Where stumbling on vice, disease, and crime is avoided, the person inevitably lands on the dull shores of the Lotophagi. Ideas and ideals are forgotten and forsaken in the routine of animal existence. This is the land of Philistinism, a land where all human, humane interests, independent thought, and courageous action are wanting. Philistines are uncritical, unconscious of defects and faults, living in the mire of self-contented stupidity and mediocrity. They cease to grow mentally and morally. Their intellectual and moral capacities become paralyzed, atrophied. Man becomes the equal of the brute.
With a philistine education and training, man is fit to become one of those unfortunate and pitiful European pawns and automata who obey blindly the commands of their superior officers. Philistines shoot, stab, poison, pillage, bum, outrage, and murder at the command of unscrupulous, self-seeking leaders, brutal junkers, bloodhounds of empires.
Brought up in a school of fear, obedience, and suggestibility, the philistine, like Cain, murders his brother without aim and without understanding the full significance of the awful deed. He is no more responsible than is the machine gun which he accurately trains and points at his supposed enemies. Philistines are led to the battlefield like cattle to the slaughter house. Philistines have no personality, no individuality, they are cogs in wheels, links in chains of monster mechanisms.
The philistine, the product of our home and school, is suggestible and gullible, he is always on the lookout for authority, for a leader whom he should worship, by whose opinions and conviction he is ready to swear, whose command he is ready and proud to follow. The philistine is good material for mobs, for mental epidemics, for religious crazes, and for all kinds of hysterical movements in which not reason but emotional automatism is in the foreground. Philistinism, stupidity, and implicit obedience of a monstrous, efficient war machine are intimately interrelated. The individual becomes a private, the nation an army, and the country a camp.
Do we as parents wish to bring up our children as soulless, willless machines? Do we wish them to be without good judgment, without personal convictions? Do we wish them to be led about like cattle? We certainly wish them to be of strong nature and sturdy character, able to stand by their convictions, able to use their critical judgment, able to discriminate the right from the wrong, able to love the good and avoid the evil.
In The Psychology of Suggestion, published by me in 1897, I arrive at the conclusion that “Personality is suppressed by the rigidity of social organization; the cultivated, civilized individual is an automaton, a mere puppet.”... Again, “Under the enormous weight of the sociostatic press ... the personal self sinks, the suggestible, subconscious, social, impersonal self rises to the surface, gets trained and cultivated, and becomes the hysterical actor in all the tragedies of historical life.”... In recent European events the suggestible, social self plays the chief rôle.
In the same work I come to the following conclusion: “When social conditions are of such a nature as to charge society with strong emotional excitement, or when institutions dwarf individuality, when they arrest personal growth, when they hinder the free development and exercise of the personal, controlling consciousness, then society falls into a hypnoid condition, the social mind gets disaggregated. The gregarious self begins to move within the bosom of the crowd, and becomes active; the demon of the demos emerges to the surface of social life, and throws the body politic into convulsions of demoniac fury.”
The European horrors, atrocities, and brutalities, dignified by the stupefying and hypnotizing slogan “Kultur, Patriotism,” are due to the early training, by fear and force, of the individual into submission to superior authority. Such pernicious training sacrifices the genius of the child, the originality of the man, to a highly efficient, but brutal and blood-thirsty Moloch State. The European war is a mental plague which attacks gigantic, social aggregates when their ultimate constituent units, the individuals, are deprived of independent thought and liberty of decision and action, when men are swayed by hypnotizing suggestions of “superior leaders” who represent the interests not of every individual at his best, but of high noble castes and of commercial classes. The organized murder of European nations is due to the stifling of human genius by the cultivation of mob spirit which is the cause of all forms of social insanity and mental epidemics.
In the stifling of the genius of the child and the cultivation of the mob spirit America does not lag behind Europe. Mental epidemics, excited by the fear instinct and by the impulse of self-preservation, are prevalent in the States. As described by me in The Psychology of Suggestion: “American society oscillates between acute financial mania and attacks of religious insanity. No sooner is the business fever over than the delirium acutum of religious mania sets in. Society is thrown from Scylla into Charybdis. From the heights of financial speculation society sinks into the abyss of revivalism. American society seems to suffer from circular insanity.”
Revivalism, a mental frenzy to which the American mob mind is specially prone, is a resurrection of Greek Bacchanalia and Roman Saturnalia. Revivals are emotional debauches, religious orgies. As I had pointed out in the same work: “Revivalism is far more dangerous to the life of society than drunkenness.... As a sot man falls below the brute; as a revivalist he sinks lower than the sot.”