Certain crowd-movements in America to-day give marked evidence of this unconscious motivation. Notice how both the radical and reactionary elements behave when, as is frequently the case with both, the crowd-spirit comes over them. Certain radicals, who are fascinated with the idea of the Russian Revolution, are still proclaiming sentiments of human brotherhood, peace, and freedom, while unconsciously they are doing just what their enemies accuse them of--playing with the welcome ideas of violence, class war, and proletarian dictatorship. And conservative crowds, while ostensibly defending American traditions and ideals against destructive foreign influence, are with their own hands daily desecrating many of the finest things which America has given to the world in its struggle of more than a century for freedom and justice. Members of each crowd, while blissfully unaware of the incompatibility of their own motives and professions, have no illusions about those of the counter-crowd. Each crowd sees in the professions of its antagonist convincing proof of the insincerity and hypocrisy of the other side. To the student of social philosophy both are right and both wrong. All propaganda is lies, and every crowd is a deceiver, but its first and worst deception is that of itself. This self-deception is a necessary step in crowd-formation and is a _sine qua non_ of becoming a crowd. It is only necessary for members of a crowd to deceive themselves and one another for the crowd-mind to function perfectly; I doubt if they are often successful in deceiving anybody else. It was this common crowd-phenomenon of self-deception which led Gobineau and Nietzsche to the conclusion that the common people are liars. But as has been said, the crowd is by no means peculiar to the working class; some of its worst features are exhibited these days among employers, law-makers, and the well-to-do classes. This deception is moreover not really conscious and deliberate. If men deliberately set about to invent lies to justify their behavior I have little doubt that most of them would be clever enough to conjure up something a little more plausible. These naïve and threadbare "hypocrisies" of crowds are a commonplace mechanism of the unconscious. It is interesting to note that the delusions of the paranoiac likewise deceive no one but himself, yet within themselves form a perfectly logical _a priori_ system. They also serve the well-understood purpose, like that of crowd-ideas, of keeping their possessor in a certain fixed relation toward portions of his own psychic material. As Brill says, they are "compromise formations."