THE HERD AND THE SUBCONSCIOUS
Superstitious terrors are by no means confined to race; they are
common to all races. For example, among the aborigines of Australia
a native will die after the infliction of even the most superficial
wound, if he is scared by the suggestion that the weapon which
inflicted the wound has been sung over, and thus endowed with
magical virtue. He simply lies down, refuses food, and pines away.
Similarly among some of the Indian tribes of Brazil, if the
medicine-man predicted the death of anyone who had offended him,
“the wretch took to his hammock instantly in such full expectation
of dying, that he would neither eat nor drink, and the prediction
was effectually executed.”
Speaking of certain African races Major Leonard observes: “I have
seen more than one hardened old Haussa soldier dying steadily and
by inches, because he believed himself to be bewitched; so that no
nourishment or medicines that were given to him had the slightest
effect either to check the mischief or to improve his condition in
any way, and nothing was able to divert him from a fate which he
considered inevitable.
“In the same way, and under very similar conditions, I have seen
Kru-men and others die, in spite of every effort that was made to
save them, simply because they had made up their minds, not (as
we thought at the time) to die, but that being in the clutch of
malignant demons they were bound to die.”
The gregarious individual must obey the master leader on pain of
death. In gregarious life the whole pack attacks the disobedient
individual for challenging the chief, king, priest, the god-man,
the lord of the horde. Obedience is a virtue, disobedience
is a mortal sin, affecting the whole horde, hence a horrible
death of the sinner is the sole punishment. The independent
personality is inhibited, the individual falls into a state of
social somnambulism, and the will-less, self-less subconscious, a
semblance of personality, charged with self-preservation and fear
instinct, obeys the commands of the master leader who is often a
brutal type, a Nero, a Domitian, a Caracalla, a Caligula, a John
the Terrible.
In a society where the socio-static press is always at work,
where political pressure is far stronger than even in the ancient
despotic monarchies, where a class government is in possession of
all modern improvements, where gray uniformity and drowsy monotony
reign supreme, obedience must be the rule. Blind, stupid obedience,
that slavish obedience which is peculiar to somnambulic subjects,
characterizes such societies.
Servility is well illustrated by the following historical incident:
Prince Sougorsky, ambassador to Germany in 1576, fell sick _en
route_ in Courland. The duke of the province often inquired as
to his health. The reply was always the same: “My health matters
nothing, provided the sovereign’s prospers.” The duke, surprised,
said, “How can you serve a tyrant with so much zeal?” He replied,
“We Russians are always devoted to our Czars, good or cruel. My
master (Ivan the Terrible) impaled a man of mark for a slight
fault, who for twenty-four hours, in his dying agonies, talked with
his family, and without ceasing kept repeating, ‘Great God, protect
the Czar!’”
The same is true of modern class societies where the Demos is the
despot. God preserve the Demos! When the business demon of the
Demos requires sacrifice, self immolation, anticipate his order.
Pray for the Demos; Great God, protect the greedy Demos! The Demos
is my Lord, to him is due my servile loyalty.
It is interesting to observe that the superstitious, the
savage, the negro, and the soldier are excellent subjects for
hypnotic purposes. Soldiers as experiments show, have a strong
predisposition to hypnotic states. I was told by Professor
Münsterberg that the hypnotic predisposition was strongly
developed in the German soldier. M. Liebault experimented on ten
hundred and twelve persons, and found only twenty-seven refractory.
Berenheim remarks on this that “It is necessary to take into
account the fact that M. Liebault operates chiefly upon the common
people.”
The great pressure exerted on the lower social strata, and
especially on soldiers, the dull monotony of their life, the
habit of strict obedience to command, predisposes them to social
subconscious automatisms,--to the formation of mobs, clubs, unions,
lodges, associations, parties, clans, sects, mobocracies. In all
such organizations there is present the same servile spirit--the
impersonal self and the gregarious fear instinct--the basis of
subconscious, social somnambulism.
Man is a social somnambulist, he lives, dreams, and obeys with his
eyes open. Whenever the impulse of self-preservation gets a special
grip on the gregarious individual, when he becomes wild with terror
in the bosom of the herd, then he may be regarded as a psychopathic
victim.
The historian of the future will represent our age as dark,
barbaric, savage, an age of the cruel Napoleonic wars, of
commercial crises, financial panics, religious revivals, vicious,
brutal, savage world wars,--mobs, crazes, plagues, social pests of
all sorts and description....
A herd of sheep stand packed close together, looking stupidly into
space.... Frighten them,--and if one begins to run, frantic with
terror, the rest are sure to follow,--a stampede ensues, each sheep
scrupulously reproduces the identical movements of the one in front
of it. This susceptibility to imitation is but what we, in relation
to man, term suggestibility, which consists in the impressing
on the person of an idea, image, movement, however absurd and
senseless, which the person in his hypnotized state reproduces
like an automaton,--although he or she thinks it is done quite
voluntarily. Suggestibility is natural to man as a social animal.
Under specially favorable conditions this suggestibility which is
always present in human beings may increase to an extraordinary
degree, and the result is a stampede, a mob, an epidemic.
It is sometimes claimed that somnambulic persons are asleep.
Sleep and somnambulism have been identified. This is a misuse of
words since there are a whole series of subconscious states in
which not one symptom of sleep appears. _Extreme susceptibility
to suggestions and mental automatisms are the chief traits of the
subconscious._
Gregarious men and women carry within themselves the germs of the
possible mob, or of mental epidemics. As social creatures men and
women are naturally suggestible. When this susceptibility or
sensitivity to suggestions becomes abnormally intense, we may say
that they are thrown into a social subconscious, somnambulic state.
We know by psychological and psychopathological experiments
that limitation of voluntary movements and inhibition of free
activities induce a subconscious state. This subconscious state
is characterized by inhibition of the will power,--memory remains
unaffected; consciousness appears intact; the subject is aware of
all that goes on.
Keeping this in mind, we can understand social life, and especially
morbid, social movements, mob life of all ages.
A subconscious state is induced in the organized individual by
the great limitation of his voluntary activities and by the
inhibition of his free critical thought. Bound fast by the strings
of tradition and authority, social men and women are reduced to
subconscious automata. The subconscious rises with the growth of
organized civilization, while the critical, independent powers of
the individual correspondingly fall. Hence the apparent social
paradox that the growth of society tends to destroy the mental
forces which helped to build up civilization.
In such societies the individual staggers under the burden of laws
and taboos. Individuality is stifled under the endless massive
excretions of legislators. Recently even the lawgivers or law
manufacturers began to object to the labor involved in the work
on the ever growing mass of bills introduced into the legislature
of one state alone. Thus a senator of a Western state complained
that in _one_ year over 1700 bills passed through the mill of his
Legislature. Multiply that figure by the number of states, add the
municipal edicts, and the endless laws turned out by the Federal
Government, and one can form some faint idea of the vast burden
laid on the shoulders of the individual citizen.
The Los Angeles Times, which no one will accuse of radicalism,
pointedly remarks: “The State has just issued a reference index to
the laws of California since 1850--it is of itself a bulky volume
of more than 1300 pages. When it takes a book of that size merely
as an _index_ it would seem that the lawmakers had about done their
worst.”
Over-production of laws is one of the great evils of modern
civilization. Civilized society is apt to be obsessed by a state of
law-mania which is a danger and a menace to the free development of
the individual citizen.
The Roman legal thinkers left us two significant sayings: _Ex
Senatus consultis et plebiscitis, crimina execrentur_,--(Senatorial
decisions and popular decrees give rise to crimes) and: _Ut olim
vitiis, sic nunc legibus laboramus_,--(As we formerly suffered
from vices and crimes so we suffer at present from laws and
legislation)....
In describing the gregariousness of the Damara oxen Francis Galton
writes: “Although the ox has so little affection for, or interest
in, his fellows, he cannot endure even a momentary severance from
his herd. If he be separated from it by stratagem or force, he
exhibits every sign of mental agony; he strives with all his might
to get back again, and when he succeeds, he plunges into the middle
to bathe his whole body with the comfort of closest companionship.
This passionate terror is a convenience to the herdsman.” ... When
an animal accustomed to a gregarious life is isolated from the
herd, it is agitated with extreme terror. The same holds true of
man who is a social animal. Man must go with the herd or with the
pack, and he is terrified to stand alone, away from the crowd,--and
still more terrorized when the crowd disapproves of him. Man is
gregarious, and as such he must go with the mass, with the crowd.
He is in mortal fear of social taboo. As a gregarious animal man
lives in fear of external danger, and is in terror of social
authority.
As Galton writes: “The vast majority of persons of our race have
a natural tendency to shrink from the responsibility of standing
and acting alone: they exalt the _vox populi_, even when they know
it to be the utterance of a mob of nobodies, into the _vox Dei_;
they are willing slaves to tradition, authority and custom. The
intellectual deficiencies corresponding to these moral flaws are
shown by the rareness of free and original thought as compared
with the frequency and readiness with which men accept the opinions
of those in authority as binding on their judgment.” This slavish
obedience is intimately bound up with one of the most fundamental
of all instincts,--the fear instinct.
The individual is so effectively trained by the pressure of taboo
based on self and fear, that he comes to love the yoke that weighs
him down to earth. Chained to his bench like a criminal galley
slave, he comes to love his gyves and manacles. The iron collar put
around his neck becomes a mark of respectability, an ornament of
civilization. Tarde finds that society is based on respect, a sort
of an alloy of fear and love, fear that is loved. A respectable
citizen is he who is fond of his bonds, stocks, and shekels, and
comes to love his bonds, stocks, and shackles of _fears and taboos_.
Human institutions depend for their existence and stability on the
impulse of self-preservation and its close associate,--the fear
instinct.