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 unconscious change in the significance of social ideas. Such a change must of course be mutual and unconscious. Compromise mechanisms will again be formed serving a purpose similar to the neurosis. As in the neurosis, thought and action will be compulsory, symbolic, 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 unconscious 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 analogous 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 disguise are less subtle. To use a term which Freud employs in this connection to describe the process of distortion in dreams, the "censor" is less active in the crowd than in most phases of mental life. Though the conscious thinking is carried on in abstract and impersonal formula, and though, as in the neurosis, the "compulsive" character of the mechanisms developed frequently—especially in permanent crowds—well nigh reduces the individual to an automaton, the crowd is one of the most naïve devices that can be employed for enhancing ones 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 exhibit himself to almost any extent without shame, oblivious of the fact that the supremacy, 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 apotheosis of ones 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 common 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. Notice 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 class whose lust for gain has made them enemies of Humanity and Justice." "Workers 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 Kingdom of Heaven on the Earth, the final triumph of Humanity!"
On the other hand, the wealthy and educated 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 "Gods chosen." "The Dutch Company is the best Company that ever came over from the Old Country." "The Irish may be ornery, and they aint worth much, but they are a whole lot better than the —— —— Dutch." "Little Nigger baby, black face, and shiny eye, youre just as good as the poor white trash, an youll git thar by and by." "He might have been a Russian or a Prussian, ... but its 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, wherever a group has become sufficiently a crowd to have a propaganda of its own. Presbyterians 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. Sundays revival meetings, then in their earlier stages, certain facts struck me with great force. Whatever else the revival may be, it provides the student 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 naïveté 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 period of intellectual awakening. Mr. Sundays meetings undeniably provided a device whereby a certain psychic type, an element which had hitherto received scant recognition in the community, could enormously enhance his ego consciousness. It would be manifestly unfair to say that this is the sole motive of the religious revival, or that only this type of mind is active in it. But it is interesting to see whose social survival values stand out most prominently in these religious crowd-phenomena. 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 accompanying 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 organizations to which they belong, and in the pompous names by which fraternal orders are commonly designated. In its more "exhibitionist" 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.