Instincts of the Herd in Peace and WarTrotter, W. (Wilfred)
Science
Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War
Trotter, W. (Wilfred)
Collective behavior; Crowds; Social psychology; World War, 1914-1918 -- Psychological aspects
It is in the matter of stimulating the energy and resolution of the
Government that the psychologist might perhaps differ to some extent
from the popular guides of opinion. In getting work out of a living
organism it is necessary to determine what is the most efficient
stimulus. One can make a man’s muscles contract by stimulating them
with an electric battery, but one can never get so energetic a
contraction with however strong a current as can be got by the natural
stimulus sent out from the man’s brain. Rising to a more complex level,
we find that a man does not do work by order so well or so thoroughly
as he does work that he desires to do voluntarily. The best way to get
our work done is to get the worker to want to do it. The most urgent
and potent of all stimuli, then, are those that come from within the
man’s soul. It is plain, therefore, that the best way to extract the
maximum amount of work from members of a Government—and it is to yield
this, at whatever cost to themselves, that they are there—is not by the
use of threats and objurgations, by talk of impeachment or dismissal,
or by hints of a day of reckoning after the war, but by keeping their
souls full of a burning passion of service. Such a supply of mental
energy can issue only from a {151} truly homogeneous herd, and it is
therefore to the production of such a homogeneity of feeling that we
come once more as the one unmistakable responsibility of the civilian.
We have seen reason to believe that there was a comparatively
favourable opportunity of establishing such a national unity in the
early phases of the war, and that the attainment of the same result
at this late period is likely to be less easy and more costly of
disturbance to the social structure.
The simplest basis of unity is equality, and this has been an
important factor in the unity which in the past has produced the
classically successful manifestations of moral and military power, as
for example in the cases of Puritan England and Revolutionary France.
Such equality as obtained in these cases was doubtless chiefly moral
rather than material, and it can scarcely be questioned that equality
of consideration and of fundamental moral estimation is a far more
efficient factor than would be equality of material possessions. The
fact that it is difficult to persuade a man with thirty shillings a
week that he has as much to lose by the loss of national independence
as a man with thirty thousand a year, is merely evidence that the
imagination of the former is somewhat restricted by his type of
education, and that we habitually attach an absurd moral significance
to material advantages. It seems certain that it would still be
possible to attain a very fair approximation to a real moral equality
without any necessary disturbance of the extreme degree of material
inequality which our elaborate class segregation has imposed upon us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account