Thus far we have been considering crowd-movements which are local and temporary—casual gatherings, which, having no abiding reason for continued association, soon dissolve into their individual elements. Frequently, after participating in such a movement, the individual, on returning to his habitual relations, "comes to." He wonders what the affair was all about. In the light 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 yesterdays orgy. Acts which he would ordinarily disapprove in his neighbors, he now disapproves in himself. If the behavior of the crowd has not been particularly 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 restrictive legislation easily lapse into indifference, 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 movements 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.
Not all crowd-movements, however, are local and temporary. There are passing moments 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 individuals morbid fixed ideas are really devices for the protection of his self-esteem. The repressed infantile 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 returned soldiers at once effect permanent organizations; persons who have been converted in one of Mr. Sundays religious campaigns do the same thing—indeed there are associations of all sorts growing out of these exciting moments in peoples 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 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, racial, etc., and each such interest is a mixture of conscious and unconscious purposes. These groups become sects, cults, partisan movements, class struggles. They develop 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 predicting that his party is bound to win at the next election.
Hence the crowd is a device by which the individuals "right" may be baptized "righteousness" 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 miserable 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 believer, 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 repressed 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 perpetuated. Every 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 religious ideas are concerned. The general and abstract character of these ideas makes them easily accessible instruments for justifying 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 unconscious 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 magazines, press agents, and special "literature" with which it continually harangues its members 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 excellence is the daily newspaper. With few exceptions 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 mans ego consciousness be offended by the sight of anything "highbrow"—that is, anything indicating that there may be a 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 personality of all but the reflective few. We editorialize and press-agent ourselves in our inmost musings. Public opinion is manufactured just as brick are made. Possibly a slightly better knowledge of mechanical engineering is required for making public opinion, 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 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 office—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 raggedness, and tawdriness have now become spiritual, 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 difference between our view and the well-known theory of Le Bon. The argument of the latter is as follows: (1) From the standpoint of psychology, the crowd, as the term is here defined, is not merely a group of people, it is the appearance 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 Bons "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 substratum" which in the crowd becomes uppermost, dominating over the unique personal consciousness. (6) Three causes determine the characteristics of the crowd-mind, (a) From purely numerical considerations, the individual acquires a sentiment of invincible power which encourages him in an unrestrained yielding to his instincts, (b) Contagion, or imitation, and (c) hypnotic suggestion cause the individuals in the crowd to become "slaves of all the unconscious 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 inferiority as compared with the isolated individual, (c) loss of moral responsibility, (d) impulsiveness, (e) credulity, (f) exaggeration, (g) intolerance, (h) blind obedience to the leader of the crowd, (i) a mystical emotionalism. (8) The crowd is finally and somewhat inconsistently treated by Le Bon as being identical with the masses, the common people, the herd.
Without pausing to review the criticisms of this argument which were made at the beginning 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 gathering 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 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. Attention is thus held diverted from the individuals 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 "compulsory" logic of these ideas moves forward without those social checks which normally keep us within bounds of the real. Hence, acting and thinking in the crowd become stereotyped and "ceremonial." Individuals move together like automatons. (6) As the unconscious 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, it follows that the crowd state, like the neurosis, is a mechanism of escape and of compensation. 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 somnambulism, the compulsion neurosis, and even paranoia. (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 freshman 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 denouncing 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.