The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological StudyMartin, Everett Dean
Science
The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study
Martin, Everett Dean
Crowds
There is a demand for revenge for old abuses. The displaced crowd likely
as not, foreseeing the doom which awaits its members, seeks escape by
attempting a counter-revolution. A propaganda of sympathy is carried on
among members of this same class who remain in the dominant crowd in
communities not affected by the revolution. There is secret plotting
and suspicion of treason on every hand. People resort to extravagant
expressions of their revolutionary principles, not only to keep up their
own faith in them, but to show their loyalty to the great cause. The
most fanatical and uncompromising members of the group gain prominence
because of their excessive devotion. By the very logic of
crowd-thinking, leadership passes to men who are less and less competent
to deal with facts and more and more extreme in their zeal. Hence the
usual decline from the Mirabeaus to the Dantons and Cariers, and from
these to the Marats and Robespierres, from the Milukoffs to the
Kerenskys and from the Kerenskys to the Trotzkys. With each excess the
crowd must erect some still new defense against the inevitable
disclosure of the fact that the people are not behaving at all as if
they were living in the kingdom of heaven. With each farther deviation
from the plain meaning of facts, the revolution must resort to more
severe measures to sustain itself, until finally an unsurmountable
barrier is reached, such as the arrival on the scene of a Napoleon. Then
the majority are forced to abandon the vain hope of really attaining
Utopia, and content themselves with fictions to the effect that what
they have really _is_ Utopia--or with such other mechanisms as will
serve to excuse and minimize the significance of existing facts and put
off the complete realization of the ideal until some future stage of
progress. It is needless to add that those who have most profited by the
revolutionary change are also most ready to take the lead in persuading
their neighbors to be content with these rational compromises.
Meanwhile, however, the revolutionary leaders have set up a dictatorship
of their own, which, while necessary to "save the revolution," is itself
a practical negation of the revolutionary dream of a free world. This
dictatorship, finally passing into the hands of the more competent
element of the revolutionary crowd, justifies itself to the many;
professing and requiring of all a verbal assent to the revolutionary
creed of which its very existence is a fundamental repudiation. This
group becomes in time the nucleus about which society finally settles
down again in comparative peace and equilibrium.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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