In the same work I come to the following conclusion: “When social conditions are of such a nature as to charge society with strong emotional excitement, or when institutions dwarf individuality, when they arrest personal growth, when they hinder the free development and exercise of the personal, controlling consciousness, then society falls into a hypnoid condition, the social mind gets disaggregated. The gregarious self begins to move within the bosom of the crowd, and becomes active; the demon of the demos emerges to the surface of social life, and throws the body politic into convulsions of demoniac fury.” The European horrors, atrocities, and brutalities, dignified by the stupefying and hypnotizing slogan “Kultur, Patriotism,” are due to the early training, by fear and force, of the individual into submission to superior authority. Such pernicious training sacrifices the genius of the child, the originality of the man, to a highly efficient, but brutal and blood-thirsty Moloch State. The European war is a mental plague which attacks gigantic, social aggregates when their ultimate constituent units, the individuals, are deprived of independent thought and liberty of decision and action, when men are swayed by hypnotizing suggestions of “superior leaders” who represent the interests not of every individual at his best, but of high noble castes and of commercial classes. The organized murder of European nations is due to the stifling of human genius by the cultivation of mob spirit which is the cause of all forms of social insanity and mental epidemics. In the stifling of the genius of the child and the cultivation of the mob spirit America does not lag behind Europe. Mental epidemics, excited by the fear instinct and by the impulse of self-preservation, are prevalent in the States. As described by me in _The Psychology of Suggestion_: “American society oscillates between acute financial mania and attacks of religious insanity. No sooner is the business fever over than the _delirium acutum_ of religious mania sets in. Society is thrown from Scylla into Charybdis. From the heights of financial speculation society sinks into the abyss of revivalism. _American society seems to suffer from circular insanity._” Revivalism, a mental frenzy to which the American mob mind is specially prone, is a resurrection of Greek Bacchanalia and Roman Saturnalia. Revivals are emotional debauches, religious orgies. As I had pointed out in the same work: “Revivalism is far more dangerous to the life of society than drunkenness.... As a sot man falls below the brute; as a revivalist he sinks lower than the sot.”