crowd-thinking, the germs which sooner or later lay it low. When a crowd
first becomes dominant, it carries into a place of power a number of
heterogeneous elements which have, up to this time, been united in a
great counter-crowd because of their common dissatisfaction with the old
order. Gradually the special interests of these several groups become
separated. The struggle for place is continued as a factional fight
within the newly ruling crowd. This factional struggle greatly
complicates every revolutionary movement. We witness this in the
murderously hostile partisan conflicts which broke out in the
revolutionary Assemblies in France. It is seen again in the Reformation,
which had hardly established itself when the movement was rent by
intense sectarian rivalries of all sorts. The same is true of Russia
since the fall of the Tsar, and of Mexico ever since the overthrow of
the Diaz regime. If these factional struggles go so far as to result in
schism--that is, in a conscious repudiation by one or more factions of
the revolutionary creed which had formerly united them all, there is
disintegration and in all probability a return to the old ruling crowd.
This reaction may also be made possible by a refusal of one faction to
recognize the others as integral parts of the newly triumphant crowd. If
the new crowd after its victory can hold itself together, the revolution
is established. It then becomes the task of the leading faction in the
newly dominant crowd to grab the lion's share of the spoils for itself,
give the other factions only so much prestige as will keep alive in
their minds the belief that they, too, share in the new victory for
"humanity" and hold the new social order together, while at the same
time justifying its own leadership by the compulsive power of the idea
which they all alike believe. This belief, as we have seen, is the _sine
qua non_ of the continued existence of any crowd. A dominant crowd
survives so long as its belief is held uncritically and repeated and
acted upon automatically both by the members of the crowd and its
victims. When the factions which have been put at a disadvantage by the
leading faction renounce the belief, or awake to the fact that they
"have been cheated," disintegration begins.
Between the crowd's professed belief and the things which it puts into
practice there is a great chasm. Yet the fiction is uniformly maintained
that the things done are the correct and faithful application of the
great principles to which the crowd is devoted. We saw in our study of
crowd-ideas in general that such ideas are not working programs, but are
screens which disguise and apparently justify the real unconscious
motive of crowd-behavior. The crowd secures its control, first, by
proclaiming in the most abstract form certain generally accepted
principles, such as freedom, righteousness, brotherly love--as though
these universal "truths" were its own invention and exclusive monopoly.
Next, certain logical deductions are made from these principles which,
when carried to their logical conclusions regardless of fact or the
effect produced, make the thing which the crowd really wants and does
appear to be a vindication of the first principles. It is these
inferences which go to make up the conscious thinking or belief of the
crowd. Thus in the revolutionary convention in France all agree to the
principles of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Fidelity to these
principles would to a non-crowd mean that the believer should not try to
dictate to his fellows what they must believe and choose, that he would
exercise good will in his dealings with them and show them the same
respect which he wished them to have for himself. But the crowd does not
understand principles in this manner. Do all agree to the great slogan
of the revolution? Well, then, fidelity to Liberty, Equality, and
Fraternity demands that the enemies of these principles and the crowd's
definition of them be overthrown. The Mountain is the truly faithful
party, hence to the guillotine with the Gironde. This chasm between
crowd faith and crowd practice is well illustrated in the case of those
Southern patriots in America who were ready to fight and die for the
rights of man as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, but
refused to apply the principle of the inalienable rights of all men to
their own black slaves. Or, again in the case of nineteenth-century
capitalism, liberty must be given to all alike. Liberty means equal
opportunity. Equal opportunity means free competition in business. Free
competition exists only where there is an "incentive"; hence the
investor must be encouraged and his gains protected by law. Therefore
anti-capitalistic doctrines must be suppressed as subversive of our free
institutions. Immigrants to whom for a generation we have extended the
hospitality of our slums and labor camps, and the opportunity of freely
competing with our well-intrenched corporations, must be made to feel
their ingratitude if they are so misguided as to conclude, from the fact
that hundreds of leading radicals have been made to serve jail
sentences, while after thirty years of enforcing the antitrust law not a
single person has ever been sent to prison, that possibly this is not a
free land.
Or again--one convicts himself of being a crowd-man who shows partiality
among crowds--the principle of democracy is generally accepted. Then
there should be industrial democracy as well as political--hence the
"Dictatorship of the Proletariat"--for the workers are "the people."
Parliamentary assemblies elected by all the people do not necessarily
represent labor. Organized labor, therefore, though a minority of the
whole, should establish "industrial democracy" by force. So, according
to Bolshevist crowd-logic, democracy means the rule of a minority by
means of force.
Now it is this fictitious, paranoiac, crowd-logic which one must be able
to dispel before he can extricate himself from the clutches of his
crowd. If he subjects the whole fabric of abstractions to critical
analysis, revalues it, puts himself above it, assumes a pragmatic
attitude toward whatever truths it contains, dares to test these truths
by their results in experience and to use them for desired ends; if, in
short, he scrutinizes his own disguised impulses, brings them to
consciousness as what they are, and refuses to be deceived as to their
real import, even when they appear dressed in such sheep's clothing as
absolutes and first principles, he becomes a non-crowd man, a social
being in the best sense.
Those, however, who continue to give assent to the crowd's first
principles, who still accept its habit of _a priori_ reasoning, merely
substituting for its accepted deductions others of their own which in
turn serve to conceal and justify their own unconscious desires, will
turn from the old crowd only to be gobbled up by a new and
counter-crowd. Such people have not really changed. They denounce the
old crowd on the ground that "it has not lived up to its principles." It
is a significant fact that a crowd's rule is generally challenged in
the name of the very abstract ideas of which it has long posed as the
champion.
For instance, there is liberty. Every crowd demands it when it is
seeking power; no crowd permits it when it is in power. A crowd which is
struggling for supremacy is really trying to free itself and as many
people as possible from the control of another crowd. Naturally, the
struggle for power appears to consciousness as a struggle for liberty as
such. The controlling crowd is correctly seen to be a tyrant and
oppressor. What the opposition crowd does not recognize is its own wish
to oppress, hidden under its struggle for power. We have had occasion to
note the intolerance of the crowd-mind as such. A revolutionary crowd,
with all its lofty idealism about liberty, is commonly just as
intolerant as a reactionary crowd. It must be so in order to remain a
crowd. Once it is triumphant it may exert its pressure in a different
direction, but the pinch is there just the same. Like its predecessor,
it must resort to measures of restraint, possibly even a "reign of
terror," in order that the new-won "liberty"--which is to say, its own
place at the head of the procession--may be preserved. The denial of
freedom appears therefore as its triumph, and for a time people are
deceived. They think they are free because everyone is talking about
liberty.
Eventually some one makes the discovery that people do not become free
just by repeating the magic word "liberty." A disappointed faction of
the newly emancipated humanity begins to demand its "rights." The crowd
hears its own catchwords quoted against itself. It proceeds to prove
that freedom exists by denouncing the disturbers and silencing them, if
necessary, by force. The once radical crowd has now become reactionary.
Its dream of world emancipation is seen to be a hoax. Lovers of freedom
now yoke themselves in a new rebel crowd so that oppressed humanity may
be liberated from the liberators. Again, the will to power is clothed in
the dream symbols of an emancipated society, and so on around and around
the circle, until people learn that with crowds freedom is impossible.
For men to attain to mastery of themselves is as abhorrent to one crowd
as to another. The crowd merely wants freedom to be a crowd--that is, to
set up its own tyranny in the place of that which offends the
self-feeling of its members.
The social idealism of revolutionary crowds is very significant for our
view of the crowd-mind. There are certain forms of revolutionary belief
which are repeated again and again with such uniformity that it would
seem the unconscious of the race changes very little from age to age.
The wish-fancy which motivates revolutionary activity always appears to
consciousness as the dream of an ideal society, a world set free; the
reign of brotherly love, peace, and justice. The folly and wickedness of
man is to cease. There will be no more incentive for men to do evil. The
lion and the lamb shall lie down together. Old extortions and tyrannies
are to be left behind. There is to be a new beginning, poverty is to be
abolished, God's will is to be done in earth, or men are at last to live
according to reason, and the inalienable rights of all are to be
secured; or the co-operative commonwealth is to be established, with no
more profit-seeking and each working gladly for the good of all. In
other words, the mind of revolutionary crowds is essentially
_eschatological_, or Messianic. The crowd always imagines its own social
dominance is a millennium. And this trait is common to revolutionary
crowds in all historical periods.
We have here the psychological explanation of the Messianic faith which
is set forth with tremendous vividness in Biblical literature. The
revolutionary import of the social teaching of both the Hebrew and
Christian religions is so plain that I do not see how any honest and
well-informed person can even attempt to deny it. The telling
effectiveness with which this element in religious teaching may be used
by clever radicals to convict the apologists of the present social
order by the words out of their own mouths is evident in much of the
socialist propaganda to-day. The tendency of the will to revolt, to
express itself in accepted religious symbols, is a thing to be expected
if the unconscious plays the important part in crowd-behavior that we
have contended that it does.
The eighth-century Hebrew prophet mingles his denunciations of those who
join house to house and field to field, who turn aside the way of the
meek, and sit in Samaria in the corner of a couch and on the silken
cushions of a bed, who have turned justice to wormwood and cast down
righteousness to the earth, etc., etc.,--reserving his choicest woes of
course for the foreign oppressors of "my people"--with promises of "the
day of the Lord" with all that such a day implies, not only of triumph
of the oppressed over their enemies, but of universal happiness.
Similarly the same complex of ideas appears in the writings which deal
with the Hebrew "Captivity" in the sixth century B.C., with the revolt
of the Maccabeans, and again in the impotent hatred against the Romans
about the time of the origin of Christianity.
The New Testament dwells upon some phase of this theme on nearly every
page. Blessed are ye poor, and woe unto you who are rich, you who laugh
now. The Messiah has come and with him the Kingdom of the Heavens, but
at present the kingdom is revealed only to the believing few, who are in
the world, but not of it. However, the Lord is soon to return; in fact,
this generation shall not pass away until all these things be
accomplished. After a period of great trial and suffering there is to be
a new world, and a new and holy Jerusalem, coming down from the skies
and establishing itself in place of the old. All the wicked, chiefly
those who oppress the poor, shall be cast into a lake of fire. There
shall be great rejoicing, and weeping and darkness and death shall be no
more.
The above sketch of the Messianic hope is so brief as to be hardly more
than a caricature, but it will serve to make my point clear, that
_Messianism is a revolutionary crowd phenomenon_. This subject has been
presented in great detail by religious writers in recent years, so that
there is hardly a member of the reading public who is not more or less
familiar with the "social gospel." My point is that _all revolutionary
propaganda is "social gospel_." Even when revolutionists profess an
antireligious creed, as did the Deists of the eighteenth century, and as
do many modern socialists with their "materialist interpretation of
history," nevertheless the element of irreligion extends only to the
superficial trappings of the revolutionary crowd-faith, and even here
is not consistent. At bottom the revolutionists' dream of a new world is
religious.
I am using the word "religious" in this connection in its popular sense,
meaning no more than that the revolutionary crowd rationalizes its dream
of a new world-order in imagery which repeats over and over again the
essentials of the Biblical "day of the Lord," or "kingdom of heaven" to
be established in earth. This notion of cosmic regeneration is very
evident in the various "utopian" socialist theories. The Fourierists and
St. Simonists of the early part of the nineteenth century were extremely
Messianic. So-called "scientific socialists" are now inclined to
ridicule such idealistic speculation, but one has only to scratch
beneath the surface of present-day socialist propaganda to find under
its materialist jargon the same old dream of the ages. A great
world-change is to come suddenly. With the triumph of the workers there
will be no more poverty or ignorance, no longer any incentive to men to
do evil to one another. The famous "Manifesto" is filled with such
ideas. Bourgeois society is doomed and about to fall. Forces of social
evolution inevitably point to the world-wide supremacy of the working
class, under whose mild sway the laborer is to be given the full product
of his toil, the exploitation of children is to cease, true liberty
will be achieved, prostitution, which is somehow a bourgeois
institution, is to be abolished, everyone will be educated, production
increased till there is enough for all, the cities shall no more lord it
over the rural communities, all alike will perform useful labor, waste
places of the earth will become cultivated lands and the fertility of
the soil will be increased in accordance with a common plan, the state,
an instrument of bourgeois exploitation, will cease to exist; in fact,
the whole wicked past is to be left behind, for as
The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with
traditional property relations, no wonder that its development
involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
In fine,
In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class
antagonisms we shall have an association in which the free
development of each is the condition for the free development of
all.
Le Bon says of the French Revolution:
The principles of the Revolution speedily inspired a wave of
mystic enthusiasm analogous to those provoked by the various
religious beliefs which had preceded it. All they did was to
change the orientation of a mental ancestry which the centuries
had solidified.
So there is nothing astonishing in the savage zeal of the men of
the Convention. Their mystic mentality was the same as that of
the Protestants at the time of the Reformation. The principal
heroes of the Terror--Couthon, Saint Just, Robespierre,
etc.--were apostles. Like Polyeuctes destroying the altars of
the false gods to propagate his faith, they dreamed of
converting the globe.... The mystic spirit of the leaders of the
Revolution was betrayed in the least details of their public
life. Robespierre, convinced that he was supported by the
Almighty, assured his hearers in a speech that the Supreme Being
had "decreed the Republic since the beginning of time."
A recent writer, after showing that the Russian revolution has failed to
put the Marxian principles into actual operation, says of Lenin and his
associates:
They have caught a formula of glittering words; they have
learned the verbal cadences which move the masses to ecstasy;
they have learned to paint a vision of heaven that shall
outflare in the minds of their followers the shabby realities of
a Bolshevik earth. They are master phraseocrats, and in Russia
they have reared an empire on phraseocracy.
The alarmists who shriek of Russia would do well to turn their
thoughts from Russia's socialistic menace. The peril of Russia
is not to our industries, but to our states. The menace of the
Bolsheviki is not an economic one, it is a political menace. It
is the menace of fanatic armies, drunken with phrases and
sweeping forward under Lenin like a Muscovite scourge. It is the
menace of intoxicated proletarians, goaded by invented visions
to seek to conquer the world.
In Nicolai Lenin the Socialist, we have naught to fear. In
Nicolai Lenin the political chief of Russia's millions, we may
well find a menace, for his figure looms over the world. His
Bolshevik abracadabra has seduced the workers of every race. His
stealthy propaganda has shattered the morale of every army in
the world. His dreams are winging to Napoleonic flights, and
well he may dream of destiny; for in an age when we bow to
phrases, it is Lenin who is the master phraseocrat of the world.
Passing over the question of Lenin's personal ambitions, and whether our
own crowd-stupidity, panic, and wrong-headed Allied diplomacy may not
have been contributing causes of the menace of Bolshevism, it can hardly
be denied that Bolshevism, like all other revolutionary crowd-movements,
is swayed by a painted vision of heaven which outflares the miseries of
earth. _Every revolutionary crowd of every description is a pilgrimage
set out to regain our lost Paradise._
Now it is this dream of paradise, or ideal society, which deserves
analytical study. Why does it always appear the minute a crowd is
sufficiently powerful to dream of world-power? It will readily be
conceded that this dream has some function in creating certain really
desirable social values. But such values cannot be the psychogenesis of
the dream. If the dream were ever realized, I think William James was
correct in saying that we should find it to be but a "sheep's heaven
and lubberland of joy," and that life in it would be so "mawkish and
dishwatery" that we should gladly return to this world of struggle and
challenge, or anywhere else, if only to escape the deadly inanity.
We have already noted the fact that this dream has the function of
justifying the crowd in its revolt and will to rule. But this is by no
means all. The social idealism has well been called a dream, for that is
just what it is, the daydream of the ages. It is like belief in fairies,
or the Cinderella myth. It is the Jack-and-the-beanstalk philosophy. The
dream has exactly the same function as the Absolute, and the ideal
world-systems of the paranoiac; _it is an imaginary refuge from the
real_. Like all other dreams, it is the realization of a wish. I have
long been impressed with the static character of this dream; not only is
it much the same in all ages, but it is always regarded as the great
culmination beyond which the imagination cannot stretch. Even those who
hold the evolutionary view of reality and know well that life is
continuous change, and that progress cannot be fixed in any passing
moment, however sweet, are generally unable to imagine progress going on
after the establishment of the ideal society and leaving it behind.
Revolutionary propaganda habitually stops, like the nineteenth-century
love story, with a general statement, "and so they lived happily ever
after." It is really the end, not the beginning or middle of the story.
It is the divine event toward which the whole creation moves, and having
reached it, _stops_. Evolution having been wound up to run to just this
end, time and change and effort may now be discontinued. There is
nothing further to do. In other words, the ideal is lifted clear out of
time and all historical connections. As in other dreams, the empirically
known sequence of events is ignored. Whole centuries of progress and
struggle and piecemeal experience are telescoped into one imaginary
symbolic moment. The moment now stands for the whole process, or rather
it is _substituted_ for the process. We have taken refuge from the real
into the ideal. The "Kingdom of Heaven," "Paradise," "The Return to Man
in the State of Nature," "Back to Primitive New Testament Christianity,"
"The Age of Reason," "Utopia," the "Revolution," the "Co-operative
Commonwealth," all mean psychologically the same thing. And that thing
is not at all a scientific social program, but a symbol of an easier and
better world where desires are realized by magic, and everyone's check
drawn upon the bank of existence is cashed. _Social idealism of
revolutionary crowds is a mechanism of compensation and escape for
suppressed desires._
Is there any easier way of denying the true nature and significance of
our objective world than by persuading ourselves that that world is even
now doomed, and is bound suddenly to be transformed into the land of our
heart's desire? Is it not to be expected that people would soon learn
how to give those desires greater unction, and to encourage one another
in holding to the fictions by which those desires could find their
compensation and escape, by resorting to precisely the crowd-devices
which we have been discussing?
The Messianists of Bible times expected the great transformation and
world cataclysm to come by means of a divine miracle. Those who are
affected by the wave of premillennialism which is now running through
certain evangelical Christian communions are experiencing a revival of
this faith with much of its primitive terminology.
Evolutionary social revolutionists expect the great day to come as the
culmination of a process of economic evolution. This is what is meant by
"evolutionary and revolutionary socialism." The wish-fancy is here
rationalized as a doctrine of evolution by revolution. Thus the
difference between the social revolutionist and the Second Adventist is
much smaller than either of them suspects. As Freud would doubtless say,
the difference extends only to the "secondary elaboration of the
manifest dream formation"--the latent dream thought is the same in both
cases. The Adventist expresses the wish in the terminology of a
prescientific age, while the social revolutionist makes use of modern
scientific jargon. Each alike finds escape from reality in the
contemplation of a new-world system. The faith of each is a scheme of
redemption--that is, of "compensation." Each contemplates the sudden,
cataclysmic destruction of the "present evil world," and its replacement
by a new order in which the meek shall inherit the earth. To both alike
the great event is destined, in the fullness of time, to come as a thief
in the night. In the one case it is to come as the fulfillment of
prophecy; in the other the promise is underwritten and guaranteed by
impersonal forces of "economic evolution."