All this, however, is the very thing that the crowd-mind is running headlong away from. As a crowd we do not wish to think empirically. Why should we seek piecemeal goods by tedious and dangerous effort, when we have only to do a little trick of attention, and behold The Good, abstract, perfect, universal, waiting just around the corner in the realm of pure reason, ready to swallow up and demolish all evil? Are we not even now in possession of Love, Justice, Beauty, and Truth by the sheer magic of thinking of them in the abstract, calling them "principles" and writing the words with the initial letters in capitals? The very mental processes by which a group of people becomes a crowd change such abstract nouns from mere class names into copies of supermundane realities.
In wholesome thinking principles are of course necessary. They are what I might call "leading ideas." Their function is to lead to more satisfactory thinking—that is, to other ideas which are desired. Or they are useful in leading us to actions the results of which are intended and wished for. They may also be principles of valuation guiding us in the choice of ends. If there were no substantial agreement among us concerning certain principles we could not relate our conduct to one another at all; social life would be impossible. But necessary as such leading ideas are, they are means rather than ends. Circumstances may demand that we alter them or make exceptions to their application.
To the crowd-mind a principle appears as an end in itself. It must be vindicated at all costs. To offend against it in one point is to be guilty of breaking the whole law. Crowds are always uncompromising about their principles. They must apply to all alike. Crowds are no respecters of persons.
As crowd-men we never appear without some set of principles or some cause over our heads. Crowds crawl under their principles like worms under stones. They cover up the wrigglings of the unconscious, and protect it from attack. Every crowd uses its principles as universal demands. In this way it gets unction upon other crowds, puts them in the wrong, makes them give assent to the crowds real purpose by challenging them to deny the righteousness of the professed justifications of that purpose. It is said that the Sioux Indians, some years ago, used to put their women and children in front of their firing line. The braves could then crouch behind these innocent ones and shoot at white men, knowing that it would be a violation of the principles of humanity for the white soldiers to shoot back and risk killing women and children. Crowds frequently make just such use of their principles. About each crowd, like the circle of fire which the gods placed about the sleeping Brunhilde, there is a flaming hedge of logical abstractions, sanctions, taboos, which none but the intellectually courageous few dare cross. In this way the slumbering critical faculties of the crowd-mind are protected against the intrusion of realities from outside the cult. The intellectual curiosity of the members of the group is kept within proper bounds. Hostile persons or groups dare not resist us, for in so doing they make themselves enemies of Truth, of Morality, of Liberty, etc. Both political parties, by a common impulse, "drape themselves in the Flag." It is an interesting fact that the most antagonistic crowds profess much the same set of principles. The "secondary rationalization" of crowds, both Northern and Southern, at the time of the Civil War, made use of our traditional principles of American Liberty, and Christian Morality. We have seen both pacifist and militarist crowds setting forth their manifestoes in terms of New Testament teaching. Each religious sect exists only to teach "the one system of doctrine logically deduced from Scripture."
As an illustration of this sort of reasoning, I give here a few passages from a propagandist publication in which the crowd-will to dominate takes the typical American method of striving to force its cult ideas upon the community as a whole by means of restrictive moralist legislation—in this case attempt is made to prohibit the exhibition of motion pictures on Sunday. That the demand for such legislation is for the most part a pure class-crowd phenomenon, designed to enhance the self-feeling and economic interests of the "reformers," by keeping the poor from having a good time, is I think, rather obvious. The reasoning here is interesting, as the real motive is so thinly disguised by pietistic platitudes that the two follow each other in alternate succession:
(1) Sunday Movies are not needed. The people have six days and six nights each week on which to attend the movies. Is not that plenty of time for all?
(2) Sunday Movie Theaters commercialize the Christian Sabbath. While "the Sabbath was made for man," yet it is Gods day. We have no right to sell it for business purposes. It is a day for rest and worship, not a day for greed and gain. Sunday would, of course, be the best day in the week financially for the movies. It would also be the best day in the week for the open saloons and horse-racing, but that is no reason why these should be allowed on Sunday. The Sabbath must not be commercialized.
(3) Sunday Movie Theaters destroy the rest and quiet of many people, especially those who live in the residential district of cities and in the neighborhood where such motion-picture theaters are located. Great crowds pour along the streets near such theaters, often breaking the Sunday quiet of that part of the city by loud and boisterous talk.
Thousands of people every year are moving away from the downtown noisy districts of the cities out into the quiet residential districts in order to have quiet Sundays. But when a motion-picture theater comes and locates next to their homes, or in their block, as has been done in many cases, and great noisy, boisterous crowds surge back and forth before their homes all Sunday afternoon and evening, going to the movies, they are being robbed of that for which they paid their money when they bought a home in that quiet part of the city....
(4) ... Anything that injures the Christian Sabbath injures the Christian churches, and certainly Sunday motion-picture theaters, wherever allowed, do injure the Christian Sabbath....
Dr. Wilbur F. Crafts of Washington, D. C., probably the greatest authority on the Sabbath question in this country, says, "The Sabbath-keeping nations are the strongest physically, mentally, morally, financially, and politically." Joseph Cook said," It is no accident that the nations that keep the Sabbath most carefully are those where there is the most political freedom." Sabbath-breaking nations gradually lose their political freedom.
(5) Sunday Movie Theaters injure the Christian Sabbath and thus injure the morals of the people. Anything that injures the morals of the people, injures the nation itself. From a patriotic standpoint, we ought to stand for strict observance of the Christian Sabbath, as past experience has shown and the testimony of many witnesses proves that a disregard of the Christian Sabbath produces crime and immorality and tends to destroy the free institutions which have helped to make our nation great....
Fundamentally, all such vicious laws are unconstitutional.
Sunday Movie Theaters disregard the rights of labor.... Canon William Sheafe Chase has aptly said, "No man has the Christ spirit who wants a better time on Sunday than he is willing to give everyone else."...
Col. Fairbanks, the famous scale manufacturer, said: "I can tell by watching the men at work Monday which spent Sunday in sport and which at home, church, or Sabbath-school. The latter do more and better work."
Superintendents of large factories in Milwaukee and elsewhere have said, "When our men go on a Sunday excursion, some cannot work Monday, and many who work cannot earn their wages, while those who had no sport Sunday do their best days work Monday." (Italics mine.)
We need not be surprised to find that the closed ideational system which in the first instance is a refuge from the real, becomes in turn a device for imposing ones will upon his fellows. The believers ego is served in both instances. It is interesting to note also that this self-feeling appears in crowd-thinking as its very opposite. The greatest enemy of personality is the crowd. The crowd does not want valuable men; it wants only useful men. Everyone must justify his existence by appealing to the not-self. One may do nothing for his own sake. He may not even strive for spiritual excellence for such a reason. He must live for "principle," for "the great cause," for impersonal abstractions—which is to say, he must live for his crowd, and so make it easier for the other members to do the same with a good face.
The complex of ideas in which the crowd-mind as we have seen takes refuge, being necessarily made up of abstract generalizations, serves the crowd-will to social dominance through the very claim to universality which such ideas exert. Grant that an idea is an absolute truth, and it follows, of course, that it must be true on all occasions and for everyone. The crowd is justified, therefore, in sacrificing people to its ideal—itself. The idea is no longer an instrument of living; it is an imperative. It is not yours to use the idea; the idea is there to use you. You have ceased to be an end. Anything about you that does not partake of the reality of this idea has no right to be, any experience of yours which happens to be incommensurable with this idea loses its right to be; for experience as such has now only a "phenomenal existence." The crowd, by identifying its will to power with this idea, becomes itself absolute. Your personal self, as an end, is quite as unwelcome to the Absolute as to the crowd. There must be no private property in thought or motive. By making everybodys business my business, I have made my business everybodys business. There may be only one standard—that of our crowd, which, because of its very universal and impersonal character is really nobodys.
The absolutism of the crowd-mind with its consequent hostility to conscious personality finds a perfect rationalization in the ethical philosophy of Kant. The absolutism of the idea of Duty is less skillfully elaborated in its popular crowd-manifestations, but in its essentials it is always present, as propaganda everywhere when carefully analyzed will show. We must not be deceived by Kants assertion that the individual is an end. This individual is not you or I, or anyone; it is a mere logical abstraction. By declaring that everyone is equally an end, Kant ignores all personal differences, and therefore the fact of individuality as such. We are each an end in respect to those qualities only in which we are identical—namely, in that we are "rational beings." But this rational being is not a personal intelligence; it is a fiction, a bundle of mental faculties assumed a priori to exist, and then treated as if it were universally and equally applicable to all actually existing intelligences.
In arguing that "I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law," Kant may be easily understood as justifying any crowd in seeking to make its peculiar maxims universal laws. Who but a Rationalist or a crowd-man presumes to have found the "universal law," who else would have the effrontery to try to legislate for every conscience in existence? But this presumption has its price. In thus universalizing my moral will, I wholly depersonalize it. He says: