Hideous sacrifices, repulsive persecutions, stake burnings and massacres were hysterically performed in efforts to stay the catastrophe. Futile efforts. Yet, whenever the people were thus frightened, they turned to violence, sadism and every evil folly. Time and again, multitudes on hilltops, awaiting to ascend to heaven, trampled each other to death while sparring for the best position from which to be sucked up by a demented Jehovah.
“The end of the Dark Ages did not alter this sinister trait. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries our American hills have seen the scramble of the doomed as they awaited Judgment. At the beginning of this very century, the country was stricken by awe when it learned Earth would pass through the tail of Halley’s Comet. By that day, to be sure, science had so prospered in a climate of liberty that many millions stood steadfast in the presence of the celestial visitation. These restrained the rest. Blood did not flow on the altars of our churches; infants were not dashed against cathedral walls in atonement for presumed guilt; mobs of True Believers did not loot their own institutions and rape their own relatives in a last ecstasy of zealous horror. But today it is not the priest, not the self-appointed prophet with his crackpot interpretation of Daniel or the Book of Revelation, who says, ‘The earth may end.’ It is that very group of reasonable, orderly, unhysterical men upon whom society has learned, a little, to lean for comfort and truth: the scientists themselves!”
Mrs. Berwyn interrupted. “Two hundred thousand church-going subscribers of the Transcript are going to view that dimly.”
“True, isn’t it?”
She reflected, tapping her lush lips with a pencil. “Yes. I suppose it’s all perfectly true. But….”
A muscle tensed visibly in his jaw. He paced away from her, swung around, came jauntily back:
“The more civilized a man may be, or a woman, or child, the less readily he, or she, or the child will admit panic. That is what ‘civilized’ means: understanding, self-control, knowledge, discipline, individual responsibility. What happens, then, if a civilized society finds itself confronted with a reasonable fear, yet one of such a magnitude and nature that it cannot be tolerated by the combined efforts of reason and the common will? Such luckless multitudes, faced with that dilemma, will have but one solution. Feeling a gigantic fear they cannot (or they will not) face, they must pretend they have no fear. They must say aloud repeatedly, There is no reason to be afraid.’ They must ridicule those who show fear’s symptoms. Especially, they must pit themselves, for the sake of a protective illusion, against all persons who endeavor to take the measure of the common dread and respond sensibly to its scope. To act otherwise would be to admit the inadmissible, the fact of their repressed panic.
“Thus a condition is set up in which a vast majority of the citizens, unable to acknowledge with their minds the dread that eats at their blind hearts, loses all contact with reality. The sensible steps are not taken. The useful slogans are outlawed. The proper attitudes are deemed improper. Appropriate responses to the universal peril dwindle, diminish and at last disappear.
“All the while, the primordial alarms are kept kindled in the darkness of self-shuttered souls. Within them, in mortal quaking, march the impulses that set Inquisitions going, threw over liberty, brought down truth screaming, and assembled men repeatedly for bloody rites. Men’s ‘leaders,’ most of them, take up the suicidal expressions of the mob. For leadership, alas, is of two sorts: one, that courageous chieftainship which administers according to high principle, whatever the mob’s view at the moment; the other, specious and chimerical, a ‘leadership’ which merely rides upon the wave of mob emotion, capitalizing it for private aggrandizement, and no more truly leads than a man ‘leads’ the sea as it dashes him toward death on a rock. Such leaders—Hitler is an example—are in the end engulfed by that which sustained them. The other sort, true leaders—Lincoln was one—conduct the people by truth and reason through their panic to security, oftentimes against its stream.
“There are no Lincolns among us today.”