is therefore no different from that of any
educated person; except in degree of application. Anyone of us might
possess this superiority. In other words, the "intellectual
snobbishness" which the crowd resents is nothing else than the
crowd-man's own fiction of self-importance, projected upon those whose
imagined superiority he envies. It is recognized, even exaggerated by
the unlearned, because it is precisely the sort of superiority which the
ignorant man himself, in his ignorance, imagines that he himself would
display if he "only had the chance," and even now possesses
unrecognized.
We have made the foregoing detour because I think it serves to
illustrate, in a way, the psychic processes behind much revolutionary
propaganda and activity. I would not attempt to minimize the extent of
the social injustice and economic slavery which a dominant crowd,
whether ecclesiastical, feudal, or capitalistic, is guilty of in its
dealings with its subjects. But every dominant crowd, certain sections
of the "proletariat" as quickly as any other, will resort to such
practices, and will alike justify them by moral catchwords the minute
its supremacy over other crowds gives it opportunity. Therefore there is
a certain amount of tautology in denouncing the "master class" for its
monstrous abuses. That the real point at issue between the dominant
crowd and the under crowd is the assumed personal superiority of the
members of the former, rather than the economic "exploitation" which it
practices, is shown by the fact that the French Revolution was led by
wealthy bourgeois, and that the leading revolutionary element in the
working class to-day consists, not of the "down and out" victims of
capitalist exploitation, but of the members of the more highly skilled
and better paid trades, also of certain intellectuals who are not
"proletarians" at all.
And now we come to our point: the fiction of superiority of the dominant
crowd, just as in the case of the assumed personal superiority of the
intellectuals, is resented by the under crowd because it is _secretly
recognized_ by the under crowd. Of course the dominant crowd, like all
crowds, is obsessed by its feelings of self-importance, and this feeling
is apparently vindicated by its very social position. But the fiction is
recognized at its full face value, and therefore resented by the under
crowds, because that is precisely the sort of personal supremacy to
which they also aspire.
One commonly hears it said to-day, by those who have made the catchwords
of democracy their crowd cult, that the issue in modern society is
between democracy and capitalism. In a sense this may be true, but only
in a superficial sense; the real issue is between the personal self as a
social entity and the crowd. Capitalism is, to my mind, the logical
first fruit of so-called democracy. Capitalism is simply the social
supremacy of the trader-man crowd. For a hundred years and more
commercial ability--that of organizing industry and selling goods--has
been rewarded out of all proportion to any other kind of ability,
because, in the first place, it leads to the kind of success which the
ordinary man most readily recognizes and envies--large houses, fine
clothes, automobiles, exclusive clubs, etc. A Whittier may be ever so
great a poet, and yet sit beside the stove in the general store of his
little country village, and no one thinks he is so very wonderful. Some
may envy him his fame, but few will envy and therefore be fascinated by
that in him which they do not understand. But a multimillionaire in
their community is understood; everyone can see and envy his success; he
is at once both envied and admired.
Moreover, the commercial ability is the sort which the average man most
commonly thinks he possesses in some degree. While, therefore, he
grumbles at the unjust inequalities in wealth which exist in modern
society, and denounces the successful business man as an exploiter and
fears his power, the average man will nevertheless endure all this, much
in the same spirit that a student being initiated into a fraternity will
take the drubbing, knowing well that his own turn at the fun will come
later. It is not until the members of the under crowd begin to suspect
that their own dreams of "aping the rich" may never come true that they
begin to entertain revolutionary ideas. In other words, forced to
abandon the hope of joining the present dominating crowd, they begin to
dream of supplanting and so dispossessing this crowd by their own crowd.
That the dominant crowd is just as much to blame for this state of
affairs as the under crowd, perhaps more so, is shown by the history of
every period preceding a revolutionary outbreak. I will dwell at some
length on this fact later. My point here is that, first, a revolution,
in the sense that the word means a violent uprising against the existing
order, is a psychological crowd-phenomenon--and second, that it takes
two crowds to make a revolution.
Writers, like Le Bon, have ignored the part which the dominant crowd
plays in such events. They have thought of revolution only as the
behavior of the under crowd. They have assumed that the crowd and the
people were the same. Their writings are hardly more than conservative
warnings against the excess and wickedness of the popular mind once it
is aroused. Sumner says:
Moral traditions are the guides which no one can afford to
neglect. They are in the mores, and they are lost in every great
revolution of the mores. Then the men are morally lost.
Le Bon says, writing of the French Revolution:
The people may kill, burn, ravage, commit the most frightful
cruelties, glorify its hero to-day and throw him into the gutter
to-morrow; it is all one; the politicians will not cease to
vaunt its virtues, its high wisdom, and to bow to its every
decision.
Now in what does this entity really consist, this mysterious
fetich which revolutionists have revered for more than a
century?
It may be decomposed into two distinct categories. The first
includes the peasants, traders, and workers of all sorts who
need tranquillity and order that they may exercise their
calling. This people forms the majority, but a majority which
never caused a revolution. Living in laborious silence, it is
ignored by historians.
The second category, which plays a capital part in all national
disturbances, consists of a subversive social residue dominated
by a criminal mentality. Degenerates of alcoholism and poverty,
thieves, beggars, destitute "casuals," indifferent workers
without employment--these constitute the dangerous bulk of the
armies of insurrection.... To this sinister substratum are due
the massacres which stain all revolutions.... To elements
recruited from the lowest dregs of the populace are added by
contagion a host of idle and indifferent persons who are simply
drawn into the movement. They shout because there are men
shouting, and revolt because there is a revolt, without having
the vaguest idea of the cause of the shouting or revolution. The
suggestive power of the environment absolutely hypnotized them.
This idea, which is held with some variation by Sumner, Gobineau,
Faguet, and Conway, is, I believe, both unhistorical and
unpsychological, because it is but a half-truth. This substratum of the
population does at the moment of revolution become a dangerous mob. Such
people are unadjusted to any social order, and the least deviation from
the routine of daily life throws them off their balance. The relaxation
of authority at the moment when one group is supplanting another in
position of social control, is to these people like the two or three
days of interregnum between the pontificates of Julius and Leo,
described by Cellini. Those who need some one to govern them, and they
are many, find their opportunity in the general disturbance. They
suddenly react to the revolutionary propaganda which up to this minute
they have not heeded, they are controlled by revolutionary crowd-ideas
in a somnambulistic manner, and like automatons carry these ideas
precipitately to their deadly conclusion. But this mob is not the really
revolutionary crowd and in the end it is always put back in its place by
the newly dominant crowd. The really revolutionary crowd consists of the
group who are near enough the dominant crowd to be able to envy its
"airs" with some show of justification, and are strong enough to dare
try issue with it for supreme position. Madame Rolland, it will be
remembered, justified her opposition to aristocrats on the principle of
equality and fraternity, but she could never forget her resentment at
being made, in the home of a member of this aristocracy, to eat with the
servants.
What Le Bon and others seem to ignore is that the ruling class may be
just as truly a crowd as the insurrectionary mob, and that the violent
behavior of revolutionary crowds is simply the logic of crowd-thinking
carried to its swift practical conclusion.
It is generally assumed that a revolution is a sudden and violent change
in the form of government. From what has been said it will be seen that
this definition is too narrow. History will bear me out in this. The
Protestant Reformation was certainly a revolution, as Le Bon has shown,
but it affected more than the government or even the organization of the
Church. The French Revolution changed the form of the government in
France several times before it was done, passing through a period of
imperial rule and even a restoration of the monarchy. But the revolution
as such survived. Even though later a Bourbon or a prince of the House
of Orleans sat on the throne of France, the restored king or his
successor was hardly more than a figurehead. A new class, the Third
Estate, remained in fact master of France. There had been a change in
the ownership of the land; power through the control of vested property
rested with the group which in 1789 began its revolt under the
leadership of Mirabeau. A new dictatorship had succeeded the old. And
this is what a revolution is--_the dictatorship of a new crowd_. The
Russian revolutionists now candidly admit this fact in their use of the
phrase "the dictatorship of the proletariat." Of course it is claimed
that this dictatorship is really the dictatorship of "all the people."
But this is simply the old fiction with which every dominant crowd
disguises seizure of power. Capitalist republicanism is also the rule of
all the people, and the pope and the king, deriving their authority from
God, are really but "the servants of all."
As we have seen, the crowd mind as such wills to dominate. Society is
made up of struggle groups, or organized crowds, each seeking the
opportunity to make its catchwords realities and to establish itself in
the position of social control. The social order is always held intact
by some particular crowd which happens to be dominant. A revolution
occurs when a new crowd pushes the old one out and itself climbs into
the saddle. When the new crowd is only another faction within the
existing dominant crowd, like one of our established political parties,
the succession will be accomplished without resort to violence, since
both elements of the ruling crowd recognize the rules of the game. It
will also not result in far-reaching social changes for the same reason.
A true revolution occurs when the difference between the dominant crowd
and the one which supplants it is so great as to produce a general
social upheaval. The Reformation, the French Revolution, and the
"Bolshevist" _coup d'etat_ in Russia, all were of this nature. A new
social leadership was established and secured by a change in each case
in the personnel of the ownership of such property as would give the
owners the desired control. In the first case there was a transfer of
property in the church estates, either to the local congregations, or
the state, or the denomination. In the second case the property
transferred was property in land, and with the Russian revolutionists
landed property was given to the peasants and vested capital turned
over to the control of industrial workers.
Those who lay all emphasis on this transfer of property naturally see
only economic causes in revolutionary movements. Economics, however, is
not a science of impersonal things. It treats rather of men's relations
to things, and hence to one another. It has to do with valuations and
principles of exchange and ownership, all of which need psychological
restatement. The transfer of the ownership of property in times of
revolution to a new class is not an end, it is a means to a new crowd's
social dominance. The doctrines, ideals, and principles believed by the
revolutionary crowd also serve this end of securing its dominance, as do
the social changes which it effects, once in power.
Revolutions do not occur directly from abuses of power, for in that case
there would be nothing but revolution all the time, since every dominant
crowd has abused its power. It is an interesting fact that revolution
generally occurs after the abuses of which the revolutionists complain
have been in great measure stopped--that is, after the ruling crowd has
begun to make efforts at reform. The Reformation occurred in the
pontificate of Leo X. If it had been the result of intolerable abuse
alone, it would have happened in the time of Alexander VI, Borgia. The
French Revolution fell upon the mild head of Louis XVI, though the
wrongs which it tried to right mostly happened in the reign of his
predecessor. In most cases the abuses, the existence of which a
revolutionary crowd uses for propaganda purposes, are in turn repeated
in new form by itself after it becomes dominant. The Reformers in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries resorted to much the same kind of
persecution from which they had themselves earlier suffered. The
Constituent Assembly, though it had demanded liberty, soon set up a more
outrageous tyranny through its own committees than any that the Louies
had dreamed of. Bolshevists in capitalist countries are the greatest
advocates of free speech; in Russia they are the authors of a very
effective press-censorship.
No, it is hardly the abuses which men suffer from their ruling crowds
which cause insurrection. People have borne the most terrible outrages
and suffered in silence for centuries. Russia itself is a good example
of this.
_A revolution occurs when the dominant crowd begins to weaken._ I think
we find proof of this in the psychology of revolutionary propaganda. A
general revolution is not made in a day, each such cataclysm is preceded
by a long period of unrest and propaganda of opposition to the existing
order and its beneficiaries. The Roman Republic began going to pieces
about a hundred years before the battle of Actium. The social unrest
which followed the Punic Wars and led to the revolt of the brothers
Gracchi was never wholly checked during the century which followed. The
dominant party had scarcely rid itself of these troublesome "demagogues"
than revolt broke out among the slave population of Sicily. This was
followed by the revolt of the Italian peasants, then again by the
insurrection of Spartacus, and this in turn by the civil war between
Marius and Sulla, the conspiracy of Catiline, the brief triumph of
Julius Cæsar over the Senate, the revenge of the latter in the
assassination of Cæsar, and the years of turmoil during the Second
Triumvirate.
It is doubtful if there was at any time a very clear or widespread
consciousness of the issues which successively arose during that unhappy
century. It would seem that first one counter-crowd and then another,
representing various elements of the populace, tried issue with the
ruling crowd. The one factor which remained constant through all this
was the progressive disintegration of the dominant party. The supremacy
of the _Patres Conscripti et Equites_ became in fact a social
anachronism the day that Tiberius Gracchus demanded the expropriation of
the landed aristocracy. The ideas whereby the dominant crowd sought to
justify its pre-emptions began to lose their functional value. Only the
undisguised use of brute force was left. Such ideas ceased to convince.
Men of unusual independence of mind, or men with ambitious motives, who
had grown up within the dominant crowd, began to throw off the spell of
its control-ideas, and, by leaving it, to weaken it further from within.
No sooner was this weakness detected by other groups than every sort of
grievance and partisan interest became a moral justification for efforts
to supplant the rulers. The attempt of the dominant crowd to retain its
hold by repeating its traditional justification-platitudes, unchanged,
but with greater emphasis, may be seen in the orations of Cicero. It
would be well if some one besides high-school students and their Latin
teachers were to take up the study of Cicero; the social and
psychological situation which this orator and writer of moral essays
reveals has some suggestive similarities to things which are happening
to-day.
The century and more of unrest which preceded both the Reformation and
the French Revolution is in each instance a long story. But in both
there is the same gradual loss of prestige on the part of the dominant
crowd; the same inability of this crowd to change with the changes of
time; to find new sanctions for itself when the old ones were no longer
believed; the same unadaptability, the same intellectual and moral
bankruptcy, therefore, the same gradual disintegration from within; the
same resort to sentimentalism and ineffective use of force, the same
circle of hungry counter-crowds waiting around with their tongues
hanging out, ready to pounce upon that before which they had previously
groveled, and to justify their ravenousness as devotion to principle;
the same growing fearlessness, beginning as perfectly loyal desire to
reform certain abuses incidental to the existing order, and advancing,
with every sign of disillusionment or weakness, to moral indignation,
open attack upon fundamental control ideas, bitter hostility, augmented
by the repressive measures taken by the dominant crowd to conserve a
_status quo_ which no longer gained assent in the minds of a growing
counter-crowd; finally force, and a new dominant crowd more successful
now in justifying old tyrannies by principles not yet successfully
challenged.
In the light of these historical analogies the record of events during
the last seventy-five years in western Europe and America is rather
discomforting reading, and I fear the student of social psychology will
find little to reassure him in the pitiable lack of intellectual
leadership, the tendency to muddle through, the unteachableness and
general want of statesmanlike vision displayed by our present dominant
crowds. If a considerable number of people of all classes, those who
desire change as well as those who oppose it, could free their thinking
from the mechanisms of the crowd-mind, it might be possible to find the
working solution of some of our pressing social problems and save our
communities from the dreadful experience of another revolution. Our hope
lies in the socially minded person who is sufficiently in touch with
reality to be also a non-crowd man.
Anyone who is acquainted with the state of the public mind at present,
knows that _a priori_ arguments against revolution as such are not
convincing, except to those who are already convinced on other ground.
The dominant crowd in each historical epoch gained its original
supremacy by means of revolution. One can hardly make effective use of
the commonplace antirevolutionary propaganda of defense of a certain
order which has among its most ardent supporters people who are proud to
call themselves sons and daughters of the Revolution. Skeptics at once
raise the question whether, according to such abstract social ethics,
revolutionists become respectable only after they are successful or have
been a long time dead. In fact, the tendency to resort to such reasoning
is one among many symptoms that the conservative mind has permitted
itself to become quite as much a crowd-phenomenon as has the radical
mind.
The correct approach here is psychological and pragmatic. There is an
increasingly critical social situation, demanding far-reaching
reconstructive change; only the most hopeless crowd-man would presume to
deny this fact. The future all depends upon the mental processes with
which we attempt to meet this situation. Nothing but useless misery can
result from dividing crowd against crowd. Crowd-thinking, as I have
said, does not solve problems. It only creates ideal compensations and
defense devices for our inner conflicts. Conservative crowd-behavior has
always done quite as much as anything else to precipitate a
revolutionary outbreak. Radical crowd-behavior does not resolve the
situation, it only inverts it. Any real solution lies wholly outside
present crowd-dilemmas. What the social situation demands most is a
different kind of thinking, a new education, an increasing number of
people who understand themselves and are intellectually and morally
independent of the tyranny of crowd-ideas.
From what has been said above, it follows that revolutionary propaganda
is not directly the cause of insurrection. Such propaganda is itself an
effect of the unconscious reaction between a waning and a crescent
crowd. It is a symptom of the fact that a large number of people have
ceased to believe in or assent to the continued dominance of the present
controlling crowd and are looking to another.
There is always a tendency among conservative crowds to hasten their own
downfall by the manner in which they deal with revolutionary propaganda.
The seriousness of the new issue is denied; the crowd seeks to draw
attention back to the old issue which it fought and won years ago in the
hour of its ascendancy. The fact that the old charms and shibboleths no
longer work, that they do not now apply, that the growing counter-crowd
is able to psychoanalyze them, discover the hidden motives which they
disguise, and laugh at them, is stoutly denied. The fiction is
maintained to the effect that present unrest is wholly uncalled-for,
that everything is all right, that the agitators who "make people
discontented" are alien and foreign and need only be silenced with a
time-worn phrase, or, that failing, shut up by force or deported, and
all will be well.
I do not doubt that before the Reformation and the French Revolution
there were ecclesiastics and nobles aplenty who were quite sure that the
masses would never have known they were miserable if meddling disturbers
had not taken the trouble to tell them so. Even an honest critical
understanding of the demands of the opposing crowd is discouraged,
possibly because it is rightly felt that the critical habit of mind is
as destructive of one crowd-complex as the other and the old crowd
prefers to remain intact and die in the last ditch rather than risk
dissolution, even with the promise of averting a revolution. Hence the
Romans were willing to believe that the Christians worshiped the head of
an ass. The mediæval Catholics, even at Leo's court, failed to grasp the
meaning of the outbreak in north Germany. Thousands saw in the
Reformation only the alleged fact that the monk Luther wanted to marry a
wife. To-day one looks almost in vain among business men, editors, and
politicians for a more intelligent understanding of socialism. A crowd
goes down to its death fighting bogies, and actually running upon the
sword of its real enemy, because a crowd, once its constellation of
ideas is formed, _never learns anything_.