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 practices by which the different classes and societies sought to get the better of one another, the "love feasts" of my society which were hardly more than mutual admiration gatherings, the "pajama" parades in which the entire 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 round and round the dormitories of the womens 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 themselves to be carried on their comrades shoulders through the public square, also the deportment with which a delegation of students would announce their arrival in a neighboring college town and the grinning self-congratulation with which we would sit in chapel and hear a wrathful president denounce our group behavior as "boorishness and hoodlumism." There was the unanimous 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 sentiment repeated ad nauseam, that the great aim of education and the highest mark of excellence in our college was the development of character. What is it all but a slightly exaggerated 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 individuals; 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 really is. Members of the crowd are always promising one another a splendid future triumph 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 suffrage, or the single tax "is coming," and thousands 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 prediction of victory in the presidential campaign of 1920. The Socialist finds warmth in the contemplation of the "coming dictatorship of the proletariat." The Prohibitionist intoxicates himself by looking forward to a "dry world." So long as the German crowds expected 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, 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 crowds own secret is substituted. The great man now appears great because he possessed the qualities of little men. He is representative man, crowd man. Every crowd has a list of heroic names which it uses in its propaganda and in its self-laudation. The greatness which each crowd reveres and demands that all men honor is just that greatness which 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 thereof. The self-feeling of a crowd is always enhanced by the triumph of its leader or representative. Who, at a ball game or athletic event, has not experienced elation and added self-complacency in seeing the home team win? 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 exhibitions make to people. Nothing so easily catches general attention and creates a crowd as a contest of any kind. The crowd unconsciously 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 observed in the "jollifications" of political parties after the election of their candidates for high office. This phenomenon is also seen, if I may say so without being misunderstood, 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 criticism of his professions, because to question them is to weaken the claim of his crowd upon the people, and to destroy in those professed ideals their function of directing his own attention away from the successful compromise 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 "compensation." 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 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 unconscious which we have not found in the conscious mind. Many conscious virtues and traits of character are thus compensations for their opposite in the unconscious.