The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study — John Shaqi
The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological StudyMartin, Everett Dean
Science
The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study
Martin, Everett Dean
Crowds
The homicidal tendencies of the crowd-mind always reveal themselves the
minute the crowd becomes sufficiently developed and powerful to relax
for the time being the usual social controls. Illustrations of this may
be seen in the rioting between the white and the colored
races--epidemics of killing--such as occurred recently in East St.
Louis, and in the cities of Washington, Chicago, and Omaha. The same
thing is evident in the "pogroms" of Russia and Poland, in the acts of
revolutionary mobs of Germany and Russia, in the promptness with which
the Turks took advantage of the situation created by the war to
slaughter the Armenians. This hatred is the specter which forever haunts
the conflict between labor and capital. It is what speedily transformed
the French Revolution from the dawn of an era of "Fraternity" to a day
of terror and intimidation. It is seen again in the curious interest
which the public always has in a sensational murder trial. It is evident
in the hostility, open or suppressed, with which any community regards
the strange, the foreign, the "outlandish"--an example of which is the
frequent bullying and insulting of immigrants in this country since the
war. Much of the "Americanization propaganda" which we have carried on
since the war unfortunately gave the typical crowd-man his opportunity.
One need only listen to the speeches or read the publications of certain
"patriotic" societies to learn why it was that the exhortation to our
foreign neighbors to be loyal did so much more harm than good.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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