Part 11

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.

The dominant crowd, therefore, in just so far as it must remain a crowd in order to secure its own position of supremacy, must strive to force all social realities into the forms of its own conflicts and dilemmas. Inevitably the self-feeling of a great many people, who are forced by the dominant crowd to conform and labor with no compensation, is hurt. They cannot but contrast their own lot with that of their more fortunate neighbors. Of all things, people probably resist most the feeling of inferiority. Any suggestion that the difference in social position is due to a similar difference in personal worth or in ability is hotly resented. The resentment is in no wise abated by the fact that in some cases this suggestion may be true. Compensations are at once created by the unconscious. In mediæval times "all men were brothers and were equal before the altars of the Church and in heaven." Thus distinctions of merit, other than those which prevailed in the social order, were set up in the interest of the common man.

As the influence of the Renaissance directed general attention from the realm of the spiritual to practical affairs of earth, these compensations changed from thoughts of the future world to dreams of the future of this world. The injured self-feeling dwells upon the economic or political inequalities which flow from the dominance of the ruling crowd. The injustices and acts of exploitation, which are certainly neither new nor rare occurrences in human relations, are seized upon as if it were these things, not the assumption to superiority, which were the issue at stake.

At the time of the French Revolution the Third Estate, or Bourgeois, which showed itself quite as capable of exploiting the poor as ever were the older aristocrats, saw itself only as part of the wronged and exploited "people." The sufferings of the poor, which it was frequently even then profiting in quite as heartily, to say the least, as the titled nobility, were represented as the grievance of all mankind against the hated nobility. That the ideas of "liberty, equality, and fraternity" which these good tradesmen preached may easily become the sort of compensatory ideas we have been discussing is shown by the fact of the genuine astonishment and indignation of the burghers when later their employees made use of this same phrase in the struggles between labor and capital. Sans-culottism had quite as many psychological motives as economic behind it.

How pompous, hateful, and snobbish were those titled folk with their powdered wigs, carriages, fine clothes, and their exclusive social gatherings to which honest citizens, often quite as wealthy as themselves, were not invited. If the "people"--that is, the burghers themselves--only had a chance they would be just as fine ladies and gentlemen as those who merely inherited their superiority. Down with the aristocrats! All men were equal and always had been. There must be fraternity and the _carier ouvert les talents_, in other words, brotherhood and free competition.

I am sure, from all I have ever seen or read of social revolt and unrest, that this injured self-feeling, or defense against the sense of personal inferiority, while not the only motive, is the most powerful one at work. It crops out everywhere, in the layman's hatred of the clergy during the Reformation, in that curious complex of ideas whereby the uneducated often look upon a college diploma as something little short of magical, and defend their ego against this ridiculously exaggerated mark of distinction and accompanying feeling of self-reproach by a slur at "high-brows." Few people realize how general this feeling is; the trick of making fun of the educated is one of the commonest forms of crowd-humor in America, both in vaudeville and in popular oratory. I have previously pointed out the fact that the religious revival in our day is to a great extent characterized by a popular resistance to scholars. No one can read Mr. Sunday's sermons and deny this fact. The City of New York gave the largest majority in its history to the candidate for the office of mayor who made opposition to "experts" the main issue in his campaign. Scores of times I have heard popular speakers resort to this trick to gain favor with their audiences, and I cannot remember ever having known such sentiments to fail to gain applause--I am not speaking now of strictly academic groups, but of general gatherings.

The point of interest here is that these same people have a most extravagant notion of the value of the academic training which they encourage the crowd speaker in ridiculing. I have made it a practice of talking with a great many people personally and drawing them out on this point, and I have found that this is almost uniformly the case. F. B., a cigar maker by trade, says, "Oh, if I had only had sense enough to go on to school when I had the opportunity!" E. L., a mechanic, says, "I might have been somebody, if I had been given any chance to get an education." R., a sort of jack-of-all-trades, says, "If I only had N.'s education, I'd be a millionaire." B., a farmer with limited intellectual interests, says, "I tell you, my boys are not going to be like me; they have got to go to college." G., a waiter, says, "I don't know much," and then proceeds to impress me with the latest bit of academic information which he has picked up. C., a printer, who has been moderately successful, says: "I'd give ten thousand dollars right this minute if I knew Greek; now there is ---- and there is ----, neighbors of mine, they're highly educated. When I'm with them I'm ashamed and feel like a dub."

When, on such occasions, I repeatedly say that the average academic student really learns hardly anything at all of the classic languages, and cite the small fruits of my own years of tedious study as an example, the effect produced is invariably comforting--until I add that one need not attend a university seven years or even four to become educated, but that nearly everyone with ability to learn and with genuine intellectual interests may achieve a remarkable degree of learning. The answer of the perplexed person is then often an extenuation. "Well, you see, a busy person or a working man is so tired after the day's work that he has no energy left for study," or it is, "Wait till the working class have more leisure, then they, too, can be cultivated." Passing over this extenuation, which ignores the fact that some of the best informed and clearest thinking people one meets are working people, while the average university graduate leads anything but an intellectual life, it can hardly be denied, I think, that our crowd cult of anti-"highbrowism" is really a defense mechanism against an inner feeling of inferiority. Now the interesting thing about this feeling of inferiority is the exaggerated notion of the superiority of the college-trained, which is entertained chiefly by the uneducated themselves. What appears here is in fact nothing other than a cheapening of the idea of superiority. Personal excellence is something which anyone may attain; it is not something congenital, but something to be added on; one "gets an education," possesses something of advantage, merely by a few years of conventional study of books. Anyone might do that, therefore. "I, too, if I only cared to, or had been given opportunity, might now be famous." "The difference between myself and the world's greatest genius is not a spiritual chasm which I could not myself, at least hypothetically, cross." "It is rather an 'acquired character,' a mere fruit of special opportunity--which in a few cases it doubtless may be--but it is something external; at bottom we are all equal."

Many facts may be advanced to corroborate the results of our analysis here. The crowd always resents the Carlyle, William James, Nietzsche, Goethe theory of genius. Genius is not congenital superiority. It is the result of hard work. The genius is not a unique personal fact, he is a "representative man." He says just what his age is thinking. The inarticulate message of his contemporaries simply becomes articulate in some one, and behold a genius. In other words, I suppose, all Vienna, messenger boys and bootblacks especially, were suddenly fascinated by Schiller's "Ode to Joy" and went about whistling improvised musical renderings of the theme of this poem, till the deaf Beethoven heard and wrote these whistlings down in the form of the Ninth Symphony.

According to the crowd, Luther did not create the Reformation, or Petrarch the Renaissance; these movements themselves created their leaders and founders; all that the genius did was to interpret and faithfully obey the People's will. Ergo, to be a genius one need only study hard enough to be able to tell the people what they already think. The superiority of genius is therefore no different from that of any educated person; except in degree of application. Anyone of us might possess this superiority. In other words, the "intellectual snobbishness" which the crowd resents is nothing else than the crowd-man's own fiction of self-importance, projected upon those whose imagined superiority he envies. It is recognized, even exaggerated by the unlearned, because it is precisely the sort of superiority which the ignorant man himself, in his ignorance, imagines that he himself would display if he "only had the chance," and even now possesses unrecognized.

We have made the foregoing detour because I think it serves to illustrate, in a way, the psychic processes behind much revolutionary propaganda and activity. I would not attempt to minimize the extent of the social injustice and economic slavery which a dominant crowd, whether ecclesiastical, feudal, or capitalistic, is guilty of in its dealings with its subjects. But every dominant crowd, certain sections of the "proletariat" as quickly as any other, will resort to such practices, and will alike justify them by moral catchwords the minute its supremacy over other crowds gives it opportunity. Therefore there is a certain amount of tautology in denouncing the "master class" for its monstrous abuses. That the real point at issue between the dominant crowd and the under crowd is the assumed personal superiority of the members of the former, rather than the economic "exploitation" which it practices, is shown by the fact that the French Revolution was led by wealthy bourgeois, and that the leading revolutionary element in the working class to-day consists, not of the "down and out" victims of capitalist exploitation, but of the members of the more highly skilled and better paid trades, also of certain intellectuals who are not "proletarians" at all.

And now we come to our point: the fiction of superiority of the dominant crowd, just as in the case of the assumed personal superiority of the intellectuals, is resented by the under crowd because it is _secretly recognized_ by the under crowd. Of course the dominant crowd, like all crowds, is obsessed by its feelings of self-importance, and this feeling is apparently vindicated by its very social position. But the fiction is recognized at its full face value, and therefore resented by the under crowds, because that is precisely the sort of personal supremacy to which they also aspire.

One commonly hears it said to-day, by those who have made the catchwords of democracy their crowd cult, that the issue in modern society is between democracy and capitalism. In a sense this may be true, but only in a superficial sense; the real issue is between the personal self as a social entity and the crowd. Capitalism is, to my mind, the logical first fruit of so-called democracy. Capitalism is simply the social supremacy of the trader-man crowd. For a hundred years and more commercial ability--that of organizing industry and selling goods--has been rewarded out of all proportion to any other kind of ability, because, in the first place, it leads to the kind of success which the ordinary man most readily recognizes and envies--large houses, fine clothes, automobiles, exclusive clubs, etc. A Whittier may be ever so great a poet, and yet sit beside the stove in the general store of his little country village, and no one thinks he is so very wonderful. Some may envy him his fame, but few will envy and therefore be fascinated by that in him which they do not understand. But a multimillionaire in their community is understood; everyone can see and envy his success; he is at once both envied and admired.

Moreover, the commercial ability is the sort which the average man most commonly thinks he possesses in some degree. While, therefore, he grumbles at the unjust inequalities in wealth which exist in modern society, and denounces the successful business man as an exploiter and fears his power, the average man will nevertheless endure all this, much in the same spirit that a student being initiated into a fraternity will take the drubbing, knowing well that his own turn at the fun will come later. It is not until the members of the under crowd begin to suspect that their own dreams of "aping the rich" may never come true that they begin to entertain revolutionary ideas. In other words, forced to abandon the hope of joining the present dominating crowd, they begin to dream of supplanting and so dispossessing this crowd by their own crowd.

That the dominant crowd is just as much to blame for this state of affairs as the under crowd, perhaps more so, is shown by the history of every period preceding a revolutionary outbreak. I will dwell at some length on this fact later. My point here is that, first, a revolution, in the sense that the word means a violent uprising against the existing order, is a psychological crowd-phenomenon--and second, that it takes two crowds to make a revolution.

Writers, like Le Bon, have ignored the part which the dominant crowd plays in such events. They have thought of revolution only as the behavior of the under crowd. They have assumed that the crowd and the people were the same. Their writings are hardly more than conservative warnings against the excess and wickedness of the popular mind once it is aroused. Sumner says:

Moral traditions are the guides which no one can afford to neglect. They are in the mores, and they are lost in every great revolution of the mores. Then the men are morally lost.

Le Bon says, writing of the French Revolution:

The people may kill, burn, ravage, commit the most frightful cruelties, glorify its hero to-day and throw him into the gutter to-morrow; it is all one; the politicians will not cease to vaunt its virtues, its high wisdom, and to bow to its every decision.

Now in what does this entity really consist, this mysterious fetich which revolutionists have revered for more than a century?

It may be decomposed into two distinct categories. The first includes the peasants, traders, and workers of all sorts who need tranquillity and order that they may exercise their calling. This people forms the majority, but a majority which never caused a revolution. Living in laborious silence, it is ignored by historians.

The second category, which plays a capital part in all national disturbances, consists of a subversive social residue dominated by a criminal mentality. Degenerates of alcoholism and poverty, thieves, beggars, destitute "casuals," indifferent workers without employment--these constitute the dangerous bulk of the armies of insurrection.... To this sinister substratum are due the massacres which stain all revolutions.... To elements recruited from the lowest dregs of the populace are added by contagion a host of idle and indifferent persons who are simply drawn into the movement. They shout because there are men shouting, and revolt because there is a revolt, without having the vaguest idea of the cause of the shouting or revolution. The suggestive power of the environment absolutely hypnotized them.

This idea, which is held with some variation by Sumner, Gobineau, Faguet, and Conway, is, I believe, both unhistorical and unpsychological, because it is but a half-truth. This substratum of the population does at the moment of revolution become a dangerous mob. Such people are unadjusted to any social order, and the least deviation from the routine of daily life throws them off their balance. The relaxation of authority at the moment when one group is supplanting another in position of social control, is to these people like the two or three days of interregnum between the pontificates of Julius and Leo, described by Cellini. Those who need some one to govern them, and they are many, find their opportunity in the general disturbance. They suddenly react to the revolutionary propaganda which up to this minute they have not heeded, they are controlled by revolutionary crowd-ideas in a somnambulistic manner, and like automatons carry these ideas precipitately to their deadly conclusion. But this mob is not the really revolutionary crowd and in the end it is always put back in its place by the newly dominant crowd. The really revolutionary crowd consists of the group who are near enough the dominant crowd to be able to envy its "airs" with some show of justification, and are strong enough to dare try issue with it for supreme position. Madame Rolland, it will be remembered, justified her opposition to aristocrats on the principle of equality and fraternity, but she could never forget her resentment at being made, in the home of a member of this aristocracy, to eat with the servants.

What Le Bon and others seem to ignore is that the ruling class may be just as truly a crowd as the insurrectionary mob, and that the violent behavior of revolutionary crowds is simply the logic of crowd-thinking carried to its swift practical conclusion.

It is generally assumed that a revolution is a sudden and violent change in the form of government. From what has been said it will be seen that this definition is too narrow. History will bear me out in this. The Protestant Reformation was certainly a revolution, as Le Bon has shown, but it affected more than the government or even the organization of the Church. The French Revolution changed the form of the government in France several times before it was done, passing through a period of imperial rule and even a restoration of the monarchy. But the revolution as such survived. Even though later a Bourbon or a prince of the House of Orleans sat on the throne of France, the restored king or his successor was hardly more than a figurehead. A new class, the Third Estate, remained in fact master of France. There had been a change in the ownership of the land; power through the control of vested property rested with the group which in 1789 began its revolt under the leadership of Mirabeau. A new dictatorship had succeeded the old. And this is what a revolution is--_the dictatorship of a new crowd_. The Russian revolutionists now candidly admit this fact in their use of the phrase "the dictatorship of the proletariat." Of course it is claimed that this dictatorship is really the dictatorship of "all the people." But this is simply the old fiction with which every dominant crowd disguises seizure of power. Capitalist republicanism is also the rule of all the people, and the pope and the king, deriving their authority from God, are really but "the servants of all."

As we have seen, the crowd mind as such wills to dominate. Society is made up of struggle groups, or organized crowds, each seeking the opportunity to make its catchwords realities and to establish itself in the position of social control. The social order is always held intact by some particular crowd which happens to be dominant. A revolution occurs when a new crowd pushes the old one out and itself climbs into the saddle. When the new crowd is only another faction within the existing dominant crowd, like one of our established political parties, the succession will be accomplished without resort to violence, since both elements of the ruling crowd recognize the rules of the game. It will also not result in far-reaching social changes for the same reason. A true revolution occurs when the difference between the dominant crowd and the one which supplants it is so great as to produce a general social upheaval. The Reformation, the French Revolution, and the "Bolshevist" _coup d'etat_ in Russia, all were of this nature. A new social leadership was established and secured by a change in each case in the personnel of the ownership of such property as would give the owners the desired control. In the first case there was a transfer of property in the church estates, either to the local congregations, or the state, or the denomination. In the second case the property transferred was property in land, and with the Russian revolutionists landed property was given to the peasants and vested capital turned over to the control of industrial workers.

Those who lay all emphasis on this transfer of property naturally see only economic causes in revolutionary movements. Economics, however, is not a science of impersonal things. It treats rather of men's relations to things, and hence to one another. It has to do with valuations and principles of exchange and ownership, all of which need psychological restatement. The transfer of the ownership of property in times of revolution to a new class is not an end, it is a means to a new crowd's social dominance. The doctrines, ideals, and principles believed by the revolutionary crowd also serve this end of securing its dominance, as do the social changes which it effects, once in power.