During the time of my connection with the Cooper Union Forum, we have not had a crowd-demonstration in anything more than an incipient form. The best laboratory for the study of such a phenomenon is the political party convention, the mass meeting, or the religious revival. The orators who commonly hold forth at such gatherings know intuitively the functional value of bathos, ridicule, and platitude, and it is upon such knowledge that they base the success of their careers in "getting the crowd." The noisy "demonstrations" which it has of late become the custom to stage as part of the rigmarole of a national party convention have been cited as crowning examples of the stupidity and excess of crowd enthusiasm. But this is a mistake. Anyone who has from the gallery witnessed one or more of these mock "stampedes" will agree that they are exhibitions of endurance rather than of genuine enthusiasm or of true crowd-mindedness. They are so obviously manipulated and so deliberately timed that they can hardly be regarded as true crowd-movements at all. They are chiefly interesting as revelations of the general insincerity of the political life of this republic.
True crowd-behavior requires an element of spontaneity—at least on the part of the crowd. And we have abundant examples of this in public meetings of all sorts. As the audience becomes crowd, the speakers cadence becomes more marked, his voice more oracular, his gestures more emphatic. His message becomes a recital of great abstract "principles." The purely obvious is held up as transcendental. Interest is kept upon just those aspects of things which can be grasped with least effort by all. Emphasis is laid upon those thought processes in which there is greatest natural uniformity. The general, abstract, and superficial come to be exalted at the expense of that which is unique and personal. Forms of thought are made to stand as objects of thinking.
It is clear that such meaning as there is in those abstract names, "Justice," "Right," "Liberty," "Peace," "Glory," "Destiny," etc., or in such general phrases as "Brotherly Love," "Grand and Glorious," "Public Weal," "Common Humanity," and many others, must vary with each ones personal associations. Popular orators deal only with the greatest common denominator of the meaning of these terms—that is, only those elements which are common to the associations of all. Now the common associations of words and phrases of this general nature are very few—hardly more than the bare sound of the words, plus a vague mental attitude or feeling of expectancy, a mere turning of the eyes of the mind, as it were, in a certain direction into empty space. When, for instance, I try now to leave out of the content of "justice" all my personal associations and concrete experiences, I can discover no remaining content beyond a sort of grand emptiness, with the intonations of the word booming in my auditory centers like the ringing of a distant bell. As "public property," the words are only a sort of worn banknote, symbols of many meanings and intentions like my own, deposited in individual minds. Interesting as these personal deposits are, and much as we are mutually interested by them and moved to harmonious acting and speaking, it is doubtful if more than the tiniest fragment of what we each mean by "justice" can ever be communicated. The word is a convenient instrument in adjusting our conduct to that of others, and when such adjustment seems to meet with mutual satisfaction we say, "That is just." But the just thing is always a concrete situation. And the general term "justice" is simply a combination of sounds used to indicate the class of things we call just. In itself it is but a form with the content left out. And so with all other such abstractions.
Now if attention can be directed to this imaginary and vague "meaning for everybody"—which is really the meaning for nobody—and so directed that the associations with the unique in personal experience are blocked, these abstractions will occupy the whole field of consciousness. The mind will yield to any connection which is made among them almost automatically. As conscious attention is cut away from the psyche as a whole, the objects upon which it is centered will appear to have a reality of their own. They become a closed system, perfectly logical it may be in itself, but with the fatal logic commonly found in paranoia—the fiction may become more real than life itself. It may be substituted, while the spell is on, for the world of actual experience. And just as the manifest content of a dream is, according to Freud, the condensed and distorted symbol of latent dream-thoughts and desires in the unconscious, so, in the case we are discussing, the unconscious invests these abstract terms with its own peculiar meanings. They gain a tremendous, though undefined, importance and an irresistible compelling power.
Something like the process I have described occurs when the crowd appears. People are translated to a different world—that is, a different sense of the real. The speaker is transfigured to their vision. His words take on a mysterious importance; something tremendous, eternal, superhuman is at stake. Commonplace jokes become irresistibly amusing. Ordinary truths are wildly applauded. Dilemmas stand clear with all middle ground brushed away. No statement now needs qualification. All thought of compromise is abhorrent. Nothing now must intervene to rob these moments of their splendid intensity. As James once said of drunkenness, "Everything is just utterly utter." They who are not for us are against us.
The crowd-mind consists, therefore, first of all, of a disturbance of the function of the real. The crowd is the creature of Belief. Every crowd has its peculiar "illusions," ideals, dreams. It maintains its existence as a crowd just so long as these crowd-ideas continue to be held by practically all the members of the group—so long, in fact, as such ideas continue to hold attention and assent to the exclusion of ideas and facts which contradict them.
I am aware of the fact that we could easily be led aside at this point into endless metaphysical problems. It is not our purpose to enter upon a discussion of the question, what is the real world? The problem of the real is by no means so simple as it appears "to common sense." Common sense has, however, in practical affairs, its own criteria, and beyond these it is not necessary for us now to stray. The "illusions" of the crowd are almost never illusions in the psychological sense. They are not false perceptions of the objects of sense. They are rather akin to the delusions and fixed ideas commonly found in paranoia. The man in the street does not ordinarily require the technique either of metaphysics or of psychiatry in order to characterize certain individuals as "crazy." The "crazy" man is simply unadjustable in his speech and conduct. His ideas may be real to him, just as the color-blind mans sensations of color may be as real as those of normal people, but they wont work, and that is sufficient.
It is not so easy to apply this criterion of the real to our crowd-ideas. Social realities are not so well ordered as the behavior of the forces of nature. Things moral, religious, and political are constantly in the making. The creative role which we all play here is greater than elsewhere in our making of reality. When most of our neighbors are motivated by certain ideas, those ideas become part of the social environment to which we must adjust ourselves. In this sense they are "real," however "crazy." Every struggle-group and faction in society is constantly striving to establish its ideas as controlling forces in the social reality. The conflicts among ideals are therefore in a sense conflicts within the real. Ideas and beliefs which seek their verification in the character of the results to which they lead, may point to very great changes in experience, and so long as the believer takes into account the various elements with which he has to deal, he has not lost his hold upon reality. But when ones beliefs or principles become ends in themselves, when by themselves they seem to constitute an order of being which is more interesting than fact, when the believer saves his faith only by denying or ignoring the things which contradict him, when he strives not to verify his ideas but to "vindicate" them, the ideas so held are pathological. The obsessions of the paranoiac are of this sort. We shall see later that these ideas have a meaning, though the conscious attention of the patient is systematically diverted from that meaning. Crowd-ideas are similar. The reason why their pathology is not more evident is the fact that they are simultaneously entertained by so great a number of people.
There are many ideas in which our faith is sustained chiefly by the knowledge that everyone about us also believes them. Belief on such ground has commonly been said to be due to imitation or suggestion. These do play a large part in determining all our thinking, but I can see no reason why they should be more operative in causing the crowd-mind than in other social situations. In fact, the distinctive phenomena which I have called crowd-ideas clearly show that other causes are at work.
Among civilized people, social relationships make severe demands upon the individual. Primitive impulses, unchecked eroticism, tendencies to perversions, and antisocial demands of the ego which are in us all, are constantly inhibited, resisted, controlled and diverted to socially acceptable ends. The savage in us is "repressed," his demands are so habitually denied that we learn to keep him down, for the most part, without conscious effort. We simply cease to pay attention to his gnawing desires. We become decently respectable members of society largely at the expense of our aboriginal nature. But the primitive in us does not really die. It asserts itself harmlessly in dreams. Psychoanalysis has revealed the fact that every dream is the realization of some desire, usually hidden from our conscious thought by our habitual repression. For this reason the dream work consists of symbols. The great achievement of Freud is the technique which enables the analyst to interpret this symbolism so that his own unconscious thought and desire are made known to the subject. The dream is harmless and is normally utilized by the unconscious ego because during sleep we cannot move. If one actually did the things he dreamed, a thing which happens in various somnambulisms, the dream would become anything but harmless. Every psychosis is really a dramatized dream of this sort.