Notes on democracy

by H. L. Mencken

Its content is best studied by a process of analysis—that is, by turning from the complex whole to the simpler parts. What does the mob think? It thinks, obviously, what its individual members think. And what is that? It is, in brief, what somewhat sharp-nosed and unpleasant children think. The mob, being composed, in the overwhelming main, of men and women who have not got beyond the ideas and emotions of childhood, hovers, in mental age, around the time of puberty, and chiefly below it. If we would get at its thoughts and feelings we must look for light to the thoughts and feelings of adolescents. The old-time introspective psychology offered little help here. It concerned itself almost exclusively with the mental processes of the more reflective, and hence the superior sort of adults; it fell into the disastrous fallacy of viewing a child as simply a little man. Just as modern medicine, by rejecting a similar fallacy on the physical plane, has set up the science and art of pediatrics, so the new behaviourist psychology has given a new dignity and autonomy to the study of the child mind. The first steps were very difficult. The behaviourists not only had to invent an entirely new technique, like the pediatricians before them; they also had to meet the furious opposition of the orthodox psychologists, whose moony speculations they laughed at and whose authority they derided. But they persisted, and the problems before them turned out, in the end, to be relatively simple, and by no means difficult to solve. By observing attentively what was before everyone’s nose they quickly developed facts which left the orthodox psychologists in an untenable and absurd position. One by one, the old psychological categories went overboard, and with them a vast mass of vague and meaningless psychological terminology.

On the cleared ground remained a massive discovery: that the earliest and most profound of human emotions is fear. Man comes into the world weak and naked, and almost as devoid of intelligence as an oyster, but he brings with him a highly complex and sensitive susceptibility to fear. He can tremble and cry out in the first hours of his life—nay, in the first minute. Make a loud noise behind an infant just born, and it will shake like a Sunday-school superintendent taken in adultery. Take away its support—that is, make it believe that it is falling—and it will send up such a whoop as comes from yokels when the travelling tooth-puller has at them. These fears, by their character, suggest that they have a phylogenic origin—that is, that they represent inherited race experience, out of the deep darkness and abysm of time. Dr. John B. Watson, the head of the behaviourist school, relates them to the daily hazards of arboreal man—the dangers presented by breaking tree branches. The ape-man learned to fear the sudden, calamitous plunge, and he learned to fear, too, the warning crack. One need not follow Dr. Watson so far; there is no proof, indeed, that man was ever arboreal. But it must be obvious that this emotion of fear is immensely deep-seated—that it is instinctive if anything is instinctive. And all the evidence indicates that every other emotion is subordinate to it. None other shows itself so soon, and none other enters so powerfully into the first functioning of the infant mind. And to the primeval and yet profoundly rational fears that it brings into the world it quickly adds others that depart farther and farther from rationality. It begins to fear ideas as well as things, strange men as well as hostile nature. It picks up dreads and trepidations from its mother, from its nurse, from other children. At the age of three years, as Dr. Watson shows, its mental baggage is often little more than a vast mass of such things. It has anxieties, horrors, even superstitions. And as it increases in years it adds constantly to the stock.

The process of education is largely a process of getting rid of such fears. It rehearses, after a fashion, the upward struggle of man. The ideal educated man is simply one who has put away as foolish the immemorial fears of the race—of strange men and strange ideas, of the powers and principalities of the air. He is sure of himself in the world; no dread of the dark rides him; he is serene. To produce such men is the central aim of every rational system of education; even under democracy it is one of the aims, though perhaps only a subordinate one. What brings it to futility is simply the fact that the vast majority of men are congenitally incapable of any such intellectual progress. They cannot take in new ideas, and they cannot get rid of old fears. They lack the logical sense; they are unable to reason from a set of facts before them, free from emotional distraction. But they also lack something more fundamental: they are incompetent to take in the bald facts themselves. Here I point to the observations of Dr. Eleanor R. Wembridge, a practical psychologist of great shrewdness. Her contribution is the discovery that the lower orders of men, though they seem superficially to use articulate speech and thus to deal in ideas, are actually but little more accomplished in that way than so many trained animals. Words, save the most elemental, convey nothing to them. Their minds cannot grasp even the simplest abstractions; all their thinking is done on the level of a few primitive appetites and emotions. It is thus a sheer impossibility to educate them, as much so as it would be if they were devoid of the five senses. The school-marm who has at them wastes her time shouting up a rain-spout. They are imitative, as many of the lower animals are imitative, and so they sometimes deceive her into believing that her expositions and exhortations have gone home, but a scientific examination quickly reveals that they have taken in almost nothing. Thus ideas leave them unscathed; they are responsive only to emotions, and their emotions are all elemental—the emotions, indeed, of tabby-cats rather than of men.

4.

Politics Under Democracy

Fear remains the chiefest of them. The demagogues, i. e., the professors of mob psychology, who flourish in democratic states are well aware of the fact, and make it the corner-stone of their exact and puissant science. Politics under democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos. The statesman becomes, in the last analysis, a mere witch-hunter, a glorified smeller and snooper, eternally chanting “Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum!” It has been so in the United States since the earliest days. The whole history of the country has been a history of melodramatic pursuits of horrendous monsters, most of them imaginary: the red-coats, the Hessians, the monocrats, again the red-coats, the Bank, the Catholics, Simon Legree, the Slave Power, Jeff Davis, Mormonism, Wall Street, the rum demon, John Bull, the hell hounds of plutocracy, the trusts, General Weyler, Pancho Villa, German spies, hyphenates, the Kaiser, Bolshevism. The list might be lengthened indefinitely; a complete chronicle of the Republic could be written in terms of it, and without omitting a single important episode. It was long ago observed that the plain people, under democracy, never vote for anything, but always against something. The fact explains, in large measure, the tendency of democratic states to pass over statesmen of genuine imagination and sound ability in favour of colourless mediocrities. The former are shining marks, and so it is easy for demagogues to bring them down; the latter are preferred because it is impossible to fear them. The demagogue himself, when he grows ambitious and tries to posture as a statesman, usually comes ignominiously to grief, as the cases of Bryan, Roosevelt and Wilson dramatically demonstrate. If Bryan had confined himself, in 1896, to the chase of the bugaboo of plutocracy, it is very probable that he would have been elected. But he committed the incredible folly of throwing most of his energies into advocating a so-called constructive program, and it was thus easy for his opponents to alarm the mob against him. That program had the capital defect of being highly technical, and hence almost wholly unintelligible to all save a small minority; so it took on a sinister look, and caused a shiver to go down the democratic spine. It was his cross-of-gold speech that nominated him; it was his cow State political economy that ruined him. Bryan was a highly unintelligent man, a true son of the mob, and thus never learned anything by experience. In his last days he discovered a new issue in the evolutionary hypothesis. It was beyond the comprehension of the mob, and hence well adapted to arousing its fears. But he allowed his foes to take the offensive out of his hands, and in the last scene of all he himself was the pursued, and the tide of the battle was running so heavily against him that even the hinds at Dayton, Tenn., were laughing at him.

Government under democracy is thus government by orgy, almost by orgasm. Its processes are most beautifully displayed at times when they stand most naked—for example, in war days. The history of the American share in the World War is simply a record of conflicting fears, more than once amounting to frenzies. The mob, at the start of the uproar, showed a classical reaction: it was eager only to keep out of danger. The most popular song, in the United States, in 1915, was “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier.” In 1916, on his fraudulent promise to preserve that boy from harm, Wilson was reëlected. There then followed some difficult manœuvres—but perhaps not so difficult, after all, to skilful demagogues. The problem was to substitute a new and worse fear for the one that prevailed—a new fear so powerful that it would reconcile the mob to the thought of entering the war. The business was undertaken resolutely on the morning after election day. Thereafter, for three months, every official agency lent a hand. No ship went down to a submarine’s torpedo anywhere on the seven seas that the State Department did not report that American citizens—nay, American infants in their mothers’ arms—were aboard. Diplomatic note followed diplomatic note, each new one surpassing all its predecessors in moral indignation. The Department of Justice ascribed all fires, floods and industrial accidents to German agents. The newspapers were filled with dreadful surmises, many of them officially inspired, about the probable effects upon the United States of the prospective German victory. It was obvious to everyone, even to the mob, that a victorious Germany would unquestionably demand an accounting for the United States’ gross violations of neutrality. Thus a choice of fears was set up. The first was a fear of a Germany heavily beset, but making alarming progress against her foes. The second was a fear of a Germany delivered from them, and thirsting for revenge on a false and venal friend. The second fear soon engulfed the first. By the time February came the mob was reconciled to entering the war—reconciled, but surely not eager.

There remained the problem of converting reluctant acquiescence into enthusiasm. It was solved, as always, by manufacturing new fears. The history of the process remains to be written by competent hands: it will be a contribution to the literature of mob psychology of the highest importance. But the main outlines are familiar enough. The whole power of the government was concentrated upon throwing the plain people into a panic. All sense was heaved overboard, and there ensued a chase of bugaboos on a truly epic scale. Nothing like it had ever been seen in the world before, for no democratic state as populous as the United States had ever gone to war before. I pass over the details, and pause only to recall the fact that the American people, by the end of 1917, were in such terror that they lived in what was substantially a state of siege, though the foe was 3000 miles away and obviously unable to do them any damage. It was only the draft, I believe, that gave them sufficient courage to attempt actual hostilities. That ingenious device, by relieving the overwhelming majority of them of any obligation to take up arms, made them bold. Before it was adopted they were heavily in favour of contributing only munitions and money to the cause of democracy, with perhaps a few divisions of Regulars added for the moral effect. But once it became apparent that a given individual, John Doe, would not have to serve, he, John Doe, developed an altruistic eagerness for a frontal attack in force. For every Richard Roe in the conscript camps there were a dozen John Does thus safely at home, with wages high and the show growing enjoyable. So an heroic mood came upon the people, and their fear was concealed by a truculent front. But not from students of mob psychology.

5.

The Rôle of the Hormones