The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological StudyMartin, Everett Dean
Science
The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study
Martin, Everett Dean
Crowds
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 millennium. And this trait is common to revolutionary
crowds in all historical periods.
We have here the psychological explanation of the Messianic faith which
is set forth with tremendous vividness in Biblical literature. The
revolutionary import of the social teaching of both the Hebrew and
Christian religions is so plain that I do not see how any honest and
well-informed person can even attempt to deny it. The telling
effectiveness with which this element in religious teaching may be used
by clever radicals to convict the apologists of the present social
order by the words out of their own mouths is evident in much of the
socialist propaganda to-day. The tendency of the will to revolt, to
express itself in accepted religious symbols, is a thing to be expected
if the unconscious plays the important part in crowd-behavior that we
have contended that it does.
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.
Similarly the same complex of ideas appears in the writings which deal
with the Hebrew "Captivity" in the sixth century B.C., with the revolt
of the Maccabeans, and again in the impotent hatred against the Romans
about the time of the origin of Christianity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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