The behavior of crowds ; a psychological study

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2007 with funding from

IVIicrosoft Corporation

http://www.archive.org/details/behaviorofcrowdsOOmartuoft

^

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

sv^^

The

BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

A Psychological Study

Everett Dean Martin

Lecturer in Social Philosophy and Director of the Cooper
Union Forum of the People's Institute of New York

HARPER &. BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON

HM

nil

The Behavior of CitovrD9

Copyrisht. 1920, by Harper & Brothent
Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAOB

FOBEWOED vii

I. The Crowd and the Social Pboblem of To-dat . . 1

II. How Crowds Are Formed 11

III. The Crowd and the Unconscious 51

IV. The Egoism of the Crowd-Mind 73

V. The Crowd a Creature of Hate 92

VI. The Absolutism of the Crowd-Mind 133

VII. The Psychology of Revolutionary Crowds . . . 166

VIII. The Fruits of Revolution — New Crowd-Tyrannies

FOR Old 219

IX. Freedom and Government by Crowds 233

X. Education as a Possible Cure for Crowd-Thinking 281
Index 305

FOREWORD

Since the publication of Le Bon's book.
The Crowd, little has been added to our
knowledge of the mechanisms of crowd-
behavior. As a practical problem, the habit
of crowd-making is daily becoming a more
serious menace to civilization. Events are
making it more and more clear that, pressing
as are certain economic questions, the forces
which threaten society are really psychological.

Interest in the economic struggle has to a
large extent diverted attention from the sig-
nificance of the problems of social psychology.
Social psychology is still a rather embryonic
science, and this notwithstanding the fact
that psychiatry has recently provided us with
a method with which we may penetrate more
deeply than ever before into the inner sources
of motive and conduct.

The remedy which I have suggested in
Chapter X deserves a much more extended
treatment than I have given it. It involves
one of the great mooted questions of modern
philosophical discussion. It is, however, not
within the province of this book to enter upon

FOREWORD

a discussion of the philosophy of Humanism.
The subject has been thoroughly thrashed over
in philosophical journals and in the writings
of James, Schiller, Dewey, and others. It is
sufficient for my purpose merely to point out
the fact that the humanist way of thinking
may provide us with just that educational
method which will break up the logical forms
in which the crowd-mind intrenches itself.

Those who expect to find a prescribed for-
mula or ideal scheme of organization as a rem-
edy for our social ills may feel that the solution
to which I have come — namely, a new educa-
tional method — is too vague. But the problem
of the crowd is really concerned with the things
of the mind. And if I am correct in my thesis
that there is a necessary connection between
crowd-thinking and the various traditional
systems of intellectualist, absolutist, and ra-
tionalist philosophy, the way out must be
through the formation of some such habits of
thinking as I have suggested.

E. D.M.

New York, October 10, 1919.

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

THE CROWD AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF
TO-DAY

EVERY one at times feels himself in the
grip of social forces over which he has
no control. The apparently impersonal na-
ture of these forces has given rise to various
mechanistic theories of social behavior. There
are those who interpret the events of history
as by-products of economic evolution. Others,
more idealistic but determinists, nevertheless,
see in the record of human events the working
out of a preordained plan.

There is a popular notion, often shared by
scholars, that the individual and society are
essentially irreconcilable principles. The in-
dividual is assumed to be by nature an anti-
social being. Society, on the other hand, is
opposed in principle to all that is personal and
private. The demands of society, its welfare
and aims, are treated as if they were a tax

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

imposed upon each and every one by some-
thing foreign to the natural will or even the
happiness of all. It is as if society as "thing-
in-itself" could prosper in opposition to the
individuals who collectively constitute it.

It is needless to say that both the individual
and the social, according to such a view, are
empty abstractions. The individual is, in
fact, a social entity. Strip him of his social
interests, endowments, and habits, and the
very feeling of self, or "social me" as William
James called it, vanishes and nothing is left
but a Platonic idea and a reflex arc. The
social also is nothing else than the manner
in which individuals habitually react to one
another. Society in the abstract, as a prin-
ciple opposed to individual existence, has no
more reality than that of the grin which Alice
in Wonderland sees after the famous Cheshire
cat has vanished. It is the mere logical con-
cept of others in general, left leering at us
after all the concrete others have been thought
away.

Much social thinking is of this cat-grin sort.
Having abstracted from the thought of self
everything that is social, and from the idea
of the social all that has to do with concrete
persons, the task remains to get pure grin and
pure cat together again in such a way that
neither shall lose its identity in the other. It
is, of course, impossible to reconcile these

THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF TO-DAY

mutually exclusive abstractions either in
theory or in practice. It is often diflScult
enough, even with the aid of empirical think-
ing, to adjust our relations with the other
people about us. But on the Cheshire-cat
hypothesis, the social problem can never be
solved, because it is not a real problem
at all.

Since the individual is therefore a social
being as such, and the social is just a way of
acting together, the social problem does not
grow out of a conflict between the self and
an impersonal social principle. The conflicts
are, in fact, clashes among certain individuals
and groups of them, or else — and this is a
subject to which social psychology has paid
insufficient attention — the social struggle is
in certain of its phases a conflict within the
personal psyche itself. Suppose that the ap-
parently impersonal element in social behavior
is not impersonal in fact, but is, for the most
part, the result of an impersonal manner of
thinking about ourselves. Every psychic fact
must really be an act of somebody. There are
no ideas without thinkers to think them, no
impersonal thoughts or disembodied impulses,
no ''independent" truths, no transcendental
principles existing in themselves and outside
of human heads. Life is everywhere reaction ;
it is nowhere a mere product or a passive
registering of impersonal forces. It is the

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

organism's behavior in the presence of what
we call environment.

Individual opinions cannot be tossed into a
common hat, like small coins. Though we
may each learn from the others, there is no
magic by which our several thoughts can sum
themselves up into a common fund of public
opinion or super-personal whole which thinks
itself, there being no collective head to think
it. No matter how many people think and
behave as I do, each of us knows only his own
thought and behavior. My thought may be
about you and what I judge you are thinking,
but it is not the same as your thought. To
each the social is nil except in so far as he
experiences it himself, and to each it is some-
thing unique when viewed from within. The
uniformity and illusion of identity — in short,
the impersonal aspect of social thinking and
activity appears only when we try to view
social behavior from without — that is, as
objectively manifest in the behavior of others.

What then is the secret of this impersonal
view of the social.^ Why do we think of our-
selves socially in the same impersonal or
external way that we think of others? There
is an interesting parallel here in the behavior
of certain types of mental pathology. There
are neurotics who commonly feel that certain
aspects of their behavior are really not of
their own authorship, but come to them as the

THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF TO-DAY

result of influences acting from without. It
was such phenomena in part that led psy-
chologists of a generation ago to construct the
theory of "multiple personality." It is known
now that the psychic material which in these
cases appears to be automatic, and impersonal,
in the sense that it is not consciously willed,
is really motivated by unconscious mechan-
isms. The apparently ''impersonal" behavior
of the neurotic is psychologically determined,
though unconsciously.

May there not be a like unconscious psychic
determination of much that is called social
behavior.'^ It is my thesis that this is so, and
that there are certain types of social behavior
which are characterized by unconscious moti-
vation to such a degree that they may be placed
in a definite class of psychological phenomena.
This group of phenomena I have, following to
some extent the terminology of Le Bon,
called "The Crowd." I wish there were a
more exact word, for it is very difiicult to use
the word crowd in its psychological sense
without causing some confusion in the mind of
the reader. In ordinary speech "a crowd" is
any gathering of people. ' In the writings of
Le Bon, as we shall see, the word has a special
meaning, denoting not a gathering of people
as such,. but a gathering which behaves in a/
certain way which may be classified and de-
scribed psychologically as "crowd mentality."

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

Not every gathering of people shows this
crowd-mentality. It is a characteristic which
appears under certain circumstances. In this
discussion the word "crowd" must be under-
stood to mean the peculiar mental condition
which sometimes occurs when people think
and act together, either immediately where the
members of the group are present and in close
contact, or remotely, as when they affect one
another in a certain way through the medium
of an organization, a party or sect, the press,
etc.

The crowd while it is a social phenomenon
differs greatly from the social as such. People
may be social — the family is an example of
this — without being a crowd either in thought
or action. Again a crowd — a mob is an ex-
ample of this — may be distinctly antisocial,
if we attach any ethical meaning to the term.
Both the individual and society suffer, as we
shall see, from crowd-behavior. I know of
nothing which to-day so menaces not only
the values of civilization, but also — it is the
same thing in other words, perhaps — the
achievement of personality and true knowl-
edge of seK, as the growing habit of behaving
as crowds.

Our society is becoming a veritable babel of
gibbering crowds. Not only are mob out-
breaks and riots increasing in number, but
every interest, patriotic, religious, ethical.

THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF TO-DAY

political, economic, easily degenerates into i,
confusion of propagandist tongues, into ex-
travagant partisanship, and intemperance.
Whatever be the ideal to which we would
attain, we find the path of self-culture too
slow; we must become army worms, eating our
way to the goal by sheer force of numbers.
The councils of democracy are conducted on
about the psychological level of commercial
advertising and with about the same degree of
sincerity. While it cannot be said that the
habit of crowd-making is peculiar to our
times — other ages, too, have indulged in it — it
does seem that the tendency to crowd-
mindedness has greatly increased in recent
years.

Whether it is temperance, or justice, oi^
greater freedom, moral excellence or national
glory, that we desire — whether we happen to
be conservatives or radicals, reformers or
liberals, we must become a cult, write our
philosophy of life in flaming headlines, and
sell our cause in the market. No matter if
we meanwhile surrender every value for which
we stand, .we must strive to cajole the majority
into imagining itself on our side* For only
with the majority with us, whoever we are,
can we live. It is numbers, not values,
that count — quantity not quality. Every-
body must "moral-crusade," " agitate," "press-
agent," play politics. Everyone is forced to

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

speak as the crowd, think as the crowd, under-
stand as the crowd. The tendency is to
smother all that is unique, rare, delicate, se-
cret. If you are to get anywhere in this pro-
gressive age you must be vulgar, you must add
to yoiu- vulgarity unction. You must take
sides upon dilemmas which are but half true,
change the tempo of your music to ragtime, |
eat your spiritual food with a knife, drape
yourself in the flag of the dominant party. |
In other words, you must be "one hundred !
per cent" crowd man.

The effect of all this upon the individual is
that he is permitted neither to know nor to ^
belong to himself. He becomes a mere banner |
toter. He must hold himself ever in readiness |
to wiggle-waggle in the perpetual Simon-says- I
thumbs-up game which his crowd is playing.
He spends his days playing a part which •
others have written for him; loses much of •
his genuineness and courage, and 4)ampers \
himself with imitation virtues and second- |
hand truths. |

Upon the social peace the effect is equally I
bad. Unnecessary and meaningless strife is i
engendered. An idolatry of phrases is en-
throned. A silly game of bullying and de- ;
ception is carried on among contending crowds, \
national, religious, moral, social. The great ^
truths of patriotism, morality, and religion i
become hardly more than caricatures — mere \

THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF TO-DAY

instruments of crowds for putting their rivals
on the defensive, and securing obeisance from
the members of the crowd itself, easily repudi-
ated in the hour of the crowd's victory. The
social harmony is menaced by numerous
cliques and parties, ranging in size all the way
from the nation-crowd down to the smallest
sect, each setting out like a band of buc-
caneers bent upon nothing but its own dom-
inance, and seeking to justify its piratical
conduct by time-worn platitudes.

That which is meant by the cry of the
Russian Revolution, "All power to the So-
viets," is pecidiar neither to Russia nor to the
working class. Such in spirit is the cry of
every crowd, for every crowd is, psychologi-
cally considered, a soviet. The industrial and
political danger of the soviet would amount to
little or nothing, were it not for the fact that
the modern world is already spiritually sovi-
etized. The threatened soviet republic is
hardly more than the practical result of a
hundred years of crowd-thinking on almost
every subject. Whether capitalist or prole-
tarian, reformer or liberal, we have all along
been behaving and thinking in soviet fashion.
In almost every important matter in life we
have ignored Emerson's warning that we
must rely upon ourselves, and have permitted
ourselves to behave and think as crowds,
fastening their labels and dogmas upon our

2 9

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

spirits and taking their shibboleths upon our
tongues, thinking more of the temporary tri-
umph of our particular sect or party than of
the effect of our behavior upon ourselves and
others.

There is certainly nothing new in the dis-
covery that our social behavior is not what it
ought to be. Mediaeval thinkers were as
much aware of the fact as we are, but they
dismissed the social problem with the simple
declaration of the "sinfulness of human na-
ture." Nineteenth-century utilitarians felt
that the social problem could be solved by
more enlightened and more reasonable be-
havior on the part of individuals. Recent
social psychology — of which the writings of
Prof. William McDougall are probably the
best example, has abandoned the theory that
social behavior is primarily governed by reason
or by considerations of utility. A better ex-
planation of social phenomena is found in in-
stinct. It is held that the true motives of
social behavior are pugnacity, the instinct of
self -appreciation or seK-debasement, of sex,
gregariousness, and the like. Each instinct
with its "affective emotion" becomes organ-
ized through various complex reactions to the
social environment, into fairly well established
"sentiments." These sentiments are held to
be the controlling social forces. As McDougall
says:

10

THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF TO-DAY

We may say then that directly or indirectly the in-
stincts are the prime movers of all human activity; by
the conative or impulsive force of some instinct (or of
some habit derived from an instinct), every train of
thought, however cold and passionless it may seem, is
borne along toward its end, and every bodily activity
is initiated and sustained. The instinctive impulses
determine the ends of all activities and supply the
driving-power by which all mental activities are
sustained; and all the complex intellectual apparatus
of the most highly developed mind is but a means
toward those ends, is but the instrument by which
these impulses seek their satisfactions. . . . These im-
pulses are the mental forces that maintain and shape
all the life of individuals and societies, and in them we
are confronted with the central mystery of life and
mind and will.

This is all very good so far as it goes. But
I confess that I am somewhat at loss to know
just what it explains so fay as crowd-behavior
is concerned Do these instincts and senti-
ments operate the same under all social condi-
tions? Are some of them suppressed by so-
ciety and forced to seek their satisfaction in
roundabout ways? If so, how? Moreover, I
fail to find in present-day social psychology,
any more than in the writings of Herbert
Spencer, Sumner, Ward, and others, any clear
distinction between the characteristic behavior
of crowds and other forms of social activity.
Only the school of Le Bon has shown any
definite appreciation of these facts. It is to

Le Bon, therefore, in spite of the many and

11

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

just criticisms of his work, that we must turn
for a discussion of the crowd as a problem
apart from social psychology in general. Le
Bon saw that the mind of the crowd demanded
special psychological study, but many of the
psychological principles which he used in
solving the problem were inadequate to the
task. Certain of his conclusions were, there-
fore, erroneous. Since the close of the nine-
teenth century, however, psychology has
gained much insight into the secret springs
of human activity. Possibly the most sig-
nificant achievement in the history of this sci-
ence is Freud's work in analytical psychology.

So much light has been thrown upon the un-
conscious by Freud and other analytical psy-
chologists, that psychology in all its branches
is beginning to take some of Freud's discover-
ies into account. Strictly speaking, psycho-
analysis is a therapeutic method. It has,
however, greatly enriched our knowledge of
mental pathology, and thus much of its data
has become indispensable to general psychology
and to social psychology in particular.

In his book the Interpretation of Dreams,
Freud has shown that there exist in the wish-
fulfilling mechanisms of dream formation
certain definite laws. These laws undoubtedly
underlie and determine also many of our
crowd-ideas, creeds, conventions, and social
ideals. In his book. Totem and Taboo, Freud

12

THE SOCIAL PROBLEM OF TO-DAY

has himself led the way to the application of
the analytical psychology to the customs and
ideas of primitive groups. I am sure that we
shall find, as we proceed, that with the ana-
lytical method we shall gain an entirely new
insight into the causes and meaning of the
behavior of crowds.

n

HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED

IN his well-known work on the psychology
of the crowd Le Bon noted the fact that
the unconscious plays a large part in determin-
ing the behavior of crowds. But he is not
clear in his use of the term "unconscious."
In fact, as Graham Wallas justly points out,
his terminology is very loose indeed. Le Bon
seems to have made little or no attempt to
discover in detail the processes of this uncon-
scious. In company with most psychologists
of his time, he based his explanation upon the
theory of "suggestion and imitation." He
saw in the unconscious merely a sort of
mystical "common humanity," from which he
derived his — also mystical — idea of a common
crowd-mind which each individual in the
crowd in some unexplained manner shared.
He says:

The most striking peculiarity presented by a psycbo-
logical crowd is the following: Whoever be the individ-
uals that compose it, however like or unlike be their
mode of life, their occupations, their character or their

14

HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED

intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed
into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of col-
lective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in
a manner quite different from that in which each in-
dividual of them would feel, think, and act were he in
a state of isolation. . . .

It is easy to prove how much the individual forming
part of a crowd differs from the isolated individual, but
it is less easy to discover the causes of this difference.

To obtain, at any rate, a glimpse of them it is neces-
sary in the first place to call to mind the truth estab-
lished by modern psychology, that unconscious phe-
nomena play an altogether preponderating part, not
only in organic life, but also in the operations of intel-
ligence. . . . Our conscious acts are the outcome of an
unconscious substratum created in the mind in the
main by heredity. This substratum consists of in-
numerable characteristics handed down from generation
to generation which constitute the genius of the race. . . .

It is more especially with respect to those uncon-
scious elements which constitute the genius of a race
that all the individuals belonging to it resemble each
other It is precisely these general qualities of charac-
ter, governed by forces of which we are unconscious and
possessed by the majority of normal individuals of a
race in much the same degree — it is precisely these
qualities, I say, that in crowds become common prop-
erty. In the collective mind the intellectual aptitudes
of the individuals, and in consequence their individ-
uality, are weakened. The heterogeneous is swamped in
the homogeneous and the unconscious qualities obtain
the upper hand.

It may safely be said, I think, that this
assumed impersonal collective mind of the
crowd has no existence in a sound psychology.

35

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

People's minds show, of course, innumerable
mutual influences, but they do not fuse and
run together. They are in many respects
very similar, but similarity is not identity,
even when people are crowded together. Our
author has doubtless borrowed here rather un-
critically from Herbert Spencer's organic con-
ception of society — ^his later statement, not
quoted here, that the alleged merging of the
heterogeneous in the homogeneous would
logically imply a regression to a lower stage in
evolution, is another bit of Spencerian jargon
commonly accepted in Le Bon's day.

When, however, Graham Wallas, in The
Great Society, states that Le Bon is not "him-
self clear whether he means that crowds have
no collective consciousness, or that every in-
dividual in a crowd is completely uncon-
scious," it seems to me that \Yallas is a little
unfair. Neither Le Bon nor the relation of
the unconscious to the crowd-mind may be
dismissed in Wallas's apparently easy manner.
Le Bon has established two points which I
think cannot be successfully denied: first,
that the crowd is essentially a psychological
phenomenon, people behaving differently in
a crowd from the way they behave when
isolated; and second, that the unconscious
has something to do with crowd-thinking and
acting.

Wallas says of Le Bon:

16

HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED

Tarde and Le Bon were Frenchmen brought up on
vivid descriptions of the Revolution and themselves
apprehensive of the spread of socialism. Political
movements which were in large part carried out by
men conscious and thoughtful, though necessarily ill
informed, seemed therefore to them as they watched
them from the outside to be due to the blind and un-
conscious impulses of masses "incapable both of re-
flection and of reasoning."

There is some truth in this criticism. In
spite of the attempt of the famous author of
crowd-psychology to give us a really scien-
tific explanation of crowd-phenomena, his
obviously conservative bias robs his work of
much of its power to convince. We find here,
just as in the case of Gobineau, Nietzsche,
Faguet, Conway, and other supporters of the
aristocratic idea, an a priori principle of dis-
trust of the common people as such. In
many passages Le Bon does not sufficiently
distinguish between the crowd and the masses.
Class and mass are opposed to each other as
though, due to their superior reasoning pow-
ers, the classes were somehow free from the
danger of behaving as crowd. This is of
course not true. Any class may behave and
think as a crowd — in fact it usually does so
in so far as its class interests are concerned.
Anyone who makes a study of the public
mind in America to-day will find that the
phenomena of the crowd-mind are not at all

17

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

confined to movements within the working
class or so-called common people.

It has long been the habit of conservative
writers to identify the crowd with the pro-
letariat and then to feel that the psychology
of the situation could be summed up in the
statement that the crowd was simply the
creature of passion and blind emotion. The
psychology which lies back of such a view —
if it is psychology rather than class prejudice
— ^is the old intellectualism which sought to
isolate the intellect from the emotional nature
and make the true mental life primarily a
knowledge affair. The crowd, therefore, since
it was regarded as an affair of the emotions,
was held to be one among many instances of
the natural mental inferiority of the common
people, and a proof of their general unfitness
for self-government.

I do not believe that this emotional theory is
the true explanation of crowd-behavior. It
cannot be denied that people in a crowd be-
come strangely excited. But it is not only
in crowds that people show emotion. Feel-
ing, instinct, impulse, are the dynamic of all
mental life. The crowd doubtless inhibits
as many emotions as it releases. Fear is
conspicuously absent in battle, pity in a
lynching mob. Crowds are notoriously anaes-
thetic toward the finer values of art, music,
and poetry. It may even be argued that the

18

HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED

feelings of the crowd are dulled, since it is
only the exaggerated, the obvious, the cheaply
sentimental, which easily moves it.

There was a time when insanity v/as also
regarded as excessive emotion. The insane
man was one who raved, he was mad. The
word "crazy" still suggests the condition of
being "out of one's mind" — that is, driven by
irrational emotion. Psychiatry would accept
no such explanation to-day. Types of in-
sanity are distinguished, not with respect to
the mere amount of emotional excitement they
display, but in accordance with the patient's
whole psychic functioning. The analyst looks
for some mechanism of controlling ideas and
their relation to impulses which are operating
in the unconscious. So with our understand-
ing of the crowd-mind. Le Bon is correct in
maintaining that the crowd is not a mere
aggregation of people. It is a state of mind.
A peculiar psychic change must happen to a
group of people before they become a crowd.
Ajid as this change is not merely a release of
emotion, neither is it the creation of a col-
lective mind by means of imitation and sug-
gestion. My thesis is that the crowd-mind is
a phenomenon which should best be classed with
dreams, delusions, and the various forms of
automatic behavior. The controlling ideas of
the crowd are the result neither of reflection
nor of "suggestion," but are akin to what, as

19

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

we shall see later, the psychoanalysts term
" complexes." The crowd-self — if I may speak
of it in this way — is analogous in many re-
spects to ''compulsion neurosis," "somnam-
bulism," or "paranoiac episode." Crowd ideas
are "fixations"; they are always symbolic;
they are always related to something re-
pressed in the unconscious. They are what
Doctor Adler would call "fictitious guiding
lines."

There is a sense in which all our thinking
consists of symbol and fiction. The laws,
measurements, and formulas of science are all
as it were "shorthand devices "—instruments
for relating ourselves to reality, rather than
copies of the real. The "truth" of these
working ideas is demonstrated in the satis-
factoriness of the results to which they lead
us. If by means of them we arrive at desired
and desirable adaptations to and within our
environment, we say they are verified. If,
however, no such verification is reached, or
the result reached flatly contradicts our
hypothesis, the sane thinker holds his conclu-
sions in abeyance, revises his theories, or
candidly gives them up and clings to the real
as empirically known.

Suppose now that a certain hypothesis, or
"fiction," instead of being an instrument for
dealing with external reality, is unconsciously
designed as a refuge from the real. Suppose

20

HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED

it is a symbolic compromise among conflicting
desires in the individual's unconscious of
which he cannot rid himself. Suppose it is a
disguised expression of motives which the
individual as a civilized being cannot admit
to his own consciousness. Suppose it is a
fiction necessary to keep up one's ego con-
sciousness or self-appreciative feeling without
which either he or his world would instantly
become valueless. In these latter cases the
fiction is not and cannot be, without outside
help, modified by the reality of experience.
The complex of ideas becomes a closed system,
a world in and of itself. Conflicting facts of
experience are discounted and denied by all
the cunning of an insatiable, unconscious will.
The fiction then gets itself substituted for
the true facts of experience; the individual
has "lost the function of the real." He no
longer admits its disturbing elements as cor-
rectives. He has become mentally unadjusted
— ^pathological.

Most healthy people doubtless would on
analysis reveal themselves as nourishing fic-
tions of this sort, more or less innocent in their
effects. It is possible that it is by means of
such things that the values of living are main-
tained for us all. But with the healthy these
fictions either hover about the periphery of
our known world as shadowy and elusive in-
habitants of the inaccessible, or else they are

21

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

socially acceptable as religious convention,
race pride, ethical values, personal ambition,
class honor, etc. The fact that so much of
the ground of our valuations, at least so far as
these affect our self -appreciation, is explicable
by psychologists as "pathological" in origin
need not startle us. William James in his
Varieties of Religious Experience^ you will re-
member, took the ground that in judging of
matters of this kind, it is not so much by
their origins — even admitting the pathological
as a cause — ^but by their fruits that we shall
know them. There are " fictions " which are
neither innocent nor socially acceptable in
their effects on life and character. Many of
our crowd-phenomena belong, like paranoia,
to this last class.

As I shall try to show later, the common
confusion of the crowd with "society" is an
error. The crowd is a social phenomenon only
in the sense that it affects a number of per-
sons at the same time. As I have indicated,
people may be highly social without becoming
a crowd. They may meet, mingle, associate
in all sorts of ways, and organize and co-
operate for the sake of common ends — in
fact, the greater part of our social life might
normally have nothing in common with crowd-
behavior. Crowd -behavior is pseudo -social
— if social organizations be regarded as a
means to the achievement of realizable goods.

22 , -

HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED

The phenomena which we call the crowd-
mind, instead of being the outgrowth of the
directly social, are social only in the sense
that all mental life has social significance;
they are rather the result of forces hidden in
the personal and unconscious psyche of the
members of the crowd, forces which are
merely released by social gatherings of a
certain sort.

Let us notice what happens in a public
meeting as it develops into a crowd, and see if
we can trace some of the steps of the process.
Picture a large meeting-hall, fairly well filled
with people. Notice first of all what sort of
interest it is which as a rule will most easily
bring an assemblage of people together. It
need not necessarily be a matter of great im-
portance, but it must be something which
catches and challenges attention without great
effort. It is most commonly, therefore, an
issue of some sort. I have seen efforts made
in New York to hold mass meetings to discuss
affairs of the very greatest importance, and I
have noted the fact that such efforts usually
fail to get out more than a handful of specially
interested persons, no matter how well adver-
tised, if the subject to be considered happens
not to be of a controversial nature. I call
especial attention to this fact because later
we shall see that it is this element of conflict,
directly or indirectly, which plays an over-

23

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

whelming part in the psychology of every
crowd.

It is the element of contest which makes
baseball so popular. A debate will draw a
larger crowd than a lecture. One of the
secrets of the large attendance of the forum is
the fact that discussion — "talking back" — is
permitted and encouraged. The evangelist
Sunday undoubtedly owes the great attend-
ance at his meetings in no small degree to the
fact that he is regularly expected to abuse some
one.

If the matter to be considered is one about
which there is keen partisan feeling and popu-
lar resentment — if it lends itself to the spec-
tacular personal achievement of one whose
name is known, especially in the face of oppo-
sition or difficulties — or if the occasion per-
mits of resolutions of protest, of the airing of
wrongs, of denouncing abuse of some kind, or
of casting statements of external principles in
the teeth of "enemies of humanity," then,
however trivial the occasion, we may count
on it that our assembly will be well attended.
Now let us watch the proceedings.

The next thing in importance is the speaker.
Preferably he should be an "old war horse,"
a victor in many battles, and this for a psy-
chological reason which we shall soon examine.
Whoever he is, every speaker with any skill
knows just when this state of mind which we

24

HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED

call "crowd" begins to appear. My work has
privided me with rather unusual opportunities
for observing this sort of thing. As a regular
lecturer and also as director of the forum which
meets three nights a week in the great hall of
Cooper Union, I have found that the intel-
lectual interest, however intense, and the
development of the crowd-spirit are accom-
panied by wholly difiFerent mental processes.
Let me add in passing that the audiences which
gather at Cooper Union are, on the whole, the
most alert, sophisticated, and reflective that
I have ever known. I doubt if in any large
popular assembly in America general discus-
sion is carried on with such habitual serious-
ness. When on rare occasions the spirit of
the crowd begins to manifest itself — and one
can always detect its beginnings before the
audience is consciously aware of it — I have
noticed that discussion instantly ceases and
people begin merely to repeat their creeds and
hurl cant phrases at one another. All then
is changed, though subtly. There may be
laughter as at first; but it is different. Be-
fore, it was humorous and playful, now there
is a note of hostility in it. It is laughter at
some one or something. Even the applause
is changed. It is more frequent. It is more
vigorous, and instead of showing mere ap-
proval of some sentiment, it becomes a means
of showing the numerical strength of a group

3 i5

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

of believers of some sort. It is as if those
who applaud were unconsciously seeking to
reveal to themselves and others that there is
a multitude on their side.

I have heard the most exciting and contro-
versial subjects discussed, and seen the dis-
cussion listened to with the intensest difference
of opinion, and all without the least crowd-
phenomena — so long as the speaker refrained
irom indulging in generalities or time-worn
forms of expression. So long as the matter
discussed requires close and sustained effort
of attention, and the method of treatment is
kept free from anything which savors of ritual,
even the favorite dogmas of popular belief
may be discussed, and though the interest be
intense, it will remain critical and the audience
does not become a crowd. But let the most
trivial bit of bathos be expressed in rhythmical
cadences and in platitudinous terms, and the
most intelligent audience will react as a crowd.
Crowd-making oratory is almost invariably
platitudinous. In fact, we think as a crowd
only in platitudes, propaganda, ritual, dogma,
and symbol. Crowd-ideas are ready-made,
they possess finality and universality. They
are fixed. They do not develop. They are
ends in themselves. Like the obsessions of
the insane, there is a deadly inevitability in
the logic of them. They are ''compulsions."

During the time of my connection with the

26

HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED

Cooper Union Forum, we have not had a
crowd-demonstration in anything more than
an incipient form. The best laboratory for
the study of such a phenomenon is the political
party convention, the mass meeting, or the
religious revival. The orators who commonly
hold forth at such gatherings know intuitively
the functional value of bathos, ridicule, and
platitude, and it is upon such knowledge that
they base the success of their careers in
"getting the crowd." The noisy ** demon-
strations" which it has of late become the
custom to stage as part of the rigmarole of a
national party convention have been cited
as crowning examples of the stupidity and
excess of crowd enthusiasm. But this is a
mistake. Anyone who has from the gallery
witnessed one or more of these mock "stam-
pedes" will agree that they are exhibitions of
endurance rather than of genuine enthusiasm
or of true crowd-mindedness. They are so ob-
viously manipulated and so deliberately timed
that they can hardly be regarded as true
crowd-movements at all. They are chiefly in-
teresting as revelations of the general insin-
cerity of the political life of this republic.

True crowd-behavior requires an element of
spontaneity — at least on the part of the crowd.
And we have abundant examples of this in
public meetings of all sorts. As the audience
becomes crowd, the speaker's cadence be-

27

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

comes more marked, his voice more oracular,
his gestures more emphatic. His message
becomes a recital of great abstract "prin-
ciples." The purely obvious is held up as
transcendental. Interest is kept upon just
those aspects of things which can be grasped
with least effort by all. Emphasis is laid
upon those thought processes in which there
is greatest natural uniformity. The general,
abstract, and superficial come to be exalted
at the expense of that which is unique and
personal. Forms of thought are made to
stand as objects of thinking.

It is clear that such meaning as there is in
those abstract names, "Justice," "Right,"
"Liberty," "Peace," "Glory," "Destiny,"
etc., or in such general phrases as "Broth-
erly Love," "Grand and Glorious," "Public
Weal," "Common Humanity," and many
others, must vary with each one's personal
associations. Popular orators deal only with
the greatest common denominator of the
meaning of these terms — that is, only those
elements which are common to the associa-
tions of all. Now the common associations
of words and phrases of this general nature
are very few — ^hardly more than the bare
sound of the words, plus a vague mental atti-
tude or feeling of expectancy, a mere turning
of the eyes of the mind, as it were, in a certaii^
direction into empty space. When, for in^

28

HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED

stance, I try now to leave out of the content
of "justice" all my personal associations and
concrete experiences, I can discover no re-
maining content beyond a sort of grand empti-
ness, with the intonations of the word booming
in my auditory centers like the ringing of a
distant bell. As "public property," the words
are only a sort of worn banknote, symbols of
many meanings and intentions like my own,
deposited in individual minds. Interesting
as these personal deposits are, and much as
we are mutually interested by them and moved
to harmonious acting and speaking, it is
doubtful if more than the tiniest fragment of
what we each mean by "justice" can ever be
communicated. The word is a convenient
instrument in adjusting our conduct to that
of others, and when such adjustment seems to
meet with mutual satisfaction we say, "That
is just." But the just thing is always a con-
crete situation. And the general term "jus-
tice" is simply a combination of sounds used
to indicate the class of things we call just.
In itself it is but a form with the content left
out. And so with all other such abstractions.
Now if attention can be directed to this
imaginary and vague "meaning for every-
body"— which is really the meaning for no-
body— and so directed that the associations
with the unique in personal experience are
blocked, these abstractions will occupy the

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

whole field of consciousness. The mind will
yield to any connection which is made among
them almost automatically. As conscious
attention is cut away from the psyche as a
whole, the objects upon which it is centered
will appear to have a reality of their own.
They become a closed system, perfectly
logical it may be in itself, but with the fatal
logic commonly found in paranoia — the fiction
may become more real than life itself. It may
be substituted, while the spell is on, for the
world of actual experience. And just as the
manifest content of a dream is, according to
Freud, the condensed and distorted symbol of
latent dream-thoughts and desires in the un-
conscious, so, in the case we are discussing,
the unconscious invests these abstract terms
w^ith its own peculiar meanings. They gain
a tremendous, though undefined, importance
and an irresistible compelling power.

Something like the process I have described
occurs when the crowd appears. People are
translated to a different world — that is, a
different sense of the real. The speaker is
transfigured to their vision. His words take
on a mysterious importance; something tre-
mendous, eternal, superhuman is at stake.
Commonplace jokes become irresistibly amus-
ing. Ordinary truths are wildly applauded.
Dilemmas stand clear with all middle ground
brushed away. No statement now needs

30

HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED

qualification. All thought of compromise is
abhorrent. Nothing now must intervene to
rob these moments of their splendid intensity.
As James once said of drunkenness, "Every-
thing is just utterly utter." They who are
not for us are against us.

The crowd-mind consists, therefore, first of
all, of a disturbance of the function of the real.
The crowd is the creature of Belief, Every
crowd has its peculiar "illusions," ideals,
dreams. It maintains its existence as a
crowd just so long as these crowd-ideas con-
tinue to be held by practically all the members
of the group — so long, in fact, as such ideas
continue to hold attention and assent to the
exclusion of ideas and facts which contradict
them.

I am aware of the fact that we could easily
be led aside at this point into endless meta-
physical problems. It is not our purpose to
enter upon a discussion of the question, what
is the real world? The problem of the real is
by no means so simple as it appears "to
common sense." Common sense has, how-
ever, in practical aflPairs, its own criteria, and
beyond these it it not necessary for us now to
stray. The "illusions" of the crowd are
almost never illusions in the psychological
sense. They are not false perceptions of the
objects of sense. They are rather akin to the
delusions and fixed ideas commonly found in

31

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

paranoia. The man in the street does not
ordinarily require the technique either of
metaphysics or of psychiatry in order to
characterize certain individuals as "crazy."
The "crazy" man is simply unadjustable in
his speech and conduct. His ideas may be
real to him, just as the color-blind man's
sensations of color may be as real as those of
normal people, but they won't work, and that
is sufficient.

It is not so easy to apply this criterion of
the real to our crowd-ideas. Social realities
are not so well ordered as the behavior of the
forces of nature. Things moral, religious, and
political are constantly in the making. The
creative role which we all play here is greater
than elsewhere in our making of reality.
When most of our neighbors are motivated
by certain ideas, those ideas become part of
the social environment to which we must
adjust ourselves. In this sense they are
"real," however "crazy." Every struggle-
group and faction in society is constantly
striving to establish its ideas as controlling
forces in the social reality. The conflicts
among ideals are therefore in a sense conflicts
within the real. Ideas and beliefs which seek
their verification in the character of the results
to which they lead, may point to very great
changes in experience, and so long as the be-
liever takes into account the various elements

32

HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED

with which he has to deal, he has not lost his
hold upon reality. But when one's beliefs
or principles become ends in themselves,
when by themselves they seem to constitute
an order of being which is more interesting
than fact, when the believer saves his faith
only by denying or ignoring the things which
contradict him, when he strives not to verify
his ideas but to "vindicate" them, the ideas
so held are pathological. The obsessions of
the paranoiac are of this sort. We shall see
later that these ideas have a meaning, though
the conscious attention of the patient is
systematically diverted from that meaning.
Crowd-ideas are similar. The reason why
their pathology is not more evident is the
fact that they are simultaneously entertained
by so great a number of people.

There are many ideas in which our faith is
sustained chiefly by the knowledge that every-
one about us also believes them. Belief on
such ground has commonly been said to be
due to imitation or suggestion. These do
play a large part in determining all our think-
ing, but I can see no reason why they should
be more operative in causing the crowd-mind
than in other social situations. In fact, the
distinctive phenomena which I have called
crowd-ideas clearly show that other causes
are at work.

Among civilized people, social relationships

$3

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

make severe demands upon the individual.
Primitive impulses, unchecked eroticism, ten-
dencies to perversions, and antisocial de-
mands of the ego which are in us all, are con-
stantly inhibited, resisted, controlled and
diverted to socially acceptable ends. The
savage in us is "repressed," his demands are
so habitually denied that we learn to keep him
down, for the most part, without conscious
eflFort. We simply cease to pay attention to
his gnawing desires. We become decently
respectable members of society largely at the
expense of our aboriginal nature. But the
primitive in us does not really die. It asserts
itself harmlessly in dreams. Psychoanalysis
has revealed the fact that every dream is the
realization of some desire, usually hidden
from our conscious thought by our habitual
repression. For this reason the dream work
consists of symbols. The great achievement
of Freud is the technique which enables the
analyst to interpret this symbolism so that
his own unconscious thought and desire are
made known to the subject. The dream is
harmless and is normally utilized by the un-
conscious ego because during sleep we can-
not move. K one actually did the things he
dreamed, a thing which happens in various
somnambulisms, the dream would become
anything but harmless. Every psychosis is
really a dramatized dream of this sort.

34

HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED

Now as it is the social which demands the
repression of our primitive impulses, it is to
be expected that the unconscious would on
certain occasions make use of this same social
in order to realize its primitive desires.
There are certain mental abnormalities, such
as dementia prsecox, in which the individual
behaves in a wholly antisocial manner, simply
withdrawing into himself. In the crowd the
'primitive ego achieves its wish by actually
gaining the assent and support of a section of
society. The immediate social environment is
all pulled in the same direction as the uncon-
scious desire. A similar unconscious impulse
motivates each member of the crowd. It is
as if all at once an unspoken agreement were
entered into whereby each member might let
himself go, on condition that he approved the
same thing in all the rest. Of course such a
thing cannot happen consciously. Our nor-
mal social consciousness would cause us each
to resist, let us say, an exhibition of cruelty —
in our neighbors, and also in ourselves. The
impulse must therefore be disguised.

The term ''unconscious" in the psychology
of the crowd does not, of course, imply that the
people in the crowd are not aware of the fact
that they are lynching a negro or demanding
the humiliation or extermination of certain
of their fellows. Everybody is perfectly aware
of what is being said and done; only the nwral

35

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

significance of the thing is changed. The
deed or sentiment, instead of being disap-
proved, appears to be demanded, by moral
principle, by the social welfare, by the glory
of the state, etc. What is unconscious is the
fact that the social is actually being twisted
around into giving approval of the things
which it normally forbids. Every crowd con-
siders that it is vindicating some sacred prin-
ciple. The more bloody and destructive the
acts to which it is impelled, the more moral are
its professions. Under the spell of the crowd's
logic certain abstract principles lead inevitably
to the characteristic forms of crowd-behavior.
They seem to glorify such acts, to make heroes
and martyrs of those who lead in their
performance.

The attention of everyone is first centered
on the abstract and universal, as I have indi-
cated. The repressed wish then unconsciously
gives to the formulas which the crowd pro-
fesses a meaning different from that which
appears, yet unconsciously associated with it.
This unconscious meaning is of course an
impulse to act. But the motive professed is
not the real motive.

Normally our acts and ideas are corrected

by our social environment. But in a crowd

our test of the real fails us, because, since the

attention of all near us is directed in the same

way as our own, the social environment for the

m

HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED

time fails to check us. As William James said :

The sense that anything we think is unreal can only
come when that thing is contradicted by some other
thing of which we think. Any object which remains
uncontradicted is ipso facto beHeved and posited as
"absolute reality."

Our immediate social environment is all
slipping along with us. It no longer con-
tradicts the thing we want to believe, and, un-
consciously, want to do. As the uncontra-
dicted idea is, for the time, reality, so is it
a motor impulse. The only normal reason
why we do not act immediately upon any one
of our ideas is that action is inhibited by ideas
of a contradictory nature. As crowd, there-
fore, we find ourselves moving in a fictitious
system of ideas uncritically accepted as real —
not as in dreams realizing our hidden wishes,
merely in imagination, but also impelled to
act them out in much the way that the psycho-
neurotic is impelled to act out the fixed ideas
which are really the symbols of his suppressed
wish. In other words, a crowd is a device for
indulging ourselves in a kind of temporary
insanity by all going crazy together.

Of the several kinds of crowds, I have se-
lected for our discussion the mass meeting,
because we are primarily interested in the
ideas which dominate the crowd. The same
essential psychological elements are also found
in the street crowd or mob. Serious mob out-

37

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

breaks seldom occur without mass meetings,
oratory, and propaganda. Sometimes, as in
the case of the French Revolution and of the
rise of the Soviets in Russia, the mass meetings
are held in streets and public places. Some-
times, as, for instance, the crowds in Berlin
when Germany precipitated the World War,
a long period of deliberate cultivation of such
crowd-ideas as happen to be advantageous to
the state precedes. There are instances, such
as the Frank case, which brought unenviable
fame to Georgia, when no mass meeting seems
to have been held. It is possible that in this
instance, however, certain newspapers, and
also the trial — which, as I remember, was held
in a theater and gave an ambitious prose-
cuting attorney opportunity to play the role
of mob leader — served the purpose of the
mass meeting.

The series of outbreaks in New York and
other cities, shortly after the War, between
the socialists and certain returned soldiers,
seem to have first occurred quite imexpectedly,
as do the customary negro lynchings in the
South. In each case I think it will be found
that the complex of crowd-ideas had been pre-
viously built up in the unconscious. A deep-
seated antagonism had been unconsciously
associated with the self -appreciative feel-
ings of a number of individuals, all of which
found justification in the consciousness of

38.

HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED

these persons in the form of devotion to prin-
ciple, loyalty, moral enthusiasm, etc. I sus-
pect that under many of our professed prin-
ciples there lurk elements of unconscious
sadism and masochism. All that is then re-
quired is an occasion, some casual incident
which will so direct the attention of a number
of these persons that they provide one another
temporarily with a congenial social environ-
ment. In the South this mob complex is
doubtless formed out of race pride, a certain
unconscious eroticism, and will to power,
which unfortunately has too abundant oppor-
tunity to justify itself as moral indignation.
With the returned soldiers the unconscious
desires were often rather thinly disguised —
primitive impulses to violence which had been
aroused and hardly satisfied by the war, a
wish to exhibit themselves which found its
opportunity in the knowledge that their law-
lessness would be applauded in certain influ-
ential quarters, a dislike of the nonconformist,
the foreign, and the unknown, which took the
outward form of a not wholly unjustifiable
resentment toward the party which had to all
appearances unpatriotically opposed our en-
trance into the war.

Given a psychic situation of this nature,
the steps by which it leads to mob violence
are much alike in all cases. All together they
simply amount to a process of like direction of

39

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

the attention of a suflScient number of persons
so affected as to produce a temporary social
environment in which the unconscious im-
pulses may be released with mutual approval.
The presence of the disliked object or person
gains general attention. At first there is
only curiosity; then amusement; there is a
bantering of crude witticisms; then ridicule.
Soon the joking turns to insults. There are
angry exclamations. A blow is struck. There
is a sudden rush. The blow, being the act
which the members of the crowd each uncon-
sciously wished to do, gains general approval,
*'it is a blow for righteousness"; a "cause"
appears. Casually associated persons at once
become a group, brought together, of course,
by their interest in vindicating the principles
at stake. The mob finds itself suddenly doing
things which its members did not know they
had ever dreamed of.

Different as this process apparently is from
that by which a meeting is turned into a crowd
by an orator, I think it will be seen that the
two are essentially alike.

Thus far we have been considering crowd-
movements which are local and temporary —
casual gatherings, which, having no abiding
reason for continued association, soon dis-
solve into their individual elements. Fre-
quently, after participating in such a move-
ment, the individual, on returning to his

40

HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED

habitual relations, "comes to." He wonders
what the affair was all about. In the ligtit
of his re-established control ideas — ^he will call
it ** reason" — the unconscious impulses are
again repressed; he may look with shame and
loathing upon yesterday's orgy. Acts which
he would ordinarily disapprove in his neigh-
bors, he now disapproves in himself. If the
behavior of the crowd has not been particu-
larly atrocious and inexcusable to ordinary
consciousness, the reaction is less strong. The
voter after the political campaign merely
"loses interest." The convert in the revival
"backslides." The striker returns to work
and is soon absorbed by the daily routine of
his task. The fiery patriot, after the war, is
surprised to find that his hatred of the enemy
is gradually waning. Electors who have been
swept by a wave of enthusiasm for "reform"
and have voted for a piece of ill-considered re-
strictive legislation easily lapse into indif-
ference, and soon look with unconcern or
amusement upon open violations of their own
enactments. There is a common saying that
the public has a short memory. Pick up an
old newspaper and read about the great move-
ments and causes which were only a short
time ago stirring the public mind, many of
them are now dead issues. But they were
not answered by argument; we simply "got
over" them.

4 41

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

Not all crowd-movements, however, are
local and temporary. There are passing mo-
ments of crowd-experience which are often
too sweet to lose. The lapse into everyday-
realism is like "falling from grace." The
crowd state of mind strives often to keep
itself in countenance by perpetuating the
peculiar social-psychic conditions in which it
can operate. There are certain forms of the
ego consciousness which are best served by the
fictions of the crowd. An analogy here is
found in paranoia, where the individual's mor-
bid fixed ideas are really devices for the pro-
tection of his self-esteem. The repressed in-
fantile psyche which exists in us all, and in
certain neurotics turns back and attaches
itself to the image of the parent, finds also in
the crowd a path for expression. It provides
a perpetual interest in keeping the crowd-
state alive. Notice how invariably former
students form alumni associations, and re-
turned soldiers at once effect permanent or-
ganizations; persons who have been con-
verted in one of Mr. Sunday's religious cam-
paigns do the same thing — indeed there are
associations of all sorts growing out of these
exciting moments in people's common past
experience, the purpose of which is mutually
to recall the old days and aid one another in
keeping alive the enlarged self-feeling.

In addition to this, society is filled with

42

HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED

what might be called "struggle groups"
organized for the survival and dominance of
similarly constituted or situated people. Each
group has its peculiar interests, economic,
spiritual, raciaj, etc., and each such interest
is a mixture of conscious and unconscious pur-
poses. These groups become sects, cults, par-
tisan movements, class struggles. They de-
velop propaganda, ritual, orthodoxies, dogma,
all of which are hardly anything more than
stereotyped systems of crowd-ideas. These
systems differ from those of the neurosis in
that the former are less idiosyncratic, but
they undoubtedly perform much the same
function. The primary aim of every such
crowd is to keep itself together as a crowd.
Hardly less important is the desire of its
members to dominate over all outsiders. The
professed purpose is to serve some cause or
principle of universal import. Thus the crowd
idealizes itself as an end, makes sanctities of
its own survival values, and holds up its ideals
to all men, demanding that every knee shall
bow and every tongue confess — which is to
say, that the crowd believes in its own future
supremacy, the members of the group knowing
that such a belief has survival value. This
principle is used by every politician in pre-
dicting that his party is bound to win at the
next election.

Hence the crowd is a device by which the

43

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

individual's "right" may be baptized "right-
eousness" in general, and this personality by
putting on impersonality may rise again to
new levels of self -appreciation. He "belongs
to something," something "glorious" and
deathless. He himself may be but a miser-
able clod, but the glory of his crowd reflects
upon him. Its expected triumph he already
shares. It gives him back his lost sense of
security. As a good crowd man, true be-
liever, loyal citizen, devoted member, he has
regained something of his early innocence.
In other members he has new brothers and
sisters. In the finality of his crowd-faith
there is escape from responsibility and further
search. He is willing to be commanded. He
is a child again. He has transferred his re-
pressed infantilism from the lost family circle
to the crowd. There is a very real sense in
which the crowd stands to his emotional life
in loco parentis.

It is to be expected, therefore, that wherever
possible the crowd-state of mind will be per-
petuated. Everj' sort of device will be used
to keep the members of the crowd from
coming to. In almost every organization
and social relationship there will be a tendency
on part of the unconscious to behave as crowd.
Thus permanent crowds exist on every hand —
especially wherever political, moral, or re-
ligious ideas are concerned. The general

44

HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED

and abstract character of these ideas makes
them easily accessible instruments for justify-
ing and screening the unconscious purpose.
Moreover it is in just those aspects of our social
life where repression is greatest that crowd-
thinking is most common, for it is by means
of such thinking and behavior that the uncon-
scious seeks evasions and finds its necessary
compensations.

The modern man has in the printing press
a wonderfully effective means for perpetuating
crowd-movements and keeping great masses
of people constantly under the sway of certain
crowd-ideas. Every crowd-group has its mag-
azines, press agents, and special "literature"
with which it continually harangues its mem-
bers and possible converts. Many books,
and especially certain works of fiction of the
"best-seller" type, are clearly reading-mob
phenomena.

But the leader in crowd-thinking par excel-
lence is the daily newspaper. With few excep-
tions our journals emit hardly anything but
crowd-ideas. These great "molders of public
opinion," reveal every characteristic of the
vulgar mob orator. The character of the
writing commonly has the standards and
prejudices of the "man in the street." And
lest this man's ego consciousness be offended
by the sight of anything "highbrow" — that
is, anything indicating that there may be a

45

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

superior intelligence ' or finer appreciation
than his own — newspaper-democracy demands
that everything more exalted than the level
of the lowest cranial altitude be left out. The
average result is a deluge of sensational
scandal, class prejudice, and special pleading
clumsily disguised with a saccharine smear of
the cheapest moral platitude/^ Consequently,
the thinking of most of us is carried on chiefly
in the form of crowd-ideas. A sort of public-
meeting self is developed in the consciousness
of the individual which dominates the per-
sonality of all but the reflective few. We
editorialize and press-agent ourselves in our
inmost musings. Public opinion is manufac-
tured just as brick are made. Possibly a
slightly better knowledge of mechanical en-
gineering is required for making public opin-
ion, but the process is the same. Both can
be stamped out in the quantity required, and
delivered anywhere to order. Our thinking
on most important subjects to-day is as little
original as the mental processes of the men
who write and the machines which print the
pages we read and repeat as our own opinions.
Thomas Carlyle was never more sound than
when railing at this "paper age." And paper,
he wisely asked us to remember, "is made of
old rags." Older writers who saw the ragged
throngs in the streets were led to identify the
mob or crowd with the tattered, illiterate

46

HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED

populace. Our mob to-day is no longer
merely tramping the streets. We have it at
the breakfast table, in the subway, alike in
shop and boudoir, and ofHee — wherever, in
fact, the newspaper goes. And the raggedness
is not exterior, nor is the mob confined to the
class of the ill-clad and the poor. The ragged-
ness, and tawdriness have now become spirit-
ual, a universal presence entering into the
fabric of nearly all our mental processes.

We have now reached a point from which we
can look back over the ground we have
traversed and note the points of diflFerence be-
tween our view and the well-known theory of
Le Bon. The argument of the latter is as fol-
lows: (1) From the standpoint of psychol-
ogy, the crowd, as the term is here defined,
is not merely a group of people, it is the ap-
pearance within such a group of a special
mental condition, or crowd-mind. (2) The
sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the
gathering take one and the same direction.
(3) Conscious personality vanishes. (4) A
collective mind is formed: This is Le Bon's
"Law of the mental unity of crowds." (5)
This collective mind consists in the main of
"general qualities of character" which are
our common racial inheritance. It is an
"unconscious substratimi" which in the
crowd becomes uppermost, dominating over
the unique personal consciousness. (6) Three

47

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

causes determine the characteristics of the
crowd-mind, (a) From purely numerical con-
siderations, the individual acquires a senti-
ment of invincible power which encourages
him in an unrestrained yielding to his in-
stincts, (b) Contagion, or imitation, and (c)
hypnotic suggestion cause the individuals in
the crowd to become "slaves of all the uncon-
scious activities of the spinal cord." (7) The
resulting characteristics of the crowd are (a) a
descent of several rungs in the ladder of
civilization, (b) a general intellectual inferi-
ority as compared with the isolated individual,
(c) loss of moral responsibility, (d) impulsive-
ness, (e) credulity, (f) exaggeration, (g) in-
tolerance, (h) blind obedience to the leader of
the crowd, (i) a mystical emotionalism. (8)
The crowd is finally and somewhat incon-
sistently treated by Le Bon as being identical
with the masses, the common people, the herd.
Without pausing to review the criticisms of
this argimient which were made at the begin-
ning of our discussion, our own view may be
summarized as follows: (1) The crowd is not
the same as the masses, or any class or gather-
ing of people as such, but is a certain mental
condition which may occur simultaneously to
people in any gathering or association. (2)
This condition is not a "collective mind."
It is a release of repressed impulses which is
made possible because certain controlling

48

HOW CROWDS ARE FORMED

ideas have ceased to function in the immediate
social environment. (3) This modification in
the immediate social environment is the result
of mutual concessions on the part of persons
whose unconscious impulses to do a certain
forbidden thing are similarly disguised as
sentiments which meet with conscious moral
approval. (4) Such a general disguising of
the real motive is a characteristic phenomenon
of dreams and of mental pathology, and occurs
in the crowd by fixing the attention of all
present upon the abstract and general. At-
tention is thus held diverted from the in-
dividual's personal associations, permitting
these associations and their accompanying
impulses to function unconsciously. (5) The
abstract ideas so entertained become symbols
of meanings which are unrecognized; they
form a closed system, like the obsessions of the
paranoiac, and as the whole group are thus
moved in the same direction, the "compul-
sory" logic of these ideas moves forward with-
out those social checks which normally keep
us within bounds of the real. Hence, acting
and thinking in the crowd become stereo-
typed and "ceremonial." Individuals move
together like automatons. (6) As the uncon-
scious chiefly consists of that part of our
nature which is habitually repressed by the
social, and as there is always, therefore, an
unconscious resistance to this repressive force,

40

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

it follows that the crowd state, like the neu-
rosis, is a mechanism of escape and of com-
pensation. It also follows that the crowd-
spirit will occur most commonly in reference
to just those social forms where repression is
greatest — in matters political, religious, and
moral. (7) The crowd-mind is then not a
mere excess of emotion on the part of people
who have abandoned "reason"; crowd-
behavior is in a sense psychopathic and has
many elements in common with somnambu-
lism, the compulsion neurosis, and even para-
noia. (8) Crowds may be either temporary or
permanent in their existence. Permanent
crowds, with the aid of the press, determine
in greater or less degree the mental habits
of nearly everyone. The individual moves
through his social world like a popular fresh-
man on a college campus, who is to be "spiked"
by one or another fraternity competing for his
membership. A host of crowds standing for
every conceivable "cause" and "ideal" hover
constantly about him, ceaselessly screaming
their propaganda into his ears, bullying and
cajoling him, pushing and crowding and de-
nouncing one another, and forcing all willy-
nilly to line up and take sides with them upon
issues and dilemmas which represent the real
convictions of nobody.

ni

THE CROWD AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

THROUGHOUT the discussion thus far I
have been making repeated reference to
the psychology of the unconscious, without
going into detail any more than was neces-
sary. Let us now take a closer look at some
of Freud's discoveries. In this way, what
Brill would call the "psychogenesis" of certain
characteristic ideas and practices of crowds
will be, I think, made clear. Up to this point
we have dealt generally with those mental
processes by which the crowd is formed.
There are certain traits, tendencies, ways of
thinking which crowds so uniformly display
that one is justified, in want of other explana-
tion, in assuming them to be unconsciously de-
termined. The remarkable blindness of or-
ganized crowds to the most obvious of their
own performances is so common as to be the
regularly expected thing — that is, of crowds
other than our own. Long and extensive
operations may be carried on for years by
crowds whose members repeatedly declare

51

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

that such things are not being done. The way
in which a nation will carefully prepare for
war, gradually organizing its whole life on a
military basis with tremendous cost and effort,
all the while declaring that it is interested
only in peace, denying its warlike intentions,
and even in the moment of picking a quarrel
with its neighbors declare to all the world that
it had been wantonly and unexpectedly at-
tacked, is all a matter of general comment.
The American colonists, during the decade
before the signing of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, of course had no conscious thought
of separating from Great Britain. Almost to
the very last they professed their loyalty to
the King; but looking back now it is clear
that Independence was the motive all along,
and doubtless could not have been achieved
more opportunely or with greater finesse if it
had been deliberately planned from the start.
The Hebrew Scriptures contain a story which
illustrates this aspect of crowd-behavior every-
where. The Children of Israel in bondage in
Egypt merely wished to go out in the wilder-
ness for a day or so to worship their God. All
they asked was religious liberty. How unjust
of the authorities to assume they were plan-
ning to run away from their masters! You
will remember that at the last moment they
incidentally borrow some jewelry from their
Egyptian neighbors. Of course they will pay

52

THE CROWD AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

it back after their little religious holiday,
but . . . later a most unforeseen thing happens
to that jewelry, a scandalous thing — it is
made into an idol. Does it require that one
be a psychologist to infer that it was the un-
conscious intention all along to use this metal
for just that, the first good chance they had —
and that, too, notwithstanding repeated pro-
hibitions of idolatry? The motive for bor-
rowing the jewelry is evident.

Certain crowd-movements in America to-
day give marked evidence of this unconscious
motivation. Notice how both the radical and
reactionary elements behave when, as is fre-
quently the case with both, the crowd-spirit
comes over them. Certain radicals, who are
fascinated with the idea of the Russian Revo-
lution, are still proclaiming sentiments of
human brotherhood, peace, and freedom, while
unconsciously they are doing just what their
enemies accuse them of — ^playing with the
welcome ideas of violence, class war, and
proletarian dictatorship. And conservative
crowds, while ostensibly defending American
traditions and ideals against destructive for-
eign influence, are with their own hands daily
desecrating many of the finest things which
America has given to the world in its struggle
of more than a century for freedom and jus-
tice. Members of each crowd, while blissfully
unaware of the incompatibility of their own

53

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

motives and professions, have no illusions
about those of the counter-crowd. Each
crowd sees in the professions of its antagonist
convincing proof of the insincerity and hypoc-
risy of the other side. To the student of so-
cial philosophy both are right and both
wrong. All propaganda is lies, and every
crowd is a deceiver, but its first and worst de-
ception is that of itself. This self-deception
is a necessary step in crowd-formation and is
a sine qua non of becoming a crowd. It is
only necessary for members of a crowd to
deceive themselves and one another for the
crowd-mind to function perfectly; I doubt if
they are often successful in deceiving anybody
else. It was this common crowd-phenomenon
of self-deception which led Gobineau and
Nietzsche to the conclusion that the common
people are liars. But as has been said, the
crowd is by no means peculiar to the working
class ; some of its worst features are exhibited
these days among employers, law-makers, and
the well-to-do classes. This deception is
moreover not really conscious and deliberate.
If men deliberately set about to invent lies to
justify their behavior I have little doubt that
most of them would be clever enough to con-
jure up something a little more plausible.
These naive and threadbare ** hypocrisies" of
crowds are a commonplace mechanism of the
unconscious. It is interesting to note that

51

%

THE CROWD AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

the delusions of the paranoiac likewise de-
ceive no one but himself, yet within them-
selves form a perfectly logical a priori system.
They also serve the well-understood purpose,
like that of crowd-ideas, of keeping their pos-
sessor in a certain fixed relation toward por-
tions of his own psychic material. As Brill
says, they are ''compromise formations."

Those who have read Freud's little book.
Delusion and Dream, an analysis of a psycho-
logical romance written by Wilhelm Jensen,
will recall how extensive a fabric of plausi-
bilities a delusion may build up in its defense
in order at the same time to satisfy a repressed
wish, and keep the true meaning of the sub-
ject's acts and thoughts from conscious atten-
tion. In the story which Freud has here
taken as his subject for study, a young
student of archaeology has apparently con-
quered all adolescent erotic interest and has
devoted himself whole-heartedly to his sci-
ence. While at the ruins of ancient Pompeii,
he finds a bas-relief containing the figure of a
young woman represented in the act of walk-
ing with peculiar grace. A cast of this figure
he brings home. His interest is curiously
aroused. At first this interest appears to be
scientific only, then aesthetic, and historical.
Finally he builds up about it a complete ro-
mance. He becomes restless and very much
of a misogynist, and is driven, he knows not

55

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

why, again to the ruins. Here he actually
meets the object of his dreams in the solitude
of the excavated city. He allows himself to
believe that the once living model of his
treasured bas-relief has again come to life.
For days he meets and talks with the girl,
living all the while in a world of complete
unreality, until she finally succeeds in re-
vealing herself as the young woman who lives
next door to him. It also appears that in
their childhood he and this girl had been
playmates, and that in spite of all his conscious
indifference to her his unconscious interest
was the source of his interest in the bas-relief
and the motive which led him to return to
Pompeii, where he unconsciously expected to
find her. The interesting thing about all this
for our present study is the series of devices,
fictions, and compromises with reality which
this repressed interest made use of while hav-
ing its way with him, and at the same time
resisting whatever might force it upon his
conscious attention, where a recognition of
its significance might result in a deliberate
rejection.

We shall not go into Freud's ingenious
analysis of the mental processes at work here.
The following passage is suflScient for our
purpose:

There is a kind of forgetting which distinguishes it-
self by the difficulty with which memory is awakened,

56

THE CROWD AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

even by strong appeals, as if a subjective resistance
struggled against the revival. Such forgetting has re-
ceived the name of "repression" in psychopathology . . .
about repression we can assert that certainly it does
not coincide with the destruction, the obliteration of
memory. The repressed material can not of itself break
through as memory, but remains potent and effective.

From this, and from what was said in our
previous chapter, it is plain that the term
"unconscious" as used in psychology does not
mean total absence of psychic activity. It
refers to thoughts and feelings which have
"purposefully been forgotten — to experiences
or impulses to which we do not pay attention
nor wish to attend to, but which influence
us nevertheless. Everyone of us, when he
dreams, has immediate knowledge of the un-
conscious as here defined. Certainly we pass
into unconsciousness when we sleep. Yet
something is unquestionably going on inside
our heads. One wakens and says, "What
strange, or exciting, or delightful dreams I
have had!" Bergson says that sleep is due to
the relaxing of attention to our environment.
Yet in dreams attention is never turned away
from ourselves. Possibly instead of the word
"unconscious" the term "unattended" might
be used with less danger of confusion.

Consciousness is, therefore, not the whole of
our psychic activity. Much of our behavior
is reflex and automatic. James used to be

5 57

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

fond of showing how much even of our higher
psychic activity was reflex in its nature. We
may be conscious of various portions of our
psychic material, but never of all of it at once.
Attention is like a spotlight thrown on a semi-
darkened stage, moving here and there, re-
vealing the figures upon which it is directed in
vivid contrast with the darkly moving ob-
jects which animate the regions outside its
circle. A speaker during his discourse will
straighten his tie, make various gestures, and
toy with any object which happens to be lying
on the desk, all without being aware of his
movements, until his attention is called to
the fact. Absent-minded persons habitually
amuse us by frequently performing complete
and rather complex series of actions while
wholly oblivious to what they are doing.
Everyone can recall nimierous instances of
absent-mindedness in his own experience.

Now all pathological types of mental life
have in common this quality of absent-minded-
ness, and it is held that the thing said or done
absent-mindedly has in every instance, even
when normal, a meaning which is unconscious.
But the unconscious or unattended is by no
means confined to the infrequent and the
trivial. As temperament, or character, its
activity is a determining factor in all our
thought and conduct. Dream fancies do not
really cease when we awake; the dream

68

THE CROWD AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

activity goes on all about our conscious
thoughts, our associations now hovering near
long-forgotten memories, now pulled in the
direction of some unrecognized bit of personal
conceit, now skipping on tiptoe over some-
thing forbidden and wicked and passing across
without looking in; only a part of our mental
processes ever directly finding expression in
our conscious acts and words. The unchosen
and the illogical run along with the desired and
the logical material, only we have learned not
to pay attention to such things. Under all
our logical structures there flows a ceaseless
stream of dream stuff. Our conscious thought
is like little planks of attention laid end to end
on the stones which here and there rise above
the surface of our thinking. The mind skips
across to a desired conclusion, not infre-
quently getting its feet wet, and, on occasion,
upsetting a plank or slipping off and falling in
altogether.

We have only to relax our attention a little
to enter the world of day dreams, of art, and
religion ; we can never hold it so rigid as to be
wholly rational for long.

Those interested in the general psychology
of the unconscious are referred to the writings
of such authorities in this field as Freud, Jung,
Adler, Dr. A. A. Brill, and Dr. William White.
In fact, the literature dealing with psycho-
analysis is now so widely read that, unless the

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

reader has received his information about this
branch of science from hostile sources alone,
it is to be assumed that he has a fairly accurate
acquaintance with its general history and
theory. We must confine our discussions to
those aspects of unconscious behavior which
can be shown by analogy with the psycho-
neurosis to be determinants of crowd-thinking.
As the details and technical discussions of
psychoanalytical material belong strictly to
the psychiatric clinic, any attempt at criticism
by the medical layman of the scientific proc-
esses by which they are established is
of course impossible. Consequently, I have
sought to make use of only those principles
which are now so well established as to become
rather generally accepted commonplaces of
psychopathology.

All analysis reveals the fact that the uncon-
scious of the individual is concerned primarily
with himself. This is true in the psychosis,
and always in dreams. Freud says:

Every dream is absolutely egotistical; in every
dream the beloved ego appears, even though it be in a
disguised form. The wishes that are realized in
dreams are regularly the wishes of this ego; it is only
a deceptive appearance if interest in another person is
thought to have caused the dream.

Freud then proceeds to give analyses of
several dreams in which the naive egoism of

THE CROWD AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

childhood which lies at the core of the un-
conscious psyche is apparently absent, and
shows that in each and every case it is there.
The hero of our dreams, notwithstanding all
appearances to the contrary, is always ourself .
Brill, in his book, Psychoanalysis^ says of the
neurosis :

Both hysteria and compulsion neurosis belong to the
defense neuropsychoses; their symptoms originate
through the psychic mechanism of defense, that is,
through the attempt to repress a painful idea which
was incompatible with the ego of the patient. There
is still another more forceful and more successful form
of defense wherein the ego misplaces the incompatible
idea with its emotions and acts as though the painful
idea had never come to pass. When this occurs the
person merges into a psychosis which may be called
"hallucinatory confusion."

Thus the psychoneurosis is in all its forms,
I believe, regarded as a drama of the ego and
its inner conflicts. The egoism of the uncon-
scious belongs alike to the normal and the
unadjusted. The mental abnormalities ap-
pear when the ego seeks to escape some such
conflict by means of a closed system of ideas
or symbolic acts which will divert attention
from the unwelcome psychic material. Adler,
in The Neurotic Constitution, is even, if possi-
ble, more emphatic in aflSrming the egoism of
the unconscious as revealed in neurotics. His
thesis is that the mainspring of all the efforts

61

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

of achievement and the source of all the vicis-
situdes of the psyche is a desire to be im-
portant, or will to "be above," not wholly
unlike Nietzsche's theory of the "will to
power." The neurosis goes back to some or-
ganic defect or other cause of childish humilia-
tion. As a result, the cause of such hu-
miliation, a defective bodily organ, or whatever
it may be, gains special attention. The
whole psyche is modified in the process of
adjustment. In cases where the psyche re-
mains normal, adjustment is achieved through
stimulation to extra effort to overcome the
disadvantage, as in the triumph of Demos-
thenes, Byron, Pope.

On the contrary, this disadvantage may
result in a fixed feeling of inferiority. Such
a feeling may be brought about in the sensi-
tive child by a variety of circumstances,
physical facts such as smallness of stature,
adenoids, derangements of the alimentary
organs, undersized genitals, homeliness of
feature, or any physical deformity or weak-
ness; again by such circumstances as domi-
neering parents or older brothers and sisters.
The child then thinks always of himself.
He forms the habit of comparing himself
with others. He creates, as a protection
against the recognition of this feeling of in-
feriority, what Adler calls the "masculine
protest."

THE CROWD AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

The feeling which the individual has of his own in-
feriority, incompetency, the realization of his smallness,
of his weakness, of his uncertainty, thus becomes the
appropriate working basis which, because of the intrin-
sically associated feelings of pleasure and pain, furnishes
the inner impulse to advance toward an imaginary

In all similar attempts (and the human psyche is
full of them), it is the question of the introduction of
an unreal and abstract scheme into actual life. . . .
No matter from what angle we observe the psychic
development of a normal or neurotic person, he is al-
ways found ensnared in the meshes of his particular
fiction — a fiction from which the neurotic is unable to
find his way back to reality and in which he believes,
while the sound and normal person utilizes it for the
purpose of reaching a definite goal . . . the thing which
impels us all, and especially the neurotic and the child,
to abandon the direct path of induction and deduction
and use such devices as the schematic fiction, originates
in the feeling of uncertainty, and is the craving for
security, the final purpose of which is to escape from
the feeling of inferiority in order to ascend to the full
height of the ego consciousness, to complete manliness,
to attain the ideal of being "above." . . .

Even our judgments concerning the value of things
are determined according to the standard of the imag-
inary goal, not according to "real" feelings or pleasur-
able sensations.

That repressed sexuality plays an important
part in the conflicts of the ego is well known
to all who are acquainted with analytical
psychology. According to Freud, the sexual
impulse dates from earliest childhood and is an
essential element in every stage of self-appre-

63

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

ciation. A summary of the process by which
the infantile ego develops to maturity is as
follows: The child is by nature "polymor-
phous perverse" — that is, both physically and
psychically he possesses elements which in the
mature individual would be considered per-
versions. Physiologically, what are known as
"erogenous zones" — tissue which is capable of
what in mature life is sexual excitation — are
diflFused through the organism. As the child
passes through the "latent period" of later
childhood and adolescence, these "erogenous
zones" are concentrated as it were in the
organs which are to serve the purpose of repro-
duction. If for any reason this process of
concentration is checked, and remains in later
life incomplete, the mature individual will be
afflicted with certain tendencies to sex
perversion.

Similarly the psychosexual passes through a
metamorphosis in normal development. The
erotic interest of the child, at first quite with-
out any object at all, is soon attached to one
or the other of the parents, then, in the "nar-
cissus period" is centered upon the individual
himself, after which, normally, but not with-
out some storm and stress, it becomes detached
and capable of "object love" — that is, love of
a person of the opposite sex. This psychic
process is by no means a smooth and easy
matter. It is attended at every stage with

64

THE CROWD AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

such dangers that a very large number of
people never achieve it entire. Various kinds
of ''shock" and wrong educational influence,
or overindulgence on the part of the parents,
may cause the psychosexual interest of the
ego — or "libido" — to remain "fixed" at some
point in its course. It may retain vestiges of
its early undiflFerentiated stage, appearing
then in the perverted forms of "masochism"
— sexual enjoyment of self-torture — or "sad-
ism"— sexual pleasure in torturing others.
Or the libido may remain fixed upon the
parent, rendering the individual in some
degree incapable of a normal mature love life.
He has never quite succeeded in severing his
infantile attachment to his mother and trans-
ferring his interest to the world of social rela-
tions and mature experiences. If he meets
with a piece of misfortune, he is likely to seek
imaginary security and compensation by a
''regression" of the libido and a revival of
childlike aflFection for the mother image. As
this return is, in maturity, unconsciously re-
sisted by the horror of incest, a conflict results.
The individual then develops certain mechan-
isms or "complex formations" in defense of his
ego against this painful situation. The with-
drawal of the libido from the ordinary affairs
of life renders the latter valueless. Thoughts
of death and like compulsory mechanisms en-
sue. The patient has become a neurotic.

65

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

Psychoanalysts make much of this latter
situation. They term it the "(Edipus com-
plex." They assert that in its severer forms
it is a common feature of psychoneurosis,
while in less marked form, according to Jimg,
it underlies, and is the real explanation of the
"birth of tragedy," being also the meaning
of much religious symbolism, including the
Divine Drama of Christian tradition. It is
not, therefore, only the psychoneurotic whose
unconscious takes the form of the "(Edipus
complex." Under certain conditions it is
manifest in normal people. I have already
indicated that the crowd is one of those con-
ditions, and shall have something a little
more specific to say about this later on.

Again the growing libido may become fiixed
in the "narcissus stage." Between the period
of love of parents and object love, the adoles-
cent youth passes through a period when he
is " in love with himself." The fact that many
people remain in some measure fixed in this
period of their development is not surprising
when we remember that self-feeling occupies a
central place in the imconscious at all times.
Many of the world's greatest men have doubt-
less been characters in which there was a
slightly more than average fixation at this
point. Inordinate ambition is, I should say,
an evidence of such a fixation. If one pos-
sesses great natural ability he may under

THE CROWD AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

such circumstances be able to forge ahead to
his goal, overcoming the conflicts which such a
fixation always raises, and show no greater
evidence of pathology in his career than is
seen in the usual saying that "genius is always
a little queer." The typical crowd-leader
would, on analysis, I think, show something
of this "narcissus complex," as would doubt-
less the great run of fanatics, bigots, and
doctrinaires, "hundred per cent" crowd-men
all.

According to Brill, these "auto erotic" per-
sons are always homosexual, their homosexu-
ality manifesting itself in various ways. The
overt manifestations of this tendency are
known as perversions. Certain persons who
have suppressed or sublimated these tenden-
cies, by means of certain defense mechanisms,
or "fictions," as Adler would call them,
get along very well so long as the defense
mechanism functions. There are cases when
this unconsciously constructed defense breaks
down. An inner conflict is then precipitated,
a marked form of which is the common type
of insanity, "paranoia." Persons suffering
with paranoia are characterized by an insati-
able demand for love along with a psychic
incapacity to give love. They have an exag-
gerated sense of their own importance which
is sustained by a wholly unreal but deadly
logical system of a priori ideas, which consti-

67

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

tute the "obsessions" common to this type of
mentality. The inner conflict becomes ex-
ternal— that is, it is '^projected." The para-
noiac projects his own inner hostility and
lack of adjustment upon others — that is, he
attributes his own feeling of hostility to some
one else, as if he were the object, not the
author, of his hatred. He imagines that he is
persecuted, as the following example will
show. The passage here quoted is taken from
a pamphlet which was several years ago given
to me by the author. He ostensibly wished
to enlist my efforts in a campaign he believed
himself to be conducting to *' expose" the
atrocious treatment of persons, like himself,
who were imprisoned in asylums as the
innocent victims of domestic conspiracy. By
way of introducing himself the author makes
it known that he has several times been
confined in various hospitals, each time by
the design and instigation of his wife, and
after stating that on the occasion described
he was very "nervous and physically ex-
hausted" and incidentally confessing that
he was arrested while attempting homicide
"purely in self-defense/' he gives this account
of his incarceration :

I was locked in a cold cell, and being in poor health,
my circulation was poor, and the officer ordered me to
go to bed and I obeyed his orders, but I began to get
cold, and believing then, as I still believe, that the coffee

68

THE CROWD AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

I got out of the coffee tank for my midnight lunch had
been "doped," and fearful that the blood in my veins
which began to coagulate would stop circulating alto-
gether, I got out of bed and walked the floor to and fro
all the remainder of the night and by so doing I saved
my life. For had I remained in bed two hours I would
have been a dead man before sunrise next morning. I
realized my condition and had the presence of mind to
do everything in my power to save my life and put my
trust in God, and asked his aid in my extremity. But
for divine aid, I would not now have the privilege of
writing my awful experiences in that hell-hole of a jail.

The officer who arrested me without any warrant of
law, and without any unlawful act on my part was the
tool of some person or persons who were either paid

for their heinous crime, or of the landlady of the

hotel (he had been a clerk there) who allowed gambling
to go on nearly every night, and thought I was a de-
tective or spy, and so was instrumental in having me
thrown into jail.

I begged so hard not to be locked in the cell that I
was allowed to stay in the corridor in front of the cells.
I observed chloral dripping through the roof of the
cell-house in different places, and as I had had some
experience with different drugs, I detected the smell of
chloral as soon as I entered the cell-house.

Sometime after midnight some one stopped up the
stovepipe and the door of the coal stove was left open
so that the coal gas issued from the stove, so that
breathing was difficult in the jail. The gases from the
stove and other gases poisoned the air . . . and your
humble servant had the presence of mind to tear up a
hair mattress and kept my nostrils continually filled
with padding out of the mattress. I would often and
instantly change the filling in one nostril, and not
during the long hours of that awful night did I once

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

open my mouth. In that manner I inhaled very little
gases. Why in my weakened condition and my poor
health anyone wanted to deprive me of my life I am
at a loss to know, but failing to kill me, I was taken
after nearly three days of sojourn in that hell-hole to
the courthouse in . But such thoughts as an inno-
cent man in my condition would think, in among
criminals of all sorts, can better be imagined than de-
scribed. ... I thought of Christ's persecutors and I
thought how the innocent suffer because of the wicked.

In general we may say that the various
forms of psyehoneurosis are characterized by
a conflict of the ego with primitive impulses
inadequately repressed. In defense against
these impulses, which though active remain
unconsciously so, the individual constructs a
fictitious system of ideas, of symbolic acts, or
bodily symptoms. These systems are at-
tempts to compromise the conflict in the un-
conscious, and in just the degree that they
are demanded for this function, they fail of
their fimction of adjusting the individual to
his external world. Thought and behavior
thus serve the purpose of compensating for
some psychic loss, and of keeping up the
individual's self feeling. Though the uncon-
scious purpose is to enhance the ego con-
sciousness, the mechanisms through which
this end is achieved produce through their
automatic and stereotyped form a shrinking
of personality and a serious lack of adjustment
to environment.

70

THE CROWD AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Now it is not at all the aim of this argument
to try to prove that crowds are really insane.
Psychoanalysts commonly assert that the
difference between the normal and the ab-
normal is largely one of degree and of success
in adjustment. We are told that the conflict
exists also in normal people, with whom, how-
ever, it is adequately repressed and "subli-
mated"— that is, normal people pass on out
of the stages in which the libido of the neu-
rotic becomes fixed, not by leaving them
behind, but by attaching the interests which
emerge in such stages to ends which are useful
in future experience. The neurotic takes the
solitary path of resolving the conflict between
his ego and the impulses which society de-
mands shall be repressed.

It is altogether conceivable that another
path lies open — that of occasional compromise
in our mutual demands on one another. The
force of repression is then relaxed by an un-
conscious change in the significance of social
ideas. Such a change must of course be
mutual and unconscious. Compromise mech-
anisms will again be formed serving a purpose
similar to the neurosis. As in the neurosis^
thought and action will be compulsory, sym-
bolic, stereotyped, and more or less in conflict
with the demands of society as a whole, though
functioning in a part of it for certain purposes.
Many of the characteristics of the uncon-

71

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

scious will then appear and will be similar in
some respects to those of neurosis. It is my
contention that this is what happens in the
crowd, and I will now point out certain phases
of crowd-behavior which are strikingly anal-
ogous to some of the phenomena which have
been described above.

IV

THE EGOISM OF THE CROWD-MIND

THE unconscious egoism of the individual
in the crowd appears in all forms of
crowd-behavior. As in dreams and in the
neurosis this self feeling is frequently though
thinly disguised, and I am of the opinion that
with the crowd the mechanisms of this dis-
guise are less subtle. To use a term which
Freud employs in this connection to describe
the process of distortion in dreams, the "cen-
sor" is less active in the crowd than in most
phases of mental life. Though the conscious
thinking is carried on in abstract and imper-
sonal formula, and though, as in the neurosis,
the ''compulsive" character of the mechan-
isms developed frequently — especially in per-
manent crowds — well nigh reduces the in-
dividual to an automaton, the crowd is one of
the most naive devices that can be employed
for enhancing one's ego consciousness. The
individual has only to transfer his repressed
self feeling to the idea of the crowd or group of
which he is a member; he can then exalt and

6 73

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

exhibit himself to almost any extent without
shame, oblivious of the fact that the su-
premacy, power, praise, and glory which he
claims for his crowd are really claimed for
himself.

That the crowd always insists on being
flattered is a fact known intuitively by every
orator and editor. As a member of a crowd
the individual becomes part of a public. The
worship with which men regard "The Public,"
simply means that the personal self falls at
the feet of the same self regarded as public,
and likewise demands that obeisance from all.
Vox populi est vox Dei is obviously the apothe-
osis of one's own voice while speaking as
crowd-man. When this "god-almightiness"
manifests itself along the solitary path of the
psychoneurosis it becomes one of the common
symptoms of paranoia. The crowd, in com-
mon with paranoia, uniformly shows this
quality of "megalomania." Every crowd
"boosts for" itself, lauds itself, gives itself
airs, speaks with oracular finality, regards
itself as morally superior, and will, so far as
it has the power, lord it over everyone. No-
tice how each group and section in society, so
far as it permits itself to think as crowd, claims
to be "the people." To the working-class
agitator, "the cause of labor is the cause of
humanity," workers are always, "innocent
exploited victims, kept down by the master

74

THE EGOISM OF THE CROWD-MIND

class whose lust for gain has made them
enemies of Humanity and Justice." "Work-
ers should rule because they are the only
useful people; the sole creators of wealth;
their dominance would mean the end of social
wrong, and the coming of the millennium of
peace and brotherhood, the Eangdom of
Heaven on the Earth, the final triumph of
Humanity!"

On the other hand, the wealthy and edu-
cated classes speak of themselves as "the
best people"; they are "society." It is they
who "bear the burdens of civilization, and
maintain Law and Order and Decency."
Racial and national crowds show the same
megalomania. Hebrews are "God's chosen."
"The Dutch Company is the best Company
that ever came over from the Old Country."
"The Irish may be ornery, and they ain't
worth much, but they are a whole lot better

than the Dutch." "Little Nigger

baby, black face, and shiny eye, you're just as
good as the poor white trash, an' you'll git thar
by and by." " He might have been a Russian
or a Prussian, . . . but it's greatly to his credit
that he is an Englishman." The German is
the happy bearer of Kultur to a barbarian
world. America is "The land of the free
and the home of the brave," and so on, wher-
ever a group has become sufficiently a crowd
to have a propaganda of its own. Presby-

75

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

terians are "the Elect," the Catholics have the
"true church of God," the Christian Scientists
have alone attained "Absolute Truth."

A number of years ago, when the interest
in the psychology of the crowd led me to
attempt a study of Mr. Sunday's revival
meetings, then in their earlier stages, certain
facts struck me with great force. Whatever
else the revival may be, it provides the stu-
dent of psychology with a delightful specimen
for analysis. Every element of the mob or
crowd-mind is present and the unconscious
manifests itself with an easy naivete which is
probably found nowhere else, not even in the
psychiatric clinic. One striking fact, which
has since provided me with food for a good deal
of reflection, was the place which the revival
holds in what I should like to call the spiritual
economy of modern democracy.

It is an interesting historical fact that each
great religious revival, from Savonarola down,
has immediately followed — and has been the
resistance of the man in the street to — a pe-
riod of intellectual awakening. Mr. Sunday's
meetings undeniably provided a device where-
by a certain psychic type, an element which
had hitherto received scant recognition in
the conamunity, could enormously enhance
his ego consciousness. It would be mani-
festly unfair to say that this is the sole motive
of the religious revival, or that only this type

76

THE EGOISM OF THE CROWD-MIND

of mind is active in it. But it is interesting to
see whose social survival values stand out most
prominently in these religious crowd-phenom-
ena. The gambler, the drunkard, the loafer,
the weak, ignorant, and unsuccessful, whose
self-esteem it may be assumed had always
been made to suffer in small communities,
where everyone knew everyone else, had only
to yield himself to the pull of the obviously
worked-up mechanism of the religious crowd,
and lo! all was changed. He was now the
repentant sinner, the new convert, over whom
there was more rejoicing in heaven, and, what
was more visible, also for a brief time, in the
Church, than over the ninety and nine just
persons. He was "redeemed," an object now
of divine love, a fact which anyone who has
studied the effects of these crowd-movements
scientifically will agree was at once seized
upon by these converts to make their own
moral dilemmas the standards of righteousness
in the community, and hence secure some
measure of dominance.

This self-adulation of crowds, with its ac-
companying will to be important, to dominate,
is so constant and characteristic a feature of
the crowd-mind that I doubt if any crowd can
long survive which fails to perform this
function for its members. Self-flattery is
evident in the pride with which many people
wear badges and other insignia of groups and

77

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

organizations to which they belong, and in
the pompous names by which fraternal orders
are commonly designated. In its more "ex-
hibitionist" types it appears in parades and
in the favorite ways in which students display
their "college spirit." How many school and
college "yells" begin with the formula, "Who
are We.'*" obviously designed to call general
attention to the group and impress upon
people its importance.

In this connection I recall my own student
days, which are doubtless typical — the pranks
which served the purpose of bringing certain
groups of students into temporary prominence
and permitted them for a brief period to
regard themselves as comic heroes, the prac-
tices by which the different classes and so-
cieties sought to get the better of one another,
the "love feasts" of my society which were
hardly more than mutual admiration gather-
ings, the "pajama" parades in which the en-
tire student body would march in costume
(the wearing of which by an isolated individual
would probably have brought him before a
lunacy commission) all through the town and
roimd and round the dormitories of the
women's college a mile or so away, in order to
announce a victory in some intercollegiate
contest or other. There was the brazenness
— it seems hardly credible now — with which
the victors on such occasions would permit

78

THE EGOISM OF THE CROWD-MIND

themselves to be carried on their comrades'
shoulders through the public square, also the
deportment with which a delegation of stu-
dents would announce their arrival in a neigh-
boring college town and the grinning self-
congratulation with which we would sit in
chapel and hear a wrathful president de-
nounce our group behavior as "boorishness
and hoodlumism." There was the unani-
mous conviction of us all, for no other reason
I imagine than that it was graced with our
particular presence, that our own institution
was the most superior college in existence, and
I well remember the priggishness with which
at student banquets we applauded the senti-
ment repeated ad nauseam, that the great aim
of education and the highest mark of excel-
lence in our college was the development of
character. What is it all but a slightly exag-
gerated account of the egoism of all organized
crowds? Persons of student age are for the
most part still in the normal "narcissus"
period, and their ego-mania is naturally less
disguised than that of older groups. But
even then we could never have given such
open manifestation to it as isolated individu-
als; it required the crowd-spirit.

The egoism of the crowd commonly takes
the form of the will to social dominance and
it is in crowd behavior that we learn how
insatiable the repressed egoism of mankind

79

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

really is. Members of the crowd are always
promising one another a splendid future tri-
umph of some sort. This promise of victory,
which is nearly always to be enjoyed at the
expense, discomfiture, and humiliation of
somebody else, is of great advantage in the
work of propaganda. People have only to
be persuaded that prohibition, or equal suf-
frage, or the single tax ''is coming," and thou-
sands whose reason could not be moved by
argument, however logical it might be, will
begin to look upon it with favor. The crowd
is never so much at home as "on the band
wagon." Each of the old political parties
gains strength through the repeated predic-
tion of victory in the presidential campaign of
1920. The Socialist finds warmth in the
contemplation of the "coming dictatorship of
the proletariat." The Prohibitionist intoxi-
cates himself by looking forward to a "dry
world." So long as the German crowds ex-
pected a victorious end of the war, their morale
remained unbroken, the Kaiser was popular.
When a crowd is defeated and its hope of
victory fades, the individual soon abandons
the unsuccessful group. The great cause,
being now a forlorn hope, is seen in a different
light, and the crowd character of the group
vanishes. When, however, certain forces still
operate to keep the crowd state of mind
alive — forces such as race feeling, patriotism,

80

^

THE EGOISM OF THE CROWD-MIND

religious belief, or class consciousness — the ego
consciousness of the individuals so grouped
finds escape in the promise of heaven, the
Judgment Day, and that "far off divine event
toward which the whole creation moves."
Meanwhile the hope of victory is changed into
that "impotent resentment" so graphically
described by Nietzsche.

Another way in which the self feeling of the
crowd functions is in idealizing those who
succeed in gaining its recognition. The crowd
always makes a hero of the public person,
living or dead. Regardless of what he really
did or was, he is transformed into a symbol of
what the crowd wishes to believe him to be.
Certain aspects of his teaching and various
incidents which would appear in his biography
are glossed over, and made into supports for
existing crowd-ideas and prejudices. Most of
the great characters in history have suffered
in this way at the hands of tradition. The
secret of their greatness, their uniqueness and
spiritual isolation, is in great part ignored.
The crowd's own secret is substituted. The
great man now appears great because he pos-
sessed the qualities of little men. He is repre-
sentative man, crowd man. Every crowd has
a list of heroic names which it uses in its propa-
ganda and in its self -laudation. The great-
ness which each crowd reveres and demands
that all men honor is just that greatness which

81

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

the crowd treasures as a symbol of itself, the
sort of superiority which the members of the
crowd may suck up to swell their own ego
consciousness.

Thus, hero worship is unconsciously worship
of the crowd itself, and the constituents there-
of. The self -feeling of a crowd is always en-
hanced by the triumph of its leader or repre-
sentative. Who, at a ball game or athletic
event, has not experienced elation and added
self-complacency in seeing the home team
win.f^ What other meaning has the excited
cheering.^ Even a horse on a race track may
become the representative of a crowd and
lift five thousand people into the wildest joy
and ecstasy by passing under a wire a few
inches ahead of a rival. We have here one of
the secrets of the appeal which all such ex-
hibitions make to people. Nothing so easily
catches general attention and creates a crowd
as a contest of any kind. The crowd uncon-
sciously identifies its members with one or
the other competitor. Success enables the
winning crowd to "crow over" the losers.
Such an occasion becomes symbolic and is
utilized by the ego to enhance its feeling of
importance.

A similar psychological fact may be ob-
served in the "jollifications" of political
parties after the election of their candidates
for high ojBSce. This phenomenon is also

82

THE EGOISM OF THE CROWD-MIND

seen, if I may say so without being misunder-
stood, in the new spirit which characterizes
a people victorious in war, and is to no small
degree the basis of the honor of successful
nations. It is seen again in the pride which
the citizens of a small town show in the fact
that the governor of the state is a native of
the place. This same principle finds place in
such teachings of the Church as the doctrine
of the ''communion of the saints," according
to which the spiritual grace and superiority
of the great and pure become the common
property of the Church, and may be shared
by all believers as a saving grace.

Every organized crowd is jealous of its
dignity and honor and is bent upon keeping
up appearances. Nothing is more fatal to it
than a successful assault upon its prestige.
Every crowd, even the casual street mob,
clothes the egoistic desires of its members or
participants in terms of the loftiest moral
motive. No crowd can afford to be laughed
at. Crowd men have little sense of humor,
certainly none concerning themselves and
their crowd-ideas. Any laughter they indulge
in is more likely to be directed at those who
do not believe with them. The crowd-man
resents any suspicion of irreverence or criti-
cism of his professions, because to question
them is to weaken the claim of his crowd upon
the people, and to destroy in those professed

83

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

ideals their function of directing his own
attention away from the successful compro-
mise of his unconscious conflicts which the
crowd had enabled him to make. The crowd
would perish if it lost its "ideals." It clings
to its fixed ideas with the same tenacity as
does the paranoiac. You can no more reason
with the former than you can with the latter,
and for much the same cause; the beliefs of
both are not the fruit of inquiry, neither do
they perform the normal intellectual function
of adjustment to environment; they are
mechanisms of the ego by which it keeps itself
in countenance.

Much of the activity of the unconscious
ego is viewed by psychologists as "compensa-
tion." Devices which serve the purpose of
compensating the ego for some loss, act of self-
sacrifice, or failure, are commonly revealed
by both the normal and the unadjusted. The
popular notion that unsatisfied desires sooner
or later perish of starvation is at best but a
half truth. These desires after we have ceased
to attend them become transformed. They
frequently find satiety in some substitute
which the unconscious accepts as a symbol of
its real object. Dreams of normal people
contain a great deal of material of this sort.
So do day-dreams, and art. Many religious
beliefs also serve this purpose of compensation.
Jung follows Freud in pointing out as a classic

84

I

THE EGOISM OF THE CROWD-MIND

example of the compensation in dreams, that
of Nebuchadnezzar, in the Bible.

Nebuchadnezzar at the height of his power had a
dream which foretold his downfall. He dreamed of a
tree which had raised its head even up to Heaven and
now must be hewn down. This was a dream which is
obviously a counterpoise to the exaggerated feeling of
royal power.

According to Jung, we may expect to find
only those things contained in the uncon-
scious which we have not found in the con-
scious mind. Many conscious virtues and
traits of character are thus compensations for
their opposite in the unconscious.

In the case of abnormal people, the individual entirely
fails to recognize the compensating influences which
arise in the unconscious. He even continues to ac-
centuate his onesidedness; this is in accord with the
well-known psychological fact that the worst enemy of
the wolf is the wolfhound, the greatest despiser of the
negro is the mulatto, and that the biggest fanatic is the
convert; for I should be a fanatic were I to attack a
thing outwardly which inwardly I am obliged to con-
cede is right.

The mentally unbalanced man tries to defend him-
self against his own unconscious — that is to say, he
battles against his own compensating influences. In
normal minds opposites of feeling and valuations lie
closely associated; the law of this association is called
"ambivalence," about which we shall see more later.
In the abnormal, the pairs are torn asunder, the re-
sulting division, or strife, leads to disaster, for the un-

85

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

conscious soon begins to intrude itself violently upon
the conscious processes.

An especially typical form of unconscious compen-
sation ... is the paranoia of the alcoholic. The alco-
holic loses his love for his wife; the unconscious com-
pensation tries to lead him back again to his duty, but
only partially succeeds, for it causes him to become
jealous of his wife as if he still loved her. As we know,
he may go so far as to kill both his wife and himself,
merely out of jealousy. In other words, his love for
his wife has not been entirely lost. It has simply
become subliminal; but from the realm of conscious-
ness it can now only reappear in the form of jealousy. . . ,
We see something of a similar nature in the case of the
religious convert. . . . The new convert feels himself
constrained to defend the faith he has adopted (since
much of the old faith still survives in the unconscious
associations) in a more or less fanatical way. It is
exactly the same in the paranoiac who feels himself
constantly constrained to defend himself against all
external criticism, because his delusional system is too
much threatened from within.

It is not necessary for us to enter here upon
a discussion of the processes by which these
compensating devices are wrought out in the
psychoneurosis. It is significant, though, that
Jung calls attention to the likeness between
religious fanaticism and paranoia. Now it is
obvious that the fanaticism of the religious
convert differs psychologically not at all from
that of any other convert. We have already
noted the fact that most religious conversions
are accomplished by the crowd. Moreover

86

^

THE EGOISM OF THE CROWD-MIND

the crowd everywhere tends to fanaticism.
The fanatic is the crowd-man pure and simple.
He is the type which it ever strives to produce.
His excess of devotion, and wilHngness to
sacrifice both himself and everyone else for
the crowd's cause, always wins the admira-
tion of his fellow crowd-members. He has
given all for the crowd, is wholly swallowed
by it, is "determined not to know anything
save" his crowd and its propaganda. He is
the martyr, the true believer, "the red-blooded
loyal American" with "my country right or
wrong." He is the uncompromising radical
whose prison record puts to shame the less
enthusiastic members of his group. He is the
militant pacifist, the ever-watchful prohibi-
tionist, and keeper of his neighbors' con-
sciences, the belligerent moral purist, who
is scandalized even at the display of lingerie
in the store windows, the professional re-
former who in every community succeeds
in making his goodness both indispensable
and unendurable.

One need not be a psychologist to suspect
that the evil against which the fanatic strug-
gles is really in large measure in himself.
He has simply externalized, or "projected"
the conflict in his own unconscious. Persons
who cry aloud with horror at every change in
the style of women's clothing are in most
cases persons whose ego is gnawed by a secret

87

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

promiscuous eroticism. The scandalmonger,
inhibited from doing the forbidden thing, en-
joys himself by a vicarious indulgence in
rottenness. The prohibition agitator, if not
himself an alcoholic barely snatched from the
burning, is likely to be one who at least feels
safer in a democracy where it is not necessary
to resist temptation while passing a saloon
door. Notice that the fanatic or crowd-man
always strives to universalize his own moral
dilemmas. This is the device by which every
crowd seeks dominance in the earth. A
crowd's virtues and its vices are really made
out of the same stuff. Each is simply the
other turned upside down, the compensation
for the other. They are alike and must be
understood together as the expression of the
type of person who constitutes the member-
ship of some particular group or crowd.

I'll never use tobacco, it is a filthy weed

I'll never put it in my mouth, said little Robert Reed.

But obviously, little Robert is already ob-
sessed with a curious interest in tobacco.
His first word shows that he has already begun
to think of this weed in connection with him-
self. Should a crowd of persons struggling
with Robert's temptation succeed in dominat-
/, ing society, tobacco would become taboo and
thus would acquire a moral significance which

88

THE EGOISM OF THE CROWD-MIND

it does not have at present. So with all our
crowd-ethics. The forbidden thing protrudes
itself upon consciousness as a negation. The
negation reveals what it is that is occupying
the inner psyche, and is its compensation.
There are certain psychoneuroses in which
this negative form of compensation is very
marked. Now it is a noteworthy fact that
with the crowd the ethical interest always
takes this negative form.

The healthy moral will is characterized by
a constant restating of the problem of living
in terms of richer and higher and more sig-
nificant dilemmas as new possibilities of per-
sonal worth are revealed by experience. New
and more daring valuations are constantly
made. The whole psychic functioning is en-
riched. Goodness means an increase of satis-
factions through a more adequate adjustment
to the real — ^richer experience, more subtle
power of appreciation and command, a self-
mastery, sureness, and general personal ex-
cellence— which on occasions great and small
mark the good will as a reality which counts
in the sum total of things. Something is
achieved because it is really desired; existence
is in so far humanized, a self has been realized.
As Professor Dewey says :

If our study has shown anything it is that the moral
is a life, not something ready-made and complete once
for all. It is instinct with movement and struggle,

7 89

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

and it is precisely the new and serious situations which
call out new vigor and lift it to higher levels.

It is not so with the crowd-ethic. It is
interesting to note that from the "Decalogue"
to Kant's "Categorical Imperative," crowd-
morals always and everywhere take the form
of prohibitions, taboos, and ready-made stand-
ards, chiefly negative. Freud has made an
analytical study of the Taboo as found in
primitive society and has shown that it has a
compensatory value similar to that of the
taboos and compulsions of certain neurotics.

The crowd admits of no personal superiority
other than that which consists in absolute
conformity to its own negative standards.
Except for the valuations expressed by its
own dilenmaas, "one man is as good as an-
other"— an idea which it can be easily seen
serves the purpose of compensation. The
goodness which consists of unique personal
superiority is very distasteful to the crowd.
There must be only one standard of behavior,
alike for all. A categorical imperative. The
standard as set up is of the sort which is most
congenial, possible of attainment, and even
necessary for the survival of the members of
some particular crowd. It is their good, the
converse and compensation of their own vices,
temptations, and failures. The crowd then
demands that this good shall be the good,

90

THE EGOISM OF THE CROWD-MIND

that it become the universal standard. By
such means even the most incompetent and
unadventurous and timid spirits may pass
judgment upon all men. They may cry to
the great of the earth, "We have piped unto
you and you have not danced." Judged by
the measure of their conformity to the stand-
ards of the small, the great may be considered
no better, possibly not so good as the little
spirits. The well are forced to behave like
the spiritually sick. The crowd is a dog in
the manger. If eating meat maketh my
brother to be scandalized, or giveth him the
cramps, I shall remain a vegetarian so long as
the world standeth. Nietzsche was correct on
this point. The crowd — he called it the herd
— is a weapon of revenge in the hands of the
weaker brother. It is a Procrustean bed on
which every spiritual superiority may be
lopped off to the common measure, and every
little ego consciousness may be stretched to
the stature of full manhood.

V

t

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

PROBABLY the most telling point of like-
ness between the crowd-mind and the
psychoneurosis — ^paranoia especially — is the
** delusion of persecution." In cases of para-
noia the notion that the patient is the victim
of all sorts of intrigue and persecution is so
common as to be a distinguishing symptom of
this disease. Such delusions are known to
be defenses, or compensation mechanisms,
growing out of the patient's exaggerated feel-
ing of self-importance. The delusion of gran-
deur and that of being persecuted commonly
go together. The reader will recall the pas-
sage quoted from the pamphlet given me by a
typical paranoiac. The author of the docu-
ment mentioned feels that he has a great mis-
sion, that of exposing and reforming the con-
ditions in hospitals for the insane. He pro-
tests his iimocence. In jail he feels like Christ
among his tormentors. His wife has con-
spired against him. The woman who owns
the hotel where he was employed wishes to

92

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

put him out of the way. The most fiendish
methods are resorted to in order to end his
life. "Some one" blocked up the stovepipe,
etc., etc.

Another illustration of a typical case is
given by Doctor Brill. I quote scattered pas-
sages from the published notes on the case
record of the patient, "E. R."

He graduated in 1898 and then took up schoolteach-
ing. . .* . He did not seem to get along well with his
principal and other teachers. . . . He imagined that the
principal and other teachers were trying to work up a
"badger game" on him, to the effect that he had some
immoral relations with his girl pupils. . . .

In 1903 he married, after a brief courtship, and soon
thereafter took a strong dislike to his brother-in-law
and sister and accused them of immorality. . . . He also
accused his wife of iUicit relations with his brother and
his brother-in-law, Mr. S.

Mr. S., his brother-in-law, was the arch conspirator
against him. He also (while in the hospital) imagined
that some women made signs to him and were in the
hospital for the purpose of liberating him. Whenever
he beard anybody talking he immediately referred it
to himself. He interpreted every movement and ex-
pression as having some special meaning for himseK. . . .

Now and then (after his first release by order of the
court) he would send mysterious letters to different
persons in New York City. At that time one of his
delusions was that he was a great statesman and that
the United States government had appointed him am-
bassador (to Canada), but that the **gang" in New
York City had some one without ability to impersonate
him so that he lost his appointment. (Later, while con-

93

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

fined to the hospital again) he thought that the daughter
of the President of the United States came to visit
him. . . .

After the patient was recommitted to Bellevue Hos-
pital, he told me that I (Doctor Brill) was one of the
"gang." I was no longer his wife in disguise (as he
has previously imagined) but his enemy.

Brill's discussion of this case contains an
interesting analysis of the several stages of
"regression" and the unconscious mechanisms
which characterize paranoia. He holds that
such cases show^ a *' fixation" in an earlier
stage of psychosexual development. The pa-
tient, an unconscious homosexual, is really in
love with himself. The resulting inner con-
flict appears, with its defense formations, as
the delusion of grandeur and as conscious
hatred for the person or persons who happen
to be the object of the patient's homosexual
wish fancy." However this may be, the
point of interest for our study is the "pro-
jection" of this hatred to others. Says Brill:

The sentence, "I rather hate him" becomes trans-
formed through projection into the sentence, "he hates
(persecutes) me, which justifies my hating him."

The paranoiac's delusional system inevi-
tably brings him in conflict with his environ-
ment, but his feeling of being persecuted is
less the result of this conflict with an external
situation than of his own inner conflict. He

94

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

convinces himself that it is the other, or others,
not he, who is the author of this hatred. He is
the innocent victim of their malice.

This phenomenon of "projection and dis-
placement" has received considerable atten-
tion in analytical psychology. Freud, in the
book, Totem and TaboOy shows the role which
projection plays in the primitive man's fear
of demons. The demons are of course the
spirits of the dead. But how comes it that
primitive people fear these spirits, and attrib-
ute to them every sort of evil design against
the living.^ To quote Freud:

When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her
mother, it not infrequently happens that the survivor
is afflicted with tormenting scruples, called "obsessive
reproaches,'* which raise the question whether she her-
self has not been guilty, through carelessness or neglect,
of the death of the beloved person. No recalling of the
care with which she nursed the invalid, or direct refu-
tation of the asserted guilt, can put an end to the tor-
ture, which is the pathological expression of mourning
and which in time slowly subsides. Psychoanalytic
investigation of such cases has made us acquainted
with the secret mainspring of this affliction. We have
ascertained that these obsessive reproaches are in a
certain sense justified. . . . Not that the mourner has
really been guilty of the death or that she has really
been careless, as the obsessive reproach asserts; but
still there was something in her, a wish of which she
was unaware, which was not displeased with the fact
that death came, and which would have brought it
about sooner had it been strong enough. The reproach

95

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

now reacts against this unconscious wish after the death
of the beloved person. Such hostility, hidden in the
unconscious behind tender love, exists in almost all
cases of intensive emotional allegiance to a particular
person; indeed, it represents the classic case, the pro-
totype of the ambivalence of human emotions. . . .

By assuming a similar high degree of ambivalence in
the emotional life of primitive races such as psycho-
analysis ascribes to persons suffering from compulsion
neurosis, it becomes comprehensible that the same kind
of reaction against the hostility latent in the uncon-
scious behind the obsessive reproaches of the neurotic
should also be necessary here after the painful loss has
occurred. But this hostility, which is painfully felt
in the unconscious in the form of satisfaction with the
demise, experiences a different fate in the case of
primitive man: the defense against it is accomplished
by a displacement upon the object of hostility — namely,
the dead. We call this defense process, frequent in
both normal and diseased psychic life, a "projec-
tion." . . . Thus we find that taboo has grown out of the
soil of an ambivalent emotional attitude. The taboo
of the dead also originates from the opposition between
conscious grief and the unconscious satisfaction at
death. If this is the origin of the resentment of spirits,
it is self-evident that the nearest and formerly most
beloved survivors have to feel it most. As in neurotic
symptoms, the taboo regulations evince opposite feel-
ings. Their restrictive character expresses mourning,
while they also betray very clearly what they are trying
to conceal — namely, the hostility toward the dead which
is now motivated as self-defense. . . .

The double feeling — tenderness and hostility —
against the deceased, which we consider well-founded,
endeavors to assert itself at the time of bereavement
as mourning and satisfaction. A conflict must ensue

96

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

between these contrary feelings, and as one of them —
namely, the hostility, is altogether, or for the greater
part, unconscious, the conflict cannot result in a con-
scious difference in the form of hostility or tenderness, as,
for instance, when we forgive an injury inflicted upon
us by some one we love. The process usually adjusts
itself through a special psychic mechanism which is
designated in psychoanalysis as "projection." This
unknown hostility, of which we are ignorant and of
which we do not wish to know, is projected from our
inner perception into the outer world and is thereby
detached from our own person and attributed to
another. Not we, the survivors, rejoice because we are
rid of the deceased, on the contrary we mourn for him ;
but now, curiously enough, he has become an evil
demon who would rejoice in our misfortune and who
seeks our death. The survivors must now defend
themselves against this evil enemy; they are freed
from inner oppression, but they have only succeeded
in exchanging it for an affliction from without.

Totem, taboo, demon worship, etc., are
clearly primitive crowd-phenomena. Freud's
main argument in this book consists in showing
the likeness between these phenomena and the
compulsion neurosis. The projection of un-
conscious hostility upon demons is by no
means the only sort of which crowds both
primitive and modem are capable. Neither
must the hostihty always be unconscious.
Projection is a common device whereby even
normal and isolated individuals justify them-
selves in hating. Most of us love to think
evil of our enemies and opponents. Just as

97

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

two fighting schoolboys will each declare that
the other "began it," so our dislike of people
often first appears to our consciousness as a
conviction that they dislike or entertain un-
friendly designs uix)n us. There is a common
type of female neurotic whose repressed erotic
wishes appear in the form of repeated accusa-
tions that various of her men acquaintances
are guilty of making improper advances to her.
When the "white slavery" reform movement
swept over the country — an awakening of the
public conscience which would have accom-
plished a more unmixed good if it had not been
taken up in the usual crowd-spirit — it was
interesting to watch the newspapers and sen-
sational propagandist speakers as they de-
liberately encouraged these pathological phe-
nomena in young people. The close psy-
chological relation between the neurosis and
the crowd-mind is shown by the fact that the
two so frequently appear at the same moment,
play so easily into each other's hands, and are
apparently reactions to the very same social
situation.

In Brill's example of paranoia, it will be
remembered that the patient's delusions of
persecution took the form of such statements
as that the "gang" had intrigued at Washing-
ton to prevent his appointment as ambassador,
that certain of his relatives were in a "con-
spiracy against him." How commonly such

98

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

phrases and ideas occur in crowd-oratory and
in the crowd-newspaper is well known to all.
We have already seen that the crowd in most
cases identifies itself with "the people," "hu-
manity," "society," etc. Listen to the crowd-
orator and you wjll also learn that there are
all sorts of abommable "conspiracies" against
"the people." "The nation is full of traitors."
The Church is being "undermined by cunning
heretics." "The Bolshevists are in secret
league with the Germans to destroy civiliza-
tion." " Socialists are planning to corrupt the
morals of our youth and undermine the sacred-
ness of the home." "The politicians' gang
intends to loot the community." "Wall Street
is conspiring to rob the people of their liber-
ties." "England plans to reduce America to
a British colony again." "Japan is getting
ready to make war on us." "German mer-
chants are conducting a secret propaganda
intending to steal our trade and pauperize our
nation." "The Catholics are about to seize
power and deliver us over to another Inqui-
sition." "The liquor interests want only to
make drunkards of our sons and prostitutes of
our daughters." And so on and so forth, wher-
ever any crowd can get a hearing for its propa-
ganda. Always the public welfare is at stake;
society is threatened. The "wrongs" in-
flicted upon an innocent humanity are re-
hearsed. Bandages are taken oflf every social

99

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

wound. Ever}^ scar, be it as old as Crom-
well's mistreatment of Ireland, is inflamed.
"The people are being deceived," "kept
down," "betrayed." They must rise and
throw off their exploiters, or they must purge
the nation of disloyalty and "anarchy."

It cannot be denied that our present social
order is characterized by deep and funda-
mental social injustices, nor that bitter strug-
gles between the various groups in society are
inevitable. But the crowd forever ignores its
own share in the responsibility for human
ills, and each crowd persists in making a
caricature of its enemies, real and imagined,
nourishing itself in a delusion of persecution
which is like nothing so much as the charac-
teristic obsessions of the paranoiac. This
suspiciousness, this habit of misrepresenta-
tion and exaggeration of every conceivable
wrong, is not only a great hindrance to the
conflicting groups in adjusting their differ-
ences, it makes impossible, by misrepresenting
the real issue at stake, any effective struggle
for ideals. As the history of all crowd move-
ments bears witness, the real source of conflict
is forgotten, the issue becomes confused with
the spectacular, the unimportant, and imag-
nary. Energy is wasted on side issues, and
the settlement finally reached, even by a
clearly victorious crowd, is seldom that of the
original matter in dispute. In fact, it is not

100

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

at all the function of these crowd-ideas of
self-pity and persecution to deal with real
external situations. These ideas are propa-
ganda. Their function is to keep the crowd
together, to make converts, to serve as a de-
fense for the egoism of the crowd-man, to
justify the anticipated tyranny which it is
the unconscious desire of the individual to
exercise in the moment of victory for his
crowd, and, as "they who are not for us are
against us," to project the crowd-man's hatred
upon the intended victims of his crowd's will
to universal dominion. In other words, these
propaganda ideas serve much the same end
as do the similar delusions of persecution in
paranoia.

This likeness between the propaganda of
the crowd and the delusions of paranoia is
illustrated daily in our newspapers. The
following items cut from the New York
Tribune are typical. The first needs no
further discussion, as it parallels the cases
given above. The second is from the pub-
lished proceedings of "a committee," ap-
pointed, as I remember it, by the assembly of
the state of New York, to conduct an investi-
gation into certain alleged seditious and
anarchist activities. These articles well il-
lustrate the character of the propaganda to
which such a committee almost inevitably
lends itself. Whether the committee or the

101

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

newspapers were chiefly responsible for such
fabrications, I do not know, but the crowd
character of much of the attempt to stamp out
Bolshevism is strikingly revealed in this in-
stance. No doubt the members of this com-
mittee, as well as the detectives and the
press agents who are associated with them,
are as honestly convinced that a mysterious
gang of radicals is planning to murder us all
as is the paranoiac W. H. M. fixed in his de-
lusion that his enemies are trying to asphyxi-
ate him. It will be remembered that BrilFs
patient *'E. S." interpreted "every movement
and expression as having some special meaning
for himself." This kind of "interpretation"
has a curious logic all its own. It is what I
would call "compulsive thinking," and is
characteristic of both the delusions of par-
anoia and the rumors of the crowd.
First clipping:

Inventor is Declared Insane by a Jury.

W. H. M. declares rivals are attempting to asphyxiate
him. W. H. M., an inventor, was declared mentally in-
competent yesterday by a jury in the Sheriff's court. . . .
Alienists said M. had hallucinations about enemies
who he thinks are trying to asphyxiate him. He also
imagines that he is under hypnotic influences and that
I)ersons are trying to affect his body with "electrical
influences."

Second clipping:

102

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

Radicals Here Seek Soldiers for "Red Guard."

Several hundred men, formerly in United States Serv-
ice, signify willingness to aid in project. A "Red
Guard " composed of men who have served in the Amer-
ican military establishment is contemplated in the
elaborate revolutionary plans of Bolshevik leaders here.
This was learned yesterday when operatives of the
Lusk committee discovered that the radicals were
making every effort to enlist the aid of the Soldiers,
Sailors, and Marines Protective Association in carrying
out a plot to overthrow the government by force.
As far as the detectives have been able to ascertain, the
great mass of fighting men are not in sympathy with
the Reds, but several hundred have signified their
willingness to co-operate.

Just how far the plans of the Reds have progressed
was not revealed. It is known, however, that at a
convention of the Left Wing Socialists in Buffalo the
movement designed to enlist the support of the Sol-
diers, Sailors, and Marines Protective Association
was launched. This convention was addressed by
prominent Left Wingers from Boston, New York, Phila-
delphia, Pittsburgh, and Paterson. They asserted
that trained military men must be obtained for the
organization if the plans were to be successful.

It was from this meeting, which was held in secret,
that agitators were sent to various parts of the state
to form Soviets in the shops and factories. This phase
of the radical activity, according to the investigators,
has met with considerable success in some large factory
districts where most of the workers are foreign-born.
In some places the Soviets in the shops have become so
strong that the employers are alarmed and have noti-
fied the authorities of the menace. When sufficient
evidence has been gathered, foreign-born agitators

103

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

working to cause unrest in factories will be apprehended
and recommended for deportation.

Later report:

Denies Formation of "Red Guard" in U. S.

Alfred Levitt, secretary of the Soldiers, Sailors, and
Marines Protective Association, yesterday emphati-
cally 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 de-
lusional system in the mind of an isolated in-
dividual, 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 uncon-
scious mechanisms of crowd-minded people.

104

THE CROWD A CREATURE OP HATE

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. Com-
monly 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 "ration-
alized" than in paranoia — that is, less suc-
cessfully disguised. Like the paranoiac, every
crowd is potentially if not actually homicidal
in its tendencies. But whereas with the para-
noiac the murderous hostility remains for the
greater part an tmconscious "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 when-
ever the tmconscious can fabricate such de-
fense mechanisms as will provide it with a
fiction of moral justification. Consequently,
it is this fiction of justification which the
crowd-man must defend.

8 105

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

The crowd's delusion of persecution, con-
spiracy, or oppression is thus a defense mech-
anism 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 invari-
ably 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 com-
munity rationally convinced of the culprit's
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-

106

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

psychology that the "morality" of the crowd
always demands a victim. Is it Ukely that
one of these mobs would "call off" an inter-
esting lynching party if at the last minute it
were demonstrated that the accused was inno-
cent? The practice of lynching has been ex-
tended, from those cases where the offense
with which the accused is charged is so revolt-
ing as justly to arouse extreme indignation,
to ofiFenses 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 saine 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 conffict between labor and capital.
It is what speedily transformed the French
Revolution from the dawn of an era of "Fra-

107

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

ternity" 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 sup-
pressed, with which any conamunity regards
the strange, the foreign, the *' outlandish" —
an example of which is the frequent bullying
and insulting of immigrants in this coimtry
since the war. Much of the "Americaniza-
tion 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 be-
comes a homicidal crowd. The army, at
least while the soldiers are in service, prob-
ably 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

108

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

subordinated to the one passion to crush the
enemy. The moment when war is declared
is usually hailed with tremendous popular en-
thusiasm and joy. There is a general lifting
of spirits. There is a sense of release, a na-
tion-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 na-
tures. The fact that in war time this crowd
hostility may, under certain circumstances,
really have survival value and be both bene-
ficial 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 "com-
pulsive manifestation" of unconscious hos-

109

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

tility 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 t
of Imperial Prussia is obvious, but the differ- \
ence in this respect, great as it is, is one of ^
degriee 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 ex-
tent that its people may be made to think and
behave as a crowd. Once a crowd, it is al- \
ways "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 ad-
vantage over neighboring peoples, or intensi-
fies hatred once it is released, is wildly ap-
plauded. Any dissent from the opinions of i
our particular party or group is trampled ]
down. He who fails at such a time to be a i

110 i

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

crowd-man and our own sort of a crowd-man
is a "slacker." Everyone's patriotism is put
under suspicion, political heresy-hunting is
the rule, any personal advantage which can
be gained by denouncing as "enemy sym-
pathizers" rival persons or groups within the
nation is sure to be snatched up by some one.
The crowd-mind, even in times of peace, dis-
torts patriotism so that it is little more than
a compulsive expression and justification of
repressed hostility. In war the crowd suc-
ceeds 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 hos-
tility 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, lynch-
ing 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

111

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

its direct overt forms the resulting conflicts
are conscious and are between the subject and
environment. It is where a tendency unac-
ceptable 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 exag-
gerated ego-feeling similar to the paranoiac's
delusion of grandeur, and as in cases of par-
anoia 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 de-
structive and homicidal acts or other unmis-
takable 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 enthu-
siasm of the crowd always demands a victim.
The idealist crowd also always makes idols of
its ideals and worships them with human

11^

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

sacrifice. The peaceable crowd is only po-
tentially 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 power-
ful and directly challenged. The crowd tends
ever to carry its ideas to their deadly logical
conclusion.

I have already referred to the crowd's in-
terest 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 base-
ball and football games knows. As an illus-
tration of my point — namely, that the en-
thusiasm aroused by athletic contests is the
suppressed hostility of the crowd, I give the
following. In this letter to a New York news-
paper, the writer, a loyal "fan," reveals the
same mentality that we find in the sectarian
fanatic, or good party man, whose "prin-
ciples" 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 Trihmie, is doubtless intended to be humorous.

113

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

The section referring to the Cincinnati baseball pub-
lic 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 Pre-
vention of Vice, or of the Prohibitionists, would
persecute if they had power? Have not paci-
fist mass meetings been known to break up
in a row? The Christian religion is funda-
mentally 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 believer's hostility. Let an editor, or
lecturer, or clergyman anywhere attack some
one, and he at once gains following and popu-
larity. Evangelists and political orators are

114

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

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 people's minds on that oc-
casion, this and this alone should have been
immediately seized upon when the crowd spirit
began to appear. I doubt if at the time there

115

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

was a very clear sense of the enormity of
Wilhelm's 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 tri-
umph 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 "^ bos 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 phe-
nomenon which psychologists call "displace-
ment." 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 mech-

116

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

anisms within the psyche. Many symbolic
acts of the person aflBicted 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 un-
conscious reasoning with the hated object, or
anyone who tries to defend him or prove him
innocent, may suffer from this crowd's 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 hos-
tility 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 de-
veloped in the House today when Representative ,

of Minnesota, attacked Secretary Baker and the Presi-
dent for the government's policy toward conscientious
objectors. The attack was the result of protests

117

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

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 conscien-
tious objectors in this country while their sons were
dying in France, the association asked Representative

to fix the responsibility for the government's

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 .

"Hehad57kmds "

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
Department's policy.

Let US pass over the obviously partisan ele-
ment in this Congressional debate — a crowd
phenomenon in itself, by the way — and con-
sider the mental state of this Fathers' Asso-
ciation.

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

118

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

reported to have dealt with this class of per-
sons, that many people, including the Secre-
tary of War, whose loyalty except to partisan
minds was above suspicion, sought in the name
of humanity to alleviate some of the condi-
tions 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 farm-
ers' sons "were dying in France." Patri-
otic 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 un-
conscious resisted it. It could not be recon-
ciled 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 con-
scious self -feeling. It was necessary to defend

119

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

the ego against these longings. Compensa-
tion 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, compen-
sated the individual and enhanced his self-
feeling.

Successful refusal anywhere to recognize the
duty which consciously motivated this sacri-
fice 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 duty's sake. By making
them suffer also, they will be forced to recog-
nize this *duty' with which we defend our-
selves 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 cow-
ardly" unconscious longings. Hostility to
the conscientious objector is thus a "projec-
tion" of their own inner conflict. By becom-
ing a crowd, the members of this "Fathers'
Association" make it mutually possible to
represent their hostility to conscientious ob-
jectors as something highly patriotic. Secre-
tary Baker's alleged leniency to these hated

120

m

■i-si;-

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

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 Crisisy 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 Washing-
ton, and to the presence in that city of many of the repre-
sentatives of the educatedy 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 ne-
groes. When the latter became aroused and began to
retaliate, the authorities stepped in and the rioting
stopped.
9 121

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

Major J. E. Spingarn, acting treasurer of the Na-
tional Association for the Advancement of the Colored
People, said the soldiers and sailors who have been tak-
ing part in the rioting in Washington resent the new at-
titude of self-respect which the negro has assumed be-
cause of the part he played in the war.

"The soldiers," he said, "instead of fighting the ne-
groes 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 communi-
ties where such race riots occur certain mem-
bers of the colored race are responsible to the
extent that they have made themselves con-
spicuously 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 ne-
groes are uniformly made of people who belong
to this element — naturally find their self-
feeling injured "if a nigger puts on a^'rs."
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

n

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

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 perinit even this element of the white
race to play the hoodlum with self-approval,
some disguise or "displacement" for this mo-
tive must be found whereby the acts to which
it prompts may appear to the consciousness
of their perpetrators as justifiable. A mis-
deed 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 nonconform-
ist, the "traitor." I have sometimes thought

123

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

that to the crowd-mind there is only one sin,
heresy. Every sort of crowd, political, re-
ligious, 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 roue 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 pro-
fessed principles are the same as the crowd's.
But let a Nietzsche, though his life be that of
an ascetic, openly challenge and repudiate
the values of popular morality, and his name
is anathema.

As an example of the hatred of the political
crowd for one who, having once put his hand
to the plow and turned back, henceforth is no
longer fit for the "kingdom," I quote the
following from an ultraradical paper. It is
hard to believe that this passage was written
by a man who, in his right mind, is really
intelligent and kind-hearted, but such is the
case:

An Explanation. — Owing to a failure of editorial
supervision we published an advertisement of John

124

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

Spargo's book on Bolshevism. We have returned
the money we received for it, and canceled the contract
for its future appearances. We do not pretend to pro-
tect our readers against patent-medicine swindlers,
real-estate sharpers, canned goods prevaricators, pto-
maine poisoners, fairy bond-sellers, picaroon nickel-
pickers, subway ticket speculators, postage-stamp
forgers, pie and pancake counterfeiters, plagiary bur-
glars, lecherous pornographers, and pictorial back-porch
climbers, plundering buccaneer blackmailers and de-
faulting matrimonial agents, journalistic poachers,
foragers, pickpockets, thimbleriggers, lick-sauce pub-
licity men, notoriety hunters, typographical body-
snatchers, blackletter assassins, and promulgators of
licentious meters in free verse. Against these natural
phenomena we offer no guarantee to our readers, but
we never intended to advertise John Spargo's book on
Bolshevism.

Here again, it seems, the reason for hatred
is "selt-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 per-
mit the escape of the repressed impulse by
relaxing the force which demands the repres-
sion-— namely, the immediate social environ-
ment. 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 in-

125

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

divlduals so affected. Or, as I have said, the
social environment, instead of acting as a
check upon the reaHzation of the wish-fancy,
sHps along in the same direction with it.
Hence the will to believe the same, so charac-
teristic of every crowd. As soon as this
mutuality is broken the habitual criteria of
the real again become operative. Every in-
dividual 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 per-
manently in a common faith. It resists dis-
integration 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 van-
ishes as in waking out of a dream.

Strong spirits can stand this disillusion-
ment. 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 them-
selves. 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

126

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

"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 them-
selves 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 ques-
tions 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 pre-
sented, 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 jBnds in the heroic man its

worthy match and mate He can stand this Universe.

127

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

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 his-
tory, and not a mere fiction, contains in it
something unique, a fraction for which there
is no common denominator. It requires just
that efiFort of attention to concrete reality and
the fact of self which in the crowd we always
seek to escape by diverting attention to con-
genial abstractions and ready-made univer-
sal. We "find ourselves" only as we "get
over" one after another of our crowd-com-
pulsions, 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 up-
holding ourselves by all leaning on one
another, an "escape from diflSculties by
^verting attention," a spiritual safety-first or
"fool-proof" mechanism by which we bear
up one another's collapsing ego-consciousness
lest it dash its foot against a stone?

The crowd-man can, when his fiction is
challenged, save himself from spiritual bank-
ruptcy, preserve his defenses, keep his crowd
from going to pieces, only by a demur. Any-
one who challenges the crowd's fictions must

128

n

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

be ruled out of court. He must not be per-/
mitted to speak. As a witness to contrary
values his testimony must be discounted.
The worth of his evidence must be discredited
by belittling the disturbing witness. "He
is a bad man; the crowd must not listen to
him." His motives must be evil; he **is
bought up"; he is an immoral character; he
tells lies; he is insincere or he "has not the
courage to take a stand" or "there is nothing
new in what he says." Ibsen's "Enemy of
the People," illustrates this point very well.
The crowd votes that Doctor Stockman may
not speak about the baths, the real point at
issue. Indeed, the mayor takes the floor and
oflScially announces that the doctor's state-
ment that the water is bad is "unreliable and
exaggerated." Then the president of the
Householder's Association makes an address
accusing the doctor of secretly ^^ aiming at
r evolution J^ 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 institu-
tion. People are induced to carry their de-
posits of faith in it, and so long as there is no

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

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 in-
curring the displeasure of the others. Mean-
while 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 ap-
pearance of continued confidence in its ideals
and values. The spiritual capital of each
depends on the confidence of the others. As
a consequence they all spend most of their
time exhorting one another to be good crowd-
men, fearing and hating no one so much as the
person who dares raise the question whether
the crowd could really meet its obligations.

The classic illustration of the manner in
which the crowd is led to discredit the witness
to values contrary to its own, is the oration of
Mark Antony in Shakespeare's "Julius Cae-
sar." 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 con-
vinced that "This Caesar was a tyrant."

130

n

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

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 Caesar 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 re-
peated four times in the first section; Caesar
was a good faithful friend to Antony, "But . . .
and Brutus is an honorable man." Again
Caesar refused the crown, but "Brutus is an
honorable man." Caesar 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 coflSin there with Caesar." The citizens
are sorry for the weeping Antony; they listen
more intently now. Again — "If I were dis-
posed 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 hon-
orable 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. Caesar's

131

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

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
Csesar." The citizens have caught the note
of irony now; the honorable men are "trai-
tors," "villains," "murderers."

From this point on the speaker's task is
easy; they have become a crowd. They
think only of revenge, of killing everyone of
the conspirators, and burning the house of
Brutus. Antony has even to remind them of
the existence of the will. The mischief is set
afloat the moment Brutus is successfully
discredited.

The development of the thought in this
oration is typical. Analysis of almost any
propagandist speech will reveal some, if not
all, the steps by which Brutus is made an object
of hatred. The crowd hates in order that it
map believe in itself.

VI

THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD-MIND

WHEREVER conscious thinking is de-
termined by unconscious mechanisms,
and all thinking is more or less so, it is dog-
matic in character. Beliefs which serve an
unconscious purpose do not require the sup-
port 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 experi-
ence 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 tbrougb a
stormy period lasting for years, but who now live con-
tentedly as if in another world. Such transformations
of the world are common in paranoia. They do not

133

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

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 catas-
trophe. 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 him-
self 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 ex-
plained all this very minutely as the new world sys-
tem. . . . 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 any-
where 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 para-
noia. 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

134

THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD

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 re-
lation between the fixed ideal system of the
paranoiac and his withdrawal of interest in
the outside world. The system gains the
f miction of reality for him in the same measure
that, loving not the world nor the things that
are in the world, he has rendered our common
human world unreal. His love thrown back
upon himself causes him to create another
world, a world of "pure reason," so to speak,
which is more congenial to him than the world
of empirical fact. In this system he takes
refuge and finds peace at last. Now we see
the function, at least so far as paranoia is
concerned, of the ideal system. As Brill says,
it is a curative process of a mind which has
suffered "regression" or turning back of its
interest from the affairs of ordinary men and
women, to the attachments of an earlier stage
in its history. To use a philosophical term,
the paranoiac is the Simon-pure "solipsist."
And as a priori thinking tends, as Schiller has
shown, ever to solipsism, we see here the grain
of truth in G. K. Chesterton's witty com-
parison of rationalism and lunacy.

135

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

"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 "trans-
ference 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 affec-
tion, 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

136

THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD

really extends beyond the small circle of per-
sonal 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 in-
timately, but because they are fellow mem-
bers. 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 coun-
try. 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 every-
body. 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 suflfering 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,

10 137

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

as end in itself, as something which it is an
honor to belong to, is to some extent a dis-
guised object of our self-love. But the idea
of the crowd disguises more than self-love.
Like most of the symbols through which the
unconscious functions, it can serve more
than one purpose at a time. The idea of the
crowd also serves to disguise the parental
image, and our own imaginary identification
or reunion with it. The nation is to the
crowd-man the *' Fatherland," the "mother
country," "Uncle Sam" — a figure which serves
to do more than personalize for cartoonists
the initials U. S. Uncle Sam is also the
father-image thinly disguised. The Church
is "the Mother," again the "Bride." Such
religious symbols as "the Heavenly Father"
and the "Holy Mother" also have the value
of standing for the parent image. For a
detailed discussion of these symbols, the
reader is referred to Jung's Psychology of the
Unconscious.

In another connection I have referred to the
fact that the crowd stands to the member in
loco "parentis. Here I wish to point out the
fact that such a return to the parent image is
commonly found in the psychoneurosis and is
what is meant by "regression." I have also
dwelt at some length on the fact that it is by
securing a modification in the immediate
social environment, ideally or actually, that

138

THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD

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 with-
draw from the social as a whole and center in
the group who have become a crowd. The
Church is "in the world but not of it." The
nation is an end in itself, so is every crowd.
Transference to the idea of the crowd differs
then from the normal substitutes which we
find for the object from which affection is
withdrawn. It is itself a kind of regression.
In the psychoneurosis — in paranoia most
clearly — ^the patient's attempt to rationalize
this shifting of interest gives rise to the closed
systems and ideal reconstructions of the world
mentioned in the passage quoted from Brill.

Does the crowd's thinking commonly show
a like tendency to construct an imaginary
world of thought-forms and then take refuge
in its ideal system? As we saw at the begin-
ning of our discussion, it does. The focusing
of general attention upon the abstract and
universal is a necessary step in the develop-
ment 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 be-
forehand. This accounts for what Le Bon
termed the "credulity" of the crowd. But
the crowd believes only what it wants to be-

139

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

lieve 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 usu-
ally supports? They are truths that are of such ad-
vanced age that they are beginning to break up. . . .
These "majority truths" are like last year's cured
meat — like rancid tainted ham; and they are the
origin of the moral scurvy that is rampant in our com-
munities. . . . 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 propa-
ganda that he can hardly think of any matter
in other terms. It is almost impossible to
keep the consideration of any subject of gen-
eral interest above the dilemmas of partisan

140

THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD

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 in-
formation. 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 think-
ing— ^have been unable to save themselves
from a doctrinaire economic orthodoxy of
spirit which is often more dogmatic and in-
tolerant than that of the ''religious folks"
to whose alleged "narrow-mindedness" every
Socialist, even while repeating his daily chap- ^
ter 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 sys-
tems of logic are created to enhance the self-

141

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

feeling, they appear to consciousness as highly
impersonal and abstract. As in the intel-
lectualist 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 thinker's peculiar
"temperament." Elsewhere he speaks of the
"Sentiment of Rationality." For a discus-
sion 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 suflS-
cient 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 log-
ically ordered system or world of "pure rea-
son." Ideals, not concrete things, are the
true realities. The world with which we are
always wrestling is but a distorted manifesta-
tion, a jumbled, stereotyped copy of what
James ironically referred to as "the de luxe

142

THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD

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 Gi-eece 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 " unimag-
inary 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 incur-
able 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 foimd
only by means of ''pure knowledge," and, to
give a familiar quotation from the Phsedo:

If we would have pure knowledge of anything we
must be quit of the body; the soul in herself must

143

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

behold things in themselves; and then we shall at-
tain 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 ephem-
eral personalities with their imperfections
and problems are unknown. A "thing in it-
self," 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

144

THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD

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 injus-
tice. . . . 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 indig-
enous philosophy, the old British empiricism, was
useless for this purpose. For though a form of intel-
lectualism, 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 unwar-
ranted 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 limita-
tions, 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 knock-
down force of sheer scientific fact. But might it not

146

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

be possible to change the venue, to shift the battle-
ground 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 reali-
ties— 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.

Schiller's sense of humor doubtless leads him
to exaggerate somewhat the deliberateness of
this importation of German metaphysics.
That these borrowed transcendental and dia-
lectical systems served their purpose in the
warfare of traditional theologies against Sci-
ence 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 it-
self 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 descrip-
tion of these motives, so far as it goes, is an

146

THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD

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 one's spiritual pride
to feel oneself a "part" or "manifestation" or "ve-
hicle" or "reproduction" of the Absolute Mind, and
to some this feeling affords so much strength and com-
fort 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 aflfliction 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 rest-
less vicissitudes of phenomena it seems to secure us
against falling out of the Universe. It assures us a

147

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

priori — and that is its supreme value — that the cosmic
order cannot fall to pieces and leave us dazed and con-
founded among the debris. . . . We want to have an
absolute assurance a jyriori concerning the future, and
the thought of the absolute seems designed to give it.
It is probably this last notion that, consciously or un-
consciously, weighs most in the psychology of the
Absolutists' creed.

In this connection the reader will recall the
passage quoted from Adler's The Neurotic Con-
stitution, in which it was shown that the ficti-
tious ''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 cal-
culated to render the forces with which he
must deal concretely more congenial and hos-
pitable 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,

148

THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD

as I believe, logically untenable, it not infre-
quently 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 inevi-
tably distorts the meaning of personal living,
robs our world and our acts of their feeling of
reality, serves as an instrument for "regres-
sion" or withdrawal of interest from the real
tasks and objects of living men and women,
and in fact functions for much the same pur-
pose, 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 the-
ories, 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,

149

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

in which science, by discovering that when-
ever a given combination of elements occurs,
a definitely foreseen result will follow, is justi-
fied in ignoring time and treating certain
futures as if they were already tucked up the
sleeves of the present. It should be remem-
bered 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 "ab-
solute." I know a number of economic de-
terminists, for instance, who just cannot get
out of their heads the notion that social evolu-
tion 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

150

THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD

the abstract idea of his species. Notwith-
standing 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 tJiis leads me to
my point. It is no mere accident that the
crowd takes to rationalistic philosophies Uke 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 Plato's. 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 self-
hood; 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 men-
tal 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.

161

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

But all this is mere swagger and "f rightful-
ness," 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 ma-
terialist 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, So-
cialists never become a crowd without becom-
ing as intellectualist as Fichte or Hegel.
There is a sense in which Marx himself never
succeeded in escaping Hegel's 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 uncom-
promising spirit and insistence upon general
uniformity of opinions; the same orthodoxy.
. All orthodoxy is nothing other than the will
I of the crowd to keep itself together. With all
kinds of crowds, also, there is the same di-
verting of attention from the personal and the
concrete to tJie impersonal and the general;
the same flight from reality to the tran-
scendental for escape, for consolation, for

152

\

THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD

defense, for vindication; the same fiction that
existence is at bottom a sort of logical propo-
sition, 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 ex-
plained 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. Augus-
tine, Thomas Aquinas, Anselm, Rousseau,
Kant, Hegel, Green, etc., have often been
called solitaiy 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, Nie-
tzsche, 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

11 153

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

seldom mentioned in popular assemblies ex-
cept 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 em-
pirically. 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, uni-
versal, waiting just around the comer 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

154

THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD

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 agree-
ment 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 excep-
tions 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 prin-
ciples. 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 crowd's
real purpose by challenging them to deny the
righteousness of the professed justifications of

155

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

that purpose. It is said that the Sioux In-
dians, 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, sanc-
tions, taboos, which none but the intellectu-
ally 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 intel-
lectual curiosity of the members of the group
is kept within proper bounds. Hostile per-
sons 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 them-
selves in the Flag." It is an interesting fact
that the most antagonistic crowds profess
much the same set of principles. The "sec-
ondary rationalization" of crowds, both
Northern and Southern, at the time of the
Civil War, made use of our traditional prin-
ciples of American Liberty, and Christian

156

THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD

Morality. We have seen both pacifist and mil-
itarist 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."

As an illustration of this sort of reasoning, I
give here a few passages from a propagandist
publication in which the crowd-will to domi-
nate takes the typical American method of
striving to force its cult ideas upon the com-
munity as a whole by means of restrictive
moralist legislation — in this case attempt is
made to prohibit the exhibition of motion
pictures on Sunday. That the demand for
such legislation is for the most part a pure
class-crowd phenomenon, designed to enhance
the self-feeling and economic interests of the
"reformers," by keeping the poor from having
a good time, is I think, rather obvious. The
reasoning here is interesting, as the real mo-
tive is so thinly disguised by pietistic plati-
tudes that the two follow each other in
alternate succession :

(1) Sunday Movies are not needed. The people
have six days and six nights each week on which to
attend the movies. Is not that plenty of time for all.'^

(2) Sunday Movie Theaters commercialize the
Christian Sabbath. While "the Sabbath was made for
man," yet it is GocTs day. We have no right to sell it
for business purposes. It is a day for rest and worship,

157

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

not a day for greed and gain. Sunday would, of course,
be the best day in the week financially for the movies.
It would also be the best day in the week for the open
saloons and horse-racing, but that is no reason why
these should be allowed on Sunday. The Sabbath must
not be commercialized.

(3) Sunday Movie Theaters destroy the rest and quiet
of many people, especially those who live in the residential
district of cities and in the neighborhood where such
motion-picture theaters are located. Great crowds
pour along the streets near such theaters, often breaking
the Sunday quiet of that part of the city by loud and
boisterous talk.

Thousands of people every year are moving away
from the downtown noisy districts of the cities out into
the quiet residential districts in order to have quiet
Sundays. But when a motion-picture theater comes
and locates next to their homes, or in their block, as
has been done in many cases, and great noisy, boisterous
crowds surge back and forth before their homes all
Sunday afternoon and evening, going to the movies,
they are being robbed of thai for which they paid their
money when they bought a home in thai quiet part of the
city. . . .

(4) . . . Anything that injures the Christian Sabbath
injures the Christian churches, and certainly Sunday
motion-picture theaters, wherever allowed, do injure
the Christian Sabbath. . . .

Dr. Wilbur F. Crafts of Washington, D. C, probably
the greatest authority on the Sabbath question in this
country, says, "The Sabbath -keeping nations are the
strongest physically, mentally, moraMy, financially, and
politically." Joseph Cook said, "It is no accident that
the nations that keep the Sabbath most carefully are
those where there is the most political freedom." Sab-
bath-breaking nations gradually lose their political freedom,

15S

THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD

(5) Sunday Movie Theaters injure the Christian
Sabbath and thus injure the morals of the people.
Anything that injures the morals of the people, injures
the nation itself. From a patriotic standpoint, we ought
to stand for strict observance of the Christian Sabbath,
as past experience has shown and the testimony of
many witnesses proves that a disregard of the Christian
Sabbath produces crime and immorality and tends to
destroy the free institutions which have helped to make
our nation great. . . .

Fundamentally, all such vicious laws are unconstitu-
tional.

Sunday Movie Theaters disregard the rights of labor
.... Canon William Sheafe Chase has aptly said, "No
man has the Christ spirit who wants a better time on
Sunday than he is willing to give everyone else." . . .

Col. Fairbanks, the famous scale manufacturer, said:
" I can tell by watching the men at work Monday which
spent Sunday in sport and which at home, church, or
Sabbath-school. The latter do more and better work.**

Superintendents of large factories in Milwaukee and
elsewhere have said, "When our men go on a Sunday
excursion, some cannot work Monday, and many who
work cannot earn their wages, while those who had no
sport Sunday do their best day*s work Monday." (Italics
mine.)

We need not be surprised to find that the
closed ideational system which in the first
instance is a refuge from the real, becomes in
turn a device for imposing one's will upon his
fellows. The believer's ego is served in both
instances. It is interesting to note also that
this self-feeling appears in crowd-thinking as
its very opposite. The greatest enemy of per-

159

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

sonality is the crowd. The crowd does not
want valuable men; it wants only useful men.
Everyone must justify his existence by ap-
pealing to the not-self. One may do nothing
for his own sake. He may not even strive
for spiritual excellence for such a reason.
He must live for "principle," for "the great
cause," for impersonal abstractions — which
is to say, he must live for his crowd, and so
make it easier for the other members to do
the same with a good face.

The complex of ideas in which the crowd-
mind as we have seen takes refuge, being neces-
sarily made up of abstract generalizations,
serves the crowd-will to social dominance
through the very claim to universality which
such ideas exert. Grant that an idea is an
absolute truth, and it follows, of course, that
it must be true on all occasions and for every-
one. The crowd is justified, therefore, in
sacrificing people to its ideal — ^itself. The
idea is no longer an instrument of living; it
is an imperative. It is not yours to use the
idea; the idea is there to use you. You have
ceased to be an end. Anything about you
that does not partake of the reality of this idea
has no right to be, any experience of yours
which happens to be incomimensurable with
this idea loses its right to be; for experience
as such has now only a "phenomenal exist-
ence." The crowd, by identifying its will to

160

THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD

power with this idea, becomes itself absolute.
Your personal self, as an end, is quite as
unwelcome to the Absolute as to the crowd.
There must be no private property in thought
or motive. By making everybody's business
my business, I have made my business every-
body's business. There may be only one
standard — that of our crowd, which, because
of its very universal and impersonal character
is really nobody's.

The absolutism of the crowd-mind with its
consequent hostility to conscious personality
finds a perfect rationalization in the ethical
philosophy of Kant. The absolutism of the
idea of Duty is less skillfully elaborated in its
popular crowd-manifestations, but in its essen-
tials it is always present, as propaganda every-
where when carefully annalyzed will show.
We must not be deceived by Kant's assertion
that the individual is an end. This indi-
vidual is not you or I, or anyone; it is a mere
logical abstraction. By declaring that every-
one is equally an end, Kant ignores all personal
differences, and therefore the fact of individu-
ality as such. We are each an end in respect
to those qualities only in which we are iden-
tical— ^namely, in that we are "rational be-
ings." But this rational being is not a per-
sonal intelligence; it is a fiction, a bundle of
mental faculties assumed a priori to exist, and
then treated as if it were universally and

161

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

equally applicable to all actually existing
intelligences.

In arguing that "I am never to act other-
wise than so that I could also will that my
maxim should become a universal law," Kant
may be easily understood as justifying any
crowd in seeking to make its peculiar maxims
universal laws. Who but a Rationalist or a
crowd-man presumes to have found the "uni-
versal law," who else would have the effron-
tery to try to legislate for every conscience in
existence.'^ But this presumption has its
price. In thus universalizing my moral will,
I wholly depersonalize it. He says:

It is of extreme importance to remember that we
must not allow ourselves to think of deducing the
reality of this principle from the particular attributes
of human nature. For duty is to be a practical uncon-
ditional necessity of action; it must therefore hold
for all rational beings (to whom an imperative can
apply at all), and for this reason only be also a law for
all human wills. On the contrary, whatever it deduces
from the particular natural characteristics of humanity,
from certain feelings and propensions, nay, even if
possible from any particular tendency proper to human
reason, and which need not necessarily hold for the
will of every rational being, this may indeed supply us
with a maxim but not with a law; with a subjective
principle on which we may have a propension or inr
clination to act, but not with an objective principle on
which we should be enjoined to act, even though aU our
propensionSy inclinations, and natural dispositions were
opposed to it. In fact, the sublimity and intrinsic dig-

162

THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD

nity of the command in duty are so much the more evi-
dent the less subjective impulses favor it, and the more
they oppose it [italics here are mine], without being
able in the slightest degree to weaken the obligation of
the law or to diminish its validity.

. . . An action done from duty derives its moral
worth not from the purpose which is to be attained by
it, but from the maxim by which it is determined.
It (this moral worth) cannot lie anywhere but in the
principle of The WilU without regard to the ends which
can be attained by such action.

This loss of the conscious self in the univer-
sal, this turning away from the empirically
known, this demand that an a "priori principle
be followed to its deadly practical conclusion
regardless of the ends to which it leads, is of
utmost importance for our study. It is pre-
cisely what the paranoiac does after his own
fashion. In crowd-thinking it is often made
the instrument of wholesale destruction and
human slaughter. The mob is ever moti-
vated by this logic of negation, and of auto-
matic behavior. It is thus that compulsive
thinking sways vast hordes of men and
women, impelling them, in the very name of
truth or righteousness, to actions of the most
atrocious character. It is this which robs
most popular movements of their intelligent
purposiveness, unleashes the fanatic and the
bigot, and leads men to die and to kill for a
phrase. This way of thinking points straight
to Salem, Massachusetts, to the torturc-

16S

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

chamber, the pile of fagots and the mill pond
at Rosmersholm.

The habit of thinking as a crowd is so wide-
spread that it is impossible to trace the influ-
ence of its rationalistic negations in the daily
mental habits of most of us. We play out
our lives as if we were but acting a part which
some one had assigned to us. The fact that
we are ourselves realities, as inevitable as
falling rain, and with th,e same right to be as
the rocks and hills, positively startles us. We
feel that we must plead extenuation, apologize
for our existence, as if the end and aim of
living were to serve or vindicate a Good which,
being sufficient in itself and independent of
us, can never be realized as actually good for
anybody. We behave as if we were un-
profitable servants, cringing before wrathful
ideas which, though our own creations, we
permit to lord it over us. Our virtues we
regard not as expressions of ourselves or as
habitual ways of reaching desirable goods, but
as if they were demanded of us unwillingly by
something not self. We should remind our-
selves that these big words we idolize have no
eyes to see us and no hearts to care what we
do, that they are but symbols of ideas which
we might find very useful if we dared to be-
come masters of them. The most common use
we make of such ideas is to beat one another
and ourselves into line with them, or enforce

164

THE ABSOLUTISM OF THE CROWD

upon ourselves and others the collection of a
debt which was contracted only by our uncon-
scious desire to cheat at cards in the game of
civilization.

A conscious recognition of this desire and its
more deliberate and voluntary resistance in
ourselves rather than in our neighbors, a
candid facing of the fact of what we really
are and really want, and a mutual readjust-
ment of our relations on this recognized basis
would doubtless deliver us from the compul-
sion of crowd-thinking in somewhat the same
way that psychoanalysis is said to cure the
neurotic by revealing to him his unconscious
wish.

That some such cure is an imperative social
need is evident. To-day the mob lurks just
under the skin of most of us, both ignorant
and educated. The ever-increasing frequency
of outbreaks of mob violence has its source in
the crowd-thinking which is everywhere en-
couraged. The mob which may at any time
engulf us is, after all, but the logical conclu-
sion and sudden ripening of thought processes
which are commonly regarded as highly re-
spectable, idealistic, and moral.

VII

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

THE crowd-mind is seen at its best and at
its worst in revolution. To many minds,
revolution is so essentially a crowd phe-
nomenon that the terms revolution and crowd-
rule are almost synonymous. "Hurrah, the
mob rules Russia," cried certain radicals in
^he spring of 1917 — **Let the people rule
everywhere." Others, more conservative, saw
in every extravagant deed and atrocity al-
leged to have happened in Russia only the
thing logically to be expected where the mob
ndes. The idea of revolution is itself so com-
monly a crowd-idea that the thinking — if
thinking it may be called — of most people on
this subject depends principally upon which
crowd we happen to belong to, the crowd
which sustains the ego-feeling of its members
by the hope of revolution, or the crowd which,
for similar reason, brands everything which
opposes its interests, real or imaginary, as
"anarchy" and "Bolshevism."
If the word "revolution" be taken to

166

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

mean fundamental change in men's habits of
thought, and life, and the forms of their rela-
tions to one another, then it may be said that
great "revolutions may be and have been
achieved with a relatively small degree of
crowd-thinking and mob violence." Much of
the normal development of civilization, for
instance, the great scientific advance of the
nineteenth century, the spread of culture, the
creation of artistic values, the rise in the
standard of living, is change of this sort.
Such change is, however, gradual. It is
brought about by countless concrete adapta-
tions, by thinking always toward realizable
ends. New and often unforeseeable results
are thus reached; but they are reached, as in
all organic growth and in all soimd thinking,
by a series of successful adjustments within
the real. True progress is doubtless made up
of changes of this sort. But for the course of
progress to run on uninterrupted and un-
defeated we should have to be, both in our
individual and social behavior, the reasonable
beings which certain nineteenth-century util-
itarians mistook us for.

It is the fool thing, the insincere thing, that
more commonly happens in matters social
and political. The adjustment reached is
not often a solution of a social problem worked
out deliberately on the "greatest-happiness"
principle. It is commonly a status quOy or

167

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

balance of power among contending crowds,
each inspired by the fiction of its own im-
portance, by self-ideahzation, and desire to
rule. It is an unstable equilibrixim usually
held in place for the time by a dominant
crowd. This dominant crowd may itself be
composed of quarreling factions, but these
parties, so long as they share enough of the
supremacy to keep up their self -feeling, so
long, in fact, as their members may even be
able to make themselves believe that they, too,
are in the upper set, or so long as they con-
tinue to hope for success in the social game as
now played, unite in repeating the catch-
words which justify their crowd in its su-
premacy. The dominant group identifies its
own interests with the general welfare. And
in the sense that some sort of order, or any at
all, is to be preferred to social chaos, there is
an element of truth in this identification.

The fact remains, however, that the domi-
nant crowd possesses always much of the
crowd-spirit which originally secured for it its
enviable position. Its ideas, like those of all
crowds, are devices for sustaining the self-
feeling of its members, for protecting itself, for
keeping the group together, for justification.
They are only secondarily, if at all, instru-
ments for dealing with new and perplexing
social situations. It cannot be denied that
a certain set of opinions, prejudices, man-

168

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

nerisms, ceremonies "go with" the social
position which corresponds to them. They
are the ready-made habits of the "set" or
class. They are badges by which the "gentle-
man" is distinguished, the evening clothes of
the psyche, as it were. Many of these crowd-
forms represent true values of living, some of
them are useful in our dealings with reality;
if this were not so, if such spiritual tattooings
or ceremonial forms were wholly harmful, the
crowd which performed them would be at such
a disadvantage that it could not hold its own.
But that considerations of utility — other than
the function which such ceremonialism is
known to have for the unconscious always —
do not directly govern these forms of thought
and behavior is seen in the fact that so many
of them, as Sumner says of "folkways," are
either harmful or useless in dealing with
matters of fact.

The dominant crowd, therefore, in just so
far as it must remain a crowd in order to secure
its own position of supremacy, must strive to
force all social realities into the forms of its
own conflicts and dilemmas. Inevitably the
self-feeling of a great many people, who are
forced by the dominant crowd to conform and
labor with no compensation, is hurt. They
cannot but contrast their own lot with that
of their more fortunate neighbors. Of all
things, people probably resist most the feeling

12 1«9

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

of inferiority. Any suggestion that the differ-
ence in social position is due to a similar differ-
ence in personal worth or in ability is hotly
resented. The resentment is in no wise
abated by the fact that in some cases this sug-
gestion may be true. Compensations are at
once created by the unconscious. In mediaeval
times "all men were brothers and were equal
before the altars of the Church and in heaven."
Thus distinctions of merit, other than those
which prevailed in the social order, were set
up in the interest of the common man.

As the influence of the Renaissance directed
general attention from the realm of the
spiritual to practical affairs of earth, these
compensations changed from thoughts of the
future world to dreams of the future of this
world. The injured self-feeling dwells upon
the economic or political inequalities which
flow from the dominance of the ruling crowd.
The injustices and acts of exploitation, which
are certainly neither new nor rare occurrences
in human relations, are seized upon as if it
were these things, not the assumption to
superiority, which were the issue at stake.

At the time of the French Revolution
the Third Estate, or Bourgeois, which showed
itself quite as capable of exploiting the poor
as ever were the older aristocrats, saw itself
only as part of the wronged and exploited
"people." The sufferings of the poor, which

170

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

it was frequently even then profiting in quite
as heartily, to say the least, as the titled
nobility, were represented as the grievance of
all mankind against the hated nobility. That
the ideas of *' liberty, equality, and fraternity"
which these good tradesmen preached may
easily become the sort of compensatory ideas
we have been discussing is shown by the fact
of the genuine astonishment and indignation
of the burghers when later their employees
made use of this same phrase in the struggles
between labor and capital. Sans-culottism
had quite as many psychological motives as
economic behind it.

How pompous, hateful, and snobbish were
those titled folk with their powdered wigs,
carriages, fine clothes, and their exclusive
social gatherings to which honest citizens,
often quite as wealthy as themselves, were not
invited. If the "people" — that is, the burgh-
ers themselves — only had a chance they would
be just as fine ladies and gentlemen as those
who merely inherited their superiority. Down
with the aristocrats ! All men were equal and
always had been. There must be fraternity
and the carier ouvert les talents, in other words,
brotherhood and free competition.

I am sure, from all I have ever seen or read
of social revolt and unrest, that this injured
self-feeling, or defense against the sense of
personal inferiority, while not the only motive,

171

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

is the most powerful one at work. It crops
out everywhere, in the layman's hatred of the
clergy during the Reformation, in that curious
complex of ideas whereby the uneducated
often look upon a college diploma as some-
thing little short of magical, and defend their
ego against this ridiculously exaggerated mark
of distinction and accompanying feeling of
/ self-reproachby a slur at "high-brows." Few

) people realize how general this feeling is; the

trick of making fun of the educated is one of
the commonest forms of crowd-himaor in
America, both in vaudeville and in popular
oratory. I have previously pointed out the
fact that the religious revival in our day is to
a great extent characterized by a popular
resistance to scholars. No one can read Mr.
Simday's sermons and deny this fact. The
City of New York gave the largest majority
in its history to the candidate for the office of
mayor who made opposition to "experts"
the main issue in his campaign. Scores of
times I have heard popular speakers resort to
this trick to gain favor with their audiences,
and I cannot remember ever having known
such sentiments to fail to gain applause— I
am not speaking now of strictly academic
groups, but of general gatherings.

The point of interest here is that these same
people have a most extravagant notion of the
value of the academic training which they

172

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

encourage the crowd speaker in ridiculing. I
have made it a practice of talking with a
great many people personally and drawing
them out on this point, and I have found that
this is almost uniformly the case. F. B., a
cigar maker by trade, says, *^0h, if I had only
had sense enough to go on to school when I
had the opportunity!" E. L., a mechanic,
says, "I might have been somebody, if I had
been given any chance to get an education."
R., a sort of jack-of-all-trades, says, "If I
only had N.'s education, I'd be a millionaire."
B., a farmer with limited intellectual interests,
says, "I tell you, my boys are not going to be
like me; they have got to go to college."
G., a waiter, says, "I don't know much," and
then proceeds to impress me with the latest
bit of academic information which he has
picked up. C, a printer, who has been
moderately successful, says: "I'd give ten
thousand dollars right this minute if I knew

Greek; now there is and there is ,

neighbors of mine, they're highly educated.
When I'm with them I'm ashamed and feel
like a dub."

When, on such occasions, I repeatedly say
that the average academic student really
learns hardly anything at all of the classic
languages, and cite the small fruits of my own
years of tedious study as an example, the
eflFect produced is invariably comforting —

173

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

until I add that one need not attend a uni-
versity seven years or even four to become
educated, but that nearly everyone with
ability to learn and with genuine intellectual
interests may achieve a remarkable degree of
learning. The answer of the perplexed person
is then often an extenuation. "Well, you see,
a busy person or a working man is so tired
after the day's work that he has no energy
left for study," or it is, "Wait till the working
class have more leisure, then they, too, can
be cultivated." Passing over this extenua-
tion, which ignores the fact that some of the
best informed and clearest thinking people
one meets are working people, while the aver-
age university graduate leads anything but
an intellectual life, it can hardly be denied,
I think, that our crowd cult of anti-
"highbrowism" is really a defense mechanism
against an inner feeling of inferiority. Now
the interesting thing about this feeling of
inferiority is the exaggerated notion of the
superiority of the college-trained, which is
entertained chiefly by the uneducated them-
selves. What appears here is in fact nothing
other than a cheapening of the idea of superi-
ority. Personal excellence is something which
anyone may attain; it is not something con-
genital, but something to be added on; one
"gets an education," possesses something of
advantage, merely by a few years of conven-

174

REVOLUTIONAKY CROWDS

tional study of books. Anyone might do
that, therefore. "I, too, if I only cared to, or
had been given opportunity, might now be
famous." "The difference between myself and
the world's greatest genius is not a spiritual
chasm which I could not myself, at least
hypothetically, cross." **It is rather an 'ac-
quired character,' a mere fruit of special oppor-
tunity— which in a few cases it doubtless may
be — but it is something external; at bottom
we are all equal."

Many facts may be advanced to corroborate
the results of our analysis here. The crowd
always resents the Carlyle, William James,
Nietzsche, Goethe theory of genius. Genius
is not congenital superiority. It is the result
of hard work. The genius is not a unique
personal fact, he is a "representative man."
He says just what his age is thinking. The
inarticulate message of his contemporaries
simply becomes articulate in some one, and
behold a genius. In other words, I suppose,
all Vienna, messenger boys and bootblacks
especially, were suddenly fascinated by Schil-
ler's "Ode to Joy" and went about whistling
improvised musical renderings of the theme
of this poem, till the deaf Beethoven heard
and wrote these whistlings down in the form
of the Ninth Symphony.

According to the crowd, Luther did not
create the Reformation, or Petrarch the Ren-

175

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

aissance; these movements themselves created
their leaders and founders; all that the genius
did was to interpret and faithfully obey the
People's will. Ergo, to be a genius one need
only study hard enough to be able to tell the
people what they already think. The su-
periority of genius is therefore no different
from that of any educated person; except in
degree of application. Anyone of us might
possess this superiority. In other words, the
"intellectual snobbishness" which the crowd
resents is nothing else than the crowd-man's
own fiction of self-importance, projected upon
those whose imagined superiority he envies.
It is recognized, even exaggerated by the un-
learned, because it is precisely the sort of
superiority which the ignorant man himself,
in his ignorance, imagines that he himself
would display if he ''only had the chance,"
and even now possesses unrecognized.

We have made the foregoing detour because
I think it serves to illustrate, in a way, the
psychic processes behind much revolutionary
propaganda and activity. I would not at-
tempt to minimize the extent of the social
injustice and economic slavery which a domi-
nant crowd, whether ecclesiastical, feudal, or
capitaHstic, is guilty of in its dealings with
its subjects. But eveiy dominant crowd,
certain sections of the "proletariat" as quickly
as any other, will resort to such practices, and

176

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

will alike justify them by moral catchwords
the minute its supremacy over other crowds
gives it opportunity. Therefore there is a
certain amount of tautology in denouncing
the "master class" for its monstrous abuses.
That the real point at issue between the
dominant crowd and the under crowd is the
assumed personal superiority of the members
of the former, rather than the economic
*' exploitation" which it practices, is shown
by the fact that the French Revolution was
led by wealthy bourgeois, and that the
leading revolutionary element in the working
class to-day consists, not of the "down and
out" victims of capitalist exploitation, but
of the members of the more highly skilled and
better paid trades, also of certain intellectuals
who are not "proletarians" at all.

And now we come to our point: the fiction
of superiority of the dominant crowd, just as
in the case of the assumed personal superiority
of the intellectuals, is resented by the under
crowd because it is secretly recognized by the
under crowd. Of course the dominant crowd,
like all crowds, is obsessed by its feelings of
self-importance, and this feeling is apparently
vindicated by its very social position. But
the fiction is recognized at its full face value,
and therefore resented by the under crowds,
because that is precisely the sort of personal
supremacy to which they also aspire.

177

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

One commonly hears it said to-day, by
those who have made the catchwords of
democracy their crowd cult, that the issue in
modern society is between democracy and
capitalism. In a sense this may be true, but
only in a superficial sense; the real issue is
between the personal self as a social entity
and the crowd. Capitalism is, to my mind,
the logical first fruit of so-called democracy.
Capitalism is simply the social supremacy of
the trader-man crowd. For a hundred years
and more commercial ability — that of or-
ganizing industry and selling goods — ^has been
rewarded out of all proportion to any other
kind of ability, because, in the first place, it
leads to the kind of success which the ordinary
man most readily recognizes and envies —
large houses, fine clothes, automobiles, ex-
clusive clubs, etc. A Whittier may be ever
so great a poet, and yet sit beside the stove in
the general store of his little country village,
and no one thinks he is so very wonderful.
Some may envy him his fame, but few will
envy and therefore be fascinated by that in
him which they do not understand. But a
multimillionaire in their community is under-
stood; everyone can see and envy his success;
he is at once both envied and admired.

Moreover, the commercial ability is the sort
which the average man most commonly
thinks he possesses in some degree. While,

178

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

therefore, he grumbles at the unjust inequali-
ties in wealth which exist in modern society,
and denounces the successful business man as
an exploiter and fears his power, the average
man will nevertheless endure all this, much in
the same spirit that a student being initiated
into a fraternity will take the drubbing,
knowing well that his own turn at the fun will
come later. It is not until the members of
the under crowd begin to suspect that their
own dreams of *' aping the rich" may never
come true that they begin to entertain revolu-
tionary ideas. In other words, forced to
abandon the hope of joining the present
dominating crowd, they begin to dream of
supplanting and so dispossessing this crowd
by their own crowd.

That the dominant crowd is just as much to
blame for this state of affairs as the under
crowd, perhaps more so, is shown by the his-
tory of every period preceding a revolutionary
outbreak. I will dwell at some length on this
fact later. My point here is that, first, a revo-
lution, in the sense that the word means a
violent uprising against the existing order, is
a psychological crowd-phenomenon — and sec-
ond, that it takes two crowds to make a
revolution.

Writers, like Le Bon, have ignored the part
which the dominant crowd plays in such
events. They have thought of revolution

179

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

only as the behavior of the under crowd.
They have assumed that the crowd and
the people were the same. Their writings
are hardly more than conservative warnings
against the excess and wickedness of the
popular mind once it is aroused. Sumner
says:

Moral traditions are the guides which no one can
afford to neglect. They are in the mores, and they are
lost in every great revolution of the mores. Then the
men are morally lost.

Le Bon says, writing of the French Revo-
lution :

The people may kill, burn, ravage, commit the most
frightful cruelties, glorify its hero to-day and throw him
into the gutter to-morrow; it is all one; the politicians
will not cease to vaunt its virtues, its high wisdom, and
to bow to its every decision.

Now in what does this entity really consist, this
mysterious fetich which revolutionists have revered
for more than a century.?

It may be decomposed into two distinct categories.
The first includes the peasants, traders, and workers of
all sorts who need tranquillity and order that they may
exercise their calling. This people forms the majority,
but a majority which never caused a revolution. Liv-
ing in laborious silence, it is ignored by historians.

The second category, which plays a capital part in
all national disturbances, consists of a subversive social
residue dominated by a criminal mentality. Degener-
ates of alcoholism and poverty, thieves, beggars, desti-
tute "casuals," indifferent workers without employ-

180

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

ment — ^these constitute the dangerous bulk of the
armies of insurrection. ... To this sinister substratum
are due the massacres which stain all revolutions. . . .
To elements recruited from the lowest dregs of the pop-
ulace are added by contagion a host of idle and in-
different persons who are simply drawn into the move-
ment. They shout because there are men shouting,
and revolt because there is a revolt, without having the
vaguest idea of the cause of the shouting or revolution.
The suggestive power of the environment absolutely
hypnotized them.

This idea, which is held with some variation
by Sumner, Gobineau, Faguet, and Conway,
is, I believe, both unhistorical and unpsycho-
logical, because it is but a half-truth. This
substratum of the population does at the
moment of revolution become a dangerous
mob. Such people are unadjusted to any
social order, and the least deviation from the
routine of daily life throws them oflF their
balance. The relaxation of authority at the
moment when one group is supplanting an-
other in position of social control, is to these
people like the two or three days of inter-
regnum between the pontificates of Julius and
Leo, described by Cellini. Those who need
some one to govern them, and they are many,
find their opportunity in the general disturb-
ance. They suddenly react to the revolu-
tionary propaganda which up to this minute
they have not heeded, they are controlled by
revolutionary crowd-ideas in a somnambulistic

181

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

manner, and like automatons carry these ideas
precipitately to their deadly conclusion. But
this mob is not the really revolutionary crowd
and in the end it is always put back in its
place by the newly dominant crowd. The
really revolutionary crowd consists of the
group who are near enough the dominant
crowd to be able to envy its "airs" with some
show of justification, and are strong enough
to dare try issue with it for supreme position.
Madame Holland, it will be remembered,
justified her opposition to aristocrats on the
principle of equality and fraternity, but she
could never forget her resentment at being
made, in the home of a member of this aris-
tocracy, to eat with the servants.

What Le Bon and others seem to ignore is
that the ruling class may be just as truly a
crowd as the insurrectionary mob, and that
the violent behavior of revolutionary crowds
is simply the logic of crowd-thinking carried
to its swift practical conclusion.

It is generally assumed that a revolution is
a sudden and violent change in the form of
government. From what has been said it
will be seen that this definition is too narrow.
History will bear me out in this. The
Protestant Reformation was certainly a revo-
lution, as Le Bon has shown, but it affected
more than the government or even the organ-
ization of the Church. The French Revolu-

182

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

tion changed the form of the government in
France several times before it was done, pass-
ing through a period of imperial rule and even
a restoration of the monarchy. But the
revolution as such survived. Even though
later a Bourbon or a prince of the House of
Orleans sat on the throne of France, the re-
stored king or his successor was hardly more
than a figurehead. A new class, the Third
Estate, remained in fact master of France.
There had been a change in the ownership of
the land; power through the control of vested
property rested with the group which in 1789
began its revolt under the leadership of Mira-
beau. A new dictatorship had succeeded the
old. And this is what a revolution is — the
dictatorship of a new crowd. The Russian
revolutionists now candidly admit this fact in
their use of the phrase ''the dictatorship of the
proletariat." Of course it is claimed that
this dictatorship is really the dictatorship of
"all the people." But this is simply the old
fiction with which every dominant crowd dis-
guises seizure of power. Capitalist republic-
anism is also the rule of all the people, and
the pope and the king, deriving their au-
thority from God, are really but "the servants
of all."

As we have seen, the crowd mind as such
wills to dominate. Society is made up of
struggle groups, or organized crowds, each

183

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

seeking the opportunity to make its catch-
words realities and to establish itself in the
position of social control. The social order is
always held intact by some particular crowd
which happens to be dominant. A revolu-
tion occurs when a new crowd pushes the old
one out and itself climbs into the saddle.
When the new crowd is only another faction
within the existing dominant crowd, like one
of our established political parties, the suc-
cession will be accomplished without resort to
violence, since both elements of the ruling
crowd recognize the rules of the game. It will
also not result in far-reaching social changes
for the same reason. A true revolution oc-
curs when the diflference between the dominant
crowd and the one which supplants it is so
great as to produce a general social upheaval.
The Reformation, the French Revolution, and
the "Bolshevist" coup d'etat in Russia, all
were of this nature. A new social leadership
was established and secured by a change in
each case in the personnel of the ownership
of such property as would give the owners the
desired control. In the first case there was a
transfer of property in the church estates,
either to the local congregations, or the state,
or the denomination. In the second case the
property transferred was property in land, and
with the Russian revolutionists landed prop-
erty was given to the peasants and vested

184

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

capital turned over to the control of industrial
workers.

Those who lay all emphasis on this transfer
of property naturally see only economic
causes in revolutionary movements. Eco-
nomics, however, is not a science of impersonal
things. It treats rather of men's relations
to things, and hence to one another. It has
to do with valuations and principles of ex-
change and ownership, all of which need
psychological restatement. The transfer of
the ownership of property in times of revolu-
tion to a new class is not an end, it is a means
to a new crowd's social dominance. The doc-
trines, ideals, and principles believed by the
revolutionary crowd also serve this end of
securing its dominance, as do the social
changes which it eflFects, once in power.

Revolutions do not occur directly from
abuses of power, for in that case there would
be nothing but revolution all the time, since
every dominant crowd has abused its power.
It is an interesting fact that revolution gener-
ally occurs after the abuses of which the revo-
lutionists complain have been in great measure
stopped — ^that is, after the ruling crowd has
begun to make eflForts at reform. The Refor-
mation occurred in the pontificate of Leo X.
If it had been the result of intolerable abuse
alone, it would have happened in the time of
Alexander VI, Borgia. The French Revolu-

13 185

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

tion fell upon the mild head of Louis XVI,
though the wrongs which it tried to right
mostly happened in the reign of his predeces-
sor. In most cases the abuses, the existence
of which a revolutionary crowd uses for propa-
ganda purposes, are in turn repeated in new
form by itself after it becomes dominant.
The Reformers in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries resorted to much the same
kind of persecution from which they had them-
selves earlier suffered. The Constituent As-
sembly, though it had demanded liberty, soon
set up a more outrageous tyranny through its
own committees than any that the Louies
had dreamed of. Bolshevists in capitalist
coimtries are the greatest advocates of free
speech; in Russia they are the authors of a
very effective press-censorship.

No, it is hardly the abuses which men
suflfer from their ruling crowds which cause
insurrection. People have borne the most ter-
rible outrages and suffered in silence for cen-
turies. Russia itself is a good example of this.

A revolution occurs when the dominant crowd
begins to weaken. I think we find proof of
this in the psychology of revolutionary propa-
ganda. A general revolution is not made in a
day, each such cataclysm is preceded by a
long period of unrest and propaganda of oppo-
sition to the existing order and its beneficiaries.
The Roman Republic began going to pieces

186

1

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

about a hundred years before the battle of
Actium. The social unrest which followed
the Punic Wars and led to the revolt of the
brothers Gracchi was never wholly checked
during the century which followed. The
dominant party had scarcely rid itself of these
troublesome "demagogues" than revolt broke
out among the slave population of Sicily.
This was followed by the revolt of the Italian
peasants, then again by the insurrection of
Spartacus, and this in turn by the civil war
between Marius and Sulla, the conspiracy of
Catiline, the brief triumph of Julius Csesar
over the Senate, the revenge of the latter in
the assassination of Csesar, and the years of
turmoil during the Second Triumvirate.

It is doubtful if there was at any time a
very clear or widespread consciousness of the
issues which successively arose during that
unhappy century. It would seem that first
one counter-crowd and then another, repre-
senting various elements of the populace, tried
issue with the ruling crowd. The one factor
which remained constant through all this was
the progressive disintegration of the dominant
party. The supremacy of the Patres Con-
scripti et Equites became in fact a social
anachronism the day that Tiberius Gracchus
demanded the expropriation of the landed
aristocracy. The ideas whereby the dominant
crowd sought to justify its pre-emptions began

187

THE BEHAVIOR OP CROWDS

to lose their functional value. Only the un-
disguised use of brute force was left. Such
ideas ceased to convince. Men of unusual
independence of mind, or men with ambitious
motives, who had grown up within the domi-
nant crowd, began to throw off the spell of its
control-ideas, and, by leaving it, to weaken it
further from within. No sooner was this
weakness detected by other groups than every
sort of grievance and partisan interest be-
came a moral justification for efforts to sup-
plant the rulers. The attempt of the domi-
nant crowd to retain its hold by repeating
its traditional justification-platitudes, un-
changed, but with greater emphasis, may
be seen in the orations of Cicero. It would be
well if some one besides high-school students
and their Latin teachers were to take up the
study of Cicero; the social and psycho-
logical situation which this orator and writer
of moral essays reveals has some suggestive
similarities to things which are happening
to-day.

The century and more of unrest which pre-
ceded both the Reformation and the French
Revolution is in each instance a long story.
But in both there is the same gradual loss of
prestige on the part of the dominant crowd;
the same inability of this crowd to change
with the changes of time; to find new sanc-
tions for itself when the old ones were no

188

f

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

longer believed; the same unadaptability, the
same intellectual and moral bankruptcy, there-
fore, the same gradual disintegration from
within; the same resort to sentimentalism
and ineflFective use of force, the same circle
of hungry counter-crowds waiting around
with their tongues hanging out, ready to
pounce upon that before which they had pre-
viously groveled, and to justify their raven-
ousness as devotion to principle; the same
growing fearlessness, beginning as perfectly
loyal desire to reform certain abuses incidental
to the existing order, and advancing, with
every sign of disillusionment or weakness, to
moral indignation, open attack upon funda-
mental control ideas, bitter hostility, aug-
mented by the repressive measures taken by
the dominant crowd to conserve a status quo
which no longer gained assent in the minds of
a growing counter-crowd; finally force, and a
new dominant crowd more successful now in
justifying old tyrannies by principles not yet
successfully challenged.

In the light of these historical analogies the
record of events during the last seventy-five
years in western Europe and America is
rather discomforting reading, and I fear the
student of social psychology will find little to
reassure him in the pitiable lack of intellectual
leadership, the tendency to muddle through,
the unteachableness and general want of

189

/?

THE BEHAVIOR OP CROWDS

statesmanlike vision displayed by our present
dominant crowds. If a considerable number
of people of all classes, those who desire change
as well as those who oppose it, could free their
thinking from the mechanisms of the crowd-
mind, it might be possible to find the working
solution of some of our pressing social prob-
lems and save our communities from the
dreadful experience of another revolution.
Our hope lies in the socially minded person
who is suflSciently in touch with reality to be
also a non-crowd man.

Anyone who is acquainted with the state of
the public mind at present, knows that a
priori arguments against revolution as such
are not convincing, except to those who are
already convinced on other ground. The
dominant crowd in each historical epoch
gained its original supremacy by means of
revolution. One can hardly make eflfective
use of the commonplace antirevolutionary
propaganda of defense of a certain order
which has among its most ardent supporters
people who are proud to call themselves sons
and daughters of the Revolution. Skeptics at
once raise the question whether, according to
such abstract social ethics, revolutionists be-
come respectable only after they are successful
or have been a long time dead. In fact, the
tendency to resort to such reasoning is one
among many symptoms that the conservative

100

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

mind has permitted itself to become quite as
much a crowd-phenomenon as has the radical
mind.

The correct approach here is psychological
and pragmatic. There is an increasingly
critical social situation, demanding far-reach-
ing reconstructive change; only the most
hopeless crowd-man would presume to deny
this fact. The future all depends upon the
mental processes with which we attempt to
meet this situation. Nothing but useless
misery can result from dividing crowd against
crowd. Crowd-thinking, as I have said, does
not solve problems. It only creates ideal
compensations and defense devices for our
inner conflicts. Conservative crowd-behavior
has always done quite as much as anything
else to precipitate a revolutionary outbreak.
Radical crowd-behavior does not resolve the
situation, it only inverts it. Any real solu-
tion lies wholly outside present crowd-dilem-
mas. What the social situation demands
most is a different kind of thinking, a new
education, an increasing number of people who
understand themselves and are intellectually
and morally independent of the tyranny of
crowd-ideas.
From what has been said above, it follows
\ that revolutionary propaganda is not directly
\ the cause of insurrection. Such propaganda
is itself an effect of the unconscious reaction

191

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

between a waning and a crescent crowd. It
is a symptom of the fact that a large number
of people have ceased to believe in or assent
to the continued dominance of the present
controlling crowd and are looking to another.

There is always a tendency among con-
servative crowds to hasten their own downfall
by the manner in which they deal with revo-
lutionary propaganda. The seriousness^ of
the new issue is denied; the crowd seeks to
draw attention back to the old issue which it
fought and won years ago in the hour of its
ascendancy. The fact that the old charms
and shibboleths no longer work, that they do
not now apply, that the growing counter-
crowd is able to psychoanalyze them, discover
the hidden motives which they disguise, and
laugh at them, is stoutly denied. The fiction
is maintained to the effect that present unrest
is wholly uncalled-for, that everything is all
right, that the agitators who "make people
discontented" are alien and foreign and need
only be silenced with a time-worn phrase, or,
that failing, shut up by force or deported, and
all will be well.

I do not doubt that before the Reformation
and the French Revolution there were eccle-
siastics and nobles aplenty who were quite
sure that the masses would never have known
they were miserable if meddling disturbers
had not taken the trouble to tell them so.

192

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

Even an honest critical understanding of the
demands of the opposing crowd is discouraged,
possibly because it is rightly felt that the
critical habit of mind is as destructive of one
crowd-complex as the other and the old crowd
prefers to remain intact and die in the last
ditch rather than risk dissolution, even with
the promise of averting a revolution. Hence
the Romans were willing to believe that the
Christians worshiped the head of an ass. The
mediaeval Catholics, even at Leo's court,
failed to grasp the meaning of the outbreak
in north Germany. Thousands saw in the
Reformation only the alleged fact that the
monk Luther wanted to marry a wife. To-day
one looks almost in vain among business men,
editors, and politicians for a more intelligent
understanding of socialism. A crowd goes
down to its death iSghting bogies, and actually
running upon the sword of its real enemy, be-
cause a crowd, once its constellation of ideas
is formed, never hams anything.

The crowd-group contains in itself, in the
very nature of 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

193

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

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 Assem-
blies 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 con-
scious 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 estab-
lished. 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

1^

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

** 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
iFheld uncritically and repeated and acted
upon automatically both by the members of
the" crowd and its victims. When the fac-
tions 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 cor-
rect and faithful application of the great prin-
ciples 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

195

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

principles which, when carried to their logical
conclusions regardless of fact or the effect pro-
duced, 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 prin-
ciples 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 prin-
ciple of the inalienable rights of all men to
their own black slaves. Or, again in the

199

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

case of nineteenth-century capitalism, liberty
must be given to all alike. Liberty means
equal opportunity. Equal opportunity means
free competition in business. Free competi-
tion 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. Immi-
grants to whom for a generation we have ex-
tended the hospitality of our slirnis and labor
camps, and the opportunity of freely com-
peting 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 gen-
erally accepted. Then there should be indus-
trial 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

197

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

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 prag-
matic attitude toward whatever truths it
contains, dares to test these truths by their
results in experience and to use them for de-
sired ends; if, in short, he scrutinizes his own
disguised impulses, brings them to conscious-
ness as what they are, and refuses to be de-
ceived as to their real import, even when they
appear dressed in such sheep's clothing as ab-
solutes 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 substi-
tuting for its accepted deductions others of
their own which in turn serve to conceal and
justify their own imconscious 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

198

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

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.

199

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

Eventually some one makes the discovery
that people do not become free just by re-
peating the magic word "liberty." A disap-
pointed faction of the newly emancipated hu-
manity 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 reac-
tionary. 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 emanci-
cipated 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 revolution-
ary 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

200

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

motivates revolutionary activity always ap-
pears 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 accord-
ing to reason, and the inalienable rights of all
are to be secured; or the co-operative common-
wealth 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 eschato-
logical, or Messianic. The crowd always imag-
ines 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 teach-
ing 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 apolo-

14 201

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

gists of the present social order by the words
out of their own mouths is evident in much of
the socialist propaganda to-day. The ten-
dency of the will to revolt, to express itself in
accepted religious symbols, is a thing to be
expected if the unconscious plays the im-
portant 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
comer of a couch and on the silken cushions
of a bed, who have turned justice to worm-
wood 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

202

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

ha« come and with him the Kingdom of the
Heavens, but at present the kingdom is re-
vealed 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 accom-
plished. 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
oldr 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 carica-
ture, but it will serve to make my point clear,
that Messicmism^i» Or-^Txmluiw 4^owd

^phenomenon. This subject has been pre-
sented 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 profa^anda.,h Jlsoc^^
gospeV Even when revolutionists profess
an antireligious creed, as did the Deists of
the eighteenth century, and as do many
modern socialists with their "materialist in-
terpretation of history," nevertheless the ele-
ment of irreligion extends imly to the super-
ficial trappings of the revolutionary crowd-

S03

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

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 ra-
tionalizes 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 Fourier-
ists and St. Simonists of the early part of the
nineteenth century were extremely Messianic.
So-called "scientific socialists" are now in-
clined to ridicule such idealistic speculation,
but one has only to scratch beneath the sur-
face 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 "Man-
ifesto" 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 exploita-

204

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

tion 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 in-
creased till there is enough for all, the cities
shall no more lord it over the rural communi-
ties, all alike will perform useful labor, waste
places of the earth will become cultivated
lands and the fertility of the soil will be in-
creased in accordance with a common plan,
the state, an instrument of bourgeois exploita-
tion, will cease to exist; in fact, the whole
wicked past is to be left behind, for as

The Communist revolution is the most radical rup-
ture 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 pro-
voked by the various religious behefs which had pre-
ceded it. All they did was to change the orientation
of a mental ancestry which the centuries had solidified.

205

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

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 principlal 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 Revo-
lution 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 men-
ace. 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

206

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

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 se-
duced the workers of every race. His stealthy propa-
ganda 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 per-
sonal 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 revolu-
tionary crowd of every description is a pilgrim- '
age 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 suflSciently 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'a

207

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

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 un imaginary refugejrom the
real. Like all other dreams, it is the realiza-
tion 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 be-
yond 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

208

n

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

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 fur-
ther to do. In other words, the ideal is lifted
clear out of time and all historical connec-
tions. As in other dreams, the empirically
known sequence of events is ignored. Whole
centuries of progress and struggle and piece-
meal experience are telescoped into one imag-
inary 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 Christi-
anity," "The Age of Reason," "Utopia," the
"Revolution," the "Co-operative Common-
wealth," 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,

£09

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

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 de-
sires could find their compensation and es-
cape, 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 premillen-
nialism which is now running through certain
evangelical Christian communions are experi-
encing 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 revolu-
tionary socialism." The wish-fancy is here
rationalized as a doctrine of evolution by
revolution. Thus the difference between the
social revolutionist and the Second Ad-
ventist is much smaller than either of them
suspects. As Freud would doubtless say, the
difference extends only to the "secondary

210

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

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 prescientifie 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 "com-
pensation." 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."
This determinism is in the one case what
Bergson calls "radical finalism," and in the
other "radical mechanism." But whether
the universe exists but to reel oflF a divine
plan conceived before all worlds, or be but
the mechanical swinging of the shuttle of
cause and effect, what difference is there if
the point arrived at is the same.^^ In both
cases this point was fixed before the beginning
of time, and the meaning of the universe is
just that and nothing else, since that is what
it all comes to in the end.

211

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

Whether the hand which turns the crank
of the world-machine be called that of God or
merely "Evolution," it is only a verbal diflFer-
ence; it is in both cases "a power not our-
selves which makes for righteousness." And
the righteousness? Why, it is just the right-
eousness of our own crowd — in other words,
the crowd's bill of rights painted in the sky
by our own wish-fancy, and dancing over our
heads like an aurora borealis. It is the his-
tory of all crowds that this dazzling pillar of
fire in. the Arctic night is hailed as the "rosy-
fingered dawn" of the Day of the Lord.

Or, to change the figure somewhat, the
faithful crowd has but to follow its fiery cloud
to the promised land which flows with milk
and honey; then march for an appointed
time about the walls of the wicked bourgeois
Jericho, playing its propaganda tune until the
walls fall down by magic and the world is
ours. No revolution is possible without a
miracle and a brass band.

I have no desire to discourage those who have
gone to work at the real tasks of social recon-
struction— certainly no wish to make this study
an apology for the existing social order. In the
face of the ugly facts which on every hand
stand as indictments of what is called "cap-
italism," it is doubtful if anyone could defend
the present system without recourse to a
certain amount of cynicism or cant. The

212

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

widespread social unrest which has enlisted
in its service so much of the intellectual
spirit of this generation surely could never
have come about without provocation more
real than the work of a mere handful of
** mischief -making agitators." The challenge
to modern society is not wholly of crowd
origin.

But it is one thing to face seriously the
manifold problems of reconstruction of our
social relations, and it is quite another thing
to persuade oneself that all these entangled
problems have but one imaginary neck which
is waiting to be cut with a single stroke of
the sword of revolution in the hands of "the
people." Hundreds of times I have heard
radicals, while discussing certain evils of
present society, say, ** All these things are but
symptoms, effects; to get rid of them you
must remove the cause." That cause is
always, in substance, the present economic
system.

If this argument means that, instead of
thinking of the various phases of social be-
havior as isolated from one another, we should
conceive of them as so interrelated as to form
something like a more or less causally con-
nected organic whole, I agree. But if it means
something else — and it frequently does —
the argument is based upon a logical fallacy.
The word "system" is not a causal term; it

213

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

IS purely descriptive. The facts referred to,
whatever connections we may discover among
them, are not the effects of a mysterious
"system" behind the facts of human be-
havior; the facts themselves, taken together,
are the system.

The confusion of causal and descriptive
ideas is a habit common to both the intel-
lectualist philosopher and the crowd-minded.
It enables people to turn their gaze from the
empirical Many to the fictitious One, from the
real to the imaginary. The idea of a system
behind, over, outside, and something different
from the related facts which the term "sys-
tem" is properly used to describe, whether
that system be a world-system, a logical
system, or a social system, whether it be
capitalism or socialism, "system" so con-
ceived is a favorite crowd-spook. It is the
same logical fallacy as if one spoke of the tem-
perature of this May day as the eflFect of the
climate, when all know that the term climate
is simply (to paraphrase James) the term by
which we characterize the temperature,
weather, etc., which we experience on this and
other days. We have already seen to what
use the crowd-mind puts all such general-
izations.

A popular revolutionary philosophy of his-
tory pictures the procession of the ages as
made up of a pageant of spook-social systems.

£14

n

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

each distinct from the others and coming in
its appointed time. But social systems do
not follow in a row, like elephants in a circus
parade — each huge beast with its trunk coiled
about the end of his predecessor's tail. The
greater part of this "evolutionary and revolu-
tionary" pageantry is simply dream-stuff.
Those who try to march into Utopia in such
an imaginary parade are not even trying to
reconstruct society; they are sociological
somnambulists.

The crowd-mind clings to such pageantry
because, as we saw in another connection, the
crowd desires to believe that evolution guaran-
tees its own future supremacy. It then
becomes unnecessary to solve concrete prob-
lems. One need only possess an oflScial pro-
gram of the order of the parade. In other
words, the crowd must persuade itself that
only one solution of the social problem is
possible, and that one inevitable — its own.

Such thinking wholly misconceives the na-
ture of the social problem. Like all the prac-
tical dilemmas of life, this problem, assuming
it to be in any sense a single problem, is real
just because more than one solution is pos-
sible. The task here is like that of choosing
a career. Whole series of partially foreseen
possibilities are contingent upon certain defi-
nite choices. Aside from our choosing, many
sorts of futures may be equally possible.

THE BEHAVIOR OP CROWDS

Our intervention at this or that definite point
is an act by which we will one series of pos-
sibilities rather than another into reality.
But the act of intervention is never performed
once for all. Each intervention leads only to
new dilemmas, among which we must again
choose and intervene. It is mainly in order
to escape from the necessity of facing this
terrifying series of unforeseeable dilemmas that
the crowd-man walketh in a vain show.

In pointing out the futility of present-day
revolutionary crowd-thinking, I am only striv-
ing to direct, in however small a degree, our
thought and energies into channels which
lead toward desired results. It is not by
trombones that we are to redeem society, nor
is the old order going to tumble down like the
walls of Jericho, and a complete new start be
given. Civilization cannot be wiped out and
begun all over again. It constitutes the
environment within which our reconstructive
thinking must, by tedious effort, make certain
definite modifications. Each such modifica-
tion is a problem in itself, to be dealt with,
not by belief in miracle, but by what Dewey
calls * * creative intelligence. ' ' Each such mod-
fication must be achieved by taking all the
known facts, which are relevant, into ac-
count. As such it is a new adaptation, and
the result of a series of such adaptations may
be as great and radical a social transformation

216

REVOLUTIONARY CROWDS

as one may have the courage to set as the goal
of a definite policy of social effort. But there
is a world of difference between social thinking
of this kind, where faith is a working hypothe-
sis, and that which ignores the concrete
problems that must be solved to reach the
desired goal, and, after the manner of crowds,
dreams of entering fairyland, or of pulling
a new world en bloc down out of the blue,
by the magic of substituting new tyrannies
for old.

Revolutionary crowd-thinking is not "cre-
ative intelligence." It is hocus-pocus, a sort
of social magic formula like the "mutabor"
in the Arabian Nights; it is an Aladdin* s4amp
philosophy. And here we may sum up this
part of our argument. The idea of the revo-
lution is to the crowd a symbol, the function
of which is compensation for the burdens of
the struggle for existence, for the feeling of
social inferiority, and for desires suppressed
by civilization. It is an imaginary escape
from hard reality, a new-world system in
which the ego seeks refuge, a defense mechan-
ism under the compulsive influence of which
crowds behave like somnambulistic individ-
uals. It is the apotheosis of the under crowd
itself and the transcendental expression and
justification of its will to rule. It is made up
of just those broad generalizations which are
of use in keeping that crowd together. It

15 «17

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

gives the new crowd unction in its fight with
the old, since it was precisely these same
dream-thoughts which the old crowd wrote on
its banners in the day when it, too, was blowing
trumpets outside the walls of Jericho.

VIII

THE FRUITS OF REVOLUTION — NEW CROWD-
TYRANNIES FOR OLD

SO much for the psychology of the revolu-
tionary propaganda. Now let us look at
what happens in the moment of revolutionary
outbreak. We have dwelt at some length on
the fact that a revolution occurs when a new
crowd succeeds in displacing an old one in
position of social control. At first there is a
general feeling of release and of freedom.
There is a brief priod of ecstasy, of good
will, a strange, almost mystical magnanimity.
A flood of oratory is released in praise of the
"new day of the people." Everyone is a
"comrade." Everyone is important. There
is an inclination to trust everyone. This
Easter-morning state of mind generally lasts
for some days — until people are driven by the
pinch of hunger to stop talking and take up
again the routine tasks of daily living. We
have all read how the "citizens" of the
French Revolution danced in the streets for
sheer joy in their new-won liberty. Those

219

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

who were in Petrograd during the days which
immediately followed the downfall of the Tsar
bear witness to a like almost mystical sense
of the general goodness of human kind and of
joy in human fellowship.

With the return to the commonplace tasks
of daily life, some effort, and indeed further
rationalization, is needed to keep up the
feeling that the new and wonderful age has
really come to stay. Conflicts of interest
and special grievances are viewed as involving
the vital principles of the Revolution. People
become impatient and censorious. There is
a searching of hearts. People watch their
neighbors, especially their rivals, to make
sure that nothing in their behavior shall con-
firm the misgivings which are vaguely felt in
their own minds. The rejoicing and com-
radeship which before were spontaneous are
now demanded. Intolerance toward the van-
quished crowd reappears with increased in-
tensity, not a little augmented by the knowl-
edge that the old enemies are now at *'the
people's" mercy.

There is a demand for revenge for old abuses.
The displaced crowd likely as not, foreseeing
the doom which awaits its members, seeks
escape by attempting a counter-revolution.
A propaganda of sympathy is carried on
among members of this same class who re-
main in the dominant crowd in communities

220

^

NEW TYRANNIES FOR OLD

not affected by the revolution. There is
secret plotting and suspicion of treason on
every hand. People resort to extravagant
expressions of their revolutionary principles,
not only to keep up their own faith in them,
but to show their loyalty to the great cause.
The most fanatical and uncompromising mem-
bers of the group gain prominence because of
their excessive devotion. By the very logic
of crowd-thinking, leadership passes to men
who are less and less competent to deal with
facts and more and more extreme in their
zeal. Hence the usual decline from the Mira-
beaus to the Dantons and Cariers, and from
these to the Marats and Robespierres, from
the Milukoffs to the Kerenskys and from the
Kerenskys to the Trotzkys. With each ex-
cess the crowd must erect some still new
defense against the inevitable disclosure of
the fact that the people are not behaving at
all as if they were living in the kingdom of
heaven. With each farther deviation from
the plain meaning of facts, the revolution
must resort to more severe measures to sus-
tain itself, until finally an unsurmountable
barrier is reached, such as the arrival on the
scene of a Napoleon. Then the majority are
forced to abandon the vain hope of really
attaining Utopia, and content themselves
with fictions to the effect that what they have
really is Utopia — or with such other mechan-

221

C C" c

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

isms as will serve to excuse and minimize the
significance of existing facts and put off the
complete realization of the ideal until some
future stage of progress. It is needless to
add that those who have most profited by the
revolutionary change are also most ready to
take the lead in persuading their neighbors
to be content with these rational compromises.

Meanwhile, however, the revolutionary
leaders have set up a dictatorship of their
own, which, while necessary to "save the revo-
lution," is itself a practical negation of the
revolutionary dream of a free world. This
dictatorship, finally passing into the hands of
the more competent element of the revolu-
tionary crowd, justifies itself to the many;
professing and requiring of all a verbal
assent to the revolutionary creed of which its
very existence is a fundamental repudiation.
This group becomes in time the nucleus about
which society finally settles down again in
comparative peace and equilibrium.

In general, then, it may be said that a revo-
lution does not and cannot realize the age-long
dream of a world set free. Its results may be
summed up as follows: a newly dominant
crowd, a new statement of old beliefs, new
* owners of property in the places of the old,
new names for old tyrannies. Looking back
over the history of the several great tidal
waves of revolution which have swept over

222

NEW TYRANNIES FOR OLD

the civilization which is to-day ours, it would
appear that one effect of them has been to
intensify the hold which crowd-thinking has
upon all of us, also to widen the range of the
things which we submit to the crowd-mind for
final judgment. In confirmation of this it is
to be noted that it is on the whole those nations
which have been burnt over by both the
Reformation and the eightenth-century revo-
lution which exhibit the most chauvian brand
of nationalism and crowd-patriotism. It is
these same nations also which have most
highly depersonalized their social relation-
ships, political structures, and ideals. It is
these nations also whose councils are most de-
termined by spasms of crowd-propaganda.

The modern man doubtless has a sense of
self in a degree unknown — except by the few
— in earlier ages, but along with this there
exists in "modern ideas," a complete system
of crowd-ideas with which the conscious self
comes into conflict at every turn. Just how
far the revolutionary crowds of the past have
operated to provide the stereotyped forms in
which present crowd-thinking is carried on, it
is almost impossible to learn. But that their
influence has been great may be seen by any-
one who attempts a psychological study of
"public opinion."

Aside from the results mentioned, I think
the deposit of revolutionary movements in

2tS

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

history has been very small. It may be that,
in the general shake-up of such a period, a few
vigorous spirits are tossed into a place where
their genius has an opportunity which it
would otherwise have failed to get. But it
would seem that on the whole the idea that
revolutions help the progress of the race is a
hoax. Where advancement has been achieved
in freedom, in intelligence, in ethical values,
in art or science, in consideration for hu-
manity, in legislation, it has in each instance
been achieved by unique individuals, and has
spread chiefly by personal influence, never
gaining assent except among those who have
power to recreate the new values won in their
own experience.

Whenever we take up a new idea as a
crowd, we at once turn it into a catchword
and a fad. Faddism, instead of being merely
a hunger for the new is rather an expression
of the crowd-will to uniformity. To be "old-
fashioned" and out of date is as truly to be a
nonconformist as to be a freak or an origina-
tor. Faddism is neither radicalism nor a
symptom of progress. It is a mark of the
passion for uniformity or the conservatism of
the croiod-mind. It is change; but its change
is insignificant.

It is often said that religious liberty is the
fruit of the Reformation. If so it is an in-
direct result and one which the reformers

224,

NEW TYRANNIES FOR OLD

certainly did not desire. They sought liberty
only for their own particular propaganda, a
fact which is abundantly proved by Calvin's
treatment of Servetus and of the Anabap-
tists, by Luther's attitude toward the Saxon
peasants, by the treatment of Catholics in
England, by the whole history of Cromwell's
rule, by the persecution of Quakers and all
other "heretics" in our American colonies —
Pennsylvania, I believe, excepted — down to
the date of the American Revolution.

It just happened that Protestantism as the
religion of the bourgeois fell into the hands
of a group, who, outside their religious-crowd
interests were destined to be the greatest
practical beneficiaries of the advancement of
applied science. Between applied science and
science as a cultural discipline — that is, science
as a humanistic study — the line is hard to
draw. The Humanist spirit of the sciences
attained a certain freedom, notwithstanding
the fact that the whole Reformation was
really a reactionary movement against the
Renaissance; in spite, moreover, of the patent
fact that the Protestant churches still, offi-
cially at least, resist the free spirit of scientific
culture.

It is to the free spirits of the Italian Renais-
sance, also to the Jeffersons and Franklins and
Paines, the Lincolns and IngersoUs, the Hux-
leys and Darwins and Spencers, the men who

225

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

dared alone to resist the religious crowd-mind
and to undermine the abstract ideas in which
it had intrenched itself, to whom the modern
world owes its religious and intellectual liberty.
The same is true of political liberty. Eng-
land, which is the most free country in the
world to-day, never really experienced the
revolutionary crowd-movement of the eight-
eenth century. Instead, the changes came
by a process of gradual reconstruction. And
it is with just such an opportunist recon-
structive process that England promises now
to meet and solve the problems of the
threatened social revolution. In contrast with
Russia, Socialism in England has much ground
for hope of success. The radical movement in
England is on the whole wisely led by men
who with few exceptions can think realistically
and pragmatically, and refuse to be swept oflF
their feet by crowd-abstractions. The British
Labor party is the least crowd-minded of any
of the socialistic organizations of our day.
The Rochdale group has demonstrated that
if it is co-operation that people desire as a
solution of the economic problem, the way to
solve it is to co-operate along definite and
practicable lines; the co-operators have given
up belief in the miracle of Jericho. The
British trade-union movement has demon-
strated the fact that organization of this kind
succeeds in just the degree that it can rise

NEW TYRANNIES FOR OLD

above crowd-thinking and deal with a sug-
gestion of concrete problems according to a
statesmanlike policy of concerted action.

To be sure it cannot be denied that the
social reconstruction in England is seriously
menaced by the tendency to crowd-behavior.
At best it reveals hardly more than the su-
perior advantage to the whole community
of a slightly less degree of crbwd-behavior;
but when compared with the Socialist move-
ment in Russia, Germany, and the United
States, it would seem that radicalism in Eng-
land has at least a remote promise of reaching
a working solution of the social problem ; and
that is more than can at present be said for
the others.

In the light of what has been said about the
psychology of revolution, I think we may
hazard an opinion about the vaunted "Dic-
tatorship of the Proletariat" — an idea that
has provided some new catchwords for the
crowd which is fascinated by the soviet revo-
lution in Russia. Granting for the sake of
argument that such a dictatorship would be
desirable from any point of view — I do not
see how the mere fact that people work
proves their capacity to rule, horses also work
— would it be possible? I think not. Even
the temporary rule of Lenin in Russia can
hardly be called a rule of the working class.
Bolshevist propaganda will have it that such

H7

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

a dictatorship of the working class is posi-
tively necessary if we are ever to get away
from the abuses of present "capitalistic so-
ciety." Moreover, it is argued that this dic-
tatorship of the organized workers could not
be undemocratic, for since vested property is
to be abolished and everyone forced to work
for his living, all will belong to the working
class, and therefore the dictatorship of the
proletariat is but the dictatorship of all.

In the first place, assuming that it is the
dictatorship of all who survive the revolu-
tion, this dictatorship of all over each is not
liberty for anyone; it may leave not the
tiniest corner where one may be permitted to
be master of himself. The tyranny of all
over each is as different from freedom as is
Pharisaism from spiritual living.

Again, what is there to show that this imag-
ined dictatorship of all is to be shared equally
by all, and if not have we not merely set up
a new privileged class — the very thing which
the Socialist Talmud has always declared it is
the mission of the workers to destroy forever?
While the workers are still a counter-crowd,
struggling for power against the present
ruling class, they are of course held together
by a common cause — namely, their opposition
to capital. But with labor's triumph, every-
body becomes a worker, and there is no one
longer to oppose. That which held the vari-

228

NEW TYRANNIES FOR OLD

ous elements of labor together in a common
crowd of revolt has now ceased to exist, "class
consciousness" has therefore no longer any
meaning. Labor itself has ceased to exist as
a class by reason of its very triumph. What
then remains to hold its various elements to-
gether in a common cause? Nothing at all.
The solidarity of the workers vanishes, when
the struggle which gave rise to that solidarity
ceases. There remains now nothing but the
humanitarian principle of the solidarity of the
human race. Solidarity has ceased to be an
economic fact, and has become purely "ideo-
logical."

Since by hypothesis everyone is a worker,
the dictatorship of the workers is a dictator-
ship based not on labor as such, but upon a
universal human quality. It would be quite
as truly a dictatorship of everyone if based
upon any other common human quality —
say, the fact that we are all bipeds, that we
all have noses, or the fact of the circulation of
the blood. As the purely proletarian charac-
ter of this dictatorship becomes meaningless,
the crowd-struggle switches from that of
labor as a whole against capital, to a series of
struggles within the dominant labor group
itself.

The experience of Russia has even now
shown that if the Soviets are to save them-
selves from nation-wide bankruptcy, specially

229

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

trained men must be found to take charge of
their industrial and political activities. Long
training is necessary for the successful man-
agement of large affairs, and becomes all the
more indispensable as industry, education,
and political affairs are organized on a large
scale. Are specially promising youths to be
set apart from early childhood to prepare
themselves for these positions of authority?
Or shall such places be filled by those vigorous
few who have the ambition and the strength
to acquire the necessary training while at the
same time working at their daily tasks? In
either case an intellectual class must be de-
veloped. Does anyone imagine that this new
class of rulers will hesitate to make use of
every opportunity to make itself a privileged
class?

"But what opportunity can there be," is
the reply, ** since private capital is to be
abolished?" Very well, there have been
ruling classes before in history who did not
enjoy the privilege of owning private property.
The clergy of the Middle Ages was such a
class, and their dominance was quite as
effective and as enduring as is that of our com-
mercial classes today. But let us not de-
ceive ourselves; in a soviet republic there
would be opportunity aplenty for exploita-
tion. As the solidarity of labor vanished,

each important trade-group would enter into

iao

NEW TYRANNIES FOR OLD

rivalry with the others for leadership in the
co-operative commonwealth. Every economic
advantage which any group possessed would
be used in order to lord it over the rest.

For instance, let us suppose that the
workers in a strategic industry, such as the
railways, or coal mines, should make the dis-
covery that by going on a strike they could
starve the community as a whole into sub-
mission and gain practically anything they
might demand. Loyalty to the rest of labor
would act no more as a check to such ambitions
than does loyalty to humanity in general now.
As we have seen, the crowd is always formed
for the unconscious purpose of relaxing the
social control by mechanisms which mu-
tually justify such antisocial conduct on the
part of members of the crowd. There is
every reason, both economic and psycho-
logical, why the workers in each industry
would become organized crowds seeking to
gain for their particular groups the lion's
share of the spoils of the social revolution.
What would there be, then, to prevent the
workers of the railroads or some other essen-
tial industry from exploiting the community
quite as mercilessly as the capitalists are al-
leged to do at present? Nothing but the
rivalry of other crowds who were seeking the
same dominance. In time a modus vivendi
would doubtless be reached whereby social

231

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROAVDS

control would be shared by a few of the
stronger unions — and their leaders.

The strike has already demonstrated the
fact that in the hands of a well-organized
body of laborers, especially in those trades
where the number of apprentices may be
controlled, industrial power becomes a much
more effective weapon than it is in the hands
of the present capitalistic owners.

A new dictatorship, therefore, must in-
evitably follow the social revolution, in sup-
port of which a favored minority will make use
of the industrial power of the community,
just as earlier privileged classes used military
power and the power of private property.
And this new dominance would be just as
predatory, and would justify itself, as did the
others, by the platitudes of crowd-thinking.
The so-called dictatorship turns out, on
examination, to be the dictatorship of one
section of the proletariat over the rest of it.
The dream of social redemption by such
means is a pure crcnvd-idea.

IX

FREEDOM AND GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

THE whole philosophy of politics comes
down at last to a question of four words.
Who is to govern? Compared with this ques-
tion the problem of the form of government
is relatively unimportant. Crowd-men, what-
ever political faith they profess, behave much
the same when they are in power. The par-
ticular forms of political organization through
which their power is exerted are mere inci-
dentals. There is the same self-laudation,
the same tawdry array of abstract principles,
the same exploitation of under crowds, the
same cunning in keeping up appearances, the
same preference of the charlatan for positions
of leadership and authority. Machiavelli's
Prince, or Dostoievsky's Grand Inquisitor,
would serve just as well as the model for the
guidance of a Caesar Borgia, a leader of
Tammany Hall, a chairman of the National
Committee of a political party, or a Nicolai
Lenin.

Ever since the days of Rousseau certain

16 «3«

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROTM)S

crowds have persisted in the conviction that
all tyrannies were foisted upon an innocent
humanity by a designing few. There may
have been a few instances in history where
such was the case, but tyrannies of that kind
have never lasted long. For the most part
the tyrant is merely the instrument and official
symbol of a dominant crowd. His acts are
his crowd's acts, and without his crowd to
support him he very soon goes the way of the
late Sultan of Turkey. The Csesars were
hardly more than "walking delegates," repre-
senting the ancient Roman Soldiers' soviet.
They were made and unmade by the army
which, though Caesars might come and Csesars
might go, continued to lord it over the Roman
world. While the army was pagan, even the
mild Marcus Aurelius followed Nero's example
of killing Christians. When finally the army
itself became largely Christian, and the fiction
that the Christians drank human blood,
worshiped the head of an ass, and were
sexually promiscuous was no longer good
patriotic propaganda, the Emperor Con-
stantine began to see visions of the Cross in
the sky. The Pope, who is doubtless the
most absolute monarch in the Occident, is,
however, 'infallible" only when he speaks
ex-cathedra — that is, as the "Church Herself."
His infallibility is that of the Church. All

crowds in one way or another claim infal-

ies4

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

libility. The tyrant Robespierre survived
only so long as did his particular revolutionary
crowd in France.

The fate of Savonarola was similar. From
his pulpit he could rule Florence with absolute
power just so long as he told his crowd what
it wished to hear, and so long as his crowd was
able to keep itself together and remain domi-
nant. The Stuarts, Hohenzollerns, Haps-
burgs, and Romanoffs, with all their claims to
divine rights, were little more than the living
symbols of their respective nation-crowds.
They vanished when they ceased to represent
successfully the crowd-will.

In general, then, it may be said that where
the crowd is, there is tyranny. Tyranny may
be exercised through one agent or through
many, but it nearly always comes from the
same source — the crowd. Crowd-rule may
exist in a monarchical form of government, or
in a republic. The personnel of the dominant
crowd will vary with a change in the form of
the state, but the spirit will be much the same.
Conservative writers are in the habit of as-
suming that democracy is the rule of crowds
pure and simple. WTiether crowd-govern-
ment is more absolute in a democracy than
in differently constituted states is a question.
The aim of democratic constitutions like our
own is to prevent any special crowd from in-
trenching itself in a position of social control

2S5

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

and thus becoming a ruling class. As the
experiment has worked out thus far it can
hardly be said that it has freed us from the
rule of crowds. It has, however, multiplied
the number of mutually suspicious crowds, so
that no one of them has for long enjoyed a
sufficiently great majority to make itself
clearly supreme, though it must be admitted
that up to the present the business-man crowd
has had the best of the deal. The story of
the recent Eighteenth Amendment shows how
easy it is for a determined crowd, even though
in a minority, to force its favorite dogmas
upon the whole community. We shall doubt-
less see a great deal more of this sort of thing
in the future than we have in the past. And
if the various labor groups should become
sufficiently united in a *' proletarian" crowd
there is nothing to prevent their going to any
extreme.

We are passing through a period of so-
cialization. All signs point to the establish-
ment of some sort of social state or industrial
commonwealth. No one can foresee the ex-
tent] to which capital now privately owned is
to be transferred to the public. It is doubt-
ful if anything can be done to check this
process. The tendency is no sooner blocked
along one channel than it begins to seep
through another. In itself there need be
nothing alarming about this transition. If

«30

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

industry could be better co-ordinated and
more wisely administered by non-crowd men
for the common good, the change might work
out to our national advantage.

It is possible to conceive of a society in
which a high degree of social democracy, even
communism, might exist along with a maxi-
mum of freedom and practical achievement.
But we should first have to get over our
crowd-ways of thinking and acting. Peo'
pie would have to regard the state as a
purely administrative aflfair. They would
have to organize for definite practical ends,
and select their leaders and administrators
very much as certain corporations now do,
strictly on the basis of their competency.
Political institutions would have to be made
such that they could not be seized by special
groups to enhance themselves at the expense
of the rest. Partisanship would have to
cease. Every effort would have to be made
to loosen the social control over the individ-
ual's personal habits. The kind of people
who have an inner gnawing to regulate their
neighbors, the kind who cannot accept the
fact of their psychic inferiority and must
consequently make crowds by way of com-
pensation, would have to be content to mind
their own business. Police power would have
to be reduced to the minimum necessary to
protect life and keep the industries running

237

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

People would have to become much more
capable of self -direction as well as of voluntary
co-operation than they are now. They would
have to be more resentful of petty official
tyranny, more independent in their judgments
and at the same time more willing to accept
the advice and authority of experts. They
would have to place the control of affairs in
the hands of the type of man against whose
dominance the weaker brethren have in all
ages waged war — that is, the free spirits and
natural masters of men. All pet dogmas and
cult ideas that clashed with practical consid-
erations would have to be swept away.

Such a conception of society is, of course,
wholly Utopian. It could not possibly be
realized by people behaving and thinking as
crowds. With our present crowd-making hab-
its, the process of greater socialization of
industry means only increased opportunities
for crowd-tyranny. In the hands of a dom-
inant crowd an industrial state would be
indeed what Herbert Spencer called the
"coming slavery.'*

As it is, the state has become overgrown and
bureaucratic. Commissions of all sorts are
being multiplied year by year. Public debts
are piled up till they approach the point of
bankruptcy. Taxes are increasing in the
same degree. Statutes are increased in num-
ber until one can hardly breathe without

238

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

violating some decree, ordinance, or bit of
sumptuary legislation. Every legislative as-
sembly is constantly besieged by the pro-
fessional lobbyists of a swarm of reformist
crowds. Busybodies of every description
twist the making and the enforcement of law
into conformity with their peculiar preju-
dices. Censorships of various kinds are grow-
ing in number and effrontery. Prohibition is
insincerely put forth as a war measure.
Ignorant societies for the ''suppression of
vice" maul over our literature and our art.
Parents of already more children than they
can support may not be permitted lawfully
to possess scientific knowledge of the means of
the prevention of conception. The govern-
ment, both state and national, takes advan-
tage of the war for freedom to pass again
the hated sort of "alien and sedition" laws
from which the country thought it had freed
itself a century ago. A host of secret agents
and volunteer "guardians of public safety"
are ready to place every citizen under sus-
picion of disloyalty to the government. Any
advocacy of significant change in established
political practices is regarded as sedition.
An inquisition is set up for the purpose of
inquiring into people's private political opin-
ions. Reputable citizens are, on the flimsiest
hearsay evidence or rumor that they entertain
nonconformist views, subjected to public cen-

239

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

sure by notoriety-seeking "investigation com-
missions"— and by an irresponsible press.
Only members of an established political
party in good standing are permitted to criti-
cize the acts of the President of the United
States. Newspapers and magazines are sup-
pressed and denied the privilege of the mails
at the whim of opinionated post-office officers
or of ignorant employees of the Department
of Justice. An intensely patriotic weekly paper
in New York, which happened to hold uncon-
ventional views on the subject of religion, has
had certain issues of its paper suppressed for
the offense of publishing accounts of the alleged
misconduct of the Y. M. C. A.

The stupidity and irresponsibility of the
Russian spy-syslem which has grown up in
this country along with our overweening
state is illustrated by an amusing little ex-
perience which happened to myself several
months after the signing of the armistice with
Germany. All through the trying months
of the war the great audience at Cooper
Union had followed me with a loyalty and
tolerance which was truly wonderful. Though
I knew that many had not always been in
hearty accord with my rather spontaneous and
outspoken Americanism, the Cooper Union
Forum was one of the few places in America
where foreign and labor elements were present
in large numbers in which there was no out-

240

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

break or demonstration of any kind which
coukl possibly be interpreted as un-American.
We all felt that perhaps the People's Institute
with its record of twenty years' work behind
it had been of some real service to the nation
in adhering strictly to its educational method
and keeping its discussions wholly above the
level of any sort of crowd-propaganda.

However, in the course of our educational
work, it became my task to give to a selected
group of advanced students a course of lec-
tures upon the Theory of Knowledge. The
course was announced with the title, **How
Free Men Think," and the little folder con-
tained the statement that it was to be a
study of the Humanist logic, with Professor
F. C. S. Schiller's philosophical writings to be
used as textbooks. The publication of this
folder announcing the course was held up by
the printer, and we learned that he had been
told not to print it by some official personage
whose identity was not revealed. Notwith-
standing the fact that Schiller is professor of
philosophy in Corpus Christi College, Oxford,
and is one of the best-known philosophical
writers in the English-speaking world, and
holds views practically identical with what is
called the "American School," led by the late
William James, it developed that the govern-
ment agents — or whoever they were — ob-
jected to the publication of the announcement

241

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

on the ground that they thought Schiller was
a German. Such is our intellectual freedom
regarding matters which have no political
significance whatever, in a world made "safe
for democracy.'* But we must not permit
ourselves to despair or grow weary of life in
this "safety first" world — waves of pseudo-
patriotic panic often follow on the heels of
easily won victory. Crowd-phenomena of
such intensity are usually of short duration,
as these very excesses soon produce the
inevitable reaction.

The question, however, arises, is democracy
more conducive to freedom than other forms
of political organization? To most minds
the terms "liberty" and "democracy" are
almost synonymous. Those who consider
that liberty consists in having a vote, in giving
everyone a voice regardless of whether he has
anything to say, will have no doubts in the
matter. But to those whose thinking means
more than the mere repetition of eighteenth-
century crowd-ideas, the question will reduce
itself to this: Is democracy more conducive
to crowd-behavior than other forms of govern-
ment? Le Bon and those who identify the
crowd with the masses would answer with an
a priori affirmative. I do not believe the
question may be answered in any such off-
hand manner. It is a question of fact rather
than of theory. Theoretically, since we have

242

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

demonstrated I think that the crowd is not
the common people as such, but is a peculiar
form of psychic behavior, it would seem that
there is no logical necessity for holding that
democracy must always and everywhere be
the rule of the mob. And we have seen that
other forms of society may also suffer from
crowd-rule. I suspect that the repugnance
which certain aristocratic, and bourgeois
writers also, show for democracy is less the
horror of crowd-rule as such, than dislike of
seeing control pass over to a crowd other than
their own. Theoretically at least, democracy
calls for a maximum of self-government and
personal freedom. The fact that democracy
is rapidly degenerating into tyranny of all
over each may be due, not to the democratic
ideal itself, but the growing tendency to crowd-
behavior in modern times. It may be that
certain democratic ideals are not so much
causes as effects of crowd-thinking and action.
It cannot be denied that such ideals come in
very handy these days in the way of furnishing
crowds with effective catchwords for their
propaganda and of providing them with
ready-made justifications for their will to
power. I should say that democracy has iii-
directly permitted, rather than directly caused,
an extension in the range of thought and be-
havior over which the crowd assumes dictator-
ship.

1245

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

In comparing democracy with more auto-
cratic forms of government, this extent or
range of crowd-control over the individual is
important. Of course, human beings will
never permit to one another a very large
degree of personal freedom. It is to the ad-
vantage of everyone in the struggle for exist-
ence to reduce his neighbors as much as
possible to automatons. In this way one's
own adjustment to the behavior of others is
made easier. If we can induce or compel all «
about us to confine their actions to perfect j
routine, then we may predict with a fair de- ^
gree of accuracy their future behavior, and
be prepared in advance to meet it. We all
dread the element of the unexpected, and no-
where so much as in the conduct of our
neighbors. If we could only get rid of the
humanly unexpected, society would be almost
fool-proof. Hence the resistance to new
truths, social change, progress, nonconformity
of any sort; hence our orthodoxies and con-
ventions; hence our incessant preaching to
our neighbors to "be good"; hence the
fanaticism with which every crowd strives to
keep its believers in line. Much of this in-
sistence on regularity is positively necessary.
Without it there could be no social or moral
order at all. It is in fact the source and
security of the accepted values of civilization,
as Schiller has shown.

244

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

But the process of keeping one another in
line is carried much farther than is necessary
to preserve the social order. It is insisted
upon to the extent that will guarantee* the
survival, even the dominance, of the spirit-
ually sick, the morally timid, the trained-
animal men, those who would revert to
savagery, or stand utterly helpless the moment
a new situation demanded that they do some
original thinking in the place of performing
the few stereotyped tricks which they have
acquired; the dog-in-the-manger people, who
because they can eat no meat insist that all
play the dyspeptic lest the well-fed out-
distance them in the race of life or set them
an example in following which they get the
stomach ache; the people who, because they
cannot pass a saloon door without going in
and getting drunk, cannot see a moving-
picture, or read a modern book, or visit a
bathing beach without being tormented with
their gnawing promiscuous eroticism, insist
upon setting up their own perverted dilemmas
as the moral standard for everybody.

Such people exist in great numbers in every
society. They are always strong for *' broth-
erly love," for keeping up appearances, for
removing temptation from the path of life,
for uniform standards of belief and conduct.
Each crowd, in its desire to become the ma-
jority, to hold the weaker brethren within its

245

THE BEHAVIOR OP CROWDS

fold, and especially as everyone of us has a
certain amount of this "little brother" weak-
ness in his own nature, which longs to be
pampered if only the pampering can be done
without hurting our pride — the crowd invari-
ably plays to this sort of thing and bids for
its support. As the little brother always ex-
presses his survival-values in terms of ac-
cepted crowd-ideas, no crowd can really turn
him down without repudiating its abstract
principles. In fact, it is just this weakness in
our nature which, as we have seen, leads us to
become crowd-men in the first place. Fur-
thermore, we have seen that any assertion of
personal independence is resented by the
crowd because it weakens the crowd-faith of
all.

The measure of freedom granted to men
will depend, therefore, upon how many things
the crowd attempts to consider its business.
There is a law of inertia at work here. In
monarchical forms of government, where the
crowd-will is exercised through a single human
agent, the monarch may be absolute in re-
gard to certain things which are necessary to
his own and his crowd's survival. In such
matters "he can do no wrong"; there is little
or no appeal from his decisions. But the very
thoroughness with which he hunts down non-
conformity in matters which directly concern
his authority, leaves him little energy^ for other

246

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

things. Arbitrary power is therefore usually
limited to relatively few things, since the
autocrat cannot busy himself with everything
that is going on. Within the radius of the
things which the monarch attempts to regulate
he may be an intolerable tyrant, but so long
as he is obeyed in these matters, so long as
things run on smoothly on the surface, there
are all sorts of things which he would prefer
not to have brought to his attention, as wit-
ness, for instance, the letter of Trajan to the
younger Pliny.

With a democracy it is different. While
the exercise of authority is never so inexo-
rable— indeed democratic states frequently
pass laws for the purpose of placing the com-
munity on record "for righteousness," rather
than with the intention of enforcing such
laws — the number of things which a democracy
will presume to regulate is vastly greater than
in monarchical states. As sovereignty is uni-
versal, everybody becomes lawmaker and
regulator of his neighbors. As the lawmaking
power is present everywhere, nothing can
escape its multieyed scrutiny. All sorts of
foibles, sectional interests, group demands,
class prejudices become part of the law of the
land. A democracy is no respecter of per-
sons and can, under its dogma of equality
before the law, admit of no exceptions. The
whole body politic is weighed down with all

247

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

the several bits of legislation which may be
demanded by any of the various groups within
it. An unusual inducement and opportunity
are thus provided for every crowd to force its
own crowd-dilemmas upon all.

The majority not only usurps the place of
the king, but it tends to subject the whole
range of human thought and behavior to its
authority — everything, in fact, that anyone,
disliking in his neighbors or finding himself
tempted to do, may wish to "pass a law
against." Every personal habit and private
opinion becomes a matter for public concern.
Custom no longer regulates; all is rationalized
according to the logic of the crowd-mind.
Public policy sits on the doorstep of every
man's personal conscience. The citizen in us
eats up the man. Not the tiniest personal
comfort may yet be left us in private enjoy-
ment. All that cannot be translated into
propaganda or hold its own in a legislative
lobby succumbs. If we are to preserve any-
thing of our personal independence, we must
organize ourselves into a crowd like the rest
and get out in the streets and set up a public
howl. Unless some one pretty soon starts a pro-
tobacco crusade and proves to the newspaper-
reading public that the use of nicotine by
everybody in equal amount is absolutely nee-
essary for the preservation of the American

home, for economic efficiency and future mili-
tia

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

tary supremacy, we shall doubtless all soon be
obliged to sneak down into the cellar and
smoke our pipes in the dark.

Here we see the true argument for a written
constitution, and also, I think, a psychological
principle which helps us to decide what should
be in a constitution and what should not. The
aim of a constitution is to put a limit to the
number of things concerning which a majority-
crowd may lord it over the individual. I am
aware that the appeal to the Constitution is
often abused by predatory interests which
skulk behind its phraseology in their defense
of special economic privilege. But, neverthe-
less, people in a democracy may be free only
so long as they submit to the dictation of the
majority in just and only those few interests con-
cerning which a monarch, were he in existence,
would take advantage of them for his personal
ends. There are certain political and economic
relations which cannot be left to the chance
exploitation of any individual or group that
happens to come along. Some one is sure to
come along, for you may be sure that if there
is a possible opportunity to take advantage,
some one will do it sooner or later.

Now because people have discovered that
there is no possible individual freedom in re-
spect to certain definite phases of their com-
mon life which are always exposed to seizure
by exploiters, democrats have substituted a

17 £49

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

tyranny of the majority for the tyranny of
the one or the favored few which would other-
wise be erected at these points. Since it is
necessary to give up freedom in these regions
anyway, there is some compensation in spread-
ing the tyrannizing around so that each gets a
little share of it. But every effort should be
made to limit the tyranny of the majority to
just these points. And the line limiting the
number of things that the majority may med-
dle with must be drawn as hard and fast as
possible, since every dominant crowd, as we
have seen, will squeeze the life out of every-
thing human it can get its hands on. The
minute a majority finds that it can extend its
tyranny beyond this strictly constitutionally
limited sphere, nothing remains to stop it; it
becomes worse than an autocracy. Tyranny
is no less abhorrent just because the number
of tyrants is increased. A nation composed of
a hundred million little tyrants snooping and
prying into every corner may be democratic,
but, personally, if that ever comes to be the
choice I think I should prefer one tyrant. He
mif^'ht occasionally look the other way and
leave me a free man, long enough at least for
me to light my pipe.

True democrats will be very jealous of gov-
ernment. Necessary as it is, there is no magic
about government, no saving grace. Govern-
ment cannot redeem us from our sins; it will

250

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

always require all the decency we possess to
redeem the government. Government always
represents the moral dilemmas of the worst
people, not the best. It cannot give us free-
dom; it can give or grant us nothing but what
it first takes from us. It is we who grant to
the government certain powers and privileges
necessary for its proper functioning. We do
not exist for the government; it exists for us.
We are not its servants; it is our servant.
Government at best is a useful and necessary
machine, a mechanism by which we protect
ourselves from one another. It has no more
rights and dignities of its own than are pos-
sessed by any other machine. Its laws should
be obeyed, for the same reason that the laws
of mechanics should be obeyed — otherwise the
machine will not run.

As a matter of fact it is not so much gov-
ernment itself against which the democrat
must be on guard, but the various crowds
which are always seeking to make use of
the machinery of government in order to
impose their peculiar tyranny upon all and
invade the privacy of everyone. By wid-
ening the radius of governmental control,
the crowd thus pinches down the individ-
uality of everyone with the same restrictions
as are imposed by the crowd upon its own
members.

Conway says:

251

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

Frescnt-day Democracy rests on a few organized
parties. What would a democracy be like if based on
millions of independent Joneses each of whom decided
to vote this or that way as be pleased? The dominion
of the crowd would be at an end, both for better and for
worse. We shall not behold any such revolution in the
world as we know it. . . .

Thus we must conclude that the crowd by its very
nature tends, and always must tend, to diminish (if
possible, to the vanishing point) the freedom of its
members, and not in one or two respects alone, but in
all. The crowd's desire is to swallow up the individu-
ality of its members and reduce them one and all to
the condition of crowd units whose whole life is lived
according to the crowd-pattern and is sacrificed and
devoted to crowd-interests. . . .

An excellent illustration of this crowd-dominance
crops up in my afternoon paper. ... It appears that in
certain parts of the country artisans, by drinking too
much alcohol, are reducing their capacity of doing
their proper work, which happens at the moment to be
of great importance to the country at war. Many
interferences with liberty are permitted in war time
by general consent. It is accordingly proposed to
put diflficulties in the way of these drinkers by execu-
tive orders. One would suppose that the just way to
do this would be to make a list of the drinkers and pro-
hibit their indulgence. But this is not the way the
crowd works. To it everyone of its constituent
members is like another, and all must be drilled and
controlled alike. . . . Whatever measure is adopted must
fall evenly on all classes, upon club, restaurant and
hotel as upon public house. Could anything be more
absurd? Lest a gunmaker or a shipbuilder in Glasgow
should drink too much, Mr. Asquith must not take a
glass of sherry with his lunch at the Athenaum! . . .

252

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

We live in days when crowd dominion over individ-
uals has been advancing at a headlong pace. ... If he
is not to drink in London lest a Glasgow engineer
should get drunk, why should not his eating be alike
limited? Why not the style and cut of his clothes?
Why not the size and character of his house? He must
cause his children to be taught at least the minimum
of muddled information which the government calls
education. He must insure for his dependents the
attention of an all-educated physician, and the ad-
ministration of drugs known to be useless. If the
crowd had its way every mother and infant would be
under the orders of inspectors, regardless of the capac-
ity of the parent. We should all be ordered about in
every relation of life from infancy to manhood. . . .
Freedom would utterly vanish, and this, not because
the crowd can arrange things better than the individual.
It cannot. It lacks the individual's brains. The ulti-
mate reason for all this interference is the crowd's desire
to swallow up and control the unit. The instinct of all
crowds is to dominate, to capture and overwhelm the
individual, to make him their slave, to absorb all his
life for their service.

The criticism has often been made of
democracy that it permits too much freedom ;
the reverse of this is nearer the truth. It was
de Tocqueville, I think, who first called atten-
tion to the "tyranny of the majority" in
democratic America. Probably one of the
most comprehensive and discriminating
studies that have ever been made of the habits
and institutions of any nation may be found
in the work of this observing young French-

253

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

man who visited our country at the close of
its first half century of political independence.
De Tocqueville's account of Democracy in
America is still good reading, much of it being
applicable to the present. This writer was in
no sense an unfriendly critic. He praised
much that he saw, but even in those days
(the period of 1830) he was not taken in by
the fiction that, because the American people
live under laws of their own making, they are
therefore free. Much of the following pas-
sages taken here and there from Chapters
XIV and XV is as true today as it was when
it was written:

America is therefore a free country in which, lest
anybody be hurt by your remarks, you are not allowed
to speak freely of private individuals, of the State, or
the citizens, or the authorities, of public or private
undertakings, in short of anything at all, except per-
haps the climate and the soil, and even then Americans
will be found ready to defend both as if they had con-
curred in producing them.

The American submits without a murmur to the
authority of the pettiest magistrate. This truth pre-
vails even in the trivial details of national life. An
American cannot converse — he speaks to you as if he
were addressing a meeting. If an American were
condemned to confine himself to his own affairs, he
would be robbed of one-half of his existence; bis
wretchedness would be unbearable. . . .

The moral authority of the majority in America is
based on the notion that there is more intelligence and
wisdom in a number of men united than in a single

254

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

individual. . . . The theory of equality is thus applied
to the intellects of men.

The French, under the old regime, held it for a maxim
that the King could do no wrong. The Americans
entertain the same opinion with regard to the majority.

In the United States, all parties are willing to recog-
nize the rights of the majority, because they all hope
at some time to be able to exercise them to their own
advantage. The majority therefore in that country
exercises a prodigious actual authority and a p>ower of
opinion which is nearly as great (as that of the absolute
autocrat). No obstacles exist which can impair or
even retard its progress so as to make it heed the com-
plaints of those whom it crushes upon its path. This
state of things is harmful in itself and dangerous for
the future.

As the majority is the only power which it is impor-
tant to court, all its projects are taken up with the
greatest ardor; but no sooner is its attention distracted
than all this ardor ceases.

There is no power on earth so worthy of honor in
itself, or clothed with rights so sacred, that I would
admit its uncontrolled and all-predominant authority.

In my opinion the main evil of the present democratic
institutions of the United States does not arise, as is
so often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but
from their irresistible strength. ... I am not so much
alarmed by the excessive liberty which reigns in that
country, as by the inadequate securities which one finds
against tyranny. When an individual or party is
wronged in the United States, to whom can he apply for
redress.'^

It is in the examination of the exercise of thought
in the United States that we clearly perceive how far
the power of the majority surpasses all the powers with
which we are acquainted in Europe. At the present

255

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

time the most absolute monarchs in Europe camiot
prevent certain opinions hostile to their authority from
circulating in secret through their dominions and even
in their courts.

It is not so in America. So long as the majority is
undecided, discussion is carried on, but as soon as its
decision is announced everyone is silent. . . .

I know of no country in which there is so little inde-
pendence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in
America. In America the majority raises formidable
barriers around the liberty of opinion. Within these
barriers an author may write what be pleases, but woe
to him if he goes beyond them. Not that he is in danger
of an auto-da-fe, but he is exposed to continued obloquy
and persecution. His political career is closed for ever.
Every sort of comp)ensation, even that of celebrity, is
refused him. Those who think like him have not the
courage to speak out, and abandon him to silence.
He yields at length, overcome by the daily effort which
he has to make, and subsides into silence as if he felt
remorse for having spoken the truth.

Fetters and headsmen were coarse instruments . . .
but civilization has perfected despotism itself. Under
absolute despotism of one man, the body was attacked
to subdue the soul, but the soul escaped the blows
and rose superior. Such is not the course adopted in
democratic republics; there the body is left free, but
the soul is enslaved. . . .

The ruling power in the United States is not to be
made game of. The smallest reproach irritates its
sensibilities. The slightest joke which has any founda-
tion in truth renders it indignant. Everything must
be the subject of encomium. No writer, whatever his
eminence, can escape paying his tribute of adoration
to his fellow citizens.

The majority lives in the perpetual utterance of

256

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

self -applause, and there are certain truths which Amer-
icans can only learn from strangers, or from experience.
If America has not yet had any great writers, the reason
is given in these facts — there can be no literary genius
without freedom of opinion, and freedom of opinion
does not exist in America.

Such passages as the above, quoted from the
words of a friendly student of American de-
mocracy, show the impression which, not-
withstanding our popular prattle about free-
dom, thoughtful foreigners have since the be-
ginning received. And de Tocqueville wrote
long before crowd-thinking had reached any-
thing like the development we see at present.
To-day the tyrannizing is not confined to the
majority -crowd. All sorts of minority -crowds,
impatient of waiting until they can by fair
means persuade the majority to agree with
them, begin to practice coercion upon every-
one within reach the minute they fall into
possession of some slight advantage which may
be used as a weapon. From the industrial
side we were first menaced by the "invisible
government" of organized vested interests;
now, by a growing tendency to government by
strikes. Organized gangs of all sorts have at
last learned the amusing trick of pointing a
pistol at the public's head and threatening it
with starvation, and up go its hands, and the
gang gains whatever it wants for itself, regard-
less of anyone else. But this "hold-up game"

257

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

is by no means confined to labor. Capitalistic
Soviets have since the beginning of the war
taken advantage of situations to enhance their
special crowd-interests. The following, quoted
from a letter written during the war to the
Atlantic Monthly, by a thoroughly American
writer, Charles D. Stewart, describes a type of
mob rule which existed in almost every part
of the nation while we were fighting for free-
dom abroad:

Carlyle said that "Of all forms of government, a
government of busybodies is the worst.'* This is
true. It is worse than Prussianism, because that is
one form of government, at least; and worse than So-
cialism, because Socialism would be run by law, any-
way. But government by busybodies has neither
head nor tail; working outside the law, it becomes
lawless; and having no law to support it, it finally
depends for its enforcement upon hoodlums and mob
rule. When the respectable and wealthy elements are
resorting to this sort of government, abetted by the
newspapers and by all sorts of busybody societies intent
upon "government by public sentiment," we finally
have a new thing in the world and a most obnoxious
one — mob rule by the rich; with the able assistance of
the hoodlums — always looking for a chance.

It starts as follows:

The government wishes a certain amount of money.
It therefore appeals to local pride; it sets a "quota,"
which has been apportioned to each locality, and
promises of a fine "over-the-top" flag to be hoisted
over the courthouse. All well and good; local pridf
is a very One thing, competition is wholesome.

258

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

But the struggle that ensues is not so much local
pride as it looks to be.

Milwaukee, for instance, a big manufacturing center,
is noted for its German population. This, the local
proprietors fear, may affect its trade. It may be boy-
cotted to some extent. A traveling man comes back
and says that a certain dealer in stoves refuses to buy
stoves made in Milwaukee!

Ha! — Milwaukee must redeem its reputation; it
must always go over the top: it must be able to aflSx
this stamp to all its letters.

Now, as the state has a quota, and the county and
city has each its quota, so each individual must have
his quota. Each individual must be "assessed" to buy
a certain quota [government war loan] of bonds. Suc-
cess must be made sure: the manufacturers must see
the honor of Milwaukee, and Wisconsin, maintained.

It is not compulsory to give a certain "assessed"
amount to the Y. M. C. A.; and the government does
not make a certain quota of bonds compulsory on
citizens — oh, no! it is not compulsory, only you must
abide by your assessment. And we will see that you
do. No excuse accepted. . . .

Picture to yourself the following "collection com-
mittee " traveling out of the highly civilized, " kultured "
city of Milwaukee.

Twenty-five automobiles containing sixty to seventy
respectable citizens of Milwaukee.

One color guard (a flag at the head) with two home
guardsmen in citizens' clothes.

Two deputy sheriffs.

One "oflScial" photographer.

One "oflBcial" stenographer.

One banker (this personage to make arrangements
to lend a farmer the money in case he protests that he
has subscribed too much already).

250

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

This phalanx, entirely lawless, moves down upon a
farmer who is urging two horses along a cloddy furrow,
doing his fall plowing.

They form a semicircle about bim; the speechmaker
says, "Let us salute the flag" (watching him to see
that he does it promptly) ; and while his horses stand
there the speechmaker delivers a speech. He must sub-
scribe his "assessed" amount — no excuses accepted.
If he owes for the farm, and has just paid his interest,
and has only fifteen dollars to go on with, it makes no
difference. He must subscribe the amount of his
"assessment," and "sign here."

If not, what happens? The farmer all the time, of
course, is probably scared out of his wits, or does not
know what to make of this delegation of notables
bearing down upon his solitary task in the fields. But
if he argues too much, he finds thb. They have a
large package of yellow placards reading :

THE OCCUPANT OF THESE PREMISES HAS

REFUSED TO TAKE HIS JUST SHARE OF

LIBERTY BONDS.

And they put them all over his place. He probably
aigns.

Now bear in mind that this method is not practiced
merely against farmers who have made unpatriotic
remarks, or have refused to support the war. It is
practiced against a farmer who has taken only one hun-
dred dollars when he was assessed a hundred and fifty —
and this is to make him "come across" with the
remainder.

You might ask. Is this comic opera or is it
government?

And now we come to the conclusion. Imagine your-
self •ither a workman in Milwaukee, or a farmer out

260

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

in the country. You are dealt with in this entirely
Prussian manner — possibly the committee, which
knows little of your financial difficulties in your home,
has just assessed you arbitrarily.

Your constitutional rights do not count. There is
no remedy. If you are painted yellow, the District
Attorney will pass the buck — he knows what the manu-
facturer expects of him, and the financier. The state
officers of these drives, Federal representatives, are
always Milwaukee bankers.

But for you there is no remedy if you are "assessed"
too high.

With the Y. M. C. A., and other religious society
drives, the same assessment scheme is worked. You
cannot give to the Y. M. C. A. You are told right ofiF
how much you are to pay.

It would seem that in our democracy free-
dom consists first of freedom to vote; second,
of freedom to make commercial profit; third,
of freedom to make propaganda; fourth, of
freedom from intellectual and moral responsi-
bility. Each of these "liberties" is little more
than a characteristic form of crowd-behavior.
The vote, our most highly prized modern
right, is nearly always so determined by crowd-
thinking that as an exercise of individual
choice it is a joke. Men are herded in droves
and delivered by counties in almost solid
blocks by professional traders of political in-
fluence. Before each election a campaign of
crowd-making is conducted in which every
sort of vulgarity and insincerity has survival

261

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

value, in which real issues are so lost in parti-
san propaganda as to become unrecognizable.
When the vote is cast it is commonly a choice
between professional crowd - leaders whose
competency consists in their ability to Billy
Sundayize the mob rather than in any marked
fitness for the ofiice to which they aspire —
also between the horns of a dilemma which
wholly misstates the issue involved and is
trumped up chiefly for purposes of political i
advertising. Time and again the franchise 1
thus becomes an agency by which rival crowds
may fasten their own tyrannies upon one
another.

Freedom to make commercial profit, to get
ahead of others in the race for dollars, is what
democracy generally means by "opportunity."
Nothing is such a give-away of the modern
man as the popular use of the word "indi-
vidualism." It is no longer a philosophy of
becoming something genuine and unique, but
of getting something and using it according to
your own whims and for personal ends regard-
less of the effect upon others. This pseudo-
individualism encourages the rankest selfish-
ness and exploitation to go hand in hand with
the most deadly spiritual conformity and in-
anity. Such "individualism" is, as I have
pointed out, a crowd-idea, for it is motivated
by a cheaply disguised ideal of personal su-
periority through the mere fact of possessing

262

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

things. Paradoxical as it may appear at first
sight, this is really the old crowd notion of
"equality," for, great as are the differences of
wealth which result, every man may cherish
the fiction that he possesses the sort of ability
necessary for this kind of social distinction.
Such superiority thus has little to do with
personal excellence; it is the result of the
external accident of success. One man may
still be *'as good as another."

Against this competitive struggle now there
has grown up a counter-crowd ideal of col-
lectivism. But here also the fiction of uni-
versal spiritual equality is maintained; the
competitive struggle is changed from an indi-
vidual to a gang struggle, while the notion
that personal worth is the result of the en-
vironment and may be achieved by anyone
whose belly is filled still persists. Proletarians
for the most part wish, chinch-bug fashion, to
crawl into the Elysian fields now occupied by
the hated capitalists. The growing tendency
to industrial democracy will probably in the
near future cut oflF this freedom to make
money, which has been the chief "liberty" of
political democracy until now, but whether
liberty in general will be the gainer thereby
remains to be seen. One rather prominent
Socialist in New York declares that liberty is
a "myth." He is correct, in so far as the
democratic movement, either political or so-

2(53

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

cial, is a crowd-phenomenon. Socialist agi-
tators are always demanding "liberty" never-
theless, but the liberty which they demand is
little more than freedom to make their own
propaganda. And this leads us to the third
liberty permitted by modem democracy.

The "freedom of speech" which is every-
where demanded in the name of democracy is
not at all freedom in the expression of indi-
vidual opinion. It is only the demand for
advertising space on the part of various
crowds for the publication of their shibboleths
and propaganda. Each crowd, while demand-
ing this freedom for itself, seeks to deny it to
other crowds, and all unite in denying it to
the non-crowd man wherever possible. The
Puritan's "right to worship according to the
dictates of a man's own conscience" did not
apply to Quakers, Deists, or Catholics. When
Republicans were "black abolitionists" they
would have regarded any attempt to suppress
The Liberator, as edited by William Lloyd
Garrison, as an assault upon the constitutional
liberties of the whole nation. But they are
not now particularly interested in preserving
the constitutional liberties of the nation as
represented in the right of circulation of The
Liberator y edited by Max Eastman. In Jef-
ferson's time, when Democrats were accused
of "Jacobinism," they invoked the "spirit of
1776" in opposition to the alien and sedition

264

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

laws under which their partisan propaganda
suffered limitation. To-day, when they are
striving to outdo the Republicans in "Amer-
icanization propaganda," they actually stand
sponsor for an espionage law which would
have made Jefferson or Andrew Jackson froth
at the mouth. Socialists are convinced that
liberty is dead because Berger and Debs are
convicted of uttering opinions out of harmony
with temporarily dominant crowd-ideas of
patriotism. But when Theodore Dreiser was
put under the ban for the crime of writing one
of the few good novels produced in America, I
do not recall that Socialists held any meetings
of protest in Madison Square Garden. I have
myself struggled in vain for three hours or
more on a street corner in Green Point trying
to tell liberty -loving Socialists the truth about
the Gary schools. When the politicians in
our legislative assemblies were tricked into
passing the obviously unliberal Eighteenth
Amendment, I was much interested in learn-
ing how the bulk of the Socialists in the Cooper
Union audiences felt about it. As I had ex-
pected, they regarded it as an unpardonable
infringement of personal freedom, as a typical
piece of American Puritan hypocrisy and
Pharisaism. But they were, on the whole, in
favor of it because they thought it would be
an aid to Bolshevist propaganda, since it
would make the working class still more dis-

18 «65

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS ^

contented! Such is liberty in a crowd-gov-
erned democracy. ... It is nothing but the
liberty of crowds to be crowds.

The fourth liberty in democratic society to-
day is freedom from moral and intellectual re-
sponsibility. This is accomplished by the
magic of substituting the machinery of the
law for self-government, bureaucratic meddle-
someness for conscience, crowd-tyranny for
personal decency. Professor Faguet has called
democracy the "cult of incompetence" and
the ''dread of responsibility." lie is not far
wrong, but these epithets apply not so much
to democracy as such as to democracy under
the heel of the crowd. The original aim of
democracy, so far as its philosophical thinkers
conceived of it, was to set genius free from the
trammels of tradition, realize a maximum of
self-government, and make living something
of an adventure. But crowds do not so under-
stand democracy. Every crowd looks upon
democracy simply as a scheme whereby it
may have its own way. We have seen that
the crowd-mind as such is a device for "kid-
ding" ourselves, for representing the easiest
path to the enhancement of our self-feeling as
something highly moral, for making our per-
sonal right appear like universal righteousness,
for dressing up our will to lord it over others,
as if it were devotion to impersonal principle.
As we have seen, the crowd therefore insists

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

upon universal conformity; goodness means
only making everyone alike. By taking refuge
in the abstract and ready-made system of
crowd-ideas, the unconscious will to power is
made to appear what it is not; the burden of
responsibility is transferred to the group with
its fiction of absolute truth. Le Bon noted the
fact of the irresponsibility of crowds, but
thought that such irresponsibility was due to
the fact that the crowd, being an anonymous
gathering, the individual could lose his iden-
tity in the multitude. The psychology of the
unconscious has provided us with what I think
is a better explanation, but the fact of irre-
sponsibility remains and is evident in all the
influence of crowd-thinking upon democratic
institutions. The crowd-ideal of society is one
in which every individual is protected not only
against exploitation, but against temptation —
protected therefore against himself. The whole
tendency of democracy in our times is toward
just such inanity. Without the least critical
analysis of accepted moral dilemmas, we are
all to be made moral in spite of ourselves, re-
gardless of our worth, without effort on our
part, moral in the same way that machines
are moral, by reducing the will to mere auto-
matic action, leaving no place for choice and
uncertainty, having everyone wound up and
oiled and regulated to run at the same speed.
Each crowd therefore strives to make its own

267

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

moral ideas the law of the land. Law becomes
thus a sort of anthology of various existing
crowd-hobbies. In the end moral responsibil-
ity is passed over to legislatures, commissions,
detectives, inspectors, and bureaucrats. Any-
thing that "gets by" the public censor, how-
ever rotten, we may wallow in with a perfect
feeling of respectability. The right and neces-
sity of choosing our way is superseded by a
system of statutory taboos, which as often as
not represent the survival values of the mean-
est little people in the community — the kind
who cannot look upon a nude picture without
a struggle with their perverted eroticism, or
entertain a significant idea without losing
their faith.

The eflfect of all this upon the intellectual
progress and the freedom of art in democratic
society is obvious, and is just what, to one
who understands the mechanisms of the crowd-
mind, might be expected. No wonder de
Tocqueville said he found less freedom of
opinion in America than elsewhere. Explain
it as you will, the fact is here staring us in the
face. Genius in our democracy is not free. It
must beg the permission of little crowd-men
for its right to exist. It must stand, hat in
hand, at the window of the commissioner of
licenses and may gain a permit for only so
much of its inspiration as happens to be of
uSe-value to the uninspired. It must play the

i68

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

conformist, pretend to be hydra-headed rather
than unique, useful rather than genuine, a
servant of the "least of these" rather than
their natural master. It must advertise, but
it may not prophesy. It may flatter and pat
ronize the stupid, but it may not stand up
taller than they. In short, democracy every-
where puts out the eyes of its Samson, cuts off
his golden-rayed locks, and makes him grind
corn to fill the bellies of the Philistines.

From the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury until now it has been chiefly the business
man, the political charlatan, the organizer of
trade, the rediscoverer of popular prejudices
who have been preferred in our free modern so-
cieties. Keats died of a broken heart; Shelley
and Wagner were exiled; Beethoven and Schu-
bert were left to starve; Darwin was con-
demned to hell fire; Huxley was denied his
professorship ; Schopenhauer was ostracized by
the elite; Nietzsche ate his heart out in soli-
tude; Walt Whitman had to be fed by a few
English admirers, while his poems were pro-
hibited as obscene in free America; Emerson
was for the greater part of his life persona non
grata at his own college; Ingersoll was denied
the political career which his genius merited;
Poe lived and died in poverty; Theodore
Parker was consigned to perdition; Percival
Lowell and Simon Newcomb lived and died
almost unrecognized by the American public.

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

Nearly every artist and writer and public
teacher is made to understand from the begin-
ning that he will be popular in just the degree
that he strangles his genius and becomes a
vulgar, commonplace, insincere clown.

On the other hand steel manufacturers and
railroad kings, whose business record will
often scarcely stand the light, are rewarded
with fabulous millions and everyone grovels
before them. When one turns from the
** commercialism," which everywhere seems to
be the dominant and most sincere interest in
democratic society, when one seeks for spir-
itual values to counterbalance this weight
of materialism, one finds in the prevailing
spirit little more than a cult of naive senti-
mentality.

It can hardly be denied that if Shakespeare,
Boccaccio, Rabelais, Montaigne, Cassanova,
Goethe, Dostoievsky, Ibsen, Tolstoi, Rous-
seau, St. Augustine, Milton, Nietzsche, Swin-
burne, Rossetti, or even Flaubert, were alive
and writing his masterpiece in America to-
day, he would be instantly silenced by some
sort of society for the prevention of vice, and
held up to the public scorn and ridicule as a
destroyer of our innocence and a corrupter of
public morals. The guardians of our char-
acters are ceaselessly expurgating the classics
lest we come to harm reading them. I often
think that the only reason why the Bible is

270

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

permitted to pass through our mails is because
hardly anyone ever reads it.

It is this same habit of crowd-thinking
which accounts to a great extent for the dearth
of intellectual curiosity in this country. From
what we have seen to be the nature of the
crowd-mind, it is to be expected that in a
democracy in which crowds play an important
part the condition described by de Tocque-
ville will generally prevail. There is much
truth in his statement that it seems at first as
if the minds of all the Americans " were formed
upon the same model.'' Spiritual variation
will be encouraged only in respect to matters
in which one crowd diflFers from another. The
conformist spirit will prevail in all. Intel-
lectual leadership will inevitably pass to the
"tight-minded." There will be violent con-
flicts of ideas, but they will be crowd ideas.

The opinions about which people differ are
for the most part ready-made. They are
concerned with the choice of social mechan-
isms, but hardly with valuations. With nearly
all alike, there is a notion that mankind may
be redeemed by the magic of externally
manipulating the social environment. There
is a wearisome monotony of professions of
optimism, idealism, humanitarianism, with
little knowledge of what these terms mean.

I am thinking of all those young people
who, in the decade and a half which preceded

271

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

the war, represented the finished product of
our colleges and universities. What a stretch
of imagination is needed before one may call
these young people educated! How little of
intellectual interest they have brought back
from school to their respective communities!
How little cerebral activity they have stirred
up ! Habits of study, of independent thinking,
have seldom been acquired. The "educated"
have possibly gained a little in social grace;
they have in some cases learned things which
are of advantage to them in the struggle for
position. Out of the confused mass of un-
assimilated information which they dimly re-
member as the education which they "got,"
a sum of knowledge doubtless remains which
is greater in extent than that possessed by the
average man, but, though greater in extent,
this knowledge is seldom different in kind.
There is the same superficiality, the same
susceptibility to crowd-thinking on every sub-
ject. The mental habits of American de-
mocracy are probably best reflected to-day by
the "best-seller" novel, the Saturday Evening
Post, the Chautauqua, the Victrola, the moving
picture.

Nearly ever5''one in America can read, for
the " schoolhouse is the bulwark of democratic
freedom." However, with the decrease in
illiteracy there has gone a corresponding low-
ering of literary and intellectual standards, a

272

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

growing timidity in telling the truth, and a
passion for the sensationally commonplace.
If it be true that before people may be polit-
ically free they must be free to function men-
tall3% one wonders how much of an aid to
liberty the public schools in this country have
been, or if, with their colossal impersonal sys-
tems and stereotyped methods of instruction,
they have not rather on the whole succeeded
cliiefly in making learning uninteresting, dull-
ing curiosity and killing habits of independent
thinking. There is probably no public insti-
tution where the spirit of the crowd reigns to
the extent that it does in the public school.
The aim seems to be to mold the child to
type, make him the good, plodding citizen,
teaching him only so much as some one thinks
it is to the public's interest that he should
know. I am sure that everyone who is familiar
with the actions of the school authorities in
New York City during the two years, 1918
and 1919, will be impelled to look elsewhere
for much of that liberty which is supposed to
go with democracy.

Some years ago I conducted a little investi-
gation into the mental habits of the average
high-school graduate. An examination was
made of twenty or more young people who
had been out of school one year. This is
doubtless too limited a number to give the
findings great general significance, but I give

278

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

the results in brief for what they are worth.
These students had been in school for eleven
years. I thought that they ought at least
to have a minimum of general cultural infor-
mation and to be able to express some sort of
opinion about the commonplaces of our spir-
itual heritage. The questions asked were such
as follow: What is the difference between the
Declaration of Independence and the Con-
stitution of the United States? What is a
dicotyledon? Does the name Darwin mean
anything to you? Have you ever heard of
William James? What is the significance of
the battle of Tours? WTio was Thomas Jef-
ferson? There were twenty questions in all.
The average grade, even with the most liberal
marking, was 44.6. The general average was
raised by one pupil who made a grade of 69.
But then we should not be too severe upon the
public-school graduate. One of the brightest
college graduates I know left a large Eastern
institution believing that Karl Marx was a
philologist. Another, a graduate from a West-
ern college, thought that Venus de Milo was
an Italian count who had been born without
any arms. I know a prominent physician,
whose scientific training is such that he has
been a lecturer in a medical college, who be-
lieves that Heaven is located just a few miles
up in the sky, beyond the Milky Way. These
are doubtless exceptional cases, but how many

274

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

persons with university degrees are there who
have really caught the spirit of the human-
istic culture, or have ever stopped to think
why the humanities are taught in our col-
leges? How many are capable of discriminat-
ing criticism of works of music, or painting,
literature, or philosophy? My own experi-
ence convinces me, and I am sure that other
public teachers who have had a like experience
will bear witness to the same lamentable fact,
that such little genuine jntdkctuaJ interest as
there is in this country is chiefly confined to
immigrant Jews, our American youth being,
on the whole, innocent of it. The significance
of this fact is obvious, as is its cause. Due to
the conformist spirit of the dominant crowd,
native-born Americans are losing their intel-
lectual leadership.

We must not ignore the fact that there is
among the educated here a small and, let us
hope, growing group of youthful ** intellectu-
als." But in the first place the proportion of
these to the whole mass is tragically small.
In the second place intellectual liberalism has
been content for the most part to tag along
behind the labor movement, as if the chief
meaning of the intellectual awakening were
economic. It is no disparagement of labor to
say that the intellect in this country of crowds
has also other work to do, and that, until it
strikes-out for itself, neither the labor move-

275

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

inent nor anything else will rise above com-
monplace crowd dilemmas. Too much of our
so-called intellectualism is merely the substi-
tution of ready-made proletarian crowd-ideas
for the traditional crowd-ideas which pass for
thinking among the middle classes.

All the facts which have been pointed out
above are the inevitable consequences of gov-
ernment by crowds. There can be no real
liberty with crowds because there can be no
personal independence. The psychic mechan-
isms of the crowd are hostile to conscious per-
sonality. The independent thinker cannot be
controlled by catchwords. In our day intel-
lectual freedom is not smothered in actual
martyr fires, but it is too often strangled in
the cradle. The existence of new values, a
thing which will inevitably happen where the
human spirit is left free in its creative im-
pulses, is disturbing to the crowd-mind. Edu-
cation must therefore be made "safe for de-
mocracy"; it must be guarded carefully lest
the youth become an original personal fact, a
new spiritual creation. I realize the element
of truth in the statement often made, that
there is already too much spiritual originality
in the youths of this generation. I am not
contending that certain phases of egoism
should not be checked by education. A solid
intellectual basis must be created which will
make social living possible. The trouble is,

276

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

however, that this task is done too well. It is
the merely useful man, not the unusual man,
whom the crowd loves. Skill is encouraged,
for, whether it be skill in serving or in de-
manding service, skill in itself does not upset
existing crowd-values . Reflection is ' * wicked
for it leads to doubt, ^and doubt is non-
gregarious behavior. Education ceases to be
the path of spiritual freedom ; it becomes a de-
vice for harnessing the spirit of youth in the
treadmill of the survival- values of the crowd.
It is also the revenge of the old against the
young, a way of making them less trouble-
some. It teaches the rules for success in a
crowd-governed w^orld while taking advantage
of the natural credulity of childhood to draw
the curtain with such terrifying mummery
about the figure of wisdom that the average
mind, never having the daring or curiosity to
lift it, will remain to its dying day a dullard
and a mental slave without suspecting the
fact. Every "dangerous" thought is de-
natured and expurgated. The student is skill-
fully insulated from any mental shock that
might galvanize him into original intellectual
life. The classic languages are taught for
purposes of "discipline." After six or seven
years' study of Greek literature in the accepted
manner one may be able to repeat most of the
rules of Goodwin's Greek Grammar, and pride
himself upon being a cultivated person, know-

277

. THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

ing in the end less of the language than a
bootblack from modern Athens knows of it,
or than a waiter from Bologna knows of Eng-
lish after one year's residence in Greenwich
Village. And the all-important thing is that
never once has the student been given a
glimpse of the beautiful free pagan life which
all this literature is about.

Science is taught that the student, if he has
ability, may learn how to make a geological
survey of oil lands, construct and operate a
cement factory, make poison gas, remove in-
fected tonsils, or grow a culture of bacteria;
but should he cease to hold popular beliefs
about the origin of life or the immortality of
the soul it is well for him to keep the tragic
fact to himself. Those who teach history,
economics, and political science in such a way
as to stimulate independence of thinking on the
part of the students are likely to be dismissed
from their faculties by the practical business
men who constitute the boards of trustees of
our institutions of higher learning; the pur-
pose of these sciences is to make our youth
more patriotic. Finally, the average instructor
receives less pay than a policeman, or a head-
waiter, and the unconscious reason for this is
all of a piece with the psychology of the
crowd-mind. The ignorant man's resentment
toward superiority, or '*highbrowism," is

thereby vindicated. Moreover, the integrity

ma

GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

of the complex of ruling crowd-ideas is less
endangered. There is less likelihood of its
being undermined in the process of education
when vigorous, independent spirits are di-
verted from intellectual pursuits by richet
prizes offered in other fields, and the task of
instruction therefore left largely to the un-
derfed and timid who are destined by tem-
perament to trot between the shafts.

In this discussion of the government of
crowds I have ignored consideration of the
mechanisms of political and social organiza-
tions which usually characterize the treatment
of this subject. It is not that I wish to divert
attention from the necessity of more practical
and just social arrangements and political
forms of organizations. These we must
achieve. But the facts which ultimately make
for our freedom or slavery are of the mind.
The statement that we cannot be politically
or economically a free people until we attain
mental freedom is a platitude, but it is one
which needs special emphasis in this day when
all attention is directed to the external form
of organization.

No tyranny was ever for long maintained
by force. All tyrannies begin and end in the
tyranny of ideas uncritically accepted. It is
of just such ideas that the conscious thinking
of the crowd consists, and it is ultimately
from the crowd as a psychological mechanism

279

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

that tyranny as such proceeds. Democracy in
America fails of freedom, not because of our
political constitution, though that would
doubtless be modified by a people who were
more free at heart; it fails because freedom
of opinion, intellectual alertness, critical think-
ing about fundamentals, is not encouraged.
There is, moreover, little promise of greater
freedom in the various revolutionary crowds
who to-day want freedom only to add to the
number of crowds which pester us. And for
this we have, whether we are radicals or re-
actionaries or simply indifferent, no one to
blame but ourselves and our own crowd-
thinking.

EDUCATION AS A POSSIBLE CURE FOR CROWD-
THINKING

WE liave seen that Democracy in and of
itself is no more, sure a guarantee of
liberty than other forms of government. Thi^
does not necessarily mean that we have been
forced by our psychological study into an ar-
gument against the idea of democracy as
such. In fact, it cannot be denied that this
form of human association may have decided
advantages, both practical and spiritual, if
we set about in the right way to realize
them. It does not follow that, because the
franchise is exercised by all, democracy must
necessarily be an orgy of mob rule. If, under
our modern political arrangements, it has been
shown that the crowd presumes to regulate
acts and thought processes hitherto considered
purely personal matters, it is also true that
the dominance of any particular crowd has,
in the long run, been rendered less absolute
and secure by the more openly expressed
hostility of rival crowds. But crowd-behavior
has been known in all historic periods. De-
19 «8i

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

mocracy cannot be said to have caused it.
It may be a mere accident of history that the
present development of crowd-mindedness has
come along with that of democratic institu-
tions. Democracy has indeed given new kinds
of crowds their hope of dominance. It has
therefore been made into a cult for the self-
justification of various modern crowds.

The formula for realizing a more free and

humane common life will not be found in any

of the proffered cure-alls and propagandas

which to-day deafen our ears with their din.

Neither are we now in such possession of the

best obtainable social order that one would

wish to preserve the status quo against all

change, which would mean, in other words,

the survival of the present ruling crowds.

Many existing facts belie the platitudes which

these crowds speak in their defense, just as

they lay bare the hidden meaning of the magic

remedies which are proposed by counter-

^ ^ >^crowds. There is no single formula for social

[ redemption, and the man who has come to

^himself will refuse to invest his faith in any

y y'such thing — which does not mean, however,

/ that he will refuse to consider favorably the

{ practical possibilities of any proposed plan

\for improving social conditions.

. The first and greatest eflfort must be to free

"^J^ mdemocracy from crowd-mindedness , by liberat-^

\ing our own thinking. The way out of this

' ' 282

t

EDUCATION AS A CURE

complex of crowd compulsions is the solitary i A
part of self -analysis and intellectual courage. |
It is the way of Socrates, and Protagoras, of
Peter Abelard, and Erasmus, and Montaigne,
of Cervantes and Samuel Butler, of Goethe,
and Emerson, of Whitman and William James.
Just here I know that certain conservatives
will heartily agree with me. "That is it,"
they will say; "begin with the individual."
Yes, but which individual shall we begin with?
Most of those who speak thus mean, begin
with some other individual. Evangelize the
heathen, uplift the poor, Americanize the
Bolshevists, do something to some one which
will make him like ourselves; in other words,
bring him into our crowd. The individual
with whom I would begin is myself. Some-
how or other if I am to have individuality at
all it will be by virtue of being an individual,
a single, "separate person." And that is a
dangerous and at present a more or less lonely
thing to do. But the problem is really one
of practical psychology. W^e must come out j

of the crowd-self, just as, before the neurotic '

may be normal, he must get over his neurosis.
To do that he must trace his malady back to j

its source in the unconscious, and learn the
meaning of his conscious behavior as it is re-
lated to his unconscious desires. Then he j .
must do a diflScult thing — he must accept the i ^ \

jaci nf hirr^^^flf at itsi rp.nl iDfJHh I /^

28S

THE BEIUVIOR OF CROWDS

It is mucli the same with our crowd-inind-
edness. If psychoanalysis has therapeutic
value by the mere fact of revealing to the
neurotic the hidden meaning of his neurosis,
then it would seem that an analysis of crowd-
behavior such as we have tried to make should
be of some help in breaking the hold of the
crowd upon our spirits, and thus freeing de-
mocracy to some extent from quackery.

To see behind the shibboleths and dogmas
of crowd-thinking the "cussedness" — that is,
the primitive side — of human nature" at work
is a great moral gain. At least the *'cussed-
ness" cannot deceive us any more. We have
won our greatest victory over it when we drag
it out into the light. We can at least wrestle
with it consciously, and maybe, by directing
it to desirable ends, it will cease to be so
'* cussed," and become a useful servant. No
such good can come to us so long as this side
of our nature is allowed its way only on con-
dition that it paint its face and we encourage
it to talk piously of things which it really does
not mean. Disillusionment may be painful
/ N. both to the neurotic and to the crowd-man, but

^ ) the gain is worth the shock to our pride. The

ego, when better understood, becomes at once
/more highl}^ personalized because more con-
scious of itself, and more truly social be-
cause better adjusted to the demands of
\ others. It is this socialized and conscious

284

\

f

EDUCATION AS A CURE

selfhood which is both the aim and the hope of
true democracy.

Such analysis may possibly give us the gift
to see ourselves as others do not see us, as we
have not wished them to see us, and finally
enable us to see ourselves and others and to
be seen by them as we really are.

We shall be free when we cease pampering
ourselves, stop lying to ourselves and to one
another, and give up the crowd-mummery in
which we indulge because it happens to flatter
our hidden weaknesses! In the end we shall
only begin to solve the social problem when
w« can cease together taking refuge from
reality in systems made up of general ideas
that we should be using as tools in meeting
the tasks from which as crowd-men and neu-
rotics people run away; when we discontinue
making use of commonly accepted principles
and ideals as defense formations for shame-
ful things in which we can indulge ^ur^elves
with a clear conscience only by all doing tEem
together.

There must be an increase in the number of
unambitious men, men who can rise above
vulgar dilemmas and are deaf to crowd propa-
ganda, men capable of philosophical toler-
ance, critical doubt and inquir}% genuine
companionship, and voluntary co-operation
in the achievement of common ends, free
spirits who can smile in the face of the mob,

.285

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

who know the mob and are not to be taken
in by it.

All this sounds much like the old gospel of
conviction of sin and repentance; perhaps it
is just that. We must think differently,
change our minds. Again and again peo-
ple have tried the wide way and the broad
gate, the crowd-road to human happiness,
only to find that it led to destruction in a
cul-de-sac. Now let us try the other road,
"the strait and narrow path." The crowd-
path leads neither to self-mastery nor social
blessedness. People in crowds are not think-
ing together; they are not thinking at all,
save as a paranoiac thinks. They are not
working together; they are only sticking to-
gether. We have leaned on one another till we
have all run and fused into a common mass.
The democratic crowd to-day, with its sweet
optimism, its warm ** brotherly love," is a.
sticky, gooey mass which one can hardly
touch and come back to himself clean. By
dissolving everything in '*one great union"
people who cannot climb alone expect to ooze
into the co-operative commonwealth or king-
dom of heaven. I am sick of this oozing
democracy. There must be something crystal-
line and insoluble left in democratic America.
Somewhere there must be people with sharp
edges that cut when they are pressed too
hard, people who are still solid, who have im-

280

EDUCATION AS A CURE

penetrable depths in them and hard facets
which reflect the sunlight. They are the hope
of democracy, these infusible ones.

To change the figure, may their tribe in-
crease. And this is the business of every edu-
cator who is not content to be a faker. What
we need is not only more education, but a
different kind of education. There is more
hope in an illiterate community where people
hate lying than in a high-school educated
nation which reads nothing but trash and is
fed up on advertising, newspapers, popular
fiction, and propaganda.

In the foregoing chapter, reference was
made to our traditional educational systems.
The subject is so closely related to the mental
habits of democracy that it would be difficult
to overemphasize its importance for our study.
Tradition£d_educationul methods have more
often given encouxagem^jtrLio .ci::Qwd-t^
than to independence of judgment. Thinking
has been divorced from doing. Knowledge,
instead of being regarded as the foresight of
ends to be reached and the conscious direction /
of activity toward such ends, has been more
commonly^egarded as the copying of i_si>lated
things to be learneHT The act of learning has
been treated as if it were the passive rece^^
of information imposedfromwit^ '^^^

subject to be learned has been sequestered"^
and set apart from experience as a whole, with )^

287 . \

>r

J.

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

the result that ideas easily romff to hft tpt
garded^asjhings in themselves. Systems of\
I thought are built up with little or no sense of /
V \ their connection with everyday problemsj
i Thus our present-day education prepares in
advance both the ready-made logical systems
in which the crowd-mind takes refuge from
the concretely real and the disposition to ac-
cept truth second-hand, upon the authority of
another, which in the crowd-man becomes the #
spirit of conformity.

Even science, taught in this spirit may be
destructive of intellectual freedom. Professor
Dewey says that while science has done much
to modify men's thoughts, still

It must be admitted that to a considerable extent
the progress thus procured has been only technical;
it has provided more efficient means for satisfying pre-
existent desires rather than modified the quality of
human purposes. There is, for example, no modern
civilization which is the equal of Greek culture in all
respects. Science is still too recent to have been a!>-
sorbed into imaginative and emotional disposition.
Men move more swiftly and surely to the realization
of their ends, but their ends too largely remain what
they were prior to scientific enlightenment. This fact
places upon education the responsibility of using science
in a way to modify the habitual attitude of imagination
and feeling, not leave it just an extension of our physical
arms and legs. . . .

The problem of an educational use of science is then
to create an intelligence pregnant with belief in the pos-
sibility of the direction of human affairs by itself. The

2S8

i

EDUCATION AS A CURE

method of science ingrained through education in habit I
means emancipation from rule of thumb and from the I
routine generated by rule of thumb procedure. . . .

Tliat science may be taught as a set of formal and .
technical exercises is only too true. This happens
whenever information about the world Ls made an end
in itself. The failure of such instruction to procure
culture is not, however, evidence of the antithesis \
of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evi- \
dence of a wrong educational attitude.

The new kind of education, the^ducatjon
which is tojibgatethe mind, will make much
of scientffic methods But let us notice what
it is to set a mind free. Mind does not exist
in a vacuum, nor in a world of "pure ideas."
The free mind is the functioning mind, the
mind which is not inhibited in its work by^
any conflict within itself. Thought is not
made free by the mere substitution of natu-
ralistic for theological dogma. It is possible
to make a cult of science itself. Crowd-
propaganda is often full of pseudoscientific
jargon of this sort. Specialization injtechnical
training^jnay produce merely a high-class
trained-anmiar man, of the purely reflex^ type,
who simply performs a prescnEed trick which
he lxas_learned, whenever an expected mptor-
cue appciars. In the presence of the unex- i
pected such a person may be as helpless as I
any other animal. It is possible to train /
circus dogs, horses, and even horned toads, to/
behave in this same way. Much so-called!

\

289

y

4

i

J

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

scientific training in our schools to-day is of
this sort. It results not in freedoin^JbjLiLjn
wh^ Bergson would call thcLjriuinpji jof
mechanism over freedom.

Science, to be a means of freedom — that is,
science as culture— may not be pursued as pure
theorizing apart from practical application.
Neither may ja-£ali^.latingj^^ gain

freedom to us by ignoring, in the application

of scientific knowledge to givpn pnHa, a pnn-

sideration of the ends themselves ^nd their
va}u£_fQr enriching human eYperienrp. It is
human interest which gives scientific knowl-
edge any meaning. Science must be taught
in the humanist spirit. It may not ignore this
quality of human interest which exists in all
knowledge. To do so is to cut off our relations
with reality. And the result may become a
negation of personality similar to that with
which the crowd compensates itself for its
unconscious ego-mania.

The reference just made to Humanism
leads us next to a consideration of the humani-
ties. It has long been the habit of traditional
education to oppose to the teaching of science
the teaching of the classic languages and the
arts, as if there were two irreconcilable prin-
ciples involved here. Dewey says that

Humanistic studies when set in opposition to study
of nature are hampered. They tend to reduce them-
stlves to exclusively literary and linguistic studies,

290

EDUCATION AS A CURE

which in turn tend to shrink to "the classics," to
languages no longer spoken. ... It would be hard to
find anything in history more ironical than the edu-
cational practices which have identified the "human-
ities " exclusively with a knowledge of Greek and Latin.
Greek and Roman art and institutions made such im-
portant contributions to our civilization that there
should always be the amplest opportunities for making
their acquaintance. But to regard them as par excel-
lence the humane studies involves a deliberate neglect
of the possibilities of the subject-matter which is ac-
cessible in education to the masses, and tends to cul-
tivate a narrow snobbery — that of a learned class whose
insignia are the accidents of exclusive opportunity.
Knowledge is humanistic in quality not because it is /J
abovi human products in the past, but because of whatj
it does in liberating human intelligence and human
sympathy. Any subject-matter which accomplishes I
this result is humane and any subject-matter which
does not accomplish it is not even educational.

X"

^

The point is that it is precisely what a cor-
rect knowledge of ancient civilization through
a study of the classics does that our traditional
educators most dread. William James once
said that the good which came from such study
was the ability to *'know a good man when
we see him. ' ' The student would thus become
more capable oT^discriminating Itppreciation.
He would grow to be a judge of values. He
would acquire sharp likes and dislikes' and
thus set up his own standards of judgment.
He would become aiLmdependent-thiixk^r and
therefore an enemy of crowds. Scholars of the

291

\

i^

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

Renaissance knew this well, and that is why
in their revolt against the crowd-mindedness
of their day they made use of the liUeroe hu-
manores to smash to pieces the whole dogmatic
system of the Middle Ages.

With the picture of ancient life before him
the student could not help becoming more
cosmopolitan in spirit. Here he got a glimpse
of a manner of living in which the controlling
ideas and fixations of his contemporary crowds
were frankly challenged. Here were witnesses
to values contrary to those in which his crowd
had sought to bring him up in a docile spirit.
Inevitably his thinking would wander into
what his crowd considered forbidden paths.
One cannot begin to know the ancients as they
really were without receiving ajjemendfius
intellectual stimulus. iVfter becoming ac-
^ quainted with the intellectual freedom and
courage and love of life which are almost
everywhere manifest in the literature of the
ancients, something happens to a man. He
becomes acquainted with himself as a valuing
animal. Few things are better calculated to
make free spirits than these ver\' classics, once
the student "catches on."

But that is just the trouble; from the
Renaissance till now, the crowd-mind, whether
interested politically, morally, or religiously;
whether Catholic, or Protestant, or merely
Rationalist, has done its level best to keep the

292

EDUCATION AS A CURE

student from "catching on/* Educational tra-%
dition, which is for the most part only s^'^s- 1
tematized crowd-thinking, has perverted the 1
classics into instruments for producing spir- \
itual results of the very opposite nature from \
the message which these literatures contain. \
Latin and Greek are taught for purposes of \
discipline. The task of learning them has been j
made aT difficuTTand as uninterestmg as pos-
siblej__with~tKe idea of forcing the student jo
do something hedSlikes, oT wEpping his spirit
into line and rendering him subservient to in-
tellectual-authQrity. Thus, while keeping up
the external appearance of culture, the effect
is to make the whole thing so meaningless and
unpleasant that the student will never have
the interest to try to find out what it is all
about.

I have said that the sciences and classics
should be approached in the "humanistic"
spirit. The humanist method must be ex-
tended to the whole subject-matter of educa-
tion, even to a revaluation of knowing itself.
I should not say everiy but primarily. It is
impossible here to enter into an extended dis-
cussion of the humanist theories of knowledge
as contrasted with the traditional or "intel-
lectualist" theories. But since we have seen
that the conscious thinking of the crowd-
mind consists in the main of abstract and
dogmatic logical systems, similar to the

293

X

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

y

K
^

"rationalizations" of the paranoiac, it is im-
portant to note the bearing of humanism upon
these logical systems wherever they are found.

A number of years ago, while discussing
certain phases of this subject with one of the
physicians in charge of a large hospital for
the insane, the significance of education for
healthy mental life was brought out with great
emphasis. It was at the time when psychi-
atrists were just beginning to make use of
analytical psychology in the treatment of
mentdjuidnervous disordfiig-

*'The trouBle with a great many of our
patients," said my friend, **is the fact that
they have been wrongly educated."

** Do you mean," I said, '* that they have not
received proper moral instruction.'^"

"Yes, but by the proper moral instruction
I do not mean quite the same thing that most
people mean by that. It all depends on the
way in which the instruction is given. Many
of these patients, are the mental slaves ofcon-
vention. They have„bgen terrified_by it; its
weight crushes them; when they discover
that their own impulses or behavior _jaEe-in
conflkt wilJbi.:$vha^ as jibsolute

standards, they cannot bear the shock. They
do^otTmbwTiqwJtG^^

condemn themselves; they seek reconciliation
by all sorts of crazy ideas which develop into
the psychoneurosis. And the only hope there

294

EDUCATION AS A CURE

IS of cure for them is re-education. The
physician, when it is not too late, often to do
any good has to become an educator."

The practice of psychoanalysis as a thera-
peutic method is really hardly anything more
than re-education. The patient must first be \
led to face the fact of himself as he really is;
then he^nmst be taught to revalue conventional
id^as in such a way that he can use these
ideasj-s jpstr^impnts with which hp jx^fiy adjust
hmisplf in thp variniis rp]f^,t,ions of life. This
process of education, in a word, is humanistic.
It is pragmatic; the patient is t^u^M t^lJ^
thinking is a way of functioning; that ideas
are instruments, ways of acting. He learns f
to value these tendencies to act and to find
himself through the mastery of his own ^
thinking.

Now we have seen that the neurosis is but
one path of escape from this conflict of self
with the imperatives and abstract ideas
through which social control is exercised. The
second way is to deny, unconsciously, the true
meaning of these ideas, and this, as we have
seen, is crowd-thinking. Here, as in the other
case, the education which is needed is that

which acqu^^JT^t.^^ fhet snbjprt with the func-

tioTmjjifltiir^ nf his own thiT^kJllg. which_directs

his attentiaQ_tQ_rfi&uIts,. which dissolves the
fictions into which the unconscious takes
refuge, by showing that systems of ideas have

295

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

■>(

J

^

J

no other reality thaiL jaJiat they do and no
other meanmg than the difference which their
being true makes in actual experience some-
where.

We have previously noted the connection
between the intellectualist philosophies with
their closed systems of ideas, their absolutists,
and the conscious thinking of crowds. The
crowd finds these systems ready-made and
merely backs into TEem arid hides itself like a
hermit crab in a deserted seashell. It follows
that the tumanist, however social he may be,
cannot be a crowd-man. He, too, will have
his ideals, but they are not made-in-advance
goods which all must accept; they are good
only as they may be made good in real experi-
ence, true only when verified in fact. To such
a mind there is no unctuousness, by which
ideas may be fastened upon others without
their assent. Nothing is regarded as so final
and settled that the spirit of inquiry should be
discouraged from efforts to modify and im-
prove it.

Generalizations, such as justice, truth, lib-
1 erty, and all other intellectualist- and crowd-
\ abstractions, become to the humanist not
\transcendental things in themselves, butoks
scriptions of certain qualities of behavior,
actual or possible, existing ojnly where they
ate experienced anJTnjlf^^"^*^ qifnnfii^nfi He
will not be swept into a howling mob by these

296

EDUCATION AS A CURE

big words ; he will stop to see what particular
things are they which in a given instance are
to be called just, what particular hypothesis
is it which it is sought to verify and thus add
to the established body of truth, whose liberty
is demanded and what, to be definite, is it
proposed that he shall do with the greater
opportunity for action? Let the crowd yell
itself hoarse, chanting its abstract nouns
made out of adjectives, the humanist will
know that these are but words and that the
realities which they point to, if they have any
meaning at all, are what "they are known as."

This humanist doctrine of the concreteness
of the real is important. It is a reaffirmation
of the reality of human experience. William
James, who called himself a "radical empiri-
cist," made much of this point. Experience
may not be ruled out for the sake of an a priori
notion of what this world ought to be. As
James used to say, we shall never know what
this world really is or is to become until the
last man's vote is in and counted. Here, of
course, is an emphasis upon the significance of
unique personality which no crowd will grant.
Crowds will admit personality as an abstract
principle, but not as an active will having
something of its own to say about the ultimate
outcome of things.

Another important point in which human-
ism corrects crowd-thinking is the fact that it

/

y

20

297

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

/

A

<e

regards intellect as an instrument of acting,
and not as a mere copyist of realities earthly
or supermundane. Dewey says:

If it be true that the self or subject of experience is
part and parcel of the course of events, it follows that
the self becomes a knower. It becomes a mind in virtue
of a distinctive way of partaking in the course of events.
The significant distinction is no longer between a knower
and the world, it is between different ways of being in
and of the movement of things; between a physical
way and a purposive way. . . .

As a matter of fact the pragmatic theory of intelli-
gence means that the function of mind is to project
new and more complex ends to free experience from
routine and caprice. Not the use of thought to accom-
plish purposes already given either in the mechanism of
the body or in that of the existent state of society, but
the use of intelligence to liberate and liberalize action,

is the pragmatic lesson Intelligence as intelligence is

inherently forward looking; only by ignoring its pri-
: maryf unction does it become a means for an end already
I given. The latter is servile, even when the end is
1 labeled moral, religious, esthetic. But ^ct ion directed

(to ends to which the agent ^asjiot-^evtouoly been
attach ed meyitably carries with it a quickened and
enlarged spirit. A pragmatic intelligence is a creative
^ intelligence, not a routine mechanic.

Hence humanism breaks down the conform-
ist spirit of crowds. From the simplest to the
most complex, ideas are regarded as primarily
motor, or, rather, as guides to our bodily
movements among other things in our en-
vironment. James says that the stream of life

298

/(

EDUCATION AS A CURE

which runs in at our eyes and ears is meant to
run out at our lips, our feet, and our finger-
tips. Bergson says that ideas are like snap-
shots of a man running. However closely they
are taken together, the movement always oc-
curs between them. They cannot, therefore,
give us reality, or the movement of life as
such, but only cross-sections of it, which serve
as guides in directing the conscious activity of
life upon matter. According to James again,
there are no permanently existing ideas, or
impersonal ones; each idea is an individual/ j ^^^
activity, known only in the thinking, and is
always thought jor a purpose. As all thinking
is purposive, and therefore partial, emphasiz-
ing just those aspects of things which are use-
ful for our present problem, it follows that the
sum total of partial views cannot give us the
whole of reality or anything like a true copy
of it. Existence as a whole cannot be reduced
to any logical system. Tfee One and the Abso-
lute are therefore meaningless and are only
logical ficjtipiis^ useful, _s^y sJ[ames^^Xjway of
allowing--U&_a_^oxt of temporary irresponsi-
bility ,._Qr**moral holiday."

From all this follows the humanist view of
Truth. Truth is nothing complete and exist-
ing in itself independent of human purpose.
The word is a noun made out of an adjective,
as I have said. An idea becomes true, says
James, when it fits into the totality of our

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

experience; truth is what we say about an
idea when it works. It must be made true,
by ourselves — that is, verified. Truth is there-
fore of human origin, frankly, man-made. To
Schiller it is the same as the good; it is the
attainment of satisfactory relations within ex-
perience. Or, to quote the famous humanist
creed of Protagoras, as Schiller is so fond of
doing, "Man is the measure of all things."
The meaning of the world is precisely, for all
purposes, its meaning for us. Its worth, both
logical and moral, is not something given, but
just what we through our activity are able to
assign to it.

The humanist is thus thrown upon his own
responsibility in the midst of concrete realities
of which he as a knowing, willing being is one.
His task is to make such modifications within
his environment, physical and social, as will
make his own activity and that of others with
him richer and more satisfactory in the future.

The question arises — it is a question com-
monly put by crowd-minded people and by
intellectual philosophers; Plato asks it of the
Protagoreans — how, if the individual man is
the measure of all things, is there to be any
conmfion measure? How any agreement?
May not a thing be good and true for one and
not for another? How, then, shall there be
any getting together without an outside au-
thority and an absolute standard? The an-

300

EDUCATION AS A CURE

swer, as Schiller and James showed, is obvi-
ous; life is a matter of adjustment. We each
constitute a part of the other's environment.
At certain points our desires conflict, our valu-
ations are different, and yet our experience
at these points overlaps, as it were. It is to
our common advantage to have agreement at
these points. Out of our habitual adjustments
to one another, a body of mutual understand-
ing and agreement grows up which constitutes
the intellectual and moral order of life. But
this order, necessary as it is, is still in the
making. It is not something given; it is not
a copy of something transcendent, impersonal,
and final which crowds may write upon their
banners and use to gain uniform submission
for anything which they may be able to ex-
press in terms which are general and abstract.
This order of life is purely practical; it exists
for us, not we for it, and because we have
agreed that certain things shall be right and
true, it does not follow that righteousness and
truth are fixed and final and must be wor-
shiped as pure ideas in such a way that the
mere repetition of these words paralyzes our
cerebral hemispheres.

Doubtless one of the greatest aids of the
humanist way of thinking in bringing the indi-
vidual to self-consciousness is the way in
which it orients us in the world of present-
day events. It inspires one to achieve a work-

301

Uf^'

i

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

ing harmony, not a fictitious haven of rest for
the mind interested only in its relations to its
j own ideas. The unity which life demands of
I us is not that of a perfect rational system. It
j is rather the unity of a healthy organism all
I the parts of which can work together.

Cut up as we are into what Emerson called
*' fragments of men," I think we are particu-
larly susceptible to crowd-thinking because we
are so disintegrated. Thought and behavior
must always be more or less automatic and
compulsory where there is no conscious co-
ordination of the several parts of it. It is
partly because we are the heirs of such a
patchwork of civilization that few people to-
day are able to think their lives through.
There can be little organic unity in the hetero-
. geneous and unrelated aggregation of half-
Y N baked information, warring interests, and ir-
I reconcilable systems of_valuation which are
I piled together in the modern man's thinking.
Life may not be reduced to a logical unity,
but it is an organic whole for each of us, and
we do not reach that organic unity by adding
mutually exclusive partial views of it together.
Something happens to one who grasps the
meaning of humanism; he becomes self-con-
scious in a new way. His psychic life becomes
/ a fascinating adventure in a real world. He
finds that his choices are real events. He is
"set intellectually on fire," as one of our edu-

S02

EDUCATION AS A CURE

cators has correctly defined education. As
Jung would doubtless say, he has "extro-
verted*' himself; his libido, which in the
crowd seeks to enhance the ego feeling by
means of the mechanism which we have de-
scribed, now is drawn out and attached to the
outer world through the intellectual channel.
Selfhood is realized in the satisfactoriness of
the results which one is able to achieve, in the
very fullness of his activity and the richness
of his interests.

Such a free spirit needs no crowds to keep
up his faith, and he is truly social, for he ap-
proaches his social relationships with intelli-
gent discrimination and judgments of worth
which are his own. He contributes to the
social, not a copy or an imitation, not a child-
ish wish-fancy furtively disguised, but a
psychic reality and a new creative energy. It
is only in the fellowship of such spirits, what-
ever political or economic forms their associa-
tion may take, that we may expect to see the
Republic of the Free.

w^

INDEX

Abelard, 153, 283.

Absolute, the. 143.

Absolutism. 133, 144.

Abstract ideas, 2, 49. 160.

function of, 154, 155.

Adler, Dr. Alfred, 59.

The NeurUi* Constitution, 20, 61.

63.

(Translated by Bernard Glueck
and John A. Lind; Moffat, Yard
A Co., New York, 1917.)

Adventist, 211.

(See also Messianism.)

Age of Reason, 209.

Agitators, 192.

Alcoholic neurosis, 86.

Alice in Wonderland, 2.

Ambition. 66.

America, conformist spirit in, 275.

crowd movements in, 53.

democracy in, 253, 280.

education in. 273, 280.

■ freedom of opinion in, 268.

— — leadership in. 275.

present condition, 189.

Amencan colonists, 52.

Declaration oif Independence, 196.

democracy, mental nabits in, 272.

revolution, 225.

Americanism, 87.

Americanization propaganda, 106.

Anabaptists, 225.

Analytical psychology, 12, 294.

(8ee also Psychoanalysis, Freud,
Jung, Adler, Brill, The Uncon-
scious.)

Anselm, 153.

o priori ideas in paranoia, 67.

Arbitrary power, limits of, 246.

Aristocrats, 182.

Armenians, persecution of," 107.

Armistice, the, 115.

Athletic contests, 82.

events, symbols of oonflict, 113.

AOarUic Monthly, 258.

Attention, 36.

direction of, 29.

function of, 58.

Augustine, Saint, 153, 270.

Bacon, Francis, 153.

Baker, Secretary Newton D., 117, 119.

Beethoven, 175, 269.

Behavior, social. 5.

Belief, crowd a creature of, 31.

Beliefs, as ends in themselves. 33.

crowd professions of, 195.

Berger, Victor, 265.
Bergson, Henri, 153.

on sleep, 57.

Creative Evolution, 211, 299.

(Translated by Arthur Mitchell;

Henry Holt & Co., New York,

1911.)
Time and Free Will, 290.

(Translated by F. L. Pogson;

George Allen A Co., London,

1912.)
Bible. 270.
Birth control, 239.
Boccaccio, 270.
Bolshevism, 166, 186, 207.

(See also Soviets, Revolution, Rus-
sia.)
Bolshevist propaganda, 228.
Bourgeoise, 170, 225.
Brill, Dr. A. A., 59.

Paychoanalyaia, Its Theories and

Application (W. B. Saunders,
Philadelphia, Pa.), 65. 61, 93. 133,
135.
British Labor Party, 226.
Butler, Samuel, 283.
Byron, 62.

CsBsar Borgia, 233.
Calvin, 225.
Capitalism. 177, 178.
Carlyle, 2.58.

Heroes and Hero Worshipers, 175.

Sartor Reaartus, 46.

Cassanova. 270.
Categorical impjerative, 90.
Cathohcs, 264.

in England, 225.

Censorships, 239.
Cervantes, 283.
Chautauqua, the, 272.
Chauvanism, 223.
Chesterton, G. K., 135.
Chicago, riot in, 107.
Child, egoism of, 62.
Christianity, primitive, 193, 209.
Chureh, the. 83. 114, 170, 234.
Cicero, 188.
Citizen, th«, 248.
Civilization, continuity of, 216.
Class, the master, 177.

struggle, 43.

(See alao Revolution.)

90S

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

Claamcs, the, 292.

Clergy of Middle Ages, 230.

Collective Mind, 15.

College 8tudeQt8, egoism of. 78, 79.

Communion of the eaints. 83.

Compensation, 120.

mechanisms of, 84.

Complex formations, causes of, 65.
Compromise mechanisms, 71.
Compulsive hatred, 112.

thinking, 71, 102.

Conflict, psychic, 3.

within the psyche, 70.

Conformist spirit, 275.

Crowd, itself absolute. 161.

— — its resentment of educated man,

172.

movements in America, 53.

moral. 124.

moral dilemmas of. 88.

motives in education. 271, 272.

notions of equahty. 262.

parental function of. 44.

restrictions upon freedom, 25.

nmaor in. 104.

— — ■ self-deception of. 54.
self-pity in, 101.

sense of responsibility in, 100.

Conformity, insisted upon by crowds, — — transference phenomenon, a 138,

268.
Conscientious objector, 120.
Consciousness, 57.

Conservatism of the crowd-mind, 224.
Conservative crowds, 191.
Conapriracy, delusion of, 105.

(See also Paranoia, Projection,

Persecution.)
Constantine, 234.

Constituent a-^sembly, French, 186.
Constitution. 247. 249.
Constitutional govcrmnent, 235.
Convert, the, 86.
Conway, Sir Martin, 17. 181.
The CTowd in Peace and War.

(Longmans. Green & Co., London,

1915.)
Co-operation, 226.
Co-operative commonwealth. 209.
Cooper Union Forum, 25, 26, 265.

240.
Counter crowds. 198.
Couthon, 206.
Creative Intelligence, 298.
Cromwell, Oliver. 225.
Crowd, the. 6.
a«ainst some one, 113.

(See also Hatred, Paranoia, De-
lusion of Persecution, Projection.)

a creature of belief, 31.

— — a state of mind. 19.

compulsive thinking of. 71. 102.

defined, 5.

delusion of conspiracy in, 105.

■ ■ • delusion of persecution. 99.

dogzna of equality in, 175.

dominant. 35. 177.

— — effect on social peace. 8.

effect on the inoividual, 8.

ego mania of. 74.

enemy of personality. 159.

ethics of, 90.

fear and suspicion in. 104.

function of ideals in, 84.

■ ■ hates in order that it may believ*

in itseU, 132.
■ hatred, a motive of self-defense,

113. 12.5.

homicidal U^ndencies of, lOft-107.

ideal of society, 267.

idealism of. loO.

idealises itself, 43.

138.

truths are a priori concepts, 141.

tyranny in, 101.

— — tyranny of, 235.

unconscious egoism of. 73.

unconscious motives of, 61.

virtues and vices of. 88.

virtues of, 164.

Crowd-behavior, in a democracy, 242.

pseudo-social. 22.

Crowd-ethics. 267.
Crowd-ideas, abstract. 49.
Crowd-ideas, moral significance of, 36.

pathology of. 37.

phenomenon of attention in, 36.

ready made, 26.

Crowd man, a dogmatist, 140.
Crowd mentality. 5.
Crowd-mind — and imranoia. 92.
— >— absolutism of. chapter vi, 133.

conservatism of, 224.

distorts patriotism. 111.

influence upon education, 277.

orthodoxy of. 152.

similarity — to paranoia, 98.

tendency to exaggerate, 1(X).

Crowd morality. 35, 157-158.

demands a victim. 106.

Crowd orator, 99.

Crowd-propaganda, 289.

Crowd- thinking — conservative, 191.

destructive tendencies of, 163.

finality of, 44.

function of, 191.

intensified by revolution, 223.

logic of, 140.

— — not creative, 217.

pageantry of, 215.

quest of naagic formulas." 150.

rationalisation of, 150-l.M.

wanting in intellectual curiosity,

271.
Crowds, claim to infallibility, 234.

counter. 198.

credulity of, 139-140.

dictatorship of, 183.

dignity of. 83.

disintegration of. 195.

dominant. 168.

faith of, 126.

function of ideas in. 165-156.

hostility to freedom, 200.

300

INDEX

Crowdn, idoalism of. 112.

illibenvliflm of, 276.

in modern society, 7.

lil>erty of. 20(5.

MesHiuuio faith of, 201.

permuuont, 42.

phenomenon of displacement in,

116.

resist disintegration, 129.

revolutionary, 180.

revolutionary phenomena in, 203.

self-adulation of, 77.

self-feeling in, 170.

slow to learn, 193.

spirit of, 298.

will to dominanoe, 79.

Curioaity of crowds, 271.

Darwin, 225, 269.
Day dreams, 84.
Day of the Lord, 202.
Debs. Eugene V.. 265.
Decalogue, 90.
Defense-mechanism, 04.
Deists, 264.
Delusion of conspiracy, 105.

(See also Paranoia, Persecution.)
of grandeur, 92.

(See also Paranoia, Egoism, Self-
feeling.)
of persecution, 68, 69, 92, 99.

(See also Paranoia, Projection,

Hate.)
Democracy, 178, 266, 282.

crowd behavior in, 242.

genius in, 268.

m America, 253, 272, 280.

law in, 268.

lawmaking power in, 247.

liberty in, 248. 261-267.

mental habits of. 287.

• not synonymous with liberty, 242.

Democratic constitutions, 235.

Democrats, 264.

Demons, 95.

Demon worship, 97.

Demosthenes, 62.

Department of Justice. United States,

240.
Determination, unconscious, 5.
Determinism, psychological motives of,

149.
Devil, the, 114.
Dewey, John, Ethics, by Dewey and

Tufts (Henry Holt & Co., New

York, 1910), 89.
■■■ Essays in Experimental Logic

(University of Chicago Press,

1916). 142.
— — Creative Intelligence (Henry Holt

& Co.. New York. 1917), 298.
' Democracy and Education (The

Macmillan Company, New York,

1916), 288-289, 290, 29L
EHar. 194.
Dictatorship, 222.
Dictatorship of crowds, 183.

Dictatorship of the proletariat, 193, 228,

229-232.
Dignity of crowds, 83.

(See also Egoism.)
Disgxiise, mechanisms of, 73.
Disintegration of crowds, 129, 195.
Dogma of infallibility, 234.
Dogmatism, 140.
Dominant crowd, 177.
Dostoievsky, 270.

The Brothers Karamazov, 233.

Dream, the. 34.

fancies, 58.

of Paradise, 207.

— ^ of social redemption. 232.

of world set free, 222.

Dreams, 57, 84.

disguise in, 73.

Dreiser, Theodore, 265.

The Genius. 265.

Du Bois, W. F. B., 121.
Duty, 161.

East St. Louis, riot in, 107.

Eastman, Max, 264.

Economic system, 213.

Economics, science of, 185.

Educated man, crowd's resentment of,

172.
Education, chapter x, 281.
— — crowd motive in, 271-272.

of present day, 288.

religious, 153.

the new, 284, 286, 289.

traditional, 292.

■ traditional systems, 277. 278.
Ego. consciousness, 70.

(See also Self -feeling.)
— — mania, 74.
Egoism of the neurotic, 61.

unconscious, 73.

Eighteenth amendment to Constitution

of United States, 236, 265.
Emerson, 9, 269, 283. 302.
Emotion, theory of, 18.
Empiricism, 297.
England, political liberty in, 220.

Socialism in. 227.

Environment, social, 35.

Epicurus, 153.

Equality, 175, 262.

Erasmus, 283.

Espionage, in United States. 241.

Ethic, of Kant. 162.

Ethics, 267.

of crowd, 90.

Europe, present condition in, 189.
Evangelists, 114.

(See also Sunday, William.)
Evolution, 212.

doctrines of, 210.

Exaggeration of CTowd-mind, 100.
Exodus of children of Israel, 52.
Exploitation, 170, 177.
Extroversion, 303.

Fads, 224.

S07

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

Faguet, The Cult of Incompetence, 17.

(Translated by Eteatrice Bar-
stow; E. P. Dutton & Co., New

York, 1916.)
The Dread of Responsibility, 266.

(Translated by Emily James;

G. P. Putnam's Sons, New

York. 1914.)
Faith, 126.
Fanaticism, 86.
Fear. 104. 128.
Feeling of importance, 82.

(See also Egoism.)
Female neurotic, 98.
Fichte, 152.

Fiction of justification, 106.
Factions, 20, 128.
Fictitious logic, 198.
Fixation-s, phenomenon of, 94.
Fhiubert, 270.
Forgetting, purposeful, 56.
Foiuierists, 204.
Franklin, 225.
Freedom, 154, 244, 248.

in democracy, 261-267.

of speech, 264.

to vote, 261.

Free spirit, 303.

French Revolution, 38. 107, 170, 182-

183, 192, 194. 219.
Freud, Dr. Sigmund, 30, 34, 59, 117,
210.

(See Analytical Psychology.)
Delusion and Dream, 55.

(Translated by Helen Downey;

MoflFat, Yard & Co., New York,

1917.)

The Interpretation of Dreams, 12,

59.

(Translated by Dr. A. A. Brill;

The Macmillan Company, New

York, 191.5.)

Three Contributions to the Sexual

Theory. "Nervous and Mental
Diseases," Monograph Series No.
4, 63.
Totem ar^d Taboo, 12, 90, 95.

(Translated bv Dr. A. A. Brill;

Moffat, Yard «k Co., New York,

1918.)

influence upon general psychology,

12.
on dream thoughts, 30.

Garrison, William Lloyd, 264.
Gary schools, 265.
Gemus, 67, 268.
Germany, 110.

and the war, 38.

Socialist movement in, 227.

Gironde, 196.

(See also French Revolution.)
Gobineau, 17, 54, 181.
Goethe, 176, 270. 283.
Good, the, 90.
Goodneiw, 89.
Guverunent, by orowds, chapter ix, 233.

Government, functions of, 251.
Grandeur, delusions of, 92.

(See also Egoism, Paranoia.)
Greatest happiness, principle of, 167.
Greece, 143.
Greek literature, 277.

Hapsburg, the, 235.
Hatred, 132.

in paranoia, 94, 112.

Hebrew prophet, 202.
Hegel, 152-153.
Heretic, the, 123.
Hero worship, 81, 82.
Hohensoilerns, the, 235.
Homicidal tendencies, 105.

(See also Crowd, ParanoU,

Hatred.)
Homosexuality, 94.
Human natiu-e, evil of, 284.

weakness of, 245-246.

Human sacrifice, 1 12.

Humanism, 225, 290, 293, 298, 300, 302.

(See also Pragmatism.)
Humanist, the, 296.
Hume, David, 153.
Huxley, 226, 269.
Hypocrisy, among crowds, 54.

IdeaUsm, 141, 144.

modern, 223.

of crowds, 112.

psychology of, 148.

Ideals, of the crowd, 84.

Ideas, o priori, 67.

descriptive confused with

214.

no impersonal, 3.

(ralitical, moral, religious, 44.

■ tyranny of, 279.

Ideational system, 159.

(See also Paranoia, Crowd Think-
ing.)

Illusions, 31.

Imitation and suggestion, theory of, 33.

Individual, the, 150, 283, 297, 301.

and society. 1-32.

Individualism, 153, 262.

InfalUbility, dogma of, 234.

Inferiority, feeling of. 62. 169-170.

(See also Egoism, Compensatioii.)^^^

IngersoU, Robert, 225, 269.

Insanity, 3.

Insanity and emotion, 19.

(See also Paranoia. Psychoanaly-
sis.)

Instinct. 11.

Instrumental theory of intellect, 298.

Intelleotualism, 144. 296.

and conservatism, 18.

Intellectuals, the, 230.

Jackson, Andrew, 265.
Jacobinism, 264.
Jacobins, the, 116.
James, WUliam, 2. 31, 153. 207, 241»
283. 391. 297.

306

INDEX

James. William, Etaays in Radical

Etnrririeiam (Longmans, Green «k

Co., New York, 1912), 142.

The Meanino of Truth, 301.

Praamatiain (Longmans, Green &

Co.. New York, 1905). 143.
Principles of Psychology (Henry

Ilolt A Co., New York. 1890), 37,

127. 298.
The Will to Believe (Longmans,

Green & Co., Reprint, 1912), 57,

175.
— ■ — Varieties of Religious Experience,

(Longmans, Green & Co., New

York. 1906). 22.
Jefferson, 225. 264.
J«richo, fall of a Revolutionary symbol,

212.
Judgment Day, 81.
Julius Csosar, 130.
Julius II, Pope, 181.
Jung. Dr. C. G., 69.

(See also Psychoanalysia.)

Analytical Psychology, 85, 303.

(Translated by E. Long; Mof-
fat, Yard & Co., New York,
1917.)
Psychology of the Unconscious, 66,

138.

(Translated by Beatrice Hinkle;
Moffat, Yard & Co., New York,
1916.)
JuBti6cation, mechanism of, 106.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, 80, 115.

Kant, l.')3. 161.

Metaphysics of Morals, 90, 162-

163.
(Translated by Thos. K. Abbot;
Longmans, Green & Co., New
York. Sixth edition, 1917.)

Keats, 269.

Kingdom of Heaven, 302.

Labor, assumed triumph of, 229.
Law, in a democracy, 268.
Leadership, 271.

in America, 275.

I^Bon. Gustave, 5, 17, 19, 139, 205,

242, 269.

■ on the imconscioiis, 14.

summary of his theory, 47,'

The Crowd, A Study of the Popular

M tnd (Eleventh edition. T. Fisher

Unwin, Ltd., London. 1917). 15.
The Psychology of RevoltUion, 180,

182, 205.

(Translated by Miall; G. P.
Putnam's Sons, New York,
1912.)
I^enin, Nioolai. 206, 227, 233.''
Leo X. Pope, 181. 185.
Liberator, the, 124, 125, 264.
Liberty, 199.

in a democracy, 242, 261-267.

of crowds, 266, 276.

Libido, 66. 136, 303.

809

Lincoln, 225.

Livingstone, R. W., The Cheek Qeniut

and Its Meaning for Us, 143.
Ix>cke, John, 163.
Logic, of crowd-thinking, 140.

in crowds and in paranoia, 198.

Ix)uiB XVI, 186.
Lowell. Percival, 269.
Lusk Committee, the, 103.
Luther, Martin, 175, 193, 225.
Lynchings, 38, 106.

McDougal, Prof. William, 10.

An Introduction to Social Psy-
chology (John W. Luce A Co.,
Boston, 1917), 11.

Machiavelli, The Prince, 233.

Madison Square Garden, 265.

Majority, as king, 248.

tyranny of, 250.

Man in the state of nature, 209.

Manifesto, Socialist, 204.
(See also Karl Marx.)

*' Man the Measure of all Things," 300.

Marcus Aurelius, 234.

Marines* Fathers* Association, 117-118.

Marx, Karl, 152.

Masculine protest, 62.

Masochism, 39, 65.

Mass meetings, 23.

Master class, 177.

Materialism, 150.

Mechani.sms, of compensation, 84.

of defense, 94.

of disguise, 73.

of justification, 40, 106.

Mechanistic theories. 1.

Mediaeval thinkers, 10.

Mental habits, 272.

Messianism as a revolutionary crowd
phenomenon, 203, 210.

Mexico, 194.

Millennium, 201.

Milton, 270.

Milwaukee, peeudo-patriotism in, 259.

Mind, collective, 15.

Minority crowds, arrogance of, 257.

Mirabeau, 183.

Mob, 6. 166.

outbreaks, 37.

Mobs, 107.

modem, 47.

Southern. 39.

Modern society challenged, 213.

Modernism, 223.

Montaigne, 270. 283.

Moral dilemmas, 88.

MoraUty, 106.

of crowd-mind, 157-168.

of the crowd, 124.

Motion pictures, 167.

Multiple personality, 5.

Mysticism of revc^utionary orowds, 210.

Napoleon, 221.
Narcissus, stage, 66.
Nations aa crowds, 83.

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

Negation, phenomenon of, 89.
Nero, 234.
Neurotic, female, 98.

similarity to crowd, 71.

Newcomb, Simon, 269.
New8paj)er8, 45.
New York City, 172.

crowds in, 115.

New Testament, 202.

Nietzsche, Friederich, 153, 269, 270.

Antichrigt (Third English edition.

Dr. Oscar Levy; The Macmillan
Company, New York, 1911), 81.
Beyond Good and Evil (Third Eng-
lish edition. Dr. Oscar Levy;
The Macmillan Company, New
York), 17, 124. 194.
'■ Genealogy of Morals (Edited by
Dr. Oscar Levy; The Macmillan
Company, New York, 1911), 91.

Thus Spake Zarathustra, 175.

(Translated by Thomas Com-
mon.)

The Will to Power, 62.

(Translated by A. M. Ludovici;
Oscar Levy edition; The Mac-
millan Company.)
Nonconformist, 123.
Non-crowd man, 226, 285.

Obsessions, 134.
CBdipus complex, G6.
Omaha, riot in, 107, 116.
Orators, 25.
Oratory, 99.
Orthodoxy, 152.

Pageantry, 216.

Paine, Thomas, 225.

Parades, 115.

Paranoia, 22, 67, 92, 93, 94, 102, 294.

— — and fanaticism, 86.

hatred in, 112.

obsessive ideas in, 134.

rationalization in, 139.

similarity to crowd-mind, 98.

Paranoiac. 84, 163, 208.

Parker. Theodore, 269.

Partisanship. 140, 194.

Pathological types, 58.

Patriotic crowds, 151.

Patriotism, 80, 111, 118, 119.

People's Institute of New York, 241.

Permanent crowds, 42.

Persecution, delusion of, 68, 69, 92.

Personal liberty. 244.

in a democracy, 248.

Personality, 297.

Perversion, 64.

Petrarch, 175.

Petrograd. 219.

Philosophers, intellectualifit, 296.

Philosophical idealism. 148.

(See also Intcllectualism, Ration-
alism.)

Philooophy, humanist. 293.

PhUooophy of "as if.'M28.

Platitudes in crowd oratory, 26.
Plato, 1.50, 153. 300.

The Republic, 143.

(Translated by Jowett; Third
edition, Oxford Press, 1892.)
Pliny, 247.
Poe, 269.
Pogroms, 107.
Poland, 107.

Political conventions, 27.
Political Ubcrty in England, 226.
Politics, philosophy of, 233.
Pope, the, 62.
Power, abuses of, 185.

crowd, will to, 160.

Pragmatism, 142, 299, 301.

(See also Humanism.)
Principles, as justification mechanisms,

40.

as leading ideas, 154.

Progress, 167.
Prohibition, 239, 265.
Prohibition agitator, 88.
Prohibitionists, the, 80, 114.
Projection, phenomenon of, 87, 95, lO.'S.
Proletarian crowd, 236.
Proletarians, 263.
Proletariat, the, 183.

dictatorship of, 197, 229-232.

Propaganda, 54, 101, 103, 142, 157. 364,

289.

Bolshevist, 228, 265.

revolutionary, 181, 189. 208.

Protagoras, 153, 283, 300.
Protestantism, 225.
Prussianism, 258.
Psychic conflict, 3.
Psychoanalysis. 34, 59, 165. 296.

therapeutic value of, 165, 284.

Psychology of crowd, summary of

author's view, 48, 49, 50.
Psychology, social, 11.
of the unconscious, 12, 51. 56, 57,

58, 64, 70, 138, 267.
Psychoneurosis, 92.

egoism of, 61.

Psyohosexual, 64.
Public opinion, 4, 46.
Public schools, 273-274.
Puritanism, 264, 265.

Quakers, the, 225, 264.

Rabelais, 270.
Race riots, 107.

motive of, 121.

Radical crowds, 152.
Rationalism, 144.

(See also Intelleetualism.)
Rationaliiation, 144, 249.
— — in crowds, 156.

of revolutionary wish-fanoy, 210.

Real, the, connreteneas of, 297.
Reality, criterion of, 32.

tense of, 37.

Re-oduoation, 294.

Reform, " white slavery," 98.

310

INDEX

Reformation, the, 182, 192, 225.
Rtformers. 157, 270.
Reformist crowds, 151.
RcKression, 111, 135.
Religion. 201.

Messianism and revolution, 204,

Religious convert, 86.

crowds, 151.

education, 153.

symbolism, 66.

Reuaissunce, 170, 175, 225. 292.
Repression, 34. 45. 63, 64.
Republicans, the, 264.
Responsibility, sense of, 100.
RevenRe, 220.
Revival meetings, 76.

(See also Sunday. William.)
Revolution, chapter vii, 166, 188.

as a crowd phenomenon, 180.

psychic causes of, 171.

small fruits of, 224.

violence in, 167.

Revolution. French, 38, 170. 182, 183,

192, 194, 205. 219.

Russian. 9, 183. 206.

Revolutionary creed, 222.

crowds, 151, 200.

propaganda, 181, 188, 189, 208.

Riots, 106.

Robespierre, 206. 235.

Rochclale movement, 226.

Rolland, Mme.. 182.

Roman republic, 187.

Romanoffs, the, 235.

Rossetti, 270.

Rousseau. Jean J., 153, 233. 270.

Rumor, 104.

Russia, pogroms in, 107.

revolution in, 186.

Socialist movement in, 227.

Russian revolution, 9, 53, 183, 206.

Sadism, 39, 65, 111.

Saint Just, 206.

Saint Simonists, 204.

Salem, Massachusetts, 163.

Sans-culottism, 171.

Saturday Evening Post, 272.

Savonarola. 235.

Saxon peasants. 225.

Schiller, F. C. S., 241, 300, 301.

Humanism (Second edition. The

Macmillan Company, London,
1912), 142.

Studies in Humanism (Second

edition. The Macmillan Com-
pany. London, 1912), 144-147.

Schopenhauer, 153, 269.

Schubert. 269.

Science, 159. 278.

humanist spirit of, 225.

Self-appreciation, 63.
(See also Egoism.)

consciousness. 301.

deception of crowds. 54.

defense, a motive of orowd hatred,

125.

130.

Self-appreciation, feeling, 170, 223.

hood, 303.

pity, 101.

Senate of United States, 114.

Servetus. 225.

Sexuality, repressed, 63.

Shakespeare. 270.

Shakespeare B *' Julius Cesar,'

Shelley, 269.

Sioux Indians, 156.

Social behavior, 1, 2.

environment, 35, 37.

idealism, 200.

— — order, how possible, 301.

order, the present, 100.

——psychology, 11.

— ^ reconstruction, task of, 212.

— — redemption, dream of. 207, 222,
232.

redemption, no formula for, 282.

thinking, 2.

SooiaUsm in England, 226.

Socialist, 80.

— — movement in Germany, 227.

movement in Russia, 227.

movement in United States, 227.

philosophy, 210.

Socialists, the, 141, 204. 265.

SociaUzation, present tendencies toward,
236.

Society, as ** Tlung-in-itself ," 2.

Society for the Prevention of Vice, 114.

Socrates. 283.

South, lynchings in. 106.

Southern mobs, 39.

Soviet republic, 9.

spirit, 9.

Soviets, 38.

Spargo, John, 124.

Tfie Psychology of Bolshevism (Har-
per A Brothers. 1919), 8.

Spencer, Herbert, 16, 226, 238.

Principles of Socioloffy (D. Apple-
ton A Co., New York, 1898), 11.

Spingam, Maj. J. E., 122.

Spirit of 1776, 264.

Spiritual valuation, 271.

State, bureaucratic. 238.

Stewart, Charies D., 258.

Strikes, 232.

Stuarts, the, 235.

Substitution, phenomenon of, 116.

Suggestion, 33.

Sumner, William Graham, 181.

Folkways (Ginn & Co., New York,

1906), 11, 181, 169.

Sunday, Rev. William, 24, 42, 76, 172.

Superiority, idea of, 174.

Suppressed wish, 40.

Suspicion, 104.

Survival values, 77.

Swinburne, 270.

Symbolic thought, 20.

Symbolism, rehgious, 66.

Taboo, 117.
T&Dunaay Hall. 233.
311

e

THE BEHAVIOR OF CROWDS

Tarde Gabriel, The Laws of Imitation,

^ (Translated by Parsons.)
- -leology, 141.
Theory of knowledge, 241.

humanist, 293.

— ;— instrumental, 298.
Thinking, compulsive, 102.

function of, 299.

instrument^ nature of, 20.

■ of crowds, 142.

social, 2.

— -— symbolic nature of, 20.

Thomas Aquinas, 153.

Tooqueville, de, democracy in America.

253-257, 268, 271.
Tolstoi, 270.
T(aem and Taboo, 95.
Tragedy, psychological meaning of, 66.
Transferenoe phenomenon, 136.
Tribune, the. New York, 101, 113.
Truth, 299, 300.
Truths, 141.
Truths, independent, 3.
Turkey, Sultan of, 234.
Turks, the, 107.
Tyranny, 101, 235.

of ideas, 279.

of the majority, 250.

Unconscious, the, chapter iii. 6, 12, 14,
35, 49, 51, 56, 67, 61. 64, 155, 267.

desire. 120.

determinism, 5.

Unction. 210.

United States, Socialist movement in.
227.

l^niversal judgments. 88.

(See also Absolute, Crowd-think-
ing, Inteilectualism.)

'ork:

Unrest, social, 213.

Utilitarianism, nineteenth century. 10

Utopia, 209, 215, 221.

Values, 169.

creation of, 276.

Variation, 271.
Violence, causes of, 39.
Virtues, 88.

of the crowd, 164.

Vote, right to, 261.

Wagner, 269.

Wallas, Graham, The Qreat „ »,

Macmillan Company. New

1917), 14, 16.
War psychology, 108, 109.
Ward, Lester, Pure Sociology (The Mao-

millan Company, New York.

Second edition, 1916), 11,
Washington, D. C, riot in, 107.
Weakness of human nature, 245-246.
White, Dr. WiUiam, Mechanisms of

Character Formation (The Mar-
_ millan Company. New York), 59.
White slavery, reform, 98.
Whitman, Walt, 268, 283.
Whittier, 179.
Will, healthy, 89.
Will to dommance, 79.
Wish-fanoy, 303.

rationaliaed, 210.

Wish, suppressed, 40.
Working class, 18, 204. 227.

(See also Proletariat.)
Worid War. 38.

Young Men's Christian Anooiation,
240. 260.

THB END

o

JSIl^UUlla 9C-WI- J1UV JL w 19/ V

HM Martin, Everett Dean

281 The behavior of crowds

M37

cop. 2

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE
CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY