Everett Dean Martin

“ Whether it is temperance, or justice, or greater freedom, moral excellence or national glory, that we desire—whether we happen to be conservatives or radicals, reformers or liberals, we must become a cult, write our philosophy of life in flaming headlines, and sell our cause in the market. No matter if we meanwhile surrender every value for which we stand, we must strive to cajole the majority into imagining itself on our side. For only with the majority with us, whoever we are, can we live. ”

“ Again, the will to power is clothed in the dream symbols of an emancipated society, and so on around and around the circle, until people learn that with crowds freedom is impossible. For men to attain to mastery of themselves is as abhorrent to one crowd as to another. The crowd merely wants freedom to be a crowd—that is, to set up its own tyranny in the place of that which offends the self-feeling of its members.
The social idealism of revolutionary crowds is very significant for our view of the crowd-mind. ”

“ Older writers who saw the ragged throngs in the streets were led to identify the mob or crowd with the tattered, illiterate [47] populace. Our mob to-day is no longer merely tramping the streets. We have it at the breakfast table, in the subway, alike in shop and boudoir, and office—wherever, in fact, the newspaper goes. And the raggedness is not exterior, nor is the mob confined to the class of the ill-clad and the poor. The raggedness, and tawdriness have now become spiritual, a universal presence entering into the fabric of nearly all our mental processes. ”

“ Grant that an idea is an absolute truth, and it follows, of course, that it must be true on all occasions and for everyone. The crowd is justified, therefore, in sacrificing people to its ideal—itself. The idea is no longer an instrument of living; it is an imperative. It is not yours to use the idea; the idea is there to use you. You have ceased to be an end. Anything about you that does not partake of the reality of this idea has no right to be, any experience of yours which happens to be incommensurable with this idea loses its right to be ”

“ A new dictatorship, therefore, must inevitably follow the social revolution, in support of which a favored minority will make use of the industrial power of the community, just as earlier privileged classes used military power and the power of private property. And this new dominance would be just as predatory, and would justify itself, as did the others, by the platitudes of crowd-thinking. The so-called dictatorship turns out, on examination, to be the dictatorship of one section of the proletariat over the rest of it. The dream of social redemption by such means is a pure crowd-idea. ”

“ We have already noted the fact that this dream has the function of justifying the crowd in its revolt and will to rule. But this is by no means all. The social idealism has well been called a dream, for that is just what it is, the daydream of the ages. It is like belief in fairies, or the Cinderella myth. It is the Jack-and-the-beanstalk philosophy. The dream has exactly the same function as the Absolute, and the ideal world-systems of the paranoiac; it is an imaginary refuge from the real. Like all other dreams, it is the realization of a wish. ”

“ We have previously noted the connection between the intellectualist philosophies with their closed systems of ideas, their absolutists, and the conscious thinking of crowds. The crowd finds these systems ready-made and merely backs into them and hides itself like a hermit crab in a deserted seashell. It follows that the humanist, however social he may be, cannot be a crowd-man. He, too, will have his ideals, but they are not made-in-advance goods which all must accept; they are good only as they may be made good in real experience, true only when verified in fact. ”

“ Every crowd demands it when it is seeking power; no crowd permits it when it is in power. A crowd which is struggling for supremacy is really trying to free itself and as many people as possible from the control of another crowd. Naturally, the struggle for power appears to consciousness as a struggle for liberty as such. The controlling crowd is correctly seen to be a tyrant and oppressor. What the opposition crowd does not recognize is its own wish to oppress, hidden under its struggle for power. ”

“ It teaches the rules for success in a crowd-governed world while taking advantage of the natural credulity of childhood to draw the curtain with such terrifying mummery about the figure of wisdom that the average mind, never having the daring or curiosity to lift it, will remain to its dying day a dullard and a mental slave without suspecting the fact. Every "dangerous" thought is denatured and expurgated. The student is skillfully insulated from any mental shock that might galvanize him into original intellectual life. ”

“ Professor Faguet has called democracy the "cult of incompetence" and the "dread of responsibility." He is not far wrong, but these epithets apply not so much to democracy as such as to democracy under the heel of the crowd. The original aim of democracy, so far as its philosophical thinkers conceived of it, was to set genius free from the trammels of tradition, realize a maximum of self-government, and make living something of an adventure. But crowds do not so understand democracy. Every crowd looks upon democracy simply as a scheme whereby it may have its own way. ”

“ It cannot be denied that our present social order is characterized by deep and fundamental social injustices, nor that bitter struggles between the various groups in society are inevitable. But the crowd forever ignores its own share in the responsibility for human ills, and each crowd persists in making a caricature of its enemies, real and imagined, nourishing itself in a delusion of persecution which is like nothing so much as the characteristic obsessions of the paranoiac. ”

“ I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion. Within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them. Not that he is in danger of an auto-da-fe, but he is exposed to continued obloquy and persecution. His political career is closed for ever. Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused him. Those who think like him have not the courage to speak out, and abandon him to silence. ”

“ Is there any easier way of denying the true nature and significance of our objective world than by persuading ourselves that that world is even now doomed, and is bound suddenly to be transformed into the land of our hearts desire? Is it not to be expected that people would soon learn how to give those desires greater unction, and to encourage one another in holding to the fictions by which those desires could find their compensation and escape, by resorting to precisely the crowd-devices which we have been discussing? ”

“ Where advancement has been achieved in freedom, in intelligence, in ethical values, in art or science, in consideration for humanity, in legislation, it has in each instance been achieved by unique individuals, and has spread chiefly by personal influence, never gaining assent except among those who have power to recreate the new values won in their own experience.
Whenever we take up a new idea as a crowd, we at once turn it into a catchword and a fad. Faddism, instead of being merely a hunger for the new is rather an expression of the crowd-will to uniformity. ”

“ Since by hypothesis everyone is a worker, the dictatorship of the workers is a dictatorship based not on labor as such, but upon a universal human quality. It would be quite as truly a dictatorship of everyone if based upon any other common human quality—say, the fact that we are all bipeds, that we all have noses, or the fact of the circulation of the blood. As the purely proletarian character of this dictatorship becomes meaningless, the crowd-struggle switches from that of labor as a whole against capital, to a series of struggles within the dominant labor group itself. ”

“ Democracy in America fails of freedom, not because of our political constitution, though that would doubtless be modified by a people who were more free at heart; it fails because freedom of opinion, intellectual alertness, critical thinking about fundamentals, is not encouraged. There is, moreover, little promise of greater freedom in the various revolutionary crowds who to-day want freedom only to add to the number of crowds which pester us. And for this we have, whether we are radicals or reactionaries or simply indifferent, no one to blame but ourselves and our own crowd-thinking. ”

“ A disappointed faction of the newly emancipated humanity begins to demand its "rights." The crowd hears its own catchwords quoted against itself. It proceeds to prove that freedom exists by denouncing the disturbers and silencing them, if necessary, by force. The once radical crowd has now become reactionary. Its dream of world emancipation is seen to be a hoax. Lovers of freedom now yoke themselves in a new rebel crowd so that oppressed humanity may be liberated from the liberators. ”

“ Many existing facts belie the platitudes which these crowds speak in their defense, just as they lay bare the hidden meaning of the magic remedies which are proposed by counter-crowds. There is no single formula for social redemption, and the man who has come to himself will refuse to invest his faith in any such thing—which does not mean, however, that he will refuse to consider favorably the practical possibilities of any proposed plan for improving social conditions.
The first and greatest effort must be to free democracy from crowd-mindedness, by liberating our own thinking. ”

“ It would seem that in our democracy freedom consists first of freedom to vote; second, of freedom to make commercial profit; third, of freedom to make propaganda; fourth, of freedom from intellectual and moral responsibility. Each of these "liberties" is little more than a characteristic form of crowd-behavior. The vote, our most highly prized modern right, is nearly always so determined by crowd-thinking that as an exercise of individual choice it is a joke. Men are herded in droves and delivered by counties in almost solid blocks by professional traders of political influence. ”

“ I do not believe that this emotional theory is the true explanation of crowd-behavior. It cannot be denied that people in a crowd become strangely excited. But it is not only in crowds that people show emotion. Feeling, instinct, impulse, are the dynamic of all mental life. The crowd doubtless inhibits as many emotions as it releases. Fear is conspicuously absent in battle, pity in a lynching mob. Crowds are notoriously anæsthetic toward the finer values of art, music, and poetry. ”

“ People may be social—the family is an example of this—without being a crowd either in thought or action. Again a crowd—a mob is an example of this—may be distinctly antisocial, if we attach any ethical meaning to the term. Both the individual and society suffer, as we shall see, from crowd-behavior. I know of nothing which to-day so menaces not only the values of civilization, but also—it is the same thing in other words, perhaps—the achievement of personality and true knowledge of self, as the growing habit of behaving as crowds. ”

“ To the crowd of true believers, the heretic or schismatic is "worse than the infidel." The moral crowd will "bear with" the worst roué if only he strives to keep up appearances, has a guilty conscience, asks forgiveness, and professes firm belief in the conventions against which he offends; one may be forgiven his inability to "live up to his principles" if only his professed principles are the same as the crowds. But let a Nietzsche, though his life be that of an ascetic, openly challenge and repudiate the values of popular morality, and his name is anathema. ”

“ Thus, hero worship is unconsciously worship of the crowd itself, and the constituents thereof. The self-feeling of a crowd is always enhanced by the triumph of its leader or representative. Who, at a ball game or athletic event, has not experienced elation and added self-complacency in seeing the home team win? What other meaning has the excited cheering? Even a horse on a race track may become the representative of a crowd and lift five thousand people into the wildest joy and ecstasy by passing under a wire a few inches ahead of a rival. ”

“ In crowd-thinking it is often made the instrument of wholesale destruction and human slaughter. The mob is ever motivated by this logic of negation, and of automatic behavior. It is thus that compulsive thinking sways vast hordes of men and women, impelling them, in the very name of truth or righteousness, to actions of the most atrocious character. It is this which robs most popular movements of their intelligent purposiveness, unleashes the fanatic and the bigot, and leads men to die and to kill for a phrase. ”