The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study

by Everett Dean Martin

Now it is this fictitious, paranoiac, crowd-logic which one must be able to dispel before he can extricate himself from the clutches of his crowd. If he subjects the whole fabric of abstractions to critical analysis, revalues it, puts himself above it, assumes a pragmatic attitude toward whatever truths it contains, dares to test these truths by their results in experience and to use them for desired ends; if, in short, he scrutinizes his own disguised impulses, brings them to consciousness as what they are, and refuses to be deceived as to their real import, even when they appear dressed in such sheeps clothing as absolutes and first principles, he becomes a non-crowd man, a social being in the best sense.

Those, however, who continue to give assent to the crowds first principles, who still accept its habit of a priori reasoning, merely substituting for its accepted deductions others of their own which in turn serve to conceal and justify their own unconscious desires, will turn from the old crowd only to be gobbled up by a new and counter-crowd. Such people have not really changed. They denounce the old crowd on the ground that "it has not lived up to its principles." It is a significant fact that a crowds rule is generally challenged in the name of the very abstract ideas of which it has long posed as the champion.

For instance, there is liberty. Every crowd demands it when it is seeking power; no crowd permits it when it is in power. A crowd which is struggling for supremacy is really trying to free itself and as many people as possible from the control of another crowd. Naturally, the struggle for power appears to consciousness as a struggle for liberty as such. The controlling crowd is correctly seen to be a tyrant and oppressor. What the opposition crowd does not recognize is its own wish to oppress, hidden under its struggle for power. We have had occasion to note the intolerance of the crowd-mind as such. A revolutionary crowd, with all its lofty idealism about liberty, is commonly just as intolerant as a reactionary crowd. It must be so in order to remain a crowd. Once it is triumphant it may exert its pressure in a different direction, but the pinch is there just the same. Like its predecessor, it must resort to measures of restraint, possibly even a "reign of terror," in order that the new-won "liberty"—which is to say, its own place at the head of the procession—may be preserved. The denial of freedom appears therefore as its triumph, and for a time people are deceived. They think they are free because everyone is talking about liberty.

Eventually some one makes the discovery that people do not become free just by repeating the magic word "liberty." A disappointed faction of the newly emancipated humanity begins to demand its "rights." The crowd hears its own catchwords quoted against itself. It proceeds to prove that freedom exists by denouncing the disturbers and silencing them, if necessary, by force. The once radical crowd has now become reactionary. Its dream of world emancipation is seen to be a hoax. Lovers of freedom now yoke themselves in a new rebel crowd so that oppressed humanity may be liberated from the liberators. Again, the will to power is clothed in the dream symbols of an emancipated society, and so on around and around the circle, until people learn that with crowds freedom is impossible. For men to attain to mastery of themselves is as abhorrent to one crowd as to another. The crowd merely wants freedom to be a crowd—that is, to set up its own tyranny in the place of that which offends the self-feeling of its members.

The social idealism of revolutionary crowds is very significant for our view of the crowd-mind. There are certain forms of revolutionary belief which are repeated again and again with such uniformity that it would seem the unconscious of the race changes very little from age to age. The wish-fancy which motivates revolutionary activity always appears to consciousness as the dream of an ideal society, a world set free; the reign of brotherly love, peace, and justice. The folly and wickedness of man is to cease. There will be no more incentive for men to do evil. The lion and the lamb shall lie down together. Old extortions and tyrannies are to be left behind. There is to be a new beginning, poverty is to be abolished, Gods will is to be done in earth, or men are at last to live according to reason, and the inalienable rights of all are to be secured; or the co-operative commonwealth is to be established, with no more profit-seeking and each working gladly for the good of all. In other words, the mind of revolutionary crowds is essentially eschatological, or Messianic. The crowd always imagines its own social dominance is a millennium. And this trait is common to revolutionary crowds in all historical periods.

We have here the psychological explanation of the Messianic faith which is set forth with tremendous vividness in Biblical literature. The revolutionary import of the social teaching of both the Hebrew and Christian religions is so plain that I do not see how any honest and well-informed person can even attempt to deny it. The telling effectiveness with which this element in religious teaching may be used by clever radicals to convict the apologists of the present social order by the words out of their own mouths is evident in much of the socialist propaganda to-day. The tendency of the will to revolt, to express itself in accepted religious symbols, is a thing to be expected if the unconscious plays the important part in crowd-behavior that we have contended that it does.

The eighth-century Hebrew prophet mingles his denunciations of those who join house to house and field to field, who turn aside the way of the meek, and sit in Samaria in the corner of a couch and on the silken cushions of a bed, who have turned justice to wormwood and cast down righteousness to the earth, etc., etc.,—reserving his choicest woes of course for the foreign oppressors of "my people"—with promises of "the day of the Lord" with all that such a day implies, not only of triumph of the oppressed over their enemies, but of universal happiness.

Similarly the same complex of ideas appears in the writings which deal with the Hebrew "Captivity" in the sixth century B.C., with the revolt of the Maccabeans, and again in the impotent hatred against the Romans about the time of the origin of Christianity.

The New Testament dwells upon some phase of this theme on nearly every page. Blessed are ye poor, and woe unto you who are rich, you who laugh now. The Messiah has come and with him the Kingdom of the Heavens, but at present the kingdom is revealed only to the believing few, who are in the world, but not of it. However, the Lord is soon to return; in fact, this generation shall not pass away until all these things be accomplished. After a period of great trial and suffering there is to be a new world, and a new and holy Jerusalem, coming down from the skies and establishing itself in place of the old. All the wicked, chiefly those who oppress the poor, shall be cast into a lake of fire. There shall be great rejoicing, and weeping and darkness and death shall be no more.

The above sketch of the Messianic hope is so brief as to be hardly more than a caricature, but it will serve to make my point clear, that Messianism is a revolutionary crowd phenomenon. This subject has been presented in great detail by religious writers in recent years, so that there is hardly a member of the reading public who is not more or less familiar with the "social gospel." My point is that all revolutionary propaganda is "social gospel." Even when revolutionists profess an antireligious creed, as did the Deists of the eighteenth century, and as do many modern socialists with their "materialist interpretation of history," nevertheless the element of irreligion extends only to the superficial trappings of the revolutionary crowd-faith, and even here is not consistent. At bottom the revolutionists dream of a new world is religious.