Part 12

Revolutions do not occur directly from abuses of power, for in that case there would be nothing but revolution all the time, since every dominant crowd has abused its power. It is an interesting fact that revolution generally occurs after the abuses of which the revolutionists complain have been in great measure stopped--that is, after the ruling crowd has begun to make efforts at reform. The Reformation occurred in the pontificate of Leo X. If it had been the result of intolerable abuse alone, it would have happened in the time of Alexander VI, Borgia. The French Revolution fell upon the mild head of Louis XVI, though the wrongs which it tried to right mostly happened in the reign of his predecessor. In most cases the abuses, the existence of which a revolutionary crowd uses for propaganda purposes, are in turn repeated in new form by itself after it becomes dominant. The Reformers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries resorted to much the same kind of persecution from which they had themselves earlier suffered. The Constituent Assembly, though it had demanded liberty, soon set up a more outrageous tyranny through its own committees than any that the Louies had dreamed of. Bolshevists in capitalist countries are the greatest advocates of free speech; in Russia they are the authors of a very effective press-censorship.

No, it is hardly the abuses which men suffer from their ruling crowds which cause insurrection. People have borne the most terrible outrages and suffered in silence for centuries. Russia itself is a good example of this.

_A revolution occurs when the dominant crowd begins to weaken._ I think we find proof of this in the psychology of revolutionary propaganda. A general revolution is not made in a day, each such cataclysm is preceded by a long period of unrest and propaganda of opposition to the existing order and its beneficiaries. The Roman Republic began going to pieces about a hundred years before the battle of Actium. The social unrest which followed the Punic Wars and led to the revolt of the brothers Gracchi was never wholly checked during the century which followed. The dominant party had scarcely rid itself of these troublesome "demagogues" than revolt broke out among the slave population of Sicily. This was followed by the revolt of the Italian peasants, then again by the insurrection of Spartacus, and this in turn by the civil war between Marius and Sulla, the conspiracy of Catiline, the brief triumph of Julius Cæsar over the Senate, the revenge of the latter in the assassination of Cæsar, and the years of turmoil during the Second Triumvirate.

It is doubtful if there was at any time a very clear or widespread consciousness of the issues which successively arose during that unhappy century. It would seem that first one counter-crowd and then another, representing various elements of the populace, tried issue with the ruling crowd. The one factor which remained constant through all this was the progressive disintegration of the dominant party. The supremacy of the _Patres Conscripti et Equites_ became in fact a social anachronism the day that Tiberius Gracchus demanded the expropriation of the landed aristocracy. The ideas whereby the dominant crowd sought to justify its pre-emptions began to lose their functional value. Only the undisguised use of brute force was left. Such ideas ceased to convince. Men of unusual independence of mind, or men with ambitious motives, who had grown up within the dominant crowd, began to throw off the spell of its control-ideas, and, by leaving it, to weaken it further from within. No sooner was this weakness detected by other groups than every sort of grievance and partisan interest became a moral justification for efforts to supplant the rulers. The attempt of the dominant crowd to retain its hold by repeating its traditional justification-platitudes, unchanged, but with greater emphasis, may be seen in the orations of Cicero. It would be well if some one besides high-school students and their Latin teachers were to take up the study of Cicero; the social and psychological situation which this orator and writer of moral essays reveals has some suggestive similarities to things which are happening to-day.

The century and more of unrest which preceded both the Reformation and the French Revolution is in each instance a long story. But in both there is the same gradual loss of prestige on the part of the dominant crowd; the same inability of this crowd to change with the changes of time; to find new sanctions for itself when the old ones were no longer believed; the same unadaptability, the same intellectual and moral bankruptcy, therefore, the same gradual disintegration from within; the same resort to sentimentalism and ineffective use of force, the same circle of hungry counter-crowds waiting around with their tongues hanging out, ready to pounce upon that before which they had previously groveled, and to justify their ravenousness as devotion to principle; the same growing fearlessness, beginning as perfectly loyal desire to reform certain abuses incidental to the existing order, and advancing, with every sign of disillusionment or weakness, to moral indignation, open attack upon fundamental control ideas, bitter hostility, augmented by the repressive measures taken by the dominant crowd to conserve a _status quo_ which no longer gained assent in the minds of a growing counter-crowd; finally force, and a new dominant crowd more successful now in justifying old tyrannies by principles not yet successfully challenged.

In the light of these historical analogies the record of events during the last seventy-five years in western Europe and America is rather discomforting reading, and I fear the student of social psychology will find little to reassure him in the pitiable lack of intellectual leadership, the tendency to muddle through, the unteachableness and general want of statesmanlike vision displayed by our present dominant crowds. If a considerable number of people of all classes, those who desire change as well as those who oppose it, could free their thinking from the mechanisms of the crowd-mind, it might be possible to find the working solution of some of our pressing social problems and save our communities from the dreadful experience of another revolution. Our hope lies in the socially minded person who is sufficiently in touch with reality to be also a non-crowd man.

Anyone who is acquainted with the state of the public mind at present, knows that _a priori_ arguments against revolution as such are not convincing, except to those who are already convinced on other ground. The dominant crowd in each historical epoch gained its original supremacy by means of revolution. One can hardly make effective use of the commonplace antirevolutionary propaganda of defense of a certain order which has among its most ardent supporters people who are proud to call themselves sons and daughters of the Revolution. Skeptics at once raise the question whether, according to such abstract social ethics, revolutionists become respectable only after they are successful or have been a long time dead. In fact, the tendency to resort to such reasoning is one among many symptoms that the conservative mind has permitted itself to become quite as much a crowd-phenomenon as has the radical mind.

The correct approach here is psychological and pragmatic. There is an increasingly critical social situation, demanding far-reaching reconstructive change; only the most hopeless crowd-man would presume to deny this fact. The future all depends upon the mental processes with which we attempt to meet this situation. Nothing but useless misery can result from dividing crowd against crowd. Crowd-thinking, as I have said, does not solve problems. It only creates ideal compensations and defense devices for our inner conflicts. Conservative crowd-behavior has always done quite as much as anything else to precipitate a revolutionary outbreak. Radical crowd-behavior does not resolve the situation, it only inverts it. Any real solution lies wholly outside present crowd-dilemmas. What the social situation demands most is a different kind of thinking, a new education, an increasing number of people who understand themselves and are intellectually and morally independent of the tyranny of crowd-ideas.

From what has been said above, it follows that revolutionary propaganda is not directly the cause of insurrection. Such propaganda is itself an effect of the unconscious reaction between a waning and a crescent crowd. It is a symptom of the fact that a large number of people have ceased to believe in or assent to the continued dominance of the present controlling crowd and are looking to another.

There is always a tendency among conservative crowds to hasten their own downfall by the manner in which they deal with revolutionary propaganda. The seriousness of the new issue is denied; the crowd seeks to draw attention back to the old issue which it fought and won years ago in the hour of its ascendancy. The fact that the old charms and shibboleths no longer work, that they do not now apply, that the growing counter-crowd is able to psychoanalyze them, discover the hidden motives which they disguise, and laugh at them, is stoutly denied. The fiction is maintained to the effect that present unrest is wholly uncalled-for, that everything is all right, that the agitators who "make people discontented" are alien and foreign and need only be silenced with a time-worn phrase, or, that failing, shut up by force or deported, and all will be well.

I do not doubt that before the Reformation and the French Revolution there were ecclesiastics and nobles aplenty who were quite sure that the masses would never have known they were miserable if meddling disturbers had not taken the trouble to tell them so. Even an honest critical understanding of the demands of the opposing crowd is discouraged, possibly because it is rightly felt that the critical habit of mind is as destructive of one crowd-complex as the other and the old crowd prefers to remain intact and die in the last ditch rather than risk dissolution, even with the promise of averting a revolution. Hence the Romans were willing to believe that the Christians worshiped the head of an ass. The mediæval Catholics, even at Leo's court, failed to grasp the meaning of the outbreak in north Germany. Thousands saw in the Reformation only the alleged fact that the monk Luther wanted to marry a wife. To-day one looks almost in vain among business men, editors, and politicians for a more intelligent understanding of socialism. A crowd goes down to its death fighting bogies, and actually running upon the sword of its real enemy, because a crowd, once its constellation of ideas is formed, _never learns anything_.

The crowd-group contains in itself, in the very nature of crowd-thinking, the germs which sooner or later lay it low. When a crowd first becomes dominant, it carries into a place of power a number of heterogeneous elements which have, up to this time, been united in a great counter-crowd because of their common dissatisfaction with the old order. Gradually the special interests of these several groups become separated. The struggle for place is continued as a factional fight within the newly ruling crowd. This factional struggle greatly complicates every revolutionary movement. We witness this in the murderously hostile partisan conflicts which broke out in the revolutionary Assemblies in France. It is seen again in the Reformation, which had hardly established itself when the movement was rent by intense sectarian rivalries of all sorts. The same is true of Russia since the fall of the Tsar, and of Mexico ever since the overthrow of the Diaz regime. If these factional struggles go so far as to result in schism--that is, in a conscious repudiation by one or more factions of the revolutionary creed which had formerly united them all, there is disintegration and in all probability a return to the old ruling crowd.

This reaction may also be made possible by a refusal of one faction to recognize the others as integral parts of the newly triumphant crowd. If the new crowd after its victory can hold itself together, the revolution is established. It then becomes the task of the leading faction in the newly dominant crowd to grab the lion's share of the spoils for itself, give the other factions only so much prestige as will keep alive in their minds the belief that they, too, share in the new victory for "humanity" and hold the new social order together, while at the same time justifying its own leadership by the compulsive power of the idea which they all alike believe. This belief, as we have seen, is the _sine qua non_ of the continued existence of any crowd. A dominant crowd survives so long as its belief is held uncritically and repeated and acted upon automatically both by the members of the crowd and its victims. When the factions which have been put at a disadvantage by the leading faction renounce the belief, or awake to the fact that they "have been cheated," disintegration begins.

Between the crowd's professed belief and the things which it puts into practice there is a great chasm. Yet the fiction is uniformly maintained that the things done are the correct and faithful application of the great principles to which the crowd is devoted. We saw in our study of crowd-ideas in general that such ideas are not working programs, but are screens which disguise and apparently justify the real unconscious motive of crowd-behavior. The crowd secures its control, first, by proclaiming in the most abstract form certain generally accepted principles, such as freedom, righteousness, brotherly love--as though these universal "truths" were its own invention and exclusive monopoly. Next, certain logical deductions are made from these principles which, when carried to their logical conclusions regardless of fact or the effect produced, make the thing which the crowd really wants and does appear to be a vindication of the first principles. It is these inferences which go to make up the conscious thinking or belief of the crowd. Thus in the revolutionary convention in France all agree to the principles of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Fidelity to these principles would to a non-crowd mean that the believer should not try to dictate to his fellows what they must believe and choose, that he would exercise good will in his dealings with them and show them the same respect which he wished them to have for himself. But the crowd does not understand principles in this manner. Do all agree to the great slogan of the revolution? Well, then, fidelity to Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity demands that the enemies of these principles and the crowd's definition of them be overthrown. The Mountain is the truly faithful party, hence to the guillotine with the Gironde. This chasm between crowd faith and crowd practice is well illustrated in the case of those Southern patriots in America who were ready to fight and die for the rights of man as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, but refused to apply the principle of the inalienable rights of all men to their own black slaves. Or, again in the case of nineteenth-century capitalism, liberty must be given to all alike. Liberty means equal opportunity. Equal opportunity means free competition in business. Free competition exists only where there is an "incentive"; hence the investor must be encouraged and his gains protected by law. Therefore anti-capitalistic doctrines must be suppressed as subversive of our free institutions. Immigrants to whom for a generation we have extended the hospitality of our slums and labor camps, and the opportunity of freely competing with our well-intrenched corporations, must be made to feel their ingratitude if they are so misguided as to conclude, from the fact that hundreds of leading radicals have been made to serve jail sentences, while after thirty years of enforcing the antitrust law not a single person has ever been sent to prison, that possibly this is not a free land.

Or again--one convicts himself of being a crowd-man who shows partiality among crowds--the principle of democracy is generally accepted. Then there should be industrial democracy as well as political--hence the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat"--for the workers are "the people." Parliamentary assemblies elected by all the people do not necessarily represent labor. Organized labor, therefore, though a minority of the whole, should establish "industrial democracy" by force. So, according to Bolshevist crowd-logic, democracy means the rule of a minority by means of force.

Now it is this fictitious, paranoiac, crowd-logic which one must be able to dispel before he can extricate himself from the clutches of his crowd. If he subjects the whole fabric of abstractions to critical analysis, revalues it, puts himself above it, assumes a pragmatic attitude toward whatever truths it contains, dares to test these truths by their results in experience and to use them for desired ends; if, in short, he scrutinizes his own disguised impulses, brings them to consciousness as what they are, and refuses to be deceived as to their real import, even when they appear dressed in such sheep's clothing as absolutes and first principles, he becomes a non-crowd man, a social being in the best sense.

Those, however, who continue to give assent to the crowd's first principles, who still accept its habit of _a priori_ reasoning, merely substituting for its accepted deductions others of their own which in turn serve to conceal and justify their own unconscious desires, will turn from the old crowd only to be gobbled up by a new and counter-crowd. Such people have not really changed. They denounce the old crowd on the ground that "it has not lived up to its principles." It is a significant fact that a crowd's rule is generally challenged in the name of the very abstract ideas of which it has long posed as the champion.

For instance, there is liberty. 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. We have had occasion to note the intolerance of the crowd-mind as such. A revolutionary crowd, with all its lofty idealism about liberty, is commonly just as intolerant as a reactionary crowd. It must be so in order to remain a crowd. Once it is triumphant it may exert its pressure in a different direction, but the pinch is there just the same. Like its predecessor, it must resort to measures of restraint, possibly even a "reign of terror," in order that the new-won "liberty"--which is to say, its own place at the head of the procession--may be preserved. The denial of freedom appears therefore as its triumph, and for a time people are deceived. They think they are free because everyone is talking about liberty.

Eventually some one makes the discovery that people do not become free just by repeating the magic word "liberty." 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. 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. There are certain forms of revolutionary belief which are repeated again and again with such uniformity that it would seem the unconscious of the race changes very little from age to age. The wish-fancy which motivates revolutionary activity always appears to consciousness as the dream of an ideal society, a world set free; the reign of brotherly love, peace, and justice. The folly and wickedness of man is to cease. There will be no more incentive for men to do evil. The lion and the lamb shall lie down together. Old extortions and tyrannies are to be left behind. There is to be a new beginning, poverty is to be abolished, God's will is to be done in earth, or men are at last to live according to reason, and the inalienable rights of all are to be secured; or the co-operative commonwealth is to be established, with no more profit-seeking and each working gladly for the good of all. In other words, the mind of revolutionary crowds is essentially _eschatological_, or Messianic. The crowd always imagines its own social dominance is a millennium. And this trait is common to revolutionary crowds in all historical periods.

We have here the psychological explanation of the Messianic faith which is set forth with tremendous vividness in Biblical literature. The revolutionary import of the social teaching of both the Hebrew and Christian religions is so plain that I do not see how any honest and well-informed person can even attempt to deny it. The telling effectiveness with which this element in religious teaching may be used by clever radicals to convict the apologists of the present social order by the words out of their own mouths is evident in much of the socialist propaganda to-day. The tendency of the will to revolt, to express itself in accepted religious symbols, is a thing to be expected if the unconscious plays the important part in crowd-behavior that we have contended that it does.

The eighth-century Hebrew prophet mingles his denunciations of those who join house to house and field to field, who turn aside the way of the meek, and sit in Samaria in the corner of a couch and on the silken cushions of a bed, who have turned justice to wormwood and cast down righteousness to the earth, etc., etc.,--reserving his choicest woes of course for the foreign oppressors of "my people"--with promises of "the day of the Lord" with all that such a day implies, not only of triumph of the oppressed over their enemies, but of universal happiness.

Similarly the same complex of ideas appears in the writings which deal with the Hebrew "Captivity" in the sixth century B.C., with the revolt of the Maccabeans, and again in the impotent hatred against the Romans about the time of the origin of Christianity.