In the light of these historical analogies the record of events during the last seventy-five years in western Europe and America is rather discomforting reading, and I fear the student of social psychology will find little to reassure him in the pitiable lack of intellectual leadership, the tendency to muddle through, the unteachableness and general want of statesmanlike vision displayed by our present dominant crowds. If a considerable number of people of all classes, those who desire change as well as those who oppose it, could free their thinking from the mechanisms of the crowd-mind, it might be possible to find the working solution of some of our pressing social problems and save our communities from the dreadful experience of another revolution. Our hope lies in the socially minded person who is sufficiently in touch with reality to be also a non-crowd man.
Anyone who is acquainted with the state of the public mind at present, knows that a priori arguments against revolution as such are not convincing, except to those who are already convinced on other ground. The dominant crowd in each historical epoch gained its original supremacy by means of revolution. One can hardly make effective use of the commonplace antirevolutionary propaganda of defense of a certain order which has among its most ardent supporters people who are proud to call themselves sons and daughters of the Revolution. Skeptics at once raise the question whether, according to such abstract social ethics, revolutionists become respectable only after they are successful or have been a long time dead. In fact, the tendency to resort to such reasoning is one among many symptoms that the conservative mind has permitted itself to become quite as much a crowd-phenomenon as has the radical mind.
The correct approach here is psychological and pragmatic. There is an increasingly critical social situation, demanding far-reaching reconstructive change; only the most hopeless crowd-man would presume to deny this fact. The future all depends upon the mental processes with which we attempt to meet this situation. Nothing but useless misery can result from dividing crowd against crowd. Crowd-thinking, as I have said, does not solve problems. It only creates ideal compensations and defense devices for our inner conflicts. Conservative crowd-behavior has always done quite as much as anything else to precipitate a revolutionary outbreak. Radical crowd-behavior does not resolve the situation, it only inverts it. Any real solution lies wholly outside present crowd-dilemmas. What the social situation demands most is a different kind of thinking, a new education, an increasing number of people who understand themselves and are intellectually and morally independent of the tyranny of crowd-ideas.
From what has been said above, it follows that revolutionary propaganda is not directly the cause of insurrection. Such propaganda is itself an effect of the unconscious reaction between a waning and a crescent crowd. It is a symptom of the fact that a large number of people have ceased to believe in or assent to the continued dominance of the present controlling crowd and are looking to another.
There is always a tendency among conservative crowds to hasten their own downfall by the manner in which they deal with revolutionary propaganda. The seriousness of the new issue is denied; the crowd seeks to draw attention back to the old issue which it fought and won years ago in the hour of its ascendancy. The fact that the old charms and shibboleths no longer work, that they do not now apply, that the growing counter-crowd is able to psychoanalyze them, discover the hidden motives which they disguise, and laugh at them, is stoutly denied. The fiction is maintained to the effect that present unrest is wholly uncalled-for, that everything is all right, that the agitators who "make people discontented" are alien and foreign and need only be silenced with a time-worn phrase, or, that failing, shut up by force or deported, and all will be well.
I do not doubt that before the Reformation and the French Revolution there were ecclesiastics and nobles aplenty who were quite sure that the masses would never have known they were miserable if meddling disturbers had not taken the trouble to tell them so. Even an honest critical understanding of the demands of the opposing crowd is discouraged, possibly because it is rightly felt that the critical habit of mind is as destructive of one crowd-complex as the other and the old crowd prefers to remain intact and die in the last ditch rather than risk dissolution, even with the promise of averting a revolution. Hence the Romans were willing to believe that the Christians worshiped the head of an ass. The mediæval Catholics, even at Leos court, failed to grasp the meaning of the outbreak in north Germany. Thousands saw in the Reformation only the alleged fact that the monk Luther wanted to marry a wife. To-day one looks almost in vain among business men, editors, and politicians for a more intelligent understanding of socialism. A crowd goes down to its death fighting bogies, and actually running upon the sword of its real enemy, because a crowd, once its constellation of ideas is formed, never learns anything.
The crowd-group contains in itself, in the very nature of crowd-thinking, the germs which sooner or later lay it low. When a crowd first becomes dominant, it carries into a place of power a number of heterogeneous elements which have, up to this time, been united in a great counter-crowd because of their common dissatisfaction with the old order. Gradually the special interests of these several groups become separated. The struggle for place is continued as a factional fight within the newly ruling crowd. This factional struggle greatly complicates every revolutionary movement. We witness this in the murderously hostile partisan conflicts which broke out in the revolutionary Assemblies in France. It is seen again in the Reformation, which had hardly established itself when the movement was rent by intense sectarian rivalries of all sorts. The same is true of Russia since the fall of the Tsar, and of Mexico ever since the overthrow of the Diaz regime. If these factional struggles go so far as to result in schism—that is, in a conscious repudiation by one or more factions of the revolutionary creed which had formerly united them all, there is disintegration and in all probability a return to the old ruling crowd.
This reaction may also be made possible by a refusal of one faction to recognize the others as integral parts of the newly triumphant crowd. If the new crowd after its victory can hold itself together, the revolution is established. It then becomes the task of the leading faction in the newly dominant crowd to grab the lions share of the spoils for itself, give the other factions only so much prestige as will keep alive in their minds the belief that they, too, share in the new victory for "humanity" and hold the new social order together, while at the same time justifying its own leadership by the compulsive power of the idea which they all alike believe. This belief, as we have seen, is the sine qua non of the continued existence of any crowd. A dominant crowd survives so long as its belief is held uncritically and repeated and acted upon automatically both by the members of the crowd and its victims. When the factions which have been put at a disadvantage by the leading faction renounce the belief, or awake to the fact that they "have been cheated," disintegration begins.
Between the crowds professed belief and the things which it puts into practice there is a great chasm. Yet the fiction is uniformly maintained that the things done are the correct and faithful application of the great principles to which the crowd is devoted. We saw in our study of crowd-ideas in general that such ideas are not working programs, but are screens which disguise and apparently justify the real unconscious motive of crowd-behavior. The crowd secures its control, first, by proclaiming in the most abstract form certain generally accepted principles, such as freedom, righteousness, brotherly love—as though these universal "truths" were its own invention and exclusive monopoly. Next, certain logical deductions are made from these principles which, when carried to their logical conclusions regardless of fact or the effect produced, make the thing which the crowd really wants and does appear to be a vindication of the first principles. It is these inferences which go to make up the conscious thinking or belief of the crowd. Thus in the revolutionary convention in France all agree to the principles of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Fidelity to these principles would to a non-crowd mean that the believer should not try to dictate to his fellows what they must believe and choose, that he would exercise good will in his dealings with them and show them the same respect which he wished them to have for himself. But the crowd does not understand principles in this manner. Do all agree to the great slogan of the revolution? Well, then, fidelity to Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity demands that the enemies of these principles and the crowds definition of them be overthrown. The Mountain is the truly faithful party, hence to the guillotine with the Gironde. This chasm between crowd faith and crowd practice is well illustrated in the case of those Southern patriots in America who were ready to fight and die for the rights of man as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, but refused to apply the principle of the inalienable rights of all men to their own black slaves. Or, again in the case of nineteenth-century capitalism, liberty must be given to all alike. Liberty means equal opportunity. Equal opportunity means free competition in business. Free competition exists only where there is an "incentive"; hence the investor must be encouraged and his gains protected by law. Therefore anti-capitalistic doctrines must be suppressed as subversive of our free institutions. Immigrants to whom for a generation we have extended the hospitality of our slums and labor camps, and the opportunity of freely competing with our well-intrenched corporations, must be made to feel their ingratitude if they are so misguided as to conclude, from the fact that hundreds of leading radicals have been made to serve jail sentences, while after thirty years of enforcing the antitrust law not a single person has ever been sent to prison, that possibly this is not a free land.
Or again—one convicts himself of being a crowd-man who shows partiality among crowds—the principle of democracy is generally accepted. Then there should be industrial democracy as well as political—hence the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat"—for the workers are "the people." Parliamentary assemblies elected by all the people do not necessarily represent labor. Organized labor, therefore, though a minority of the whole, should establish "industrial democracy" by force. So, according to Bolshevist crowd-logic, democracy means the rule of a minority by means of force.