We may sincerely think that we vote the Republican ticket because we have thought out the issues of the political campaign and reached our decision in the cold-blooded exercise of judgment. The fact remains that it is just as likely that we voted the Republican ticket because we did so the year before or because the Republican platform contains a declaration of principle, no matter how vague, which awakens profound emotional response in us, or because our neighbor whom we do not like happens to be a Democrat.
Mr. Lippmann remarks:[19] “For the most part we do not first see and then define, we define first and then see. In the great booming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out of the clutter what is already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.”
Mr. Trotter cites as a few of the examples of rationalization the mechanism which “enables the European lady who wears rings in her ears to smile at the barbarism of the colored lady who wears her rings in her nose”[20] and the process which enables the Englishman “who is amused by the African chieftain’s regard for the top hat as an essential piece of the furniture of state to ignore the identity of his own behavior when he goes to church beneath the same tremendous ensign.”
The gregarious tendency in man, according to Mr. Trotter, results in five characteristics which he displays in common with all gregarious animals.
1. “He is intolerant and fearful of solitude, physical or mental.”[21] The same urge which drives the buffalo into the herd and man into the city requires on the part of the latter a sense of spiritual identification with the herd. Man is never so much at home as when on the band wagon.
2. “He is more sensitive to the voice of the herd than to any other influence.” Mr. Trotter illustrates this characteristic in a paragraph which is worth quoting in its entirety. He says: “It (the voice of the herd) can inhibit or stimulate his thought and conduct. It is the source of his moral codes, of the sanctions of his ethics and philosophy. It can endow him with energy, courage, and endurance, and can as easily take these away. It can make him acquiesce in his own punishment and embrace his executioner, submit to poverty, bow to tyranny, and sink without complaint under starvation. Not merely can it make him accept hardship and suffering unresistingly, but it can make him accept as truth the explanation that his perfectly preventable afflictions are sublimely just and gentle. It is this acme of the power of herd suggestion that is perhaps the most absolutely incontestable proof of the profoundly gregarious nature of man.”
3. “He is subject to the passions of the pack in his mob violence and the passions of the herd in his panics.”
4. “He is remarkably susceptible to leadership.” Mr. Trotter points out that the need for leadership is often satisfied by leadership of a quality which cannot stand analysis, and which must therefore satisfy some impulse rather than the demands of reason.
5. “His relations with his fellows are dependent upon the recognition of him as a member of the herd.”
The gregarious tendency, Mr. Trotter believes, is biologically fundamental. He finds therefore that the herd reaction is not confined to outbreaks such as panics and mob violence, but that it is a constant factor in all human thinking and feeling. Discussing the results of the sensitiveness of the individual to the herd point of view, Mr. Trotter says in part, “To believe must be an ineradicable natural bias of man, or in other words, an affirmation, positive or negative, is more readily accepted than rejected, unless its source is definitely disassociated from the herd. Man is not, therefore, suggestible by fits and starts, not merely in panics and mobs, under hypnosis, and so forth, but always, everywhere, and under any circumstances.”