I remember some years ago a Boston girl just entering social work, fresh from college, with all the ardor and enthusiasm of youth and having been taught the ideals of service to others. She was talking to me about her future and said that she was sorry family circumstances obliged her to work in Boston instead of New York, there was so much more to reform in New York! She seemed really afraid that justice and morality had reached such a point with us that she might not be afforded sufficient scope for her zeal. It was amusing, but think of the irony of it: that girl had been taught such a view of life that her happiness, her outlet, her self-expression, depended actually on there being plenty of misery and wretchedness for her to change; there would be no scope for her in a harmonious, well-ordered world. The self-and-others theory of society is then wrong. We have seen that the Perfect Society is the complete interrelating of an infinite number of selves knowing themselves as one Self. We see that we are dependent on the whole, while seeing that we are one with it in creating it. We are separate that we may belong, that we may greatly produce. Our separateness, our individual initiative, are the very factors which accomplish our true unity with men. We shall see in the chapter on “Political Pluralism” that “irreducible pluralism” and the self-unifying principle are not contradictory. ----- Footnote 28: It must be remembered, however, that these welfare arrangements are often accompanied by truly social motives, and experiments looking towards a more democratic organization of industries. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ XII THE CROWD FALLACY -------------- MANY people are ready to accept the truth that association is the law of life. But in consequence of an acceptance of this theory with only a partial understanding of it, many people to-day are advocating the life of the crowd. The words society, crowd, and group are often used interchangeably for a number of people together. One writer says, “The real things are breathed forth from multitudes ... the real forces of to-day are group forces.” Or we read of “the gregarious or group life,” or “man is social because he is suggestible,” or, “man is social because he likes to be with a crowd.” But we do not find group forces in multitudes: the crowd and the group represent entirely different modes of association. Crowd action is the outcome of agreement based on concurrence of emotion rather than of thought, or if on the latter, then on a concurrence produced by becoming aware of similarities, not by a slow and gradual creating of unity. It is a crowd emotion if we all shout “God save the King.” Suggestibility, feeling, impulse—this is usually the order in the crowd mind.