Every organized crowd is jealous of its dignity and honor and is bent upon keeping up appearances. Nothing is more fatal to it than a successful assault upon its prestige. Every crowd, even the casual street mob, clothes the egoistic desires of its members or participants in terms of the loftiest moral motive. No crowd can afford to be laughed at. Crowd men have little sense of humor, certainly none concerning themselves and their crowd-ideas. Any laughter they indulge in is more likely to be directed at those who do not believe with them. The crowd-man resents any suspicion of irreverence or criticism of his professions, because to question them is to weaken the claim of his crowd upon the people, and to destroy in those professed ideals their function of directing his own attention away from the successful compromise of his unconscious conflicts which the crowd had enabled him to make. The crowd would perish if it lost its "ideals." It clings to its fixed ideas with the same tenacity as does the paranoiac. You can no more reason with the former than you can with the latter, and for much the same cause; the beliefs of both are not the fruit of inquiry, neither do they perform the normal intellectual function of adjustment to environment; they are mechanisms of the ego by which it keeps itself in countenance. Much of the activity of the unconscious ego is viewed by psychologists as "compensation." Devices which serve the purpose of compensating the ego for some loss, act of self-sacrifice, or failure, are commonly revealed by both the normal and the unadjusted. The popular notion that unsatisfied desires sooner or later perish of starvation is at best but a half truth. These desires after we have ceased to attend them become transformed. They frequently find satiety in some substitute which the unconscious accepts as a symbol of its real object. Dreams of normal people contain a great deal of material of this sort. So do day-dreams, and art. Many religious beliefs also serve this purpose of compensation. Jung follows Freud in pointing out as a classic example of the compensation in dreams, that of Nebuchadnezzar, in the Bible. Nebuchadnezzar at the height of his power had a dream which foretold his downfall. He dreamed of a tree which had raised its head even up to Heaven and now must be hewn down. This was a dream which is obviously a counterpoise to the exaggerated feeling of royal power. According to Jung, we may expect to find only those things contained in the unconscious which we have not found in the conscious mind. Many conscious virtues and traits of character are thus compensations for their opposite in the unconscious.