Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
The main business of a democracy is to find out which these people are
in it and put them where they will represent it. The trouble seems to
have been in democracies so far, that we find out who these people are a
generation too late. The great and rare moments of history have been
those in which we have found out who they were in time, as when we found
in America Abraham Lincoln, an unaristocratic-looking and ungainly man,
and saw suddenly that he was the first gentleman in the United States.
The next great task of democracy is to determine the best means it can
of finding out who its aristocrats are, its all-men, and determining who
they are in time, men who have vision, courage, individuality,
imagination enough to face real things, and to know real people, and to
put real things and real people together.
It is what an aristocracy in a democratic form of government is for, to
furnish imagination to crowds. A real aristocracy is the only
clear-headed, practical means a great nation can have of distributing,
classifying, and digesting and evoking hordes of men and women. People
do not have imagination in hordes, and imagination is latent and
unorganized in masses of people. The crowd problem is the problem of
having leaders who can fertilize the imagination and organize the will
of crowds. Nothing but worship or great desire has ever been able to
focus a crowd, and only the great man, rich and various in his elements,
abounding, great as the crowd is great, can ever hope to do it.
Every man in a crowd knows that he is or is in danger of being a mere
Me-man, or a mere class-man, and he knows that his neighbour is, and he
wishes to be in a world that is saved from his own mere me-ness and his
own mere classness. His hero-worship is his way of worshipping his
larger self. He communes with his possible or completed self, his self
of the best moments in the official great man or crowd man.
The average man in a crowd does not want to be an average man, and the
last thing he wants is to have an average man to represent him. He wants
a man to represent him as he would like to be.
He cannot express himself--his best self, in the State, to all the
others in the State, without a lifted-up man or crowd man to do it.
It is as if he said--as if the average man said, "I want a certain sort
of world, I want to be able to point to a man, to a particular man, and
say, as I look at him and ask others to look at him, 'This is the sort
of world I want.'"
Then everybody knows.
The great world that lies in all men's hearts is expressed in miniature,
in the great man.
Crowds speak in heroes.
* * * * *
I have often heard Socialists wondering among themselves why a movement
that had so many fine insights and so many noble motives behind it had
produced so few artists.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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