The Behavior of Crowds Part 6

However, a withdrawal of libido is not an exclusive occurrence in paranoia, nor is its occurrence anywhere necessarily followed by disastrous consequences. Indeed, in normal life there is a constant withdrawal of libido from persons and objects without resulting in paranoia or other neuroses. It merely causes a special psychic mood. The withdrawal of the libido as such cannot therefore be considered as pathogenic of paranoia. It requires a special character to distinguish the paranoiac withdrawal of libido from other kinds of the same process. This is readily found when we follow the further utilization of the libido thus withdrawn. Normally, we immediately seek a subst.i.tute for the suspended attachment, and until one is found the libido floats freely in the psyche and causes tensions which influence our moods. In hysteria the freed sum of libido becomes transformed into bodily innervations of fear. Clinical indications teach us that in paranoia a special use is made of the libido which is withdrawn from its object ... the freed libido in paranoia is thrown back on the ego and serves to magnify it.

Note the fact that there is a necessary relation between the fixed ideal system of the paranoiac and his withdrawal of interest in the outside world. The system gains the function of reality for him in the same measure that, loving not the world nor the things that are in the world, he has rendered our common human world unreal. His love thrown back upon himself causes him to create another world, a world of "pure reason," so to speak, which is more congenial to him than the world of empirical fact. In this system he takes refuge and finds peace at last. Now we see the function, at least so far as paranoia is concerned, of the ideal system. As Brill says, it is a curative process of a mind which has suffered "regression" or turning back of its interest from the affairs of ordinary men and women, to the attachments of an earlier stage in its history. To use a philosophical term, the paranoiac is the Simon-pure "solipsist." And as _a priori_ thinking tends, as Schiller has shown, ever to solipsism, we see here the grain of truth in G. K. Chesterton's witty comparison of rationalism and lunacy.

"Regression," or withdrawal of the libido, is present to some degree I believe in all forms of the neurosis. But we are informed that a withdrawal of the libido may, and frequently does, occur also in normal people. Knowledge of the neurosis here, as elsewhere, serves to throw light on certain thought processes of people who are considered normal.

Brill says that "normally we seek a subst.i.tute for the suspended attachment." New interests and new affections in time take the places of the objects from which the feelings have been torn. In a.n.a.lytical psychology the process by which this is achieved is called a "transference."

Now the crowd is in a sense a "transference phenomenon." In the temporary crowd or mob this transference is too transitory to be very evident, though even here I believe there will generally be found a certain _esprit de corps_. In permanent crowds there is often a marked transference to the other members of the group. This is evident in the joy of the new convert or the newly initiated, also in such terms of affection as "comrade" and "brother." I doubt, however, if this affection, so far as it is genuine among individuals of a certain crowd, is very different from the good will and affection which may spring up anywhere among individuals who are more or less closely a.s.sociated, or that it ever really extends beyond the small circle of personal friends that everyone normally gains through his daily relations with others.

But to the crowd-mind this transference is supposed to extend to all the members of the group; they are comrades and brothers not because we like them and know them intimately, but because they are fellow members. In other words, this transference, so far as it is a crowd phenomenon as such, is not to other individuals, but to the idea of the crowd itself.

It is not enough for the good citizen to love his neighbors in so far as he finds them lovable; he must love his country. To the churchman the Church herself is an object of faith and adoration. One does not become a humanitarian by being a good fellow; he must love "humanity"--which is to say, the bare abstract idea of everybody. I remember once asking a missionary who was on his way to China what it was that impelled him to go so far in order to minister to suffering humanity. He answered, "It is love." I asked again, "Do you really mean to say that you care so much as that for Chinese, not one of whom you have ever seen?" He answered, "Well, I--you see, I love them through Jesus Christ." So in a sense it is with the crowd-man always; he _loves through the crowd_.

The crowd idealized as something sacred, as end in itself, as something which it is an honor to belong to, is to some extent a disguised object of our self-love. But the idea of the crowd disguises more than self-love. Like most of the symbols through which the unconscious functions, it can serve more than one purpose at a time. The idea of the crowd also serves to disguise the parental image, and our own imaginary identification or reunion with it. The nation is to the crowd-man the "Fatherland," the "mother country," "Uncle Sam"--a figure which serves to do more than personalize for cartoonists the initials U. S. Uncle Sam is also the father-image thinly disguised. The Church is "the Mother,"

again the "Bride." Such religious symbols as "the Heavenly Father" and the "Holy Mother" also have the value of standing for the parent image.

For a detailed discussion of these symbols, the reader is referred to Jung's _Psychology of the Unconscious_.

In another connection I have referred to the fact that the crowd stands to the member _in loco parentis_. Here I wish to point out the fact that such a return to the parent image is commonly found in the psychoneurosis and is what is meant by "regression." I have also dwelt at some length on the fact that it is by securing a modification in the immediate social environment, ideally or actually, that the crowd permits the escape of the repressed wish. Such a modification in the social at once sets the members of the crowd off as a "peculiar people."

Interest tends to withdraw from the social as a whole and center in the group who have become a crowd. The Church is "in the world but not of it." The nation is an end in itself, so is every crowd. Transference to the idea of the crowd differs then from the normal subst.i.tutes which we find for the object from which affection is withdrawn. It is itself a kind of regression. In the psychoneurosis--in paranoia most clearly--the patient's attempt to rationalize this s.h.i.+fting of interest gives rise to the closed systems and ideal reconstructions of the world mentioned in the pa.s.sage quoted from Brill.

Does the crowd's thinking commonly show a like tendency to construct an imaginary world of thought-forms and then take refuge in its ideal system? As we saw at the beginning of our discussion, it does. The focusing of general attention upon the abstract and universal is a necessary step in the development of the crowd-mind.

The crowd does not think in order to solve problems. To the crowd-mind, as such, there are no problems. It has closed its case beforehand. This accounts for what Le Bon termed the "credulity" of the crowd. But the crowd believes only what it wants to believe and nothing else. Anyone who has been in the position of a public teacher knows how almost universal is the habit of thinking in the manner of the crowd and how difficult it is to get people to think for themselves. One frequently hears it said that the people do not think, that they do not want to know the truth.

Ibsen makes his Doctor Stockman say:

What sort of truths are they that the majority usually supports?

They are truths that are of such advanced age that they are beginning to break up.... These "majority truths" are like last year's cured meat--like rancid tainted ham; and they are the origin of the moral scurvy that is rampant in our communities.... The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom among us is the compact majority, yes, the d.a.m.ned compact liberal majority ... the majority has might on its side unfortunately, but _right_ it has never.

It is not really because so many are ignorant, but because so few are able to resist the appeal which the peculiar logic of crowd-thinking makes to the unconscious, that the cheap, the tawdry, the half-true almost exclusively gain popular acceptance. The average man is a dogmatist. He thinks what he thinks others think he is thinking. He is so used to propaganda that he can hardly think of any matter in other terms. It is almost impossible to keep the consideration of any subject of general interest above the dilemmas of partisan crowds. People will wherever possible change the discussion of a mooted question into an antiphonal chorus of howling mobs, each chanting its ritual as ultimate truth, and hurling its s.h.i.+bboleths in the faces of the others. Pursuit of truth with most people consists in repeating their creed. Nearly every movement is immediately made into a cult. Theology supplants religion in the churches. In popular ethics a dead formalism puts an end to moral advance. Straight thinking on political subjects is subordinated to partisan ends. Catch-phrases and magic formulas become subst.i.tuted for scientific information. Even the Socialists, who feel that they are the intellectually elect--and I cite them here as an example in no unfair spirit, but just because so many of them are really well-informed and "advanced" in their thinking--have been unable to save themselves from a doctrinaire economic orthodoxy of spirit which is often more dogmatic and intolerant than that of the "religious folks" to whose alleged "narrow-mindedness" every Socialist, even while repeating his daily chapter from the Marxian Koran, feels himself superior.

The crowd-mind is everywhere idealistic, and absolutist. Its truths are "given," made-in-advance. Though unconsciously its systems of logic are created to enhance the self-feeling, they appear to consciousness as highly impersonal and abstract. As in the intellectualist philosophies, forms of thought are regarded as themselves objects of thought. Systems of general ideas are imposed upon the minds of men apparently from without. Universal acceptance is demanded. Thought becomes stereotyped.

What ought to be is confused with what is, the ideal becomes more real than fact.

In the essays on "Pragmatism" William James showed that the rationalist system, even that of the great philosopher, is in large measure determined by the thinker's peculiar "temperament." Elsewhere he speaks of the "Sentiment of Rationality." For a discussion of the various types of philosophical rationalism, the reader is referred to the criticisms by William James, F. C. S. Schiller, Dewey, and other Pragmatists. It is sufficient for our purpose to note the fact that the rationalist type of mind everywhere shows a tendency to a.s.sert the unreality of the world of everyday experience, and to seek comfort and security in the contemplation of a logically ordered system or world of "pure reason."

Ideals, not concrete things, are the true realities. The world with which we are always wrestling is but a distorted manifestation, a jumbled, stereotyped copy of what James ironically referred to as "the de luxe edition which exists in the Absolute." The parable of the cave which Plato gives in the _Republic_ represents ordinary knowledge as a delusion, and the empirically known world as but dancing shadows on the wall of our subterranean prison.

R. W. Livingstone, who sees in Platonism, from the very beginning, a certain world-weariness and turning away of the Greek spirit from the healthy realism which had formerly characterized it, says:

For if Greece showed men how to trust their own nature and lead a simply human life, how to look straight in the face of the world and read the beauty that met them on the surface, certain Greek writers preached a different lesson from this. In opposition to directness they taught us to look past the "unimaginary and actual" qualities of things to secondary meanings and inner symbolism. In opposition to liberty and humanism they taught us to mistrust our nature, to see in it weakness, helplessness, and incurable taint, to pa.s.s beyond humanity to communion with G.o.d, to live less for this world than for one to come.... Perhaps to some people it may seem surprising that this writer is Plato.

According to this view reality may be found only by means of "pure knowledge," and, to give a familiar quotation from the Phaedo:

If we would have pure knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body; the soul in herself must behold things in themselves; and then we shall attain the wisdom which we desire and of which we say that we are lovers; not while we live, but after death; for if, while in company with the body, the soul cannot have pure knowledge, one of two things follows--either knowledge is not to be obtained at all, or if at all after death.

Intellectualism may not always be so clearly other-worldly as Plato shows himself to be in this pa.s.sage. But it commonly argues that behind the visible world of "illusory sense experience" lies the true ground and cause--an unseen order in which the contradictions of experience are either unknown or harmonized, an external and unchangeable "Substance,"

a self-contained Absolute to which our ephemeral personalities with their imperfections and problems are unknown. A "thing in itself," or principle of Being which transcends our experience.

This type of thinking, whether it be known as Idealism, Rationalism, Intellectualism, or Absolutism, finds little sympathy from those who approach the study of philosophy from the standpoint of psychology. The following pa.s.sages taken from _Studies in Humanism_ by Schiller, show that even without the technique of the a.n.a.lytical method, it was not hard to detect some of the motives which prompted the construction of systems of this sort. The partisanism of one of these motives is rather suggestive for our study of the mind of the crowd. Says our author:

Logical defects rarely kill beliefs to which men, for psychological reasons, remain attached.... This may suggest to us that we may have perhaps unwittingly misunderstood Absolutism, and done it a grave injustice.... What if its real appeal was not logical but psychological?...

The history of English Absolutism distinctly bears out these antic.i.p.ations. It was originally a deliberate importation from Germany, with a purpose. And this purpose was a religious one--that of counteracting the antireligious developments of Science. The indigenous philosophy, the old British empiricism, was useless for this purpose. For though a form of intellectualism, its sensationalism was in no wise hostile to Science. On the contrary, it showed every desire to ally itself with, and to promote, the great scientific movement of the nineteenth century, which penetrated into and almost overwhelmed Oxford between 1859 and 1870.

But this movement excited natural and not unwarranted alarm in that great center of theology. For Science, flushed with its hard-won liberty, ignorant of philosophy, and as yet unconscious of its proper limitations, was decidedly aggressive and overconfident. It seemed naturalistic, nay, materialistic, by the law of its being. The logic of Mill, the philosophy of Evolution, the faith in democracy, in freedom, in progress (on material lines), threatened to carry all before them.

What was to be done? Nothing directly; for on its own ground Science seemed invulnerable, and had the knack of crus.h.i.+ng the subtlest dialectics by the knockdown force of sheer scientific fact. But might it not be possible to change the venue, to s.h.i.+ft the battleground to a region _ubi instabilis terra unda_ (where the land afforded no firm footing), where the frozen sea could not be navigated, where the very air was thick with mists so that phantoms might well pa.s.s for realities--the realm, in short, of metaphysics?...

So it was rarely necessary to do more than recite the august table of _a priori_ categories in order to make the most audacious scientist feel that he had got out of his depth; while at the merest mention of the Hegelian dialectic all the "advanced thinkers" of the time would flee affrighted.

Schiller's sense of humor doubtless leads him to exaggerate somewhat the deliberateness of this importation of German metaphysics. That these borrowed transcendental and dialectical systems served their purpose in the warfare of traditional theologies against Science is but half the truth. The other half is that these logical formulas provided certain intelligent believers with a defense, or safe refuge, in their own inner conflicts.

That this is the case, Schiller evidently has little doubt. After discussing Absolutism itself as a sort of religion, and showing that its "catch-words" taken at their face value are not only emotionally barren, but also logically meaningless because "inapplicable to our actual experience," he then proceeds to an examination of the unconscious motives which determine this sort of thinking. His description of these motives, so far as it goes, is an excellent little bit of a.n.a.lytical psychology. He says:

How then can Absolutism possibly be a religion? It must appeal to psychological motives of a different sort, rare enough to account for its total divergence from the ordinary religious feelings and compelling enough to account for the fanaticism with which it is held and the persistence with which the same old round of negations has been reiterated through the ages. Of such psychological motives we shall indicate the more important and reputable.

(1) It is decidedly flattering to one's spiritual pride to feel oneself a "part" or "manifestation" or "vehicle" or "reproduction" of the Absolute Mind, and to some this feeling affords so much strength and comfort and such exquisite delight that they refrain from inquiring what these phrases mean.... It is, moreover, the strength of this feeling which explains the blindness of Absolutists toward the logical defects of their own theory....

(2) There is a strange delight in wide generalization merely as such, which, when pursued without reference to the ends which it subserves, and without regard to its actual functioning, often results in a sort of logical vertigo. This probably has much to do with the peculiar "craving for unity" which is held to be the distinctive affliction of philosophers. At any rate, the thought of an all-embracing One or Whole seems to be regarded as valuable and elevating quite apart from any definite function it performs in knowing, or light it throws on any actual problem.

(3) The thought of an Absolute Unity is cherished as a guarantee of cosmic stability. In face of the restless vicissitudes of phenomena it seems to secure us against falling out of the Universe. It a.s.sures us _a_ _priori_--and that is its supreme value--that the cosmic order cannot fall to pieces and leave us dazed and confounded among the debris.... We want to have an absolute a.s.surance _a priori_ concerning the future, and the thought of the absolute seems designed to give it. It is probably this last notion that, consciously or unconsciously, weighs most in the psychology of the Absolutists' creed.

In this connection the reader will recall the pa.s.sage quoted from Adler's _The Neurotic Const.i.tution_, in which it was shown that the fict.i.tious "guiding-lines" or rational systems of both the neurotic and normal are motivated by this craving for security. But it makes all the difference in the world whether the system of ideas is used, as in science and common sense, to solve real problems in an objective world, or is created to be an artificial and imaginary defense of the ego against a subjective feeling of insecurity; whether, in a word, the craving for security moves one to do something calculated to render the forces with which he must deal concretely more congenial and hospitable to his will, or makes him content to withdraw and file a demur to the challenge of the environment in the form of theoretical denial of the reality of the situation.

There is no denying the fact that Absolute Idealism, if not taken too seriously, may have the function for some people of steadying their nerves in the battle of life. And though, as I believe, logically untenable, it not infrequently serves as a rationalization of faith-values which work out beneficially, and, quite apart from their metaphysical trappings, may be even indispensable. Yet when carried to its logical conclusions such thinking inevitably distorts the meaning of personal living, robs our world and our acts of their feeling of reality, serves as an instrument for "regression" or withdrawal of interest from the real tasks and objects of living men and women, and in fact functions for much the same purpose, if not precisely in the same way, as do the ideal systems of the psychopath.

In justice to idealism it should be added that this is by no means the only species of Rationalism which may lead to such psychic results.

There are various paths by which the craving for artificial security may lead to such attempts to reduce the whole of possible experience to logical unity that the realities of time and change and of individual experience are denied. How many deterministic theories, with all their scientific jargon, are really motivated by an inability to accept a world with an element of chance in it. There is a sense in which all science by subsuming like individuals in a common cla.s.s, and thus ignoring their individuality, in so far as they are alike in certain respects, gains added power over all of them. There is a sense, too, in which science, by discovering that whenever a given combination of elements occurs, a definitely foreseen result will follow, is justified in ignoring time and treating certain futures as if they were already tucked up the sleeves of the present. It should be remembered that this sort of determinism is purely methodological, and is, like all thinking, done for a purpose--that of effecting desirable ends in a world made up of concrete situations.

When this purpose becomes supplanted by a pa.s.sion to discount all future change in general--when one imagines that he has a formula which enables him to write the equation of the curve of the universe, science has degenerated into scientificism, or head-in-the-sand philosophy. The magic formula has precisely the same psychic value as the "absolute." I know a number of economic determinists, for instance, who just cannot get out of their heads the notion that social evolution is a process absolutely underwritten, guaranteed, and predictable, without the least possible doubt. In such a philosophy of history as this the individual is of course a mere "product of his environment," and his role as a creator of value is nil. On this "materialistic" theory, the individual is as truly a mere manifestation of impersonal evolutionary forces as he is, according to orthodox Platonism, a mere manifestation of the abstract idea of his species. Notwithstanding the professed impersonalism of this view, its value for consolation in minimizing the causes of the spiritual difference in men--that is, its function for enhancing the self-feeling of some people, is obvious. That such an idea should become a crowd-idea is not to be wondered at. And this leads me to my point. _It is no mere accident that the crowd takes to rationalistic philosophies like a duck to water._

The crowd-man, however unsophisticated he may be, is a Platonist at heart. He may never have heard the word epistemology, but his theory of knowledge is essentially the same as Plato's. Religious crowds are, to one familiar with the Dialogues, astonis.h.i.+ngly Platonic. There is the same habit of giving ontological rather than functional value to general ideas, the same other-worldliness, the same moral dilemmas, the same contempt for the material, for the human body, for selfhood; the same a.s.sertion of finality, and the conformist spirit.

Reformist crowds differ only superficially from religious crowds.

Patriotic crowds make use of a different terminology, but their mental habits are the same. It has become a cult among crowds with tendencies toward social revolution to paint their faces with the colors of a borrowed nineteenth-century materialism. But all this is mere swagger and "frightfulness," an attempt to make themselves look terrible and frighten the bourgeois. I am sure that no one who has seen all this radical rigmarole, as I have had occasion to see it, can be deceived by it. These dreadful materialist doctrines of the radical crowd are wooden guns, no thicker than the soap-box. As a matter of fact, the radical crowds are extremely idealistic. With all their talk of proletarian opposition to intellectualism, Socialists never become a crowd without becoming as intellectualist as Fichte or Hegel. There is a sense in which Marx himself never succeeded in escaping Hegel's dilemmas, he only followed the fas.h.i.+on in those days of turning them upside down.

With radical crowds as with conservative, there is the same subst.i.tution of a closed system of ideas for the s.h.i.+fting phenomena of our empirical world; the same wors.h.i.+p of abstract forms of thought, the same uncompromising spirit and insistence upon general uniformity of opinions; the same orthodoxy. All orthodoxy is nothing other than the will of the crowd to keep itself together. With all kinds of crowds, also, there is the same diverting of attention from the personal and the concrete to the impersonal and the general; the same flight from reality to the transcendental for escape, for consolation, for defense, for vindication; the same fiction that existence is at bottom a sort of logical proposition, a magic formula or principle of Being to be correctly copied and learned by rote; the same attempt to create the world or find reality by thinking rather than by acting.

The intellectualist bias of the average man is doubtless due in great part to the fact that theology, and therefore the religious education of the young, both Christian and Jewish, has throughout the history of these religions been saturated with Platonism. But then, the universal sway of this philosopher may be explained by the fact that there is something in his abstractionism which is congenial to the creed-making propensities of the crowd-mind. The great _a priori_ thinkers, Plato, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Anselm, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Green, etc., have often been called solitary men, but it is significant that their doctrines survive in popularized form in the creeds and s.h.i.+bboleths of permanent crowds of all descriptions. While humanists, nominalists, empiricists, realists, pragmatists, men like Protagoras, Epicurus, Abelard, Bacon, Locke, Hume, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, James, have always had a hard time of it. They are considered destructive, for the reason that the tendency of their teaching is to disintegrate the crowd-mind and call one back to himself. Their names are seldom mentioned in popular a.s.semblies except to discredit them.

Yet it is on the whole these latter thinkers who orient us in our real world, make us courageously face the facts with which we have to deal, stimulate our wills, force us to use our ideas for what they are--instruments for better living,--inspire us to finer and more correct valuations of things, and point out the way to freedom for those who dare walk in it.

All this, however, is the very thing that the crowd-mind is running headlong away from. As a crowd we do not wish to think empirically. Why should we seek piecemeal goods by tedious and dangerous effort, when we have only to do a little trick of attention, and behold The Good, abstract, perfect, universal, waiting just around the corner in the realm of pure reason, ready to swallow up and demolish all evil? Are we not even now in possession of Love, Justice, Beauty, and Truth by the sheer magic of thinking of them in the abstract, calling them "principles" and writing the words with the initial letters in capitals?

The very mental processes by which a group of people becomes a crowd change such abstract nouns from mere cla.s.s names into copies of supermundane realities.

In wholesome thinking principles are of course necessary. They are what I might call "leading ideas." Their function is to lead to more satisfactory thinking--that is, to other ideas which are desired. Or they are useful in leading us to actions the results of which are intended and wished for. They may also be principles of valuation guiding us in the choice of ends. If there were no substantial agreement among us concerning certain principles we could not relate our conduct to one another at all; social life would be impossible. But necessary as such leading ideas are, they are means rather than ends. Circ.u.mstances may demand that we alter them or make exceptions to their application.

To the crowd-mind a principle appears as an end in itself. It must be vindicated at all costs. To offend against it in one point is to be guilty of breaking the whole law. Crowds are always uncompromising about their principles. They must apply to all alike. Crowds are no respecters of persons.

As crowd-men we never appear without some set of principles or some cause over our heads. Crowds crawl under their principles like worms under stones. They cover up the wrigglings of the unconscious, and protect it from attack. Every crowd uses its principles as universal demands. In this way it gets unction upon other crowds, puts them in the wrong, makes them give a.s.sent to the crowd's real purpose by challenging them to deny the righteousness of the professed justifications of that purpose. It is said that the Sioux Indians, some years ago, used to put their women and children in front of their firing line. The braves could then crouch behind these innocent ones and shoot at white men, knowing that it would be a violation of the principles of humanity for the white soldiers to shoot back and risk killing women and children. Crowds frequently make just such use of their principles. About each crowd, like the circle of fire which the G.o.ds placed about the sleeping Brunhilde, there is a flaming hedge of logical abstractions, sanctions, taboos, which none but the intellectually courageous few dare cross. In this way the slumbering critical faculties of the crowd-mind are protected against the intrusion of realities from outside the cult. The intellectual curiosity of the members of the group is kept within proper bounds. Hostile persons or groups dare not resist us, for in so doing they make themselves enemies of Truth, of Morality, of Liberty, etc.

Both political parties, by a common impulse, "drape themselves in the Flag." It is an interesting fact that the most antagonistic crowds profess much the same set of principles. The "secondary rationalization"

of crowds, both Northern and Southern, at the time of the Civil War, made use of our traditional principles of American Liberty, and Christian Morality. We have seen both pacifist and militarist crowds setting forth their manifestoes in terms of New Testament teaching. Each religious sect exists only to teach "the one system of doctrine logically deduced from Scripture."