The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological StudyMartin, Everett Dean
Science
The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study
Martin, Everett Dean
Crowds
In comparing democracy with more autocratic forms of government, this
extent or range of crowd-control over the individual is important. Of
course, human beings will never permit to one another a very large
degree of personal freedom. It is to the advantage of everyone in the
struggle for existence to reduce his neighbors as much as possible to
automatons. In this way one's own adjustment to the behavior of others
is made easier. If we can induce or compel all about us to confine their
actions to perfect routine, then we may predict with a fair degree of
accuracy their future behavior, and be prepared in advance to meet it.
We all dread the element of the unexpected, and nowhere so much as in
the conduct of our neighbors. If we could only get rid of the humanly
unexpected, society would be almost fool-proof. Hence the resistance to
new truths, social change, progress, nonconformity of any sort; hence
our orthodoxies and conventions; hence our incessant preaching to our
neighbors to "be good"; hence the fanaticism with which every crowd
strives to keep its believers in line. Much of this insistence on
regularity is positively necessary. Without it there could be no social
or moral order at all. It is in fact the source and security of the
accepted values of civilization, as Schiller has shown.
But the process of keeping one another in line is carried much farther
than is necessary to preserve the social order. It is insisted upon to
the extent that will guarantee the survival, even the dominance, of the
spiritually sick, the morally timid, the trained-animal men, those who
would revert to savagery, or stand utterly helpless the moment a new
situation demanded that they do some original thinking in the place of
performing the few stereotyped tricks which they have acquired; the
dog-in-the-manger people, who because they can eat no meat insist that
all play the dyspeptic lest the well-fed outdistance them in the race of
life or set them an example in following which they get the stomach
ache; the people who, because they cannot pass a saloon door without
going in and getting drunk, cannot see a moving-picture, or read a
modern book, or visit a bathing beach without being tormented with their
gnawing promiscuous eroticism, insist upon setting up their own
perverted dilemmas as the moral standard for everybody.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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