The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological StudyMartin, Everett Dean
Science
The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study
Martin, Everett Dean
Crowds
Evolutionary social revolutionists expect the great day to come as the
culmination of a process of economic evolution. This is what is meant by
"evolutionary and revolutionary socialism." The wish-fancy is here
rationalized as a doctrine of evolution by revolution. Thus the
difference between the social revolutionist and the Second Adventist is
much smaller than either of them suspects. As Freud would doubtless say,
the difference extends only to the "secondary elaboration of the
manifest dream formation"--the latent dream thought is the same in both
cases. The Adventist expresses the wish in the terminology of a
prescientific age, while the social revolutionist makes use of modern
scientific jargon. Each alike finds escape from reality in the
contemplation of a new-world system. The faith of each is a scheme of
redemption--that is, of "compensation." Each contemplates the sudden,
cataclysmic destruction of the "present evil world," and its replacement
by a new order in which the meek shall inherit the earth. To both alike
the great event is destined, in the fullness of time, to come as a thief
in the night. In the one case it is to come as the fulfillment of
prophecy; in the other the promise is underwritten and guaranteed by
impersonal forces of "economic evolution."
This determinism is in the one case what Bergson calls "radical
finalism," and in the other "radical mechanism." But whether the
universe exists but to reel off a divine plan conceived before all
worlds, or be but the mechanical swinging of the shuttle of cause and
effect, what difference is there if the point arrived at is the same? In
both cases this point was fixed before the beginning of time, and the
meaning of the universe is just that and nothing else, since that is
what it all comes to in the end.
Whether the hand which turns the crank of the world-machine be called
that of God or merely "Evolution," it is only a verbal difference; it is
in both cases "a power not ourselves which makes for righteousness." And
the righteousness? Why, it is just the righteousness of our own
crowd--in other words, the crowd's bill of rights painted in the sky by
our own wish-fancy, and dancing over our heads like an aurora borealis.
It is the history of all crowds that this dazzling pillar of fire in the
Arctic night is hailed as the "rosy-fingered dawn" of the Day of the
Lord.
Or, to change the figure somewhat, the faithful crowd has but to follow
its fiery cloud to the promised land which flows with milk and honey;
then march for an appointed time about the walls of the wicked bourgeois
Jericho, playing its propaganda tune until the walls fall down by magic
and the world is ours. _No revolution is possible without a miracle and
a brass band._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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