The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological StudyMartin, Everett Dean
Science
The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study
Martin, Everett Dean
Crowds
In pointing out the futility of present-day revolutionary
crowd-thinking, I am only striving to direct, in however small a degree,
our thought and energies into channels which lead toward desired
results. It is not by trombones that we are to redeem society, nor is
the old order going to tumble down like the walls of Jericho, and a
complete new start be given. Civilization cannot be wiped out and begun
all over again. It constitutes the environment within which our
reconstructive thinking must, by tedious effort, make certain definite
modifications. Each such modification is a problem in itself, to be
dealt with, not by belief in miracle, but by what Dewey calls "creative
intelligence." Each such modification must be achieved by taking all the
known facts, which are relevant, into account. As such it is a new
adaptation, and the result of a series of such adaptations may be as
great and radical a social transformation as one may have the courage
to set as the goal of a definite policy of social effort. But there is a
world of difference between social thinking of this kind, where faith is
a working hypothesis, and that which ignores the concrete problems that
must be solved to reach the desired goal, and, after the manner of
crowds, dreams of entering fairyland, or of pulling a new world _en
bloc_ down out of the blue, by the magic of substituting new tyrannies
for old.
Revolutionary crowd-thinking is not "creative intelligence." It is
_hocus-pocus_, a sort of social magic formula like the "mutabor" in the
Arabian Nights; it is an _Aladdin's-lamp_ philosophy. And here we may
sum up this part of our argument. The idea of the revolution is to the
crowd a symbol, the function of which is compensation for the burdens of
the struggle for existence, for the feeling of social inferiority, and
for desires suppressed by civilization. It is an imaginary escape from
hard reality, a new-world system in which the ego seeks refuge, a
defense mechanism under the compulsive influence of which crowds behave
like somnambulistic individuals. It is the apotheosis of the under crowd
itself and the transcendental expression and justification of its will
to rule. It is made up of just those broad generalizations which are of
use in keeping that crowd together. It gives the new crowd unction in
its fight with the old, since it was precisely these same dream-thoughts
which the old crowd wrote on its banners in the day when it, too, was
blowing trumpets outside the walls of Jericho.
VIII
THE FRUITS OF REVOLUTION--NEW CROWD-TYRANNIES FOR OLD
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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