The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological StudyMartin, Everett Dean
Science
The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study
Martin, Everett Dean
Crowds
In the light of these historical analogies the record of events during
the last seventy-five years in western Europe and America is rather
discomforting 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 our present dominant
crowds. 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 reasoning
is 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. 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. 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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