Part 14

There is a demand for revenge for old abuses. The displaced crowd likely as not, foreseeing the doom which awaits its members, seeks escape by attempting a counter-revolution. A propaganda of sympathy is carried on among members of this same class who remain in the dominant crowd in communities not affected by the revolution. There is secret plotting and suspicion of treason on every hand. People resort to extravagant expressions of their revolutionary principles, not only to keep up their own faith in them, but to show their loyalty to the great cause. The most fanatical and uncompromising members of the group gain prominence because of their excessive devotion. By the very logic of crowd-thinking, leadership passes to men who are less and less competent to deal with facts and more and more extreme in their zeal. Hence the usual decline from the Mirabeaus to the Dantons and Cariers, and from these to the Marats and Robespierres, from the Milukoffs to the Kerenskys and from the Kerenskys to the Trotzkys. With each excess the crowd must erect some still new defense against the inevitable disclosure of the fact that the people are not behaving at all as if they were living in the kingdom of heaven. With each farther deviation from the plain meaning of facts, the revolution must resort to more severe measures to sustain itself, until finally an unsurmountable barrier is reached, such as the arrival on the scene of a Napoleon. Then the majority are forced to abandon the vain hope of really attaining Utopia, and content themselves with fictions to the effect that what they have really _is_ Utopia--or with such other mechanisms as will serve to excuse and minimize the significance of existing facts and put off the complete realization of the ideal until some future stage of progress. It is needless to add that those who have most profited by the revolutionary change are also most ready to take the lead in persuading their neighbors to be content with these rational compromises.

Meanwhile, however, the revolutionary leaders have set up a dictatorship of their own, which, while necessary to "save the revolution," is itself a practical negation of the revolutionary dream of a free world. This dictatorship, finally passing into the hands of the more competent element of the revolutionary crowd, justifies itself to the many; professing and requiring of all a verbal assent to the revolutionary creed of which its very existence is a fundamental repudiation. This group becomes in time the nucleus about which society finally settles down again in comparative peace and equilibrium.

In general, then, it may be said that a revolution does not and cannot realize the age-long dream of a world set free. Its results may be summed up as follows: a newly dominant crowd, a new statement of old beliefs, new owners of property in the places of the old, new names for old tyrannies. Looking back over the history of the several great tidal waves of revolution which have swept over the civilization which is to-day ours, it would appear that one effect of them has been to intensify the hold which crowd-thinking has upon all of us, also to widen the range of the things which we submit to the crowd-mind for final judgment. In confirmation of this it is to be noted that it is on the whole those nations which have been burnt over by both the Reformation and the eighteenth-century revolution which exhibit the most chauvian brand of nationalism and crowd-patriotism. It is these same nations also which have most highly depersonalized their social relationships, political structures, and ideals. It is these nations also whose councils are most determined by spasms of crowd-propaganda.

The modern man doubtless has a sense of self in a degree unknown--except by the few--in earlier ages, but along with this there exists in "modern ideas," a complete system of crowd-ideas with which the conscious self comes into conflict at every turn. Just how far the revolutionary crowds of the past have operated to provide the stereotyped forms in which present crowd-thinking is carried on, it is almost impossible to learn. But that their influence has been great may be seen by anyone who attempts a psychological study of "public opinion."

Aside from the results mentioned, I think the deposit of revolutionary movements in history has been very small. It may be that, in the general shake-up of such a period, a few vigorous spirits are tossed into a place where their genius has an opportunity which it would otherwise have failed to get. But it would seem that on the whole the idea that revolutions help the progress of the race is a hoax. 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. To be "old-fashioned" and out of date is as truly to be a nonconformist as to be a freak or an originator. Faddism is neither radicalism nor a symptom of progress. It is a mark of the passion for uniformity or _the conservatism of the crowd-mind_. It is change; but its change is insignificant.

It is often said that religious liberty is the fruit of the Reformation. If so it is an indirect result and one which the reformers certainly did not desire. They sought liberty only for their own particular propaganda, a fact which is abundantly proved by Calvin's treatment of Servetus and of the Anabaptists, by Luther's attitude toward the Saxon peasants, by the treatment of Catholics in England, by the whole history of Cromwell's rule, by the persecution of Quakers and all other "heretics" in our American colonies--Pennsylvania, I believe, excepted--down to the date of the American Revolution.

It just happened that Protestantism as _the religion of the bourgeois_ fell into the hands of a group, who, outside their religious-crowd interests were destined to be the greatest practical beneficiaries of the advancement of applied science. Between applied science and science as a cultural discipline--that is, science as a humanistic study--the line is hard to draw. The Humanist spirit of the sciences attained a certain freedom, notwithstanding the fact that the whole Reformation was really a reactionary movement against the Renaissance; in spite, moreover, of the patent fact that the Protestant churches still, officially at least, resist the free spirit of scientific culture.

It is to the free spirits of the Italian Renaissance, also to the Jeffersons and Franklins and Paines, the Lincolns and Ingersolls, the Huxleys and Darwins and Spencers, the men who dared alone to resist the religious crowd-mind and to undermine the abstract ideas in which it had intrenched itself, to whom the modern world owes its religious and intellectual liberty.

The same is true of political liberty. England, which is the most free country in the world to-day, never really experienced the revolutionary crowd-movement of the eighteenth century. Instead, the changes came by a process of gradual reconstruction. And it is with just such an opportunist reconstructive process that England promises now to meet and solve the problems of the threatened social revolution. In contrast with Russia, Socialism in England has much ground for hope of success. The radical movement in England is on the whole wisely led by men who with few exceptions can think realistically and pragmatically, and refuse to be swept off their feet by crowd-abstractions. The British Labor party is the least crowd-minded of any of the socialistic organizations of our day. The Rochdale group has demonstrated that if it is co-operation that people desire as a solution of the economic problem, the way to solve it is to co-operate along definite and practicable lines; the co-operators have given up belief in the miracle of Jericho. The British trade-union movement has demonstrated the fact that organization of this kind succeeds in just the degree that it can rise above crowd-thinking and deal with a suggestion of concrete problems according to a statesmanlike policy of concerted action.

To be sure it cannot be denied that the social reconstruction in England is seriously menaced by the tendency to crowd-behavior. At best it reveals hardly more than the superior advantage to the whole community of a slightly less degree of crowd-behavior; but when compared with the Socialist movement in Russia, Germany, and the United States, it would seem that radicalism in England has at least a remote promise of reaching a working solution of the social problem; and that is more than can at present be said for the others.

In the light of what has been said about the psychology of revolution, I think we may hazard an opinion about the vaunted "Dictatorship of the Proletariat"--an idea that has provided some new catchwords for the crowd which is fascinated by the soviet revolution in Russia. Granting for the sake of argument that such a dictatorship would be desirable from any point of view--I do not see how the mere fact that people work proves their capacity to rule, horses also work--would it be possible? I think not. Even the temporary rule of Lenin in Russia can hardly be called a rule of the working class. Bolshevist propaganda will have it that such a dictatorship of the working class is positively necessary if we are ever to get away from the abuses of present "capitalistic society." Moreover, it is argued that this dictatorship of the organized workers could not be undemocratic, for since vested property is to be abolished and everyone forced to work for his living, all will belong to the working class, and therefore the dictatorship of the proletariat is but the dictatorship of all.

In the first place, assuming that it is the dictatorship of all who survive the revolution, this dictatorship of all over each is not liberty for anyone; it may leave not the tiniest corner where one may be permitted to be master of himself. The tyranny of all over each is as different from freedom as is pharisaism from spiritual living.

Again, what is there to show that this imagined dictatorship of all is to be shared equally by all, and if not have we not merely set up a new privileged class--the very thing which the Socialist Talmud has always declared it is the mission of the workers to destroy forever? While the workers are still a counter-crowd, struggling for power against the present ruling class, they are of course held together by a common cause--namely, their opposition to capital. But with labor's triumph, everybody becomes a worker, and there is no one longer to oppose. That which held the various elements of labor together in a common crowd of revolt has now ceased to exist, "class consciousness" has therefore no longer any meaning. Labor itself has ceased to exist _as a class_ by reason of its very triumph. What then remains to hold its various elements together in a common cause? Nothing at all. The solidarity of the workers vanishes, when the struggle which gave rise to that solidarity ceases. There remains now nothing but the humanitarian principle of the solidarity of the human race. Solidarity has ceased to be an economic fact, and has become purely "ideological."

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.

The experience of Russia has even now shown that if the soviets are to save themselves from nation-wide bankruptcy, specially trained men must be found to take charge of their industrial and political activities. Long training is necessary for the successful management of large affairs, and becomes all the more indispensable as industry, education, and political affairs are organized on a large scale. Are specially promising youths to be set apart from early childhood to prepare themselves for these positions of authority? Or shall such places be filled by those vigorous few who have the ambition and the strength to acquire the necessary training while at the same time working at their daily tasks? In either case an _intellectual class_ must be developed. Does anyone imagine that this new class of rulers will hesitate to make use of every opportunity to make itself a privileged class?

"But what opportunity can there be," is the reply, "since private capital is to be abolished?" Very well, there have been ruling classes before in history who did not enjoy the privilege of owning private property. The clergy of the Middle Ages was such a class, and their dominance was quite as effective and as enduring as is that of our commercial classes today. But let us not deceive ourselves; in a soviet republic there would be opportunity aplenty for exploitation. As the solidarity of labor vanished, each important trade-group would enter into rivalry with the others for leadership in the co-operative commonwealth. Every economic advantage which any group possessed would be used in order to lord it over the rest.

For instance, let us suppose that the workers in a strategic industry, such as the railways, or coal mines, should make the discovery that by going on a strike they could starve the community as a whole into submission and gain practically anything they might demand. Loyalty to the rest of labor would act no more as a check to such ambitions than does loyalty to humanity in general now. As we have seen, the crowd is always formed for the unconscious purpose of relaxing the social control by mechanisms which mutually justify such antisocial conduct on the part of members of the crowd. There is every reason, both economic and psychological, why the workers in each industry would become organized crowds seeking to gain for their particular groups the lion's share of the spoils of the social revolution. What would there be, then, to prevent the workers of the railroads or some other essential industry from exploiting the community quite as mercilessly as the capitalists are alleged to do at present? Nothing but the rivalry of other crowds who were seeking the same dominance. In time a _modus vivendi_ would doubtless be reached whereby social control would be shared by a few of the stronger unions--and their leaders.

The strike has already demonstrated the fact that in the hands of a well-organized body of laborers, especially in those trades where the number of apprentices may be controlled, industrial power becomes a much more effective weapon than it is in the hands of the present capitalistic owners.

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_.

IX

FREEDOM AND GOVERNMENT BY CROWDS

The whole philosophy of politics comes down at last to a question of four words. Who is to govern? Compared with this question the problem of the form of government is relatively unimportant. Crowd-men, whatever political faith they profess, behave much the same when they are in power. The particular forms of political organization through which their power is exerted are mere incidentals. There is the same self-laudation, the same tawdry array of abstract principles, the same exploitation of under crowds, the same cunning in keeping up appearances, the same preference of the charlatan for positions of leadership and authority. Machiavelli's Prince, or Dostoievsky's Grand Inquisitor, would serve just as well as the model for the guidance of a Cæsar Borgia, a leader of Tammany Hall, a chairman of the National Committee of a political party, or a Nicolai Lenin.

Ever since the days of Rousseau certain crowds have persisted in the conviction that all tyrannies were foisted upon an innocent humanity by a designing few. There may have been a few instances in history where such was the case, but tyrannies of that kind have never lasted long. For the most part the tyrant is merely the instrument and official symbol of a dominant crowd. His acts are his crowd's acts, and without his crowd to support him he very soon goes the way of the late Sultan of Turkey. The Cæsars were hardly more than "walking delegates," representing the ancient Roman Soldiers' soviet. They were made and unmade by the army which, though Cæsars might come and Cæsars might go, continued to lord it over the Roman world. While the army was pagan, even the mild Marcus Aurelius followed Nero's example of killing Christians. When finally the army itself became largely Christian, and the fiction that the Christians drank human blood, worshiped the head of an ass, and were sexually promiscuous was no longer good patriotic propaganda, the Emperor Constantine began to see visions of the Cross in the sky. The Pope, who is doubtless the most absolute monarch in the Occident, is, however, "infallible" only when he speaks _ex-cathedra_--that is, as the "Church Herself." His infallibility is that of the Church. All crowds in one way or another claim infallibility. The tyrant Robespierre survived only so long as did his particular revolutionary crowd in France.

The fate of Savonarola was similar. From his pulpit he could rule Florence with absolute power just so long as he told his crowd what it wished to hear, and so long as his crowd was able to keep itself together and remain dominant. The Stuarts, Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs, and Romanoffs, with all their claims to divine rights, were little more than the living symbols of their respective nation-crowds. They vanished when they ceased to represent successfully the crowd-will.

In general, then, it may be said that _where the crowd is, there is tyranny_. Tyranny may be exercised through one agent or through many, but it nearly always comes from the same source--the crowd. Crowd-rule may exist in a monarchical form of government, or in a republic. The personnel of the dominant crowd will vary with a change in the form of the state, but the spirit will be much the same. Conservative writers are in the habit of assuming that democracy is the rule of crowds pure and simple. Whether crowd-government is more absolute in a democracy than in differently constituted states is a question. The aim of democratic constitutions like our own is to prevent any special crowd from intrenching itself in a position of social control and thus becoming a ruling class. As the experiment has worked out thus far it can hardly be said that it has freed us from the rule of crowds. It has, however, multiplied the number of mutually suspicious crowds, so that no one of them has for long enjoyed a sufficiently great majority to make itself clearly supreme, though it must be admitted that up to the present the business-man crowd has had the best of the deal. The story of the recent Eighteenth Amendment shows how easy it is for a determined crowd, even though in a minority, to force its favorite dogmas upon the whole community. We shall doubtless see a great deal more of this sort of thing in the future than we have in the past. And if the various labor groups should become sufficiently united in a "proletarian" crowd there is nothing to prevent their going to any extreme.

We are passing through a period of socialization. All signs point to the establishment of some sort of social state or industrial commonwealth. No one can foresee the extent, to which capital now privately owned is to be transferred to the public. It is doubtful if anything can be done to check this process. The tendency is no sooner blocked along one channel than it begins to seep through another. In itself there need be nothing alarming about this transition. If industry could be better co-ordinated and more wisely administered by non-crowd men for the common good, the change might work out to our national advantage.

It is possible to conceive of a society in which a high degree of social democracy, even communism, might exist along with a maximum of freedom and practical achievement. But we should first have to get over our crowd-ways of thinking and acting. People would have to regard the state as a purely administrative affair. They would have to organize for definite practical ends, and select their leaders and administrators very much as certain corporations now do, strictly on the basis of their competency. Political institutions would have to be made such that they could not be seized by special groups to enhance themselves at the expense of the rest. Partisanship would have to cease. Every effort would have to be made to loosen the social control over the individual's personal habits. The kind of people who have an inner gnawing to regulate their neighbors, the kind who cannot accept the fact of their psychic inferiority and must consequently make crowds by way of compensation, would have to be content to mind their own business. Police power would have to be reduced to the minimum necessary to protect life and keep the industries running. People would have to become much more capable of self-direction as well as of voluntary co-operation than they are now. They would have to be more resentful of petty official tyranny, more independent in their judgments and at the same time more willing to accept the advice and authority of experts. They would have to place the control of affairs in the hands of the type of man against whose dominance the weaker brethren have in all ages waged war--that is, the free spirits and natural masters of men. All pet dogmas and cult ideas that clashed with practical considerations would have to be swept away.

Such a conception of society is, of course, wholly utopian. It could not possibly be realized by people behaving and thinking as crowds. With our present crowd-making habits, the process of greater socialization of industry means only increased opportunities for crowd-tyranny. In the hands of a dominant crowd an industrial state would be indeed what Herbert Spencer called the "coming slavery."