The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological StudyMartin, Everett Dean
Science
The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study
Martin, Everett Dean
Crowds
In this connection I recall my own student days, which are doubtless
typical--the pranks which served the purpose of bringing certain groups
of students into temporary prominence and permitted them for a brief
period to regard themselves as comic heroes, the practices by which the
different classes and societies sought to get the better of one another,
the "love feasts" of my society which were hardly more than mutual
admiration gatherings, the "pajama" parades in which the entire student
body would march in costume (the wearing of which by an isolated
individual would probably have brought him before a lunacy commission)
all through the town and round and round the dormitories of the women's
college a mile or so away, in order to announce a victory in some
intercollegiate contest or other. There was the brazenness--it seems
hardly credible now--with which the victors on such occasions would
permit themselves to be carried on their comrades' shoulders through
the public square, also the deportment with which a delegation of
students would announce their arrival in a neighboring college town and
the grinning self-congratulation with which we would sit in chapel and
hear a wrathful president denounce our group behavior as "boorishness
and hoodlumism." There was the unanimous conviction of us all, for no
other reason I imagine than that it was graced with our particular
presence, that our own institution was the most superior college in
existence, and I well remember the priggishness with which at student
banquets we applauded the sentiment repeated _ad nauseam_, that the
great aim of education and the highest mark of excellence in our college
was the development of character. What is it all but a slightly
exaggerated account of the egoism of all organized crowds? Persons of
student age are for the most part still in the normal "narcissus"
period, and their ego-mania is naturally less disguised than that of
older groups. But even then we could never have given such open
manifestation to it as isolated individuals; it required the
crowd-spirit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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