If the word "revolution" be taken to mean fundamental change in men's habit of thought, and life, and the forms of their relation to one another, then it may be said that great "revolutions may be and have been achieved with a relatively small degree of crowd-thinking and mob violence." Much of the normal development of civilization, for instance, the great scientific advance of the nineteenth century, the spread of culture, the creation of artistic values, the rise in the standard of living, is change of that sort. Such change is, however, gradual. It is brought about by countless concrete adaptations, by thinking always towards realizable ends. New and almost unforeseeable results are thus reached; but they are reached, as in all organic growth and in all sound thinking, by a series of successful adjustments within the real. True progress is doubtless made up of changes of that sort. But for the course of progress to run on uninterrupted and undefeated we should have to be, both in our individual and social behavior, the reasonable being which certain nineteenth-century utilitarians mistook us for.
It is the fool thing, the insincere thing, that more commonly happens in matters social and political. The adjustment reached is not often a solution of a social problem worked out deliberately on the "greatest-happiness" principle. It is commonly a status quo, or balance of power among contending crowds, each inspired by the fiction of its own importance, by self-idealization, and desire to rule. It is an unstable equilibrium usually held in place for the time by a dominant crowd. This dominant crowd may itself be composed of quarreling factions, but these parties, so long as they share enough of the supremacy to keep up their self-feeling, so long, in fact, as their members may even be able to make themselves believe that they, too, are in the upper set, or so long as they continue to hope for success in the social game as now played, unite in repeating the catchwords which justify their crowd in its supremacy. [Either that or they prefer to stay where they are. You'd think that attitude would merit some respect - DMR.] The dominant group identifies its own interests with the general welfare. And in the sense that some sort of order, or any at all, is to be preferred to social chaos, there is an element of truth in this identification.
The fact remains, however, that the dominant crowd possesses always much of the crowd-spirit which originally secured for it its enviable position. [Or unenviable; we don't envy our parents - DMR.] Its ideas, like those of all crowds, are devices for sustaining the self-feeling of its members, for protecting itself, for keeping the group together, for justification. They are only secondarily, if at all, instruments for dealing with new and perplexing social situations. It cannot be denied that a certain set of opinions, prejudices, mannerisms, ceremonies "go with" the social position which corresponds to them. They are the ready-made habits of the "set" or class. They are badges by which the "gentleman" is distinguished, the evening clothes of the psyche, as it were. Many of these crowd-forms represent true values of living, some of them are useful in our dealings with reality; if this were not so, if such spiritual tattooings or ceremonial forms were wholly harmful, the crowd which performed them would be at such a disadvantage that it could not hold its own. But that considerations of utility - other than the function which such ceremonialism is known to have for the unconscious always - do not directly govern these forms of thought and behavior is seen in the fact that so many of them, as Sumner says of "folkways," are either harmful or useless in dealing with matters of fact.
The dominant crowd, therefore, in just so far as it might remain a crowd in order to secure its own position of supremacy, must strive to force all social realities into the forms of its own conflicts and dilemmas. Inevitably the self-feeling of a great many people, who are forced by the dominant crowd to conform and labor with no compensation, is hurt. [Unless they have the guts to stand up for themselves, perhaps with the aid of a you-know-what. Of course, if ostracism and/or persecution results from this, and the logical response - leaving town - is followed by whininess from the town they left, Martin has a good point - DMR.] They cannot but contrast their own lot with that of their own fortunate neighbors. Of all things, people probably resist most the feeling of inferiority. Any suggestion that the difference in social position is due to a similar difference in personal worth or in ability is hotly resented. [Maybe. I can't help thinking of athletes, rock stars, actors, etc., but these are definite exceptions - DMR.] The resentment is in no ways abated by the fact that in some cases this suggestion may be true. Compensations are at once created by the unconscious. In mediaeval times "all men were created brothers and were equal before the altars of the Church and in heaven." Thus distinctions of merit, other than those which prevailed in the social order, were set up in the interest of the common man. [And that's a pivotal question for political science: when is such a conclusion, or assumption, true? - DMR.]
As the influence of the Renaissance directed general attention from the realm of the spiritual to practical affairs of earth, these compensations changed from thoughts of the future world to dreams of the future of this world. The injured self-feeling dwells upon the economic or political inequalities which flow from the dominance of the ruling crowd. The injustices and acts of exploitation, which are certainly neither new nor rare occurrences in human relations, are seized upon as if it were these things, not the assumption to superiority, which were the issue at stake.
At the time of the French Revolution the Third Estate, or Bourgeois, which showed itself quite as capable of exploiting the poor as ever were the older aristocrats, saw itself only as part of the wronged and exploited "people." [And that, if true, might have made the "exploitation" worse, perhaps: tough people are callous people. Also, and this may be more to the point, the grandchildren of tough people, if they've had easy lives but pretend they're the same as their grandpappy, can very easily put the word "exploitation" into the heads of regular people - DMR.] The sufferings of the poor, which it was frequently even then profiting in quite as heartily, to say the least, as the titled nobility, were represented as the grievance of all mankind against the hated nobility. That the ideas of "liberty, equality, and fraternity" which these good tradesmen preached may easily become the sort of compensatory ideas we have been discussing is shown by the fact of the genuine astonishment and indignation of the burghers when later their employees made use of the same phrase in the struggles between labor and capital. Sans-culottism has quite as many psychological motives as economic behind it.
How pompous, hateful and snobbish were these titled folk with their powdered wigs, carriages, fine clothes, and their exclusive social gatherings to which honest citizens, often quite as wealthy as themselves, were not invited. If the "people" - that is, the burghers themselves - only had a chance they would be just as fine ladies and gentlemen as those who merely inherited their superiority. Down with the aristocrats! All men were equal and always had been. There must be fraternity and the carier ouvert les talents, in other words, brotherhood and free competition.
I am sure, from all I have ever seen or read of social revolt and unrest, that this injured self-feeling, or defense against the sense of personal inferiority, while not the only motive, is the most powerful one at work. It crops out everywhere, in the layman's hatred of the clergy during the Reformation, in that curious complex of ideas whereby the uneducated often look upon a college diploma as something little short of magical, and defend their ego against this ridiculously exaggerated mark of distinction and accompanying feeling of self-reproach by a slur at "high-brows." Few people realize how general this feeling is; the trick of making fun of the educated is one of the commonest forms of crowd-humor in America, both in vaudeville and in popular oratory. I have previously pointed out the fact that the religious revival in our day is to a great extent characterized by a popular resistance to scholars. No one can read Mr. Sunday's sermons and deny that fact. The City of New York gave the largest majority in its history to the candidate for the office of mayor who made opposition to "experts" the main issue in his campaign. [Did they fuck up? - DMR.] Scores of times I have heard popular speakers resort to this trick to gain favor with their audiences, and I cannot remember ever having known such sentiments to fail to gain applause - I am not speaking now of strictly groups, but of general gatherings.
The point of interest here is that these same people have a most extravagant notion of the value of the academic training which they encourage the crowd speaker in ridiculing. I have made it a practice of talking with a great many people personally and drawing them out on this point, and I have found that this is almost uniformly the case. F. B., a cigar maker by trade, says, "Oh, if I had only had sense enough to go on to school when I had the opportunity!" E. L., a mechanic, says, "I might have been somebody, if I had been given any chance to get an education." R., a sort of jack-of-all-trades, says, "If I only had N.'s education, I'd be a millionaire." B., a farmer with limited intellectual interests, says, "I tell you, my boys are not going to be like me; they have got to go to college." G., a waiter, says, "I don't know much," and then proceeds to impress me with the latest bit of academic information which he has picked up." C., a printer, who has been moderately successful, says: "I'd give ten thousand dollars right this minute if I knew Greek; now there is [OMITTED] and there is [ALSO BLIPPED], neighbors of mine, they're highly educated. When I'm with them I'm ashamed and feel like a dub."
When, on such occasions, I repeatedly say that the average academic student really learns hardly anything at all of the classic languages, and cite the small fruits of my own years of tedious study as an example, the effects produced is invariably comforting - until I add that one need not attend a university seven years or even four to become educated, but that nearly everyone with ability to learn and with genuine intellectual interests may achieve a remarkable degree of learning. The answer of the perplexed person is then often an extenuation. "Well, you see, a busy person or a working man is so tired after the day'' work that he has no energy left for study," or it is, "Wait till the working class has more leisure, then they, too can be cultivated." Passing over this extenuation [or explanation - DMR], which ignores the fact that some of the best informed and clearest thinking people one meets are working people, while the average university graduate leads anything but an intellectual life, it can hardly be denied, I think, that our crowd cult of anti-"highbrowism" is really a defense mechanism against an inner feeling of inferiority. [And that, to Martin's credit, is a sure sign: a combination of deference and spitting - in short, immaturity. If you see this in yourself with regard to something, though, it might be a good idea to ask yourself if you need to defer: the answer might, realistically, be "yes." If "no" is the conclusion, try stopping it by replacing that deference with simple respect (or possibly simple laughter), perhaps after some mental practice to break the habit. See how your friends and neighbors react… - DMR.] Now the interesting thing about this feeling of inferiority is the exaggerated notion of the superiority of the college-trained, which is entertained chiefly by the uneducated themselves. What appears here is in fact nothing other than a cheapening of the idea of superiority. Personal excellence is something which anyone may attain; it is not something congenital, but something to be added on; one "gets and education," possesses something of advantage, merely by a few years of conventional study of books. Anyone might do that, therefore. "I, too, if I only cared to, or had been given opportunity, might now be famous." "The difference between myself and the world's greatest genius is not a spiritual chasm which I could not myself, at least hypothetically, cross." "It is rather an 'acquired character,' a mere fruit of special opportunity - which in a few cases it doubtless may be - but it is something external; at bottom we are all equal."
Many facts can be advanced to corroborate the results of our analysis here. The crowd always resents the Carlyle, William James, Nietzsche, Goethe theory of genius. Genius is not congenital superiority. It is the result of hard work. The genius is not a unique personal fact, he is a "representative man." He says just what his age is thinking. The inarticulate message of his contemporaries simply becomes articulate in some one, and behold a genius. In other words, I suppose, all Vienna, messenger boys and bootblacks especially, were suddenly fascinated by Schiller's "Ode to Joy" and went about whistling improvised musical renderings of the theme of this poem, till the deaf Beethoven heard and wrote these whistlings down in the form of the Ninth Symphony. [Okay, in this case, the above theory is pretty ridiculous. But, even if you believe the genius-is-something-you're-born-with theory, the above makes a lot of sense, if you see a "genius" as someone that can articulate something that the community's about to think, or something that's compatible with what they already think, but hasn't come into conscious awareness yet. I'll grant that this is a hack model, and it doesn't apply to those whose works rot in the shelves during their lifetime and give them immortality when they're gone, but this seems to imply that genius is a special kind of intellectualized or artistic empathy, one that might, but not necessarily, translate into superior social skills and/or popularity - DMR.]
According to the crowd, Luther did not create the Reformation, or Petrarch the Renaissance; these movements themselves created their leaders and founders; all that the genius did was to interpret and faithfully obey the People's will. Ergo, to be a genius one need only study hard enough to be able to tell the people what they already think. The superiority of genius is therefore no different from that of any educated person; except in degree of application. Anyone of us might possess this superiority. In other words, the "intellectual snobbishness" which the crowd resents is nothing else than the crowd-man's own fiction of self-importance, projected upon those whose imagined superiority he envies. It is recognized, even exaggerated by the unlearned, because it is precisely the sort of superiority which the ignorant man himself, in his ignorance, imagines that he himself would display if he "only had the chance," and even now possesses unrecognized. [There might be a degree of truth to this, if you see the above skill as differing in degree form regular people. But true genius tends to use durable self-hatred, and/or trying to live up to two or more contradictory values that they revere, or perhaps one value that is totally wrong for the kind of person they are - for example, a "born collectivist" embracing libertarianism. The last two, if this passion (of whatever kind) is exempt, can translate into simple but necessary good judgement - DMR.]
We have made the foregoing detour because I think it serves to illustrate, in a way, the psychic process behind much revolutionary propaganda and activity. I would not attempt to minimize the extent of the social injustice and economic slavery which a dominant crowd, whether ecclesiastical, feudal, or capitalistic, is guilty of in its dealings with its subjects. But every dominant crowd, certain sections of the "proletariat" as quickly as any other, will resort to such practices, and will alike justify them by moral catchwords the minute its supremacy over other crowds gives it opportunity. Therefore there is a certain amount of tautology in denouncing the "master class" for its monstrous abuses. That the real point at issue between the dominant crowd and the under crowd is the assumed personal superiority of the members of the former, rather than the economic "exploitation" which it practices, is shown by the fact that the French Revolution was led by wealthy bourgeois, and that the leading revolutionary element in the working class to-day consists, not of the "down and out" victims of capitalist exploitation, but of the members of the more highly skilled and better paid trades, also of certain intellectuals who are not "proletarians" at all.
And now we come to our point: the fiction of the superiority of the dominant crowd, just as in the case of the assumed personal superiority of the intellectuals, is resented by the under crowd because it is secretly recognized by the under crowd. Of course the dominant crowd, like all crowds, is obsessed by its feelings of self-importance, and this feeling is apparently vindicated by its social position. But the fiction is recognized at its full face value, and therefore resented by the under crowds, because that is precisely the sort of personal superiority to which they also aspire. [Or if it's rubbed in their face, perhaps by being snobbish or, more commonly, patronizing - DMR.]
One commonly hears it said to-day, by those who have made the catchwords of democracy their crowd cult, that the issue in modern society is between democracy and capitalism. In a sense this may be true, but only in a superficial sense; the real issue is between the personal self as a social entity and the crowd. Capitalism is, to my mind, the logical first fruit of so-called democracy. Capitalism is simply the social supremacy of the trader-man crowd. For a hundred years and more commercial ability - that of organizing industry and selling goods - has been rewarded out of all proportion to any other kind of ability, because, in the first place, it leads to the kind of success which the ordinary man most readily recognizes and envies - large houses, fine clothes, automobiles, exclusive clubs, etc. A Whittier maybe ever so great a poet, and yet sit beside the stove in the general store of his little country village, and no one thinks he is so very wonderful. Some may envy him his fame, but few will envy and therefore be fascinated by that in him which they do not understand. [And I'll bet Whittier was mighty grateful for that - DMR.] But a multimillionaire in their community is understood; everyone can see and envy his success; he is at once both envied and admired.
Moreover, the commercial ability is the sort which the average man most commonly thinks he possesses in some degree. While, therefore, he grumbles at the unjust inequalities in wealth which exist in modern society, and denounces the successful business man as an exploiter and fears his power, the average man will nevertheless endure all this, much in the same spirit that a student being initiated into a fraternity will take the drubbing, knowing well that his own turn at the fun will come later. It is not until the members of the under crowd begin to suspect that their own dreams of "aping the rich" may never come true that they begin to entertain revolutionary ideas. In other words, forced to abandon the hope of joining the present dominating crowd, they begin to dream of supplanting and so dispossessing this crowd by their own crowd.
That the dominant crowd is just as much to blame for this state of affairs as the under crowd, perhaps more so, is shown by the history of every period preceding a revolutionary outbreak. I will dwell at some length on this fact later. My point here is that, first, a revolution, in the sense that the word means a violent uprising against the existing order, is a psychological crowd-phenomenon - and second, that it takes two crowds to make a revolution.
This idea, which is held with some variation by Sumner, Gobineau, Faguet, and Conway, is, I believe, both unhistorical and unpsychological, because it is but a half-truth. This substratum of the population does at the moment of revolution become a dangerous mob. Such people are unadjusted to any social order, and the least deviation from their routine of daily life throws them off their balance. The relaxation of authority at the moment when one group is supplanting another in position of social control, is to these people like the two or three days of interregnum between the pontifications of Julius and Leo, described by Cellini. Those who need some one to govern them, and they are many [or seem to be when there are many would-be "governors" - DMR], find their opportunity in the general disturbance. They suddenly react to the revolutionary propaganda which up to this minute they have not heeded, they are controlled by revolutionary crowd-ideas in a somnambulistic manner, and like automatons carry these ideas precipitately to their deadly conclusion. But this mob is not the really revolutionary crowd and in the end it is always put back in its place by the newly dominant crowd. [Indeed. In the trade, these are known as "useful idiots." - DMR.] The really revolutionary crowd consists of the group who are near enough the dominant crowd to be able to envy its "airs" with some show of justification, and are strong enough to dare try issue with it for supreme position. Madame Rolland, it will be remembered, justified her opposition to aristocrats on the principle of equality and fraternity, but she could never forget her resentment at being made, in the home of a member of this aristocracy, to eat with the servants.
It is generally assumed that a revolution is a sudden and violent change in the form of government. From what has been said it will be seen that this definition is too narrow. History will bear me out on this. The Protestant Reformation was certainly a revolution, as Le Bon has shown, but it affected more than the government or even the organization of the Church. The French Revolution changed the form of the government in France several times before it was done, passing through a period of imperial rule and even a restoration of the monarchy. But the revolution as such survived. Even though later a Bourbon or a prince of the House of Orleans sat on the throne of France, the restored king or successor was hardly more than a figurehead. A new class, the Third Estate, remained in fact master of France. There had been a change of ownership of the land; power through the control of vested property rested with the group which in 1789 began its revolt under the leadership of Mirabeau. A new dictatorship had succeeded the old. And this is what a revolution is - the dictatorship of a new crowd. The Russian revolutionists now candidly admit this fact in their use of the phrase "the dictatorship of the proletariat." Of course it is claimed that this dictatorship is really the dictatorship of "all the people." But this is simply the old fiction with which every dominant crowd disguises seizure of power. Capitalist republicanism is also the rule of all the people, and the pope and the king, deriving their authority from God, are really but "the servants of all."
As we have seen, the crowd mind as such wills to dominate. Society is made up of struggle groups, or organized crowds, each seeking the opportunity to make its catchwords realities and to establish itself in the position of social control. The social order is always held intact by some particular crowd which happens to be dominant. A revolution occurs when a new crowd pushes the old one out and itself climbs in the saddle. When the new crowd is only another faction within the existing dominant crowd, like one of our established political parties, the succession will be accomplished without resort to violence, since both elements of the ruling crowd recognize the rules of the game. It will also not result in far-reaching social changes for the same reason. A true revolution occurs when the difference between the dominant crowd and the one which supplants it is so great as to produce a general social upheaval. The Reformation, the French Revolution, and the "Bolshevist" coup d'etat in Russia, all were of this nature. A new social leadership was established and secured by a change in each case in the personnel of the ownership of such property as would give the owners the desired control. In the first case there was a transfer of property in the church estates, either to the local congregations, or the state, or the denomination. In the second case the property transferred was property in land, and with the Russian revolutionists landed property was given to the peasants and vested capital turned over to the control of industrial workers.
Those who lay all emphasis on this transfer of property naturally only see economic causes in revolutionary movements. Economics, however, is not a science of impersonal things. It treats rather of men's relations to things, and hence to one another. It has to do with valuations and principles of exchange and ownership, all of which need psychological restatement. The transfer of the ownership of property in times of revolution to a new class is not an end, it is a means to a new crowd's social dominance. The doctrines, ideals, and principles believed by the revolutionary crowd also serve this end of securing its dominance, as do the social changes which it effects, once in power.
Revolutions do not occur directly from abuses of power, for in that case there would be nothing but revolution all the time, since every dominant crowd has abused its power. It is an interesting fact that revolution generally occurs after the abuses of which the revolutionists complain have been in great measure stopped - that is, after the ruling crowd has begun to make efforts at reform. The Reformation occurred at the pontificate of Leo X. If it had been the result of intolerable abuse alone, it would have happened at the time of Alexander VI, Borgia. The French Revolution fell upon the mild head of Louis XVI, though the wrongs which it tried to right mostly happened in the reign of his predecessor. In most cases the abuses, the existence of which a revolutionary crowd uses for propaganda purposes, are in turn repeated in new form by itself after it becomes dominant. The Reformers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries resorted to much the same kind of persecution from which they themselves earlier suffered. The Constituent Assembly, though it had demanded liberty, soon set up a more outrageous tyranny through its own committees than any that the Louies had dreamed of. Bolshevists in capitalists countries are the greatest advocates of free speech; in Russia they are the authors of a very effective press-censorship. [In part, this is due to a swindle, but there's more to it than that. Revolution tends to make you really callous, so when gentle reason doesn't work, successful revolutionists are pretty damned good at being repressive - in many cases, more so than the previous horsemen. It's really hard to shake yourself of the you-ungrateful-swines-wanna-see-what-I-put-up-with? habit - and if the new rulers were former outcasts, or if the personal indignities they suffered are exaggerated in their own heads a la "I walked three miles to school, and it was uphill both ways" - that could lead to ye olde guillotine being set up, and used - DMR.]
A revolution occurs when the dominant crowd begins to weaken. I think we find proof of this in the psychology of revolutionary propaganda. A general revolution is not made in a day, each such cataclysm is preceded by a long period of unrest and propaganda of opposition to the existing order and its beneficiaries. The Roman Republic began going to pieces about a hundred years before the battle of Actium. The social unrest which followed the Punic Wars and led to the revolt of the brothers Gracchi were never wholly checked during the century which followed. The dominant party had scarcely rid itself of these troublesome "demagogues" than revolt broke out among the slave population of Sicily. This was followed by the revolt of the Indian peasants, then again by the insurrection of Spartacus, and this in turn by the civil war between Marius and Sulla, the conspiracy of Catiline, the brief triumph of Julius Caesar over the Senate, the revenge of the latter in the assassination of Caesar, and the years of turmoil during the Second Triumvirate.
It is doubtful if there was at any time a very clear or widespread consciousness of the issues which successively arose during that unhappy century. It would seem that first one counter-crowd and then another, representing various elements of the populace, tried issue with the ruling crowd. The one factor which remained constant through all this was the progressive disintegration of the dominant party. The supremacy of the Patres Conscripti et Equites became in fact a social anachronism the day that Tiberius Gracchus demanded the expropriation of the landed aristocracy. The ideas whereby the dominant crowd sought to justify its pre-emptions began to lose their functional value. Only the undisguised use of brute force was left. Such ideas ceased to convince. Men of unusual independence of mind, or men with ambitious motives, who had grown up within the dominant crowd, began to throw off the spell of its control-ideas, and, by leaving it, to weaken it further from within. No sooner was this weakness detected by other groups than every sort of grievance and partisan interest became a moral justification for efforts to supplant the rulers. The attempt of the dominant crowd to retain its hold by repeating its traditional justification-platitudes, unchanged, but with greater emphasis, may be seen in the orations of Cicero. It would be well if some one besides high school students and their Latin teachers were to take up the study of Cicero; the social and psychological situation which this orator and writer of moral essays reveals has some suggestive similarities to things which are happening to-day.
The century and more of unrest which preceded both the Reformation and the French Revolution is in each instance a long story. But in both there is the same gradual loss of prestige on the part of the dominant crowd; the same inability of this crowd to change with the changes of time; to find new sanctions for itself when the old ones were no longer believed; the same unadaptability, the same intellectual and moral bankruptcy, therefore, the same gradual disintegration from within; the same resort to sentimentalism and ineffective use of force, the same circle of hungry counter-crowds waiting around with their tongues hanging out, ready to pounce upon that before which they had previously groveled, and to justify their ravenousness as devotion to principle; the same growing fearlessness, beginning as perfectly loyal desire to reform certain abuses incidental to the existing order, and advancing, with every sign of disillusionment or weakness, to moral indignation, open attack upon fundamental control ideas, bitter hostility, augmented by the repressive measures taken by the dominant crowd to conserve a status quo which no longer gained assent in the minds of a growing counter-crowd; finally force, and a new dominant crowd more successful now in justifying old tyrannies by principles not yet successfully challenged.
In the light of these historical analogies the record of events during the last seventy-five years in western Europe and America is rather discomfiting reading, and I fear the student of social psychology will find little to reassure him in the pitiable lack of intellectual leadership, the tendency to muddle through, the unteachableness and general want of statesmanlike vision displayed by present dominant crowds. [They got it when Hoover showed up, didn't they? - DMR.] If a considerable number of people of all classes, those who desire change as well as those who oppose it, could free their thinking from the mechanisms of the crowd-mind, it might be possible to find the working solution of some of our pressing social problems and save our communities from the dreadful experience of another revolution. Our hope lies in the socially minded person who is sufficiently in touch with reality to be also a non-crowd man.
Anyone who is acquainted with the state of the public mind at present, knows that a priori arguments against revolution as such are not convincing, except to those who are already convinced on other ground. The dominant crowd in each historical epoch gained its original supremacy by means of revolution. One can hardly make effective use of the commonplace antirevolutionary propaganda of defense of a certain order which has among its most ardent supporters people who are proud to call themselves sons and daughters of the Revolution. Skeptics at once raise the question whether, according to such abstract social ethics, revolutionists become respectable only after they are successful or have been a long time dead. In fact, the tendency to resort to such reasonings one among many symptoms that the conservative mind has permitted itself to become quite as much a crowd-phenomenon as has the radical mind.
The correct approach here is psychological and pragmatic. [Now, I'll bet you can guess where good old Ayn Rand got "By what standard?" from - DMR.] There is an increasingly critical social situation, demanding far-reaching reconstructive change; only the most hopeless crowd-man would presume to deny this fact. The future all depends upon the mental processes with which we attempt to meet this situation. Nothing but useless misery can result from dividing crowd against crowd. Crowd-thinking, as I have said, does not solve problems. It only creates ideal compensations and defense devices for our inner conflicts. Conservative crowd-behavior has always done quite as much as anything else to precipitate a revolutionary outbreak. Radical crowd-behavior does not resolve the situation, it only inverts it. Any real solution lies wholly outside present crowd-dilemmas. [I'll bet this guy's too good to envy, too - DMR.] What the social situation demands most is a different kind of thinking, a new education, an increasing number of people who understand themselves and are intellectually and morally independent of the tyranny of crowd-ideas. [And you should pause to think about this. Theoretically, Martin said that all dominant crowds, and all those that aspire to the captain's chair, are in fact crowds, but which ones has he been rubbishing throughout the book, except for the obviously evil ones? - DMR.]
There is always a tendency among conservative crowds to hasten their own downfall by the manner in which they deal with revolutionary propaganda. [Bear in mind that "conservatives" in the U.S.S.R. during Gorbachev's rule were orthodox Marxist-Leninists - DMR.] The seriousness of the new issue is denied; the crowd seeks to draw attention back to the old issue which it fought and won years ago in the hour of its ascendancy. The fact that the old charms and shibboleths no longer work, that they do not now apply, that the growing counter-crowd is able to psychoanalyze them, discover the hidden motives which they disguise, and laugh at them, is stoutly denied. The fiction is maintained to the effect that present unrest is wholly uncalled-for, that everything is all right, that the agitators who "make people discontented" are alien and foreign and need only be silenced with a time-worn phrase, or, that failing, shut up by force or deported, and all will be well.
I do not doubt that before the Reformation and the French Revolution there were ecclesiastics and nobles aplenty who were quite sure that the masses would never have known they were miserable if meddling disturbers had not taken the trouble to tell them so. [Especially if these "meddling disturbers" were aristocrats on the make - DMR.] Even an honest critical misunderstanding of the demands of the opposing crowd is discouraged, possibly because it is rightly felt that the critical habit of mind is as destructive of one crowd-complex as the other and the old crowd prefers to remain intact and die in the last ditch rather than risk dissolution, even with the promise of averting a revolution. Hence the Romans were willing to believe that the Christians worshiped the head of an ass. The mediaeval Catholics, even at Leo's court, failed to grasp the meaning of the outbreak in north Germany. Thousands saw in the Reformation only the alleged fact that the monk Luther wanted to marry a wife. To-day one looks almost in vain among business men, editors and politicians for a more intelligent understanding of socialism. A crowd goes down to its death fighting bogies, and actually running upon the sword of its real enemy, because a crowd, once its constellation of ideas is formed, never learns anything. [Then why do some of them stay on top for so long? Clearly, they learn up to a certain point - DMR.]
The crowd-group contains in itself, in the very nature of crowd-thinking, the germs which sooner or later lay it low. When a crowd first becomes dominant, it carries into a place of power a number of heterogeneous elements which have, up to this time, been united in a great counter-crowd because of their common dissatisfaction with the old order. Gradually the special interests of these several groups become separated. The struggle for place is continued as a factional fight within the newly ruling crowd. This factional struggle greatly complicates every revolutionary movement. We witness this in the murderously hostile partisan conflicts which broke out in the revolutionary Assemblies in France. It is seen again in the Reformation, which had hardly established itself when the movement was rent by intense sectarian rivalries of all sorts. The same is true of Russia since the fall of the Tsar, and of Mexico ever since the overthrow of the Diaz regime. If these factional struggles go so far as to result in schism - that is, in a conscious repudiation by one or more factions of the revolutionary creed which had formerly united them all, there is disintegration and in all probability a return to the old ruling crowd.
This reaction may also be made possible by a refusal of one faction to recognize the others as integral parts of the newly triumphant crowd. If the new crowd after its victory can hold itself together, the revolution is established. It then becomes the task of the leading faction in the newly dominant crowd to grab the lion's share of the spoils for itself, give the other factions only so much prestige as will keep alive in their minds the belief that they, too, share in the new victory for "humanity" and hold the new social order together, while at the same time justifying its own leadership by the compulsive power of the idea which they all alike believe. This belief, as we have seen, is the sine qua non of the continued existence of any crowd. A dominant crowd survives so long as its belief is held uncritically and repeated and acted upon automatically both by the members of the crowd and its victims. When the factions which have been put at a disadvantage by the leading faction renounce the belief, or awake to the fact that they "have been cheated," disintegration begins.
Between the crowd's professed belief and the things which it puts into practice there is a great chasm. Yet the fiction is uniformly maintained that the things done are the correct and faithful application of the great principles to which the crowd is devoted. We saw in our study of crowd-ideas in general that such ideas are not working programs, but are screens which disguise and apparently justify the real unconscious motive of crowd-behavior. The crowd secures its control, first, by proclaiming in the most abstract form certain generally accepted principles, such as freedom, righteousness, brotherly love - as though these universal "truths" were its own invention and exclusive monopoly. Next, certain logical deductions are made from these principles which, when carried to their logical conclusions regardless of fact or the effect produced, make the thing which the crowd really wants and does appear to be a vindication of the first principles. It is these inferences which go to make up the conscious thinking or belief of the crowd. Thus in the revolutionary convention in France all agree to the principles of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Fidelity to these principles would to a non-crowd [person] mean that the believer should not try to dictate to his fellows what they must believe and choose, that he would exercise good will in his dealings with them and show them the same respect which he wished them to have for himself. [What, though, if you're a leader? - DMR.] But the crowd does not understand principles in this manner. Do all agree to the great slogan of the revolution? Well, then, fidelity to Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity demands that the enemies of these principles and the crowd's definition of them be overthrown. The Mountain is the truly faithful party, hence to the guillotine with the Gironde. The chasm between crowd faith and crowd practice is well illustrated in the case of those Southern patriots in America who were ready to fight and die for the rights of man as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, but refused to apply the principle of the inalienable rights of all men to their own black slaves. Or, again in the case of nineteenth-century capitalism, liberty must be given to all alike. Liberty means equal opportunity. Equal opportunity means free competition in business. Free competition exists only where there is an "incentive"; hence the investor must be encouraged and his gains protected by law. Therefore anti-capitalistic doctrines must be suppressed as subversive of our free institutions. Immigrants to whom for a generation we have extended the hospitality of our slums and labor camps, and the opportunity of freely competing with our well-intrenched corporations, must be made to feel their ingratitude if they are so misguided as to conclude, from the fact that hundreds of leading radicals have been made to serve jail sentences, while after thirty years of enforcing the antitrust law not a single person has ever been sent to prison, that possibly this is not a free land.
Or again - one convicts himself of being a crowd-man who shows partiality among crowds - the principle of democracy is generally accepted. Then "there should be industrial democracy as well as political" - hence the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" - for the workers are "the people." Organized labor, therefore, though a minority of the whole, should establish "industrial democracy" by force. So, according to Bolshevist crowd-logic, democracy means the rule of a minority by means of force.
Now it is this fictitious, paranoiac, crowd-logic which one must be able to dispel before he can extricate himself from the clutches of his crowd. If he subject the whole fabric of abstractions to critical analysis, revalues it, puts himself above it, assumes a pragmatic attitude toward whatever truths it contains, dares to test these truths by their results in experience [whose? - DMR] and to use them for desired ends; if, in short, he scrutinizes his own disguised impulses, brings them to consciousness as what they are, and refuses to be deceived as to their real import, even when they appear dressed in such sheep's clothing as absolutes and first principles, he becomes a non-crowd man, a social being in the best sense.
Those, however, who continue to give assent to the crowd's first principles, who still accept its habit of a priori reasoning, merely substituting for its own accepted deductions others of their own which in turn serve to conceal and justify their own unconscious desires, will turn from the old crowd only to be gobbled up by a new and counter-crowd. Such people have not really changed. [Should they be made to? - DMR.] They denounce the old crowd on the ground that "it has not lived up to its principles." It is a significant fact that a crowd's rule is generally challenged in the name of the very abstract ideas of which it has long posed as the champion.
For instance, there is liberty. Every crowd demands it when it is seeking power; no crowd permits it when it is in power. A crowd which is struggling for supremacy is really trying to free itself and as many people as possible from the control of another crowd. Naturally, the struggle for power appears to consciousness as a struggle for liberty as such. The controlling crowd is correctly seen to be a tyrant and oppressor. What the opposition crowd does not recognize is its own wish to oppress, hidden under its struggle for power. We have had occasion to note the intolerance of the crowd-mind as such. A revolutionary crowd, with all its lofty idealism about liberty, is commonly just as intolerant as a reactionary crowd. It must be so in order to remain a crowd. Once it is triumphant it may exert its pressure in a different direction, but the pinch is there just the same. Like its predecessor, it must resort to measures of restraint, possibly even a "reign of terror," in order that the new-won "liberty" - which is to say, its own place at the head of the procession - may be preserved. The denial of freedom appears therefore as its triumph, and for a time people are deceived. They think they are free because everyone is talking about liberty.
Eventually some one makes the discovery that people do not become free just by repeating the magic word "liberty." A disappointed faction of the newly emancipated humanity begins to demand its "rights." The crowd hears its own catchwords quoted against itself. It proceeds to prove that freedom exists by denouncing its disturbers and silencing them, if necessary, by force. The once radical crowd has now become reactionary. Its dreams of world emancipation is seen to be a hoax. Lovers of freedom now yoke themselves in a new rebel crowd so that oppressed humanity may be liberated from the liberators. Again, the will to power is clothed in the dream symbols of an emancipated society, and so on around and around the circle, until people learn that with crowds freedom is impossible. For men to attain to mastery of themselves is as abhorrent to one crowd as to another. The crowd merely wants freedom to be a crowd - that is, to set up its own tyranny in the pace of that which offends the self-feeling of its members.
The social idealism of revolutionary crowds is very significant for our view of the crowd-mind. There are certain forms of revolutionary belief which are repeated again and again with such uniformity that it would seem the unconscious of the race changes very little from age to age. The wish-fancy which motivates revolutionary activity always appears to consciousness as the dream of an ideal society, a world set free; the reign of brotherly love, peace and justice. The folly and wickedness of man is to cease. There will be no more incentive for men to do evil. The lion and the lamb shall lie down together. Old extortions and tyrannies are to be left behind. There is to be a new beginning, poverty is to be abolished, God's will is to be done in earth, or men are at last to live according to reason, and the inalienable rights of all are to be secured; or the co-operative commonwealth is to be established, with no more profit-seeking and each working gladly for the good of all. In other words, the mind of revolutionary crowds is essentially eschatological, or Messianic. The crowd always imagines its own social dominance is a millenium. And this trait is common to revolutionary crowds in all historical periods.
The eighth-century Hebrew prophet mingles his denunciations of those who join house to house and field to field, who turn aside the way of the meek, and sit in Samaria in the corner of a couch and on the silken cushions of a bed, who have turned justice to wormwood and cast down righteousness to the earth, etc., etc., - reserving his choicest woes of course for the foreign oppressors of "my people" - with promises of "the day of the Lord" with all that such a day implies, not only of triumph of the oppressed over their enemies, but of universal happiness.
The New Testament dwells upon some phase of this theme on nearly every page. Blessed are ye poor, and woe unto you who are rich, you who laugh now. The Messiah has come and with him the Kingdom of the Heavens, but at present the kingdom is revealed only to the believing few, who are in the world, but not of it. However, the Lord is soon to return; in fact, this generation shall not pass away until all these things be accomplished. After a period of great trial and suffering there is to be a new world, and a new and holy Jerusalem, coming down from the skies and establishing itself in place of the old. All the wicked, chiefly those who oppress the poor, shall be cast into a lake of fire. There shall be great rejoicing, and weeping and darkness and death shall be no more.
The above sketch of the Messianic hope is so brief as to be hardly more than a caricature, but it will serve to make my point clear, that Messianism is a revolutionary crowd phenomenon. This subject has been presented in great detail by religious writers in recent years, so that there is hardly a member of the reading public who is not more or less familiar with the "social gospel." My point is that all revolutionary propaganda is "social gospel." Even when revolutionists profess an antireligious creed, as did the Deists of the eighteenth century, and as do many modern socialists with their "materialist interpretation of history," nevertheless the element of irreligion extends only to the superficial trappings of the revolutionary crowd-faith, and even here is not consistent. At bottom the revolutionists' dream of a new world is religious.
I am using the word "religious" in this connection in its popular sense, meaning no more than that the revolutionary crowd rationalizes its dream of a new world-order in imagery which repeats over and over again the essentials of the Biblical "day of the Lord," or "kingdom of heaven" to be established in earth. The notion of cosmic regeneration is very evident in the various "utopian" socialist theories. The Fourierists and St. Simonists of the early part of the nineteenth century were extremely Messianic. So-called "scientific socialists" are now inclined to ridicule such idealistic speculation, but one has to only scratch beneath the surface of present-day socialist propaganda to find under its materialist jargon the same old dream of the ages. A great world-change is to come suddenly. With the triumph of the workers there will be no more poverty or ignorance, no longer any incentive to men to do evil to one another. The famous "Manifesto" is filled with such ideas. Bourgeois society is doomed and about to fall. Forces of social evolution inevitably point to the world-wide supremacy of the working class, under whose mild sway the laborer is to be given the full product of his toil, the exploitation of children is to cease, true liberty will be achieved, prostitution, which is somehow a bourgeois institution, is to be abolished, everyone will be educated, production increased till there is enough for all, the cities shall no more lord it over the rural communities, all alike will perform useful labor, waste places of the earth will become cultivated lands and the fertility of the soil will be increased in accordance with a common plan, the state, an instrument of bourgeois exploitation, will cease to exist; in fact, the whole wicked past is to be left behind, for as
Passing over the question of Lenin's personal ambitions, and whether our own crowd-stupidity, panic, and wrong-headed Allied diplomacy may not have been contributing causes of the menace of Bolshevism, [or that Lenin gave the impression of being a fellow-traveler of the Kaiser - DMR] it can hardly be denied that Bolshevism, like all other revolutionary crowd-movements, is swayed by a painted vision of heaven which outflares the miseries of earth. Every revolutionary crowd of every description is a pilgrimage set out to regain our lost Paradise.
Now it is this dream of paradise, or ideal society, which deserves analytical study. Why does it always appear the minute a crowd is sufficiently powerful to dream of world-power? It will readily be conceded that the dream has some function in creating some really desirable social values. But such values cannot be the psychogenesis of the dream. If the dream were ever realized, I think William James was correct in saying that we should find it to be but a "sheep's heaven and lubberland of joy," and that life in it would be so "mawkish and dishwatery" that we should gladly return to this world of struggle and challenge, or anywhere else, if only to escape the deadly inanity. [Granted it would be that way for intellectuals, but who else? What does "the free development of each" mean to a Marxist? - DMR.]
We have already noted the fact that this dream has the function of justifying the crowd in its revolt and will to rule. But this is by no means all. The social idealism has well been called a dream, for that is just what it is, the daydream of the ages. It is like belief in fairies, or the Cinderella myth. It is the Jack-and-the-beanstalk philosophy. The dream has exactly the same function as the Absolute, and the ideal world-systems of the paranoiac; it is an imaginary refuge from the real. Like all other dreams, it is the realization of a wish. I have long been impressed with the static character of this dream; not only is it much the same in all ages, but it is always regarded as the great cumulation beyond which the imagination cannot stretch. Even those who hold the evolutionary view of reality and know well that life is continuous change, and that progress cannot be fixed in any passing moment, however sweet, are generally unable to imagine progress going on after the establishment of the ideal society and leaving it behind.
Revolutionary propaganda habitually stops, like the nineteenth-century love story, with a general statement, "and so they lived happily ever after." It is really the end, not the beginning or middle of the story. It is the divine event toward which the whole creation moves, and having reached it, stops. Evolution having been wound up to run to just this end, time and change and effort may now be discounted. There is nothing further to do. In other words, the ideal is lifted clear out of time and all historical connections. As in other dreams, the empirically known sequence of events is ignored. Whole centuries of progress and struggle and piecemeal experience are telescoped into one imaginary symbolic moment. The moment now stands for the whole process, or rather it is substituted for the process. We have taken refuge from the real into the ideal. The "Kingdom of Heaven," "Paradise," "The Return to Man in the State of Nature," "Back to Primitive New Testament Christianity," "The Age of Reason," "Utopia," the "Revolution," the "Co-operative Commonwealth," all mean psychologically the same thing. And that thing is not at all a scientific social program, but a symbol of an easier and better world where desires are realized by magic, and everyone's check drawn upon the bank of existence is cashed. Social idealism of revolutionary crowds is a mechanism of compensation and escape for suppressed desires.
Evolutionary social revolutionists expect the great day to come as the cumulation of a process of economic evolution. This is what is meant by "evolutionary and revolutionary socialism." The wish-fancy is here rationalized as a doctrine of evolution by revolution. Thus the difference between the social revolutionist and the Second Adventist is much smaller than either of them suspects. As Freud would doubtless say, the difference extends only to the "secondary elaboration of the manifest dream formation" - the latent dream thought is the same in both cases. The Adventist expresses the wish in the terminology of a prescientific age, while the social revolutionist makes use of a modern scientific jargon. Each alike finds escape from reality in the contemplation of a new-world system. The faith of each is a scheme of redemption - that is, of "compensation." Each contemplates the sudden, cataclysmic destruction of the "present evil world," and its replacement by a new order in which the meek shall inherit the earth. To both alike the great event is destined, in the fullness of time, to come as a thief in the night. In the one case it is to come as the fulfillment of prophesy; in the other the promise is underwritten and guaranteed by the impersonal forces of "economic evolution."
This determinism is in the one case what Bergson calls "radical finalism," and in the other "radical mechanism." But whether the universe exists but to reel off a divine plan conceived before all worlds, or be but the mechanical swinging of the shuttle of cause and effect, what difference is there if the point arrived at is the same? In both cases this point was fixed before the beginning of time, and the meaning of the universe is just that and nothing else, since that is what it all comes to in the end.
But it is one thing to face seriously the manifold problems of reconstruction of social relations, and it is quite another thing to persuade oneself that all these entangled problems have but one imaginary neck which is waiting to be cut with a single stroke of the sword of revolution in the hands of "the people." Hundreds of times I have heard radicals, while discussing certain evils of present society, say, "All these things are but symptoms, effects; to get rid of them you must remove the cause." That cause is always, in substance, the present economic system.
If this argument means that, instead of thinking of the various phases of social behavior as isolated from one another, we should conceive of them as so interrelated as to form something like a more or less causally connected organic whole, I agree. But if it means something else - and it frequently does - the argument is based upon a logical fallacy. The word "system" is not a causal term; it is purely descriptive. The facts referred to, whatever connections we may discover among them, are not the effects of a mysterious "system" behind the facts of human behavior; the facts themselves, taken together, are the system.
The confusion of causal and descriptive ideas is a habit common to both the intellectualist philosopher and the crowd-minded. It enables people to turn their gaze from the empirical Many to the fictitious One, from the real to the imaginary. The idea of a system behind, over, outside, and something different from the related facts which the term "system" is properly used to describe, whether that system be a world-system, a logical system, or a social system, whether it be capitalism or socialism, "system" so conceived is a favorite crowd-spook. It is the same logical fallacy as if one spoke of the temperature of this May day as the effect of the climate, when all know that the term climate is simply (to paraphrase James) the term by which we characterize temperature, weather, etc., which we experience on this and other days. We have already seen to what use the crowd-mind puts all such generalizations.
Such thinking wholly misconceives the nature of the social problem. Like all the practical dilemmas of life, this problem, assuming it to be in any sense a single problem, is real just because more than one solution is possible. [And that, believe it or not, is what the word means - DMR.] The task here is like that of choosing a career. Whole series of partially foreseen possibilities are contingent upon certain definite choices. Aside from our choosing, many sorts of futures may be equally possible. Our intervention at this or that definite point is an act by which we will one series of possibilities rather than another into reality. But the act of intervention is never performed once for all. Each intervention leads only to new dilemmas, among which we must again choose and intervene. It is mainly in order to escape from the necessity of facing this terrifying series of unforeseeable dilemmas the crowd-man walketh in a vain show.
In pointing out the futility of present-day revolutionary crowd-thinking, I am only striving to direct, in however small a degree, our thought and energies in channels which lead towards desired results. It is not by trombones that we are to redeem society, nor is the old order going to tumble down like the walls of Jericho, and a complete new start be given. Civilization cannot be wiped out and begun all over again. It constitutes the environment within which our reconstructive thinking must, by tedious effort, make certain definite modifications. Each such modification is a problem in itself, to be dealt with, not by belief in miracle, but by what Dewey calls "creative intelligence." Each such modification must be achieved by taking in all the known facts, which are relevant, into account. As such it is a new adaptation, and the result of a series of such adaptations may be as great and radical a social transformation as one may have the courage to set as the goal of a definite policy of social effort. But there is a world of difference between social thinking of this kind, where faith is a working hypothesis, and that which ignores the concrete problems that might be solved to reach the desired goal, and, after the manner of crowds, dreams of entering fairyland, or of pulling a new world en bloc down out of the blue, by the magic of substituting new tyrannies for old.