It is the fool thing, the insincere thing, that more commonly happens in matters social and political. The adjustment reached is not often a solution of a social problem worked out deliberately on the "greatest-happiness" principle. It is commonly a _status quo_, or balance of power among contending crowds, each inspired by the fiction of its own importance, by self-idealization, and desire to rule. It is an unstable equilibrium usually held in place for the time by a dominant crowd. This dominant crowd may itself be composed of quarreling factions, but these parties, so long as they share enough of the supremacy to keep up their self-feeling, so long, in fact, as their members may even be able to make themselves believe that they, too, are in the upper set, or so long as they continue to hope for success in the social game as now played, unite in repeating the catchwords which justify their crowd in its supremacy. The dominant group identifies its own interests with the general welfare. And in the sense that some sort of order, or any at all, is to be preferred to social chaos, there is an element of truth in this identification. The fact remains, however, that the dominant crowd possesses always much of the crowd-spirit which originally secured for it its enviable position. Its ideas, like those of all crowds, are devices for sustaining the self-feeling of its members, for protecting itself, for keeping the group together, for justification. They are only secondarily, if at all, instruments for dealing with new and perplexing social situations. It cannot be denied that a certain set of opinions, prejudices, mannerisms, ceremonies "go with" the social position which corresponds to them. They are the ready-made habits of the "set" or class. They are badges by which the "gentleman" is distinguished, the evening clothes of the psyche, as it were. Many of these crowd-forms represent true values of living, some of them are useful in our dealings with reality; if this were not so, if such spiritual tattooings or ceremonial forms were wholly harmful, the crowd which performed them would be at such a disadvantage that it could not hold its own. But that considerations of utility--other than the function which such ceremonialism is known to have for the unconscious always--do not directly govern these forms of thought and behavior is seen in the fact that so many of them, as Sumner says of "folkways," are either harmful or useless in dealing with matters of fact.