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 crowds 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.
Ordinary mobs or riots would seem to need very little justification of this sort. But even these directly homicidal crowds invariably represent themselves as motivated by moral idealism and righteous indignation. Negroes are lynched in order to protect the white womanhood of the South, also because, once accused, the negro happens to be helpless. If the colored people were in the ascendancy and the whites helpless we should doubtless see the reverse of this situation. A community rationally convinced of the culprits guilt could well afford to trust the safety of womanhood to the justice meted out by the courts, but it is obvious that these "moral" crowds are less interested in seeing that justice is done than in running no risk of losing their victim, once he is in their power. A recent development of this spirit is the lynching in a Southern town of a juror who voted for the acquittal of a black man accused of a crime.
It may be taken as a general law of crowd-psychology that the "morality" of the crowd always demands a victim. Is it likely that one of these mobs would "call off" an interesting lynching party if at the last minute it were demonstrated that the accused was innocent? The practice of lynching has been extended, from those cases where the offense with which the accused is charged is so revolting as justly to arouse extreme indignation, to offenses which are so trivial that they merely serve as a pretext for torture and killing.
The homicidal tendencies of the crowd-mind always reveal themselves the minute the crowd becomes sufficiently developed and powerful to relax for the time being the usual social controls. Illustrations of this may be seen in the rioting between the white and the colored races—epidemics of killing—such as occurred recently in East St. Louis, and in the cities of Washington, Chicago, and Omaha. The same thing is evident in the "pogroms" of Russia and Poland, in the acts of revolutionary mobs of Germany and Russia, in the promptness with which the Turks took advantage of the situation created by the war to slaughter the Armenians. This hatred is the specter which forever haunts the conflict between labor and capital. It is what speedily transformed the French Revolution from the dawn of an era of "Fraternity" to a day of terror and intimidation. It is seen again in the curious interest which the public always has in a sensational murder trial. It is evident in the hostility, open or suppressed, with which any community regards the strange, the foreign, the "outlandish"—an example of which is the frequent bullying and insulting of immigrants in this country since the war. Much of the "Americanization propaganda" which we have carried on since the war unfortunately gave the typical crowd-man his opportunity. One need only listen to the speeches or read the publications of certain "patriotic" societies to learn why it was that the exhortation to our foreign neighbors to be loyal did so much more harm than good.
The classic example of the killing crowd is, of course, a nation at war. There are, to be sure, wars of national self-defense which are due to political necessity rather than to crowd-thinking, but even in such cases the phenomena of the crowd are likely to appear to the detriment of the cause. At such times not only the army but the whole nation becomes a homicidal crowd. The army, at least while the soldiers are in service, probably shows the crowd-spirit in a less degree than does the civilian population. The mental processes of an entire people are transformed. Every interest—profit-seeking excepted—is subordinated to the one passion to crush the enemy. The moment when war is declared is usually hailed with tremendous popular enthusiasm and joy. There is a general lifting of spirits. There is a sense of release, a nation-wide exultation, a sigh of relief as we feel the deadening hand of social control taken from our throats. The homicidal wish-fancy, which in peace times and in less sovereign crowds exists only as an hypothesis, can now become a reality. And though it is doubtful if more than one person in a million can ever give a rational account of just what issue is really at stake in any war, the conviction is practically unanimous that an occasion has been found which justifies, even demands, the release of all the repressed hostility in our natures. The fact that in war time this crowd hostility may, under certain circumstances, really have survival value and be both beneficial and necessary to the nation, is to my mind not a justification of crowd-making. It is rather a revelation of the need of a more competent leadership in world politics.
Unconsciously every national crowd, I mean the crowd-minded element in the nation, carries a chip on its shoulder, and swaggers and challenges its neighbors like a young town-bully on his way home from grammar school. This swaggering, which is here the "compulsive manifestation" of unconscious hostility characteristic of every crowd, appears to consciousness as "national honor." To the consciousness of the nation-crowd the quarrel for which it has been spoiling for a long time always appears to have been "forced upon it." Some nations are much more quarrelsome than others. I cannot believe that our conviction that Imperial Germany was the aggressor in the great war is due merely to patriotic conceit on our part. The difference between our national spirit and that of Imperial Prussia is obvious, but the difference in this respect, great as it is, is one of degree rather than of kind, and is due largely to the fact that the political organization of Germany permitted the Prussian patriots to hold the national mind in a permanent crowd state to a degree which is even now hardly possible in this republic. My point is that a nation becomes warlike to precisely the extent that its people may be made to think and behave as a crowd. Once a crowd, it is always "in the right" however aggressive and ruthless its behavior; every act or proposal which is calculated to involve the nation-crowd in a controversy, which gains some advantage over neighboring peoples, or intensifies hatred once it is released, is wildly applauded. Any dissent from the opinions of our particular party or group is trampled down. He who fails at such a time to be a crowd-man and our own sort of a crowd-man is a "slacker." Everyones patriotism is put under suspicion, political heresy-hunting is the rule, any personal advantage which can be gained by denouncing as "enemy sympathizers" rival persons or groups within the nation is sure to be snatched up by some one. The crowd-mind, even in times of peace, distorts patriotism so that it is little more than a compulsive expression and justification of repressed hostility. In war the crowd succeeds in giving rein to this hostility by first projecting it upon the enemy.
Freud in his little book, War and Death, regards war as a temporary "regression" in which primitive impulses which are repressed by civilization, but not eradicated, find their escape. He argues that most people live psychologically "beyond their means." Hence war could be regarded, I suppose, as a sort of "spiritual liquidation." But if the hostility which the war crowd permits to escape is simply a repressed impulse to cruelty, we should be obliged to explain a large part of crowd-behavior as "sadistic." This may be the case with crowds of a certain type, lynching mobs, for instance. But as the homicidal tendencies of paranoia are not commonly explained as sadism, I can see no reason why those of the crowd should be. Sadism is a return to an infantile sex perversion, and in its direct overt forms the resulting conflicts are conscious and are between the subject and environment. It is where a tendency unacceptable to consciousness is repressed—and inadequately—that neurotic conflict ensues. This conflict being inner, develops certain mechanisms for the defense of the ego-feeling which is injured. The hatred of the paranoiac is really a defense for his own injured self-feeling. As the crowd always shows an exaggerated ego-feeling similar to the paranoiacs delusion of grandeur, and as in cases of paranoia this inner conflict is always "projected" in the form of delusions of persecution, may we not hold that the characteristic hostility of the crowd is also in some way a device for protecting this inflated self-appreciation from injury? The forms which this hatred takes certainly have all the appearance of being "compulsive" ideas and actions.
We have been discussing crowds in which hostility is present in the form of overt destructive and homicidal acts or other unmistakable expressions of hatred. But are there not also peaceable crowds, crowds devoted to religious and moral propaganda, idealist crowds? Yes, all crowds moralize, all crowds are also idealistic. But the moral enthusiasm of the crowd always demands a victim. The idealist crowd also always makes idols of its ideals and worships them with human sacrifice. The peaceable crowd is only potentially homicidal. The death-wish exists as a fancy only, or is expressed in symbols so as to be more or less unrecognizable to ordinary consciousness. I believe that every crowd is "against some one." Almost any crowd will persecute on occasion—if sufficiently powerful and directly challenged. The crowd tends ever to carry its ideas to their deadly logical conclusion.
I have already referred to the crowds interest in games and athletic events as an innocent symbolization of conflict. How easy it is to change this friendly rivalry into sudden riot—its real meaning—every umpire of baseball and football games knows. As an illustration of my point—namely, that the enthusiasm aroused by athletic contests is the suppressed hostility of the crowd, I give the following. In this letter to a New York newspaper, the writer, a loyal "fan," reveals the same mentality that we find in the sectarian fanatic, or good party man, whose "principles" have been challenged. The challenge seems in all such cases to bring the hostility into consciousness as "righteous indignation."
To the Editor:
Sir,—The article under the caption "Giants Chances for Flag to be Settled in Week," on the sporting page of the Tribune, is doubtless intended to be humorous.
The section referring to the Cincinnati baseball public is somewhat overdrawn, to say the least, and does not leave a very favorable impression on the average Cincinnatian, such as myself. I have been a reader of your paper for some time, but if this sort of thing continues I shall feel very much like discontinuing.
W. L. D.
The extremes to which partisan hatred and jealousy can lead even members of the United States Senate, the intolerance and sectarian spirit which frequently characterize crowds, the "bigotry" of reformist crowds, are matters known to us all. Does anyone doubt that certain members of the Society for the Prevention of Vice, or of the Prohibitionists, would persecute if they had power? Have not pacifist mass meetings been known to break up in a row? The Christian religion is fundamentally a religion of love, but the Church has seldom been wholly free from the crowd-spirit, and the Church crowd will persecute as quickly as any other. In each period of its history when Christian believers have been organized as dominant crowds the Church has resorted to the severest forms of persecution. Popular religion always demands some kind of devil to stand as the permanent object of the believers hostility. Let an editor, or lecturer, or clergyman anywhere attack some one, and he at once gains following and popularity. Evangelists and political orators are always able to "get" their crowd by resorting to abuse of some one. Let any mass meeting become a crowd, and this note of hostility inevitably appears.
Notice the inscriptions which commonly appear on the banners carried in political or labor parades. On the day after the armistice was signed with Germany, when the most joyous and spontaneous crowds I have ever seen filled the streets of New York, I was greatly impressed with those homemade banners. Though it was the occasion of the most significant and hard-won victory in human history, there was hardly a reference to the fact. Though it was the glad moment of peace for which all had longed, I did not see ten banners bearing the word "Peace," even in the hands of the element in the city who were known to be almost unpatriotically pacifist. But within less than an hour I counted on Fifth Avenue more than a hundred banners bearing the inscription, "To Hell with the Kaiser."
That the man chiefly responsible for the horrors of the war should be the object of universal loathing is only to be expected, but the significant fact is that of all the sentiments which swept into peoples minds on that occasion, this and this alone should have been immediately seized upon when the crowd spirit began to appear. I doubt if at the time there was a very clear sense of the enormity of Wilhelms guilt in the minds of those laughing people. The Kaiser was hardly more than a symbol. The antagonist, whoever he be, was "fallen down to hell," our own sense of triumph was magnified by the depth of his fall. Just so the Hebrew Prophet cried "Babylon is fallen," so the early Christians pictured Satan cast into the bottomless pit, so the Jacobins cried "A bas les Aristocrats," our own Revolutionary crowds cried "Down with George III," and the Union soldiers sang, "Hang Jeff Davis on a Sour Apple Tree." I repeat that wherever the crowd-mind appears, it will always be found to be "against" some one.
An interesting fact about the hostility of a crowd is its ability on occasion to survive the loss of its object. It may reveal the phenomenon which psychologists call "displacement." That is to say, another object may be substituted for the original one without greatly changing the quality of the feeling. A mob in the street, driven back from the object of its attack, will loot a store or two before it disperses. Or, bent on lynching a certain negro, it may even substitute an innocent man, if robbed of its intended victim—as, for instance, the lynching of the mayor of Omaha. Such facts would seem to show that these hostile acts are really demanded by mechanisms within the psyche. Many symbolic acts of the person afflicted with compulsion neurosis show this same trait of substitution. If inhibited in the exercise of one mechanism of escape, the repressed wish will substitute another. Also anyone associated by the unconscious reasoning with the hated object, or anyone who tries to defend him or prove him innocent, may suffer from this crowds hatred. Freud has analyzed this phenomenon in his study of taboo. He who touches the tabooed object himself becomes taboo.
I have said that the hostility of the crowd is a sort of "defense mechanism." That this is so in certain cases, I think can be easily demonstrated. The following news item is an example of the manner in which such hostility may serve as a "defense mechanism" compensating the self-feeling for certain losses and serving to enhance the feeling of self-importance:
Charges Baker Had 57 Brands of Army Objector.
——, of Minnesota, Defending Marines Fathers Association Protest; Assails Freeing of "Slackers."
Washington, July 23.—A bitter partisan quarrel developed in the House today when Representative ——, of Minnesota, attacked Secretary Baker and the President for the governments policy toward conscientious objectors. The attack was the result of protests by the Marines Fathers Association of Minneapolis, Minnesota, representing between 500 and 600 young marines now in France, all from the Minneapolis high schools and the University of Minnesota, and many in the famous 6th Regiment of Marines that took a big part in stopping the Germans at Chateau Thierry.
Upon learning of the treatment accorded conscientious objectors in this country while their sons were dying in France, the association asked Representative —— to fix the responsibility for the governments policy. Representative —— fixed it today as that of Secretary Baker and President Wilson, charging that they extended the definition of those to be exempted from military service laid down by Congress in an act of May 17, 1917.
"One variety of conscientious objector was not enough for Mr. Baker," declared Representative ——. "He had 57 kinds...."
Representative ——, of Arizona, defended Secretary Baker, asserting that of 20,000 men who were certified as conscientious objectors, 16,000 ultimately went to war. The case of Sergt. Alvin C. York, the Tennessee hero, who had conscientious objections at first, but soon changed his mind, was cited in defense of the War Departments policy.
Let us pass over the obviously partisan element in this Congressional debate—a crowd phenomenon in itself, by the way—and consider the mental state of this Fathers Association.
In spite of the fact that the treatment of those who refused military service in this country was so much more severe than the manner with which the British government is reported to have dealt with this class of persons, that many people, including the Secretary of War, whose loyalty except to partisan minds was above suspicion, sought in the name of humanity to alleviate some of the conditions in our military prisons, it was not severe enough to satisfy these "fathers." It is doubtful if anything short of an auto da fe would have met their approval. Now no one believes that these simple farmers from the Northwest are such sadists at heart that they enjoy cruelty for its own sake. I imagine that the processes at work here are somewhat as follows:
The telltale phrase here is that these farmers sons "were dying in France." Patriotic motives rightly demanded that fathers yield their sons to the hardship and danger of battle, and while the sacrifice was made consciously, with willingness and even with pride in having done their painful duty, it was not accomplished without struggle—the unconscious resisted it. It could not be reconciled to so great a demand. In other words, these fathers, and probably many of their sons also, were unconsciously "conscientious objectors." Unconsciously they longed to evade this painful duty, but these longings were put aside, "repressed" as shameful and cowardly—that is, as unacceptable to conscious self-feeling. It was necessary to defend the ego against these longings. Compensation was demanded and found in the nation-wide recognition of the value of this patriotic sacrifice. Expressions of patriotic sentiment on the part of others, therefore, compensated the individual and enhanced his self-feeling.
Successful refusal anywhere to recognize the duty which consciously motivated this sacrifice strengthened the unconscious desire to evade it. The unconscious reasoning was something like this: "If those men got out of this thing, why should not we? Since we had to bear this loss, they must also. We have suffered for dutys sake. By making them suffer also, they will be forced to recognize this duty with which we defend ourselves against our sense of loss and desire to escape it." As a witness to the values against which the ego of these fathers has to struggle, the existence of the conscientious objector, in a less degree of suffering than their own, is as intolerable as their own "shameful and cowardly" unconscious longings. Hostility to the conscientious objector is thus a "projection" of their own inner conflict. By becoming a crowd, the members of this "Fathers Association" make it mutually possible to represent their hostility to conscientious objectors as something highly patriotic. Secretary Bakers alleged leniency to these hated persons is now not only an affront to these fathers, it is an affront to the entire nation.
Another and somewhat different example of the function of hatred in the service of the self-feeling is the following item, which throws some light on the motives of the race riots in Washington. This is, of course, a defense of but one of the crowds involved, but it is interesting psychologically.
Negro Editor Blames Whites for Race Riots.
Dr. W. F. B. DuBois, of 70 Fifth Avenue, editor of The Crisis, a magazine published in connection with the work of the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People, yesterday attributed the race riots in Washington to the irritability of all people and the unsettling of many ideas caused by the war, to the influx of a large number of Southerners into Washington, and to the presence in that city of many of the representatives of the educated, well-dressed class of negroes which white racial antagonists dislike.
Washington policemen are notoriously unfriendly to the colored people, he added. Time and time again they stand by and witness a dispute between a white man and a negro, and when it is over and the negro has been beaten they arrest the negro, and not the white man who caused the trouble in the first place.
The colored editor pointed out the similarity between the present riots in Washington and the Atlanta riots which occurred about twelve years ago. In both places, he said, white hoodlums began rioting and killing negroes. When the latter became aroused and began to retaliate, the authorities stepped in and the rioting stopped.
Major J. E. Spingarn, acting treasurer of the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People, said the soldiers and sailors who have been taking part in the rioting in Washington resent the new attitude of self-respect which the negro has assumed because of the part he played in the war.
"The soldiers," he said, "instead of fighting the negroes because the latter think better of themselves for having fought in the war, should respect them for having proved themselves such good fighters." (The italics are mine.)
It is quite possible that in most communities where such race riots occur certain members of the colored race are responsible to the extent that they have made themselves conspicuously offensive to their white neighbors.
But such individual cases, even where they exist, do not justify attacks upon hundreds of innocent people. And it must be said that in general the kind of people whose feelings of personal superiority can find no other social support than the mere fact that they happen to belong to the white race—and I think it will be found that the mobs who attack negroes are uniformly made of people who belong to this element—naturally find their self-feeling injured "if a nigger puts on airs." Their fiction is challenged; to accept the challenge would force upon the consciousness of such people a correct estimate of their own worth. Such an idea is unacceptable to consciousness. The presumptuous negroes who serve as such unpleasant reminders "must be put in their proper place"—that is, so completely under the feet of the white element in the community that the mere fact of being a white man may serve as a defense mechanism for just those members of our noble race who approach more closely to the social position of the colored element in our midst.
As the moral standards of the community will not permit even this element of the white race to play the hoodlum with self-approval, some disguise or "displacement" for this motive must be found whereby the acts to which it prompts may appear to the consciousness of their perpetrators as justifiable. A misdeed is committed by a black man; instantly this element of the white race becomes a crowd. The deed provides the whites with just the pretext they want. They may now justify themselves and one another in an assault on the whole colored community. Here I believe we have the explanation of much that is called "race prejudice." The hatred between the races, like all crowd-hatred, is a "defense mechanism" designed to protect the ego in its conflict with ideas unacceptable to consciousness.
The intensest hatred of the crowd is that directed toward the heretic, 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 crowds. 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 Spargos 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 Spargos 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 anothers 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 crowds 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." Ibsens "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 doctors statement that the water is bad is "unreliable and exaggerated." Then the president of the Householders 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 Shakespeares "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. Cæsars 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 speakers 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.
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. Chestertons 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 Jungs 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 patients 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 crowds 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 years 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.
The crowd-mind is everywhere idealistic, and absolutist. Its truths are "given," made-in-advance. Though unconsciously its systems of logic are created to enhance the self-feeling, they appear to consciousness as highly impersonal and abstract. As in the intellectualist philosophies, forms of thought are regarded as themselves objects of thought. Systems of general ideas are imposed upon the minds of men apparently from without. Universal acceptance is demanded. Thought becomes stereotyped. What ought to be is confused with what is, the ideal becomes more real than fact.
In the essays on "Pragmatism" William James showed that the rationalist system, even that of the great philosopher, is in large measure determined by the thinkers peculiar "temperament." Elsewhere he speaks of the "Sentiment of Rationality." For a discussion of the various types of philosophical rationalism, the reader is referred to the criticisms by William James, F. C. S. Schiller, Dewey, and other Pragmatists. It is sufficient for our purpose to note the fact that the rationalist type of mind everywhere shows a tendency to assert the unreality of the world of everyday experience, and to seek comfort and security in the contemplation of a logically ordered system or world of "pure reason." Ideals, not concrete things, are the true realities. The world with which we are always wrestling is but a distorted manifestation, a jumbled, stereotyped copy of what James ironically referred to as "the de luxe edition which exists in the Absolute." The parable of the cave which Plato gives in the Republic represents ordinary knowledge as a delusion, and the empirically known world as but dancing shadows on the wall of our subterranean prison.
R. W. Livingstone, who sees in Platonism, from the very beginning, a certain world-weariness and turning away of the Greek spirit from the healthy realism which had formerly characterized it, says:
For if Greece showed men how to trust their own nature and lead a simply human life, how to look straight in the face of the world and read the beauty that met them on the surface, certain Greek writers preached a different lesson from this. In opposition to directness they taught us to look past the "unimaginary and actual" qualities of things to secondary meanings and inner symbolism. In opposition to liberty and humanism they taught us to mistrust our nature, to see in it weakness, helplessness, and incurable taint, to pass beyond humanity to communion with God, to live less for this world than for one to come.... Perhaps to some people it may seem surprising that this writer is Plato.
According to this view reality may be found only by means of "pure knowledge," and, to give a familiar quotation from the Phædo:
If we would have pure knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body; the soul in herself must behold things in themselves; and then we shall attain the wisdom which we desire and of which we say that we are lovers; not while we live, but after death; for if, while in company with the body, the soul cannot have pure knowledge, one of two things follows—either knowledge is not to be obtained at all, or if at all after death.
Intellectualism may not always be so clearly other-worldly as Plato shows himself to be in this passage. But it commonly argues that behind the visible world of "illusory sense experience" lies the true ground and cause—an unseen order in which the contradictions of experience are either unknown or harmonized, an external and unchangeable "Substance," a self-contained Absolute to which our ephemeral personalities with their imperfections and problems are unknown. A "thing in itself," or principle of Being which transcends our experience.
This type of thinking, whether it be known as Idealism, Rationalism, Intellectualism, or Absolutism, finds little sympathy from those who approach the study of philosophy from the standpoint of psychology. The following passages taken from Studies in Humanism by Schiller, show that even without the technique of the analytical method, it was not hard to detect some of the motives which prompted the construction of systems of this sort. The partisanism of one of these motives is rather suggestive for our study of the mind of the crowd. Says our author:
Logical defects rarely kill beliefs to which men, for psychological reasons, remain attached.... This may suggest to us that we may have perhaps unwittingly misunderstood Absolutism, and done it a grave injustice.... What if its real appeal was not logical but psychological?...
The history of English Absolutism distinctly bears out these anticipations. It was originally a deliberate importation from Germany, with a purpose. And this purpose was a religious one—that of counteracting the antireligious developments of Science. The indigenous philosophy, the old British empiricism, was useless for this purpose. For though a form of intellectualism, its sensationalism was in no wise hostile to Science. On the contrary, it showed every desire to ally itself with, and to promote, the great scientific movement of the nineteenth century, which penetrated into and almost overwhelmed Oxford between 1859 and 1870.
But this movement excited natural and not unwarranted alarm in that great center of theology. For Science, flushed with its hard-won liberty, ignorant of philosophy, and as yet unconscious of its proper limitations, was decidedly aggressive and overconfident. It seemed naturalistic, nay, materialistic, by the law of its being. The logic of Mill, the philosophy of Evolution, the faith in democracy, in freedom, in progress (on material lines), threatened to carry all before them.
What was to be done? Nothing directly; for on its own ground Science seemed invulnerable, and had the knack of crushing the subtlest dialectics by the knockdown force of sheer scientific fact. But might it not be possible to change the venue, to shift the battleground to a region ubi instabilis terra unda (where the land afforded no firm footing), where the frozen sea could not be navigated, where the very air was thick with mists so that phantoms might well pass for realities—the realm, in short, of metaphysics?...
So it was rarely necessary to do more than recite the august table of a priori categories in order to make the most audacious scientist feel that he had got out of his depth; while at the merest mention of the Hegelian dialectic all the "advanced thinkers" of the time would flee affrighted.
Schillers sense of humor doubtless leads him to exaggerate somewhat the deliberateness of this importation of German metaphysics. That these borrowed transcendental and dialectical systems served their purpose in the warfare of traditional theologies against Science is but half the truth. The other half is that these logical formulas provided certain intelligent believers with a defense, or safe refuge, in their own inner conflicts.
That this is the case, Schiller evidently has little doubt. After discussing Absolutism itself as a sort of religion, and showing that its "catch-words" taken at their face value are not only emotionally barren, but also logically meaningless because "inapplicable to our actual experience," he then proceeds to an examination of the unconscious motives which determine this sort of thinking. His description of these motives, so far as it goes, is an excellent little bit of analytical psychology. He says:
How then can Absolutism possibly be a religion? It must appeal to psychological motives of a different sort, rare enough to account for its total divergence from the ordinary religious feelings and compelling enough to account for the fanaticism with which it is held and the persistence with which the same old round of negations has been reiterated through the ages. Of such psychological motives we shall indicate the more important and reputable.
(1) It is decidedly flattering to ones spiritual pride to feel oneself a "part" or "manifestation" or "vehicle" or "reproduction" of the Absolute Mind, and to some this feeling affords so much strength and comfort and such exquisite delight that they refrain from inquiring what these phrases mean.... It is, moreover, the strength of this feeling which explains the blindness of Absolutists toward the logical defects of their own theory....
(2) There is a strange delight in wide generalization merely as such, which, when pursued without reference to the ends which it subserves, and without regard to its actual functioning, often results in a sort of logical vertigo. This probably has much to do with the peculiar "craving for unity" which is held to be the distinctive affliction of philosophers. At any rate, the thought of an all-embracing One or Whole seems to be regarded as valuable and elevating quite apart from any definite function it performs in knowing, or light it throws on any actual problem.
(3) The thought of an Absolute Unity is cherished as a guarantee of cosmic stability. In face of the restless vicissitudes of phenomena it seems to secure us against falling out of the Universe. It assures us a priori—and that is its supreme value—that the cosmic order cannot fall to pieces and leave us dazed and confounded among the debris.... We want to have an absolute assurance a priori concerning the future, and the thought of the absolute seems designed to give it. It is probably this last notion that, consciously or unconsciously, weighs most in the psychology of the Absolutists creed.
In this connection the reader will recall the passage quoted from Adlers The Neurotic Constitution, in which it was shown that the fictitious "guiding-lines" or rational systems of both the neurotic and normal are motivated by this craving for security. But it makes all the difference in the world whether the system of ideas is used, as in science and common sense, to solve real problems in an objective world, or is created to be an artificial and imaginary defense of the ego against a subjective feeling of insecurity; whether, in a word, the craving for security moves one to do something calculated to render the forces with which he must deal concretely more congenial and hospitable to his will, or makes him content to withdraw and file a demur to the challenge of the environment in the form of theoretical denial of the reality of the situation.
There is no denying the fact that Absolute Idealism, if not taken too seriously, may have the function for some people of steadying their nerves in the battle of life. And though, as I believe, logically untenable, it not infrequently serves as a rationalization of faith-values which work out beneficially, and, quite apart from their metaphysical trappings, may be even indispensable. Yet when carried to its logical conclusions such thinking inevitably distorts the meaning of personal living, robs our world and our acts of their feeling of reality, serves as an instrument for "regression" or withdrawal of interest from the real tasks and objects of living men and women, and in fact functions for much the same purpose, if not precisely in the same way, as do the ideal systems of the psychopath.
In justice to idealism it should be added that this is by no means the only species of Rationalism which may lead to such psychic results. There are various paths by which the craving for artificial security may lead to such attempts to reduce the whole of possible experience to logical unity that the realities of time and change and of individual experience are denied. How many deterministic theories, with all their scientific jargon, are really motivated by an inability to accept a world with an element of chance in it. There is a sense in which all science by subsuming like individuals in a common class, and thus ignoring their individuality, in so far as they are alike in certain respects, gains added power over all of them. There is a sense, too, in which science, by discovering that whenever a given combination of elements occurs, a definitely foreseen result will follow, is justified in ignoring time and treating certain futures as if they were already tucked up the sleeves of the present. It should be remembered that this sort of determinism is purely methodological, and is, like all thinking, done for a purpose—that of effecting desirable ends in a world made up of concrete situations.
When this purpose becomes supplanted by a passion to discount all future change in general—when one imagines that he has a formula which enables him to write the equation of the curve of the universe, science has degenerated into scientificism, or head-in-the-sand philosophy. The magic formula has precisely the same psychic value as the "absolute." I know a number of economic determinists, for instance, who just cannot get out of their heads the notion that social evolution is a process absolutely underwritten, guaranteed, and predictable, without the least possible doubt. In such a philosophy of history as this the individual is of course a mere "product of his environment," and his role as a creator of value is nil. On this "materialistic" theory, the individual is as truly a mere manifestation of impersonal evolutionary forces as he is, according to orthodox Platonism, a mere manifestation of the abstract idea of his species. Notwithstanding the professed impersonalism of this view, its value for consolation in minimizing the causes of the spiritual difference in men—that is, its function for enhancing the self-feeling of some people, is obvious. That such an idea should become a crowd-idea is not to be wondered at. And this leads me to my point. It is no mere accident that the crowd takes to rationalistic philosophies like a duck to water.
The crowd-man, however unsophisticated he may be, is a Platonist at heart. He may never have heard the word epistemology, but his theory of knowledge is essentially the same as Platos. Religious crowds are, to one familiar with the Dialogues, astonishingly Platonic. There is the same habit of giving ontological rather than functional value to general ideas, the same other-worldliness, the same moral dilemmas, the same contempt for the material, for the human body, for selfhood; the same assertion of finality, and the conformist spirit.
Reformist crowds differ only superficially from religious crowds. Patriotic crowds make use of a different terminology, but their mental habits are the same. It has become a cult among crowds with tendencies toward social revolution to paint their faces with the colors of a borrowed nineteenth-century materialism. But all this is mere swagger and "frightfulness," an attempt to make themselves look terrible and frighten the bourgeois. I am sure that no one who has seen all this radical rigmarole, as I have had occasion to see it, can be deceived by it. These dreadful materialist doctrines of the radical crowd are wooden guns, no thicker than the soap-box. As a matter of fact, the radical crowds are extremely idealistic. With all their talk of proletarian opposition to intellectualism, Socialists never become a crowd without becoming as intellectualist as Fichte or Hegel. There is a sense in which Marx himself never succeeded in escaping Hegels dilemmas, he only followed the fashion in those days of turning them upside down.
With radical crowds as with conservative, there is the same substitution of a closed system of ideas for the shifting phenomena of our empirical world; the same worship of abstract forms of thought, the same uncompromising spirit and insistence upon general uniformity of opinions; the same orthodoxy. All orthodoxy is nothing other than the will of the crowd to keep itself together. With all kinds of crowds, also, there is the same diverting of attention from the personal and the concrete to the impersonal and the general; the same flight from reality to the transcendental for escape, for consolation, for defense, for vindication; the same fiction that existence is at bottom a sort of logical proposition, a magic formula or principle of Being to be correctly copied and learned by rote; the same attempt to create the world or find reality by thinking rather than by acting.
The intellectualist bias of the average man is doubtless due in great part to the fact that theology, and therefore the religious education of the young, both Christian and Jewish, has throughout the history of these religions been saturated with Platonism. But then, the universal sway of this philosopher may be explained by the fact that there is something in his abstractionism which is congenial to the creed-making propensities of the crowd-mind. The great a priori thinkers, Plato, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Anselm, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Green, etc., have often been called solitary men, but it is significant that their doctrines survive in popularized form in the creeds and shibboleths of permanent crowds of all descriptions. While humanists, nominalists, empiricists, realists, pragmatists, men like Protagoras, Epicurus, Abelard, Bacon, Locke, Hume, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, James, have always had a hard time of it. They are considered destructive, for the reason that the tendency of their teaching is to disintegrate the crowd-mind and call one back to himself. Their names are seldom mentioned in popular assemblies except to discredit them. Yet it is on the whole these latter thinkers who orient us in our real world, make us courageously face the facts with which we have to deal, stimulate our wills, force us to use our ideas for what they are—instruments for better living,—inspire us to finer and more correct valuations of things, and point out the way to freedom for those who dare walk in it.
All this, however, is the very thing that the crowd-mind is running headlong away from. As a crowd we do not wish to think empirically. Why should we seek piecemeal goods by tedious and dangerous effort, when we have only to do a little trick of attention, and behold The Good, abstract, perfect, universal, waiting just around the corner in the realm of pure reason, ready to swallow up and demolish all evil? Are we not even now in possession of Love, Justice, Beauty, and Truth by the sheer magic of thinking of them in the abstract, calling them "principles" and writing the words with the initial letters in capitals? The very mental processes by which a group of people becomes a crowd change such abstract nouns from mere class names into copies of supermundane realities.
In wholesome thinking principles are of course necessary. They are what I might call "leading ideas." Their function is to lead to more satisfactory thinking—that is, to other ideas which are desired. Or they are useful in leading us to actions the results of which are intended and wished for. They may also be principles of valuation guiding us in the choice of ends. If there were no substantial agreement among us concerning certain principles we could not relate our conduct to one another at all; social life would be impossible. But necessary as such leading ideas are, they are means rather than ends. Circumstances may demand that we alter them or make exceptions to their application.
To the crowd-mind a principle appears as an end in itself. It must be vindicated at all costs. To offend against it in one point is to be guilty of breaking the whole law. Crowds are always uncompromising about their principles. They must apply to all alike. Crowds are no respecters of persons.
As crowd-men we never appear without some set of principles or some cause over our heads. Crowds crawl under their principles like worms under stones. They cover up the wrigglings of the unconscious, and protect it from attack. Every crowd uses its principles as universal demands. In this way it gets unction upon other crowds, puts them in the wrong, makes them give assent to the crowds real purpose by challenging them to deny the righteousness of the professed justifications of that purpose. It is said that the Sioux Indians, some years ago, used to put their women and children in front of their firing line. The braves could then crouch behind these innocent ones and shoot at white men, knowing that it would be a violation of the principles of humanity for the white soldiers to shoot back and risk killing women and children. Crowds frequently make just such use of their principles. About each crowd, like the circle of fire which the gods placed about the sleeping Brunhilde, there is a flaming hedge of logical abstractions, sanctions, taboos, which none but the intellectually courageous few dare cross. In this way the slumbering critical faculties of the crowd-mind are protected against the intrusion of realities from outside the cult. The intellectual curiosity of the members of the group is kept within proper bounds. Hostile persons or groups dare not resist us, for in so doing they make themselves enemies of Truth, of Morality, of Liberty, etc. Both political parties, by a common impulse, "drape themselves in the Flag." It is an interesting fact that the most antagonistic crowds profess much the same set of principles. The "secondary rationalization" of crowds, both Northern and Southern, at the time of the Civil War, made use of our traditional principles of American Liberty, and Christian Morality. We have seen both pacifist and militarist crowds setting forth their manifestoes in terms of New Testament teaching. Each religious sect exists only to teach "the one system of doctrine logically deduced from Scripture."