Boris Sidis

“ The suggestion reverberates from individual to individual, gathers strength, becomes overwhelming, driving crowd into a fury of activity, into a frenzy of excitement. As the suggestions are taken up by the mob and executed, the wave of excitement rises higher and higher. Each fulfilled suggestion increases the emotion of the mob in volume and intensity. Each new attack is followed by a more violent paroxysm of furious, demoniac frenzy. The mob is like an avalanche, the more it rolls, the more menacing and dangerous it grows. ”

“ Only one answer is given by science, by Biology, Sociology, and Social Psychology: Fortify the resistance of the individual by freedom of individuality and by the full development of personality. Immunize the individual against social, mental plagues by the full development of his rational reflective self, controlling the suggestible, automatic subconscious with its reflex consciousness. Put no barriers to man's self expression, lay no chains on man, put no taboos on the human spirit. Do not, like the savage, run man's mind and skull into ugly shapes and distorted moulds of social traditions. ”

“ The manifestation of the apparently false opinion keeps thought awake; it constantly challenges us, making us review again and again our established truths, and contributes to an ever deeper realization of what has been gained by severe thought and hard labor. The freedom of the seemingly false opinion and our tolerance of it and our willingness to meet with it in the open help test the validity of truth while keeping alive the critical sense which is the main spring of all advancement of human thought and is the vital point, the very soul, of all human progress. ”

“ If ceaseless vigilance is the price of liberty, more so is it true that ceaseless criticism of ever new opinions and ever new views, however distasteful, bizarre, and paradoxical, is the price of truth. For we must keep in mind the fact that truth does not come as deus ex machina or like Athena out of the head of Zeus; but must be found after persistent, laborious, painstaking searching of heart, mind, and fact. Truth is in the deep, as a Greek sage puts it. One must dive again and again often bringing up nothing but brilliant falsehoods before the homely truths are found. ”

“ What would have been left of the Carthaginian empire, if not for the Greek and Roman historians? Those empires passed away at one single blow, and with the sudden collapse vanished all the glory of imperial power. But long before that fall the real glory had departed,—the glory of the individual. Empires may often look grand and magnificent, but they are built with poor material,—with small men and petty minds. Military aggregates or societies, held together by the sword are doomed to disolution at the moment of their birth. ”

“ The acts and decrees of the great Assyrian, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian monarchs lie buried in the ruins and dust of their once magnificent palaces, but the living words of these few humble men, the prophets, ring loud and true across the gulf of ages. Insignificant as, those men might have been in the courts of a Sargon, Tiglath-Pileser, Esarhaddon, Cyrus, and Darius, it was nonetheless those lowly men who stood for human progress, and transmitted to humanity the precious treasures of human ideals. ”

“ With a scanty supply of laws in Hellenic commonwealths or city states what an immense vista for an Aristotle, of that grand, complex, efficient machinery of law, turning out yearly thousands of laws and taboos for the paternalistic control and alleged welfare of the citizen! What a joy to watch our bureaucratic governments piling law on law fit for the wastebasket and the scrap heap! Edicts, ordinances, regulations are issued by the thousands by states, cities, towns, boroughs, organizations, societies, associations, and leagues for all imaginary human ills. ”

“ With the increase in mass of the human aggregate the mob-energy grows like the momentum of an avalanche in its downward course. Witness the overwhelming migratory obsession of swarming multitudes of hordes of barbarians, an obsession akin to the uncontrollable, migratory instinct of birds, or of buffaloes, an obsession which has seized periodically on barbaric tribes, such as the migrations of Semites, Aryans in the early dawn of history, the Lust-Wanderung of Celts, Goths, Normans, and Germans, Huns, Mongols, Tartars in the early ages of our era ”

“ Christianity was a plague which threatened with infection the body-politic and with pollution the very sources of society, a fatal scourge that surely tended towards dissolution of all ties, sacred to family, society, and humanity. Christians were moral lepers. No punishment, no torture was adequate for such fiends in human shape. Such were the terrible charges brought against the Christians, accusations circulated among the populace by writers, by reliable witnesses, government agents, informers, professional spies and detectives, and by respectable citizens. ”

“ No opinion should be disdained and scorned. No individuality should be suppressed and crushed. The manifestation of individuality and originally should in every well-ordered and progressive community not only be persecuted, but on the contrary it should be cherished, protected, and cultivated as the fons et origo of civilization and human progress.
If we wish social life not to become stationary and stagnant, we should give free scope to all individuality and originality, no matter how eccentric they may seem to us. ”

“ The trance became deepened, the subconscious emotions of fear anger, and aggression became more and more intensified, fanned as they were by the hot breath of propaganda and the bellows of the press, until the mass of the nation fairly quivered with the fever of enthusiasm and maniacal excitement, an overwhelming mass excitement which no individual could withstand. ”

“ Drill and discipline trained people into automatism of the subconscious with its abnormal suggestibility and extreme sensitivity to direct and indirect suggestions, intensified by brilliant parades, hypnotizing oratory, and by all the artifices of a militant chauvinistic press. Nations were thrown into a social trance, the subconscious came to the surface, yielded to the noxious suggestions, wriggled in hysterical convulsions of nationalism, became obsessed with the fury of homicidal mania, and plunged into the abyss of the world war with all its horrors and atrocities. ”

“ Science supplied virus, venom, toxins, poison, gas, rifles, cannons, tanks, and long range guns. Hell was let loose on earth. Professors of philosophy and science carrying high the patriotic banner of Kultur and culture gloried in the system of compulsory, universal, military service, first made in Germany exulted in the degrading, vicious process of training by which the individual is hypnotized into submission to a brutal organization of military junkers, hallowed by the name of state and Fatherland, it was the darkest period in the history of mankind. ”

“ A social aggregate which has chosen the fatal path of organic evolution must succumb to the same law of organic development to which all organisms are subject, namely greater and greater organization, increase of structure, greater differentiation, decrease of critical, personal, consciousness, loss of individual liberty, increased activity of the subconscious forces, falling into a state of somnambulism which can only be redeemed by revolution or by death. ”

“ Imperial pomp is bought with the life-blood of man. Vain is imperial glory; for it is the symptom of disease and death of the social organism, grown fat with the lives of men. Society never appears so brilliant as when the end is nigh. ”

“ The iron collar put around his neck becomes a mark of respectability, an ornament of civilization. Tarde finds that society is based on respect, (respectability I should say) , a sort of an alloy of fear and love, fear that is loved. A respectable citizen is he who is fond of his bonds, stocks, and shackles, and comes to love his bonds, stocks and shackles of fears and taboos. In fact, he attacks and fights those who wish to free him from his social, religious, and political fetters. ”

“ You can make its legs, its hands, any limb you like, perfectly rigid; you can make it eat pepper for sugar; you can make it drink water for wine; feel cold or warm; hear delightful stories in the absence of all sound; feel pain or pleasure; see oranges where there is nothing; you can make it eat them and enjoy their taste. In short, you can do with the subwaking self anything you like. The subwaking consciousness is in your power, like clay in the hands of a potter. ”

“ Society enmeshes the individual in a close and strongly woven network of taboos, customs, commandments, and traditions, all maintained by force and fear.
Fear of the outraged sense of the community inhibits even the very thought of breach of a taboo or violation of custom. The taboo is based on some subconscious fear of some unknown force, or some vague apprehension of a spirit power avenging the awful transgression. The taboo is essentially the fear of the unseen, of the unknown. "A taboo is anything that one must not do lest ill-luck befall. ”

“ For such a mental state can only be paralleled by the crusade mania of the Middle Ages, the mania which cost Europe millions of men, killed and crippled, devastations of populations and countries, followed by the no less terrible epidemic of the Black Plague which ravaged Europe and Asia from end to end, with the destruction of half the human race. ”

“ In a certain sense it may be said that it is the function of the false to keep the truth alive. The suppression of the freedom of thought or the liberty of individual expression, whether in speech or in press, is the crushing of all true human progress. Thus science, Sociology, Social Psychology, all go to confirm the same central attitude towards the free manifestation of individuality in the life existence of a well-ordered, progressive commonwealth. ”

“ The fall of the empire is sometimes so sudden and so complete, and the spirit of individuality before its departure is so small and dwarfed, that no spirit is left to transmit the history of the imperial achievements. When a couple of centuries after the fall of the mighty Assyrian empire Xenophon passed the ruins of the once Nineveh the great, the capital of Assyria, the terror of nations, he was unable even to find out its name. Assyria was wiped out from the memory of man as if it had never existed. ”

“ This Chinese remark clearly reveals the fear not only of innovations, but also the fear of all originality, talent, and genius. The unusual individual comes to an untimely end. And the time was when the unusual was shunned as a Plague, and the unusual individual was actually put to death.
The value of freedom of opinion is by no means lessened even if the given opinion or examination turns out to be wholly false. For the true value of an opinion is not so much in its truth as in its freedom. ”

“ I pointed out an important law in Social Psychology, namely, that greatness of individuality is inversely proportional to the mass of the social aggregate. ”

“ Of all the mental epidemics that befall aggregate humanity and its subconscious activities, the worst are the mob feelings of the militaristic type. The subconscious activities are not rationalized and humanized, they are in fact more brutalized than ever, inasmuch as under the aegis of military law and under the tacit understanding that necessity knows no law, there is no pity and no mercy in war. The worst of crimes are committed for the benefit of the army and the militant nation. ”

“ That form of social constitution is best in which every man is best, whoever he may be, and can act for the best, and live happily. Happiness is virtuous activity. The active life of thought (as we put it, the active life of the upper, critical consciousness) is the best for man and the citizen. Happiness is activity, and the actions of the wise, and the just (not the present business ideal of specialization, vocational, technical, professional or business efficiency of the greatest amount of marketable articles and luxuries) are the realization of what is good and noble. ”

“ The few are forced into silence and submission by threats of violence and torture. If anyone dares to say anything rational, or if he has the courage to set himself in opposition to the maddened current of popular opinion, he is mobbed by pious crowds and is persecuted by inquisitorial courts of justice. Such was the terrible state of the mediaeval crusade-mania. Such in fact is the state of every crusade-mania which seizes on the minds of nations in the long history of national mental epidemics. ”

“ In the general history of science and in the history of each individual investigation we find this freedom of thought and critical sense ceaselessly at work. Rarely, if ever, do we strike in science the truth at a flash. ”

“ I should like, indeed, to live to a time when it will be universally recognized that the military man and the government-maker are types which have survived from a previous condition of civilization, not ours; and when they will no longer be looked upon as heroes of mankind. In that future those persons who have really created our civilization will receive the recognition which is their due. Let these thoughts dwell long in your meditation, because it is a serious problem in all our civilization to-day how to secure due recognition of the value of thought, and how to encourage it. ”

“ All manifestations of individuality and personality, no matter how opposed to our notions and foreign to all our tastes, ideas, beliefs and feelings, should be carefully left to grow and develop without any inhibitions, prohibitions, and punishments, nor branded by social custom and law as "dangerous, seditious, and subversive of the welfare of the state," should not be oppressed and persecuted by organized society and scourged by the scorpions of law and order. ”

“ Aristotle takes it for granted that it is absurd and ludicrous to force a person to cure himself. He had no suspicion that many centuries later man will be forced into treatment by benevolent organizations, charity boards, philanthropic societies, hygienic and eugenic societies, boards of health, and municipal councils. In fear of disease and in the interest of his health man will be muzzled and masked like a vicious dog, and that without any murmur of complaint. Breathing freely will become a social offense, punished by fine and by jail in their communities of the free West. ”