The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study

by Everett Dean Martin

A number of years ago, while discussing certain phases of this subject with one of the physicians in charge of a large hospital for the insane, the significance of education for healthy mental life was brought out with great emphasis. It was at the time when psychiatrists were just beginning to make use of analytical psychology in the treatment of mental and nervous disorders.

"The trouble with a great many of our patients," said my friend, "is the fact that they have been wrongly educated."

"Do you mean," I said, "that they have not received proper moral instruction?"

"Yes, but by the proper moral instruction I do not mean quite the same thing that most people mean by that. It all depends on the way in which the instruction is given. Many of these patients are the mental slaves of convention. They have been terrified by it; its weight crushes them; when they discover that their own impulses or behavior are in conflict with what they regard as absolute standards, they cannot bear the shock. They do not know how to use morality; they simply condemn themselves; they seek reconciliation by all sorts of crazy ideas which develop into the psychoneurosis. And the only hope there is of cure for them is re-education. The physician, when it is not too late, often to do any good has to become an educator."

The practice of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method is really hardly anything more than re-education. The patient must first be led to face the fact of himself as he really is; then he must be taught to revalue conventional ideas in such a way that he can use these ideas as instruments with which he may adjust himself in the various relations of life. This process of education, in a word, is humanistic. It is pragmatic; the patient is taught that his thinking is a way of functioning; that ideas are instruments, ways of acting. He learns to value these tendencies to act and to find himself through the mastery of his own thinking.

Now we have seen that the neurosis is but one path of escape from this conflict of self with the imperatives and abstract ideas through which social control is exercised. The second way is to deny, unconsciously, the true meaning of these ideas, and this, as we have seen, is crowd-thinking. Here, as in the other case, the education which is needed is that which acquaints the subject with the functional nature of his own thinking, which directs his attention to results, which dissolves the fictions into which the unconscious takes refuge, by showing that systems of ideas have no other reality than what they do and no other meaning than the difference which their being true makes in actual experience somewhere.

We have previously noted the connection between the intellectualist philosophies with their closed systems of ideas, their absolutists, and the conscious thinking of crowds. The crowd finds these systems ready-made and merely backs into them and hides itself like a hermit crab in a deserted seashell. It follows that the humanist, however social he may be, cannot be a crowd-man. He, too, will have his ideals, but they are not made-in-advance goods which all must accept; they are good only as they may be made good in real experience, true only when verified in fact. To such a mind there is no unctuousness, by which ideas may be fastened upon others without their assent. Nothing is regarded as so final and settled that the spirit of inquiry should be discouraged from efforts to modify and improve it.

Generalizations, such as justice, truth, liberty, and all other intellectualist- and crowd-abstractions, become to the humanist not transcendental things in themselves, but descriptions of certain qualities of behavior, actual or possible, existing only where they are experienced and in definite situations. He will not be swept into a howling mob by these big words; he will stop to see what particular things are they which in a given instance are to be called just, what particular hypothesis is it which it is sought to verify and thus add to the established body of truth, whose liberty is demanded and what, to be definite, is it proposed that he shall do with the greater opportunity for action? Let the crowd yell itself hoarse, chanting its abstract nouns made out of adjectives, the humanist will know that these are but words and that the realities which they point to, if they have any meaning at all, are what "they are known as."

This humanist doctrine of the concreteness of the real is important. It is a reaffirmation of the reality of human experience. William James, who called himself a "radical empiricist," made much of this point. Experience may not be ruled out for the sake of an a priori notion of what this world ought to be. As James used to say, we shall never know what this world really is or is to become until the last mans vote is in and counted. Here, of course, is an emphasis upon the significance of unique personality which no crowd will grant. Crowds will admit personality as an abstract principle, but not as an active will having something of its own to say about the ultimate outcome of things.

Another important point in which humanism corrects crowd-thinking is the fact that it regards intellect as an instrument of acting, and not as a mere copyist of realities earthly or supermundane. Dewey says: