Chapter III: Part 3

When a crowd is defeated and its hope of victory fades, the individual soon abandons the unsuccessful group. The great cause, being now a forlorn hope, is seen in a different light, and the crowd character of the group vanishes. When, however, certain forces still operate to keep the crowd state of mind alive--forces such as race feeling, patriotism, religious belief, or class consciousness--the ego consciousness of the individuals so grouped finds escape in the promise of heaven, the Judgment Day, and that "far off divine event toward which the whole creation moves." Meanwhile the hope of victory is changed into that "impotent resentment" so graphically described by Nietzsche.

Another way in which the self feeling of the crowd functions is in idealizing those who succeed in gaining its recognition. The crowd always makes a hero of the public person, living or dead. Regardless of what he really did or was, he is transformed into a symbol of what the crowd wishes to believe him to be. Certain aspects of his teaching and various incidents which would appear in his biography are glossed over, and made into supports for existing crowd-ideas and prejudices. Most of the great characters in history have suffered in this way at the hands of tradition. The secret of their greatness, their uniqueness and spiritual isolation, is in great part ignored. The crowd's own secret is substituted. The great man now appears great because he possessed the qualities of little men. He is representative man, crowd man. Every crowd has a list of heroic names which it uses in its propaganda and in its self-laudation. The greatness which each crowd reveres and demands that all men honor is just that greatness which the crowd treasures as a symbol of itself, the sort of superiority which the members of the crowd may suck up to swell their own ego consciousness.

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. We have here one of the secrets of the appeal which all such exhibitions make to people. Nothing so easily catches general attention and creates a crowd as a contest of any kind. The crowd unconsciously identifies its members with one or the other competitor. Success enables the winning crowd to "crow over" the losers. Such an occasion becomes symbolic and is utilized by the ego to enhance its feeling of importance.

A similar psychological fact may be observed in the "jollifications" of political parties after the election of their candidates for high office. This phenomenon is also seen, if I may say so without being misunderstood, in the new spirit which characterizes a people victorious in war, and is to no small degree the basis of the honor of successful nations. It is seen again in the pride which the citizens of a small town show in the fact that the governor of the state is a native of the place. This same principle finds place in such teachings of the Church as the doctrine of the "communion of the saints," according to which the spiritual grace and superiority of the great and pure become the common property of the Church, and may be shared by all believers as a saving grace.

Every organized crowd is jealous of its dignity and honor and is bent upon keeping up appearances. Nothing is more fatal to it than a successful assault upon its prestige. Every crowd, even the casual street mob, clothes the egoistic desires of its members or participants in terms of the loftiest moral motive. No crowd can afford to be laughed at. Crowd men have little sense of humor, certainly none concerning themselves and their crowd-ideas. Any laughter they indulge in is more likely to be directed at those who do not believe with them. The crowd-man resents any suspicion of irreverence or criticism of his professions, because to question them is to weaken the claim of his crowd upon the people, and to destroy in those professed ideals their function of directing his own attention away from the successful compromise of his unconscious conflicts which the crowd had enabled him to make. The crowd would perish if it lost its "ideals." It clings to its fixed ideas with the same tenacity as does the paranoiac. You can no more reason with the former than you can with the latter, and for much the same cause; the beliefs of both are not the fruit of inquiry, neither do they perform the normal intellectual function of adjustment to environment; they are mechanisms of the ego by which it keeps itself in countenance.

Much of the activity of the unconscious ego is viewed by psychologists as "compensation." Devices which serve the purpose of compensating the ego for some loss, act of self-sacrifice, or failure, are commonly revealed by both the normal and the unadjusted. The popular notion that unsatisfied desires sooner or later perish of starvation is at best but a half truth. These desires after we have ceased to attend them become transformed. They frequently find satiety in some substitute which the unconscious accepts as a symbol of its real object. Dreams of normal people contain a great deal of material of this sort. So do day-dreams, and art. Many religious beliefs also serve this purpose of compensation. Jung follows Freud in pointing out as a classic example of the compensation in dreams, that of Nebuchadnezzar, in the Bible.

Nebuchadnezzar at the height of his power had a dream which
foretold his downfall. He dreamed of a tree which had raised its
head even up to Heaven and now must be hewn down. This was a
dream which is obviously a counterpoise to the exaggerated
feeling of royal power.

According to Jung, we may expect to find only those things contained in the unconscious which we have not found in the conscious mind. Many conscious virtues and traits of character are thus compensations for their opposite in the unconscious.

In the case of abnormal people, the individual entirely fails to
recognize the compensating influences which arise in the
unconscious. He even continues to accentuate his onesidedness;
this is in accord with the well-known psychological fact that
the worst enemy of the wolf is the wolfhound, the greatest
despiser of the negro is the mulatto, and that the biggest
fanatic is the convert; for I should be a fanatic were I to
attack a thing outwardly which inwardly I am obliged to concede
is right.

The mentally unbalanced man tries to defend himself against his
own unconscious--that is to say, he battles against his own
compensating influences. In normal minds opposites of feeling
and valuations lie closely associated; the law of this
association is called "ambivalence," about which we shall see
more later. In the abnormal, the pairs are torn asunder, the
resulting division, or strife, leads to disaster, for the
unconscious soon begins to intrude itself violently upon the
conscious processes.

An especially typical form of unconscious compensation ... is
the paranoia of the alcoholic. The alcoholic loses his love for
his wife; the unconscious compensation tries to lead him back
again to his duty, but only partially succeeds, for it causes
him to become jealous of his wife as if he still loved her. As
we know, he may go so far as to kill both his wife and himself,
merely out of jealousy. In other words, his love for his wife
has not been entirely lost. It has simply become subliminal; but
from the realm of consciousness it can now only reappear in the
form of jealousy.... We see something of a similar nature in the
case of the religious convert.... The new convert feels himself
constrained to defend the faith he has adopted (since much of
the old faith still survives in the unconscious associations) in
a more or less fanatical way. It is exactly the same in the
paranoiac who feels himself constantly constrained to defend
himself against all external criticism, because his delusional
system is too much threatened from within.

It is not necessary for us to enter here upon a discussion of the processes by which these compensating devices are wrought out in the psychoneurosis. It is significant, though, that Jung calls attention to the likeness between religious fanaticism and paranoia. Now it is obvious that the fanaticism of the religious convert differs psychologically not at all from that of any other convert. We have already noted the fact that most religious conversions are accomplished by the crowd. Moreover the crowd everywhere tends to fanaticism. The fanatic is the crowd-man pure and simple. He is the type which it ever strives to produce. His excess of devotion, and willingness to sacrifice both himself and everyone else for the crowd's cause, always wins the admiration of his fellow crowd-members. He has given all for the crowd, is wholly swallowed by it, is "determined not to know anything save" his crowd and its propaganda. He is the martyr, the true believer, "the red-blooded loyal American" with "my country right or wrong." He is the uncompromising radical whose prison record puts to shame the less enthusiastic members of his group. He is the militant pacifist, the ever-watchful prohibitionist, and keeper of his neighbors' consciences, the belligerent moral purist, who is scandalized even at the display of lingerie in the store windows, the professional reformer who in every community succeeds in making his goodness both indispensable and unendurable.

One need not be a psychologist to suspect that the evil against which the fanatic struggles is really in large measure in himself. He has simply externalized, or "projected" the conflict in his own unconscious. Persons who cry aloud with horror at every change in the style of women's clothing are in most cases persons whose ego is gnawed by a secret promiscuous eroticism. The scandalmonger, inhibited from doing the forbidden thing, enjoys himself by a vicarious indulgence in rottenness. The prohibition agitator, if not himself an alcoholic barely snatched from the burning, is likely to be one who at least feels safer in a democracy where it is not necessary to resist temptation while passing a saloon door. Notice that the fanatic or crowd-man always strives to universalize his own moral dilemmas. This is the device by which every crowd seeks dominance in the earth. A crowd's virtues and its vices are really made out of the same stuff. Each is simply the other turned upside down, the compensation for the other. They are alike and must be understood together as the expression of the type of person who constitutes the membership of some particular group or crowd.

I'll never use tobacco, it is a filthy weed
I'll never put it in my mouth, said little Robert Reed.

But obviously, little Robert is already obsessed with a curious interest in tobacco. His first word shows that he has already begun to think of this weed in connection with himself. Should a crowd of persons struggling with Robert's temptation succeed in dominating society, tobacco would become taboo and thus would acquire a moral significance which it does not have at present. So with all our crowd-ethics. The forbidden thing protrudes itself upon consciousness as a negation. The negation reveals what it is that is occupying the inner psyche, and is its compensation. There are certain psychoneuroses in which this negative form of compensation is very marked. Now it is a noteworthy fact that with the crowd the ethical interest always takes this negative form.

The healthy moral will is characterized by a constant restating of the problem of living in terms of richer and higher and more significant dilemmas as new possibilities of personal worth are revealed by experience. New and more daring valuations are constantly made. The whole psychic functioning is enriched. Goodness means an increase of satisfactions through a more adequate adjustment to the real--richer experience, more subtle power of appreciation and command, a self-mastery, sureness, and general personal excellence--which on occasions great and small mark the good will as a reality which counts in the sum total of things. Something is achieved because it is really desired; existence is in so far humanized, a self has been realized. As Professor Dewey says:

If our study has shown anything it is that the moral _is_ a
life, not something ready-made and complete once for all. It is
instinct with movement and struggle, and it is precisely the
new and serious situations which call out new vigor and lift it
to higher levels.

It is not so with the crowd-ethic. It is interesting to note that from the "Decalogue" to Kant's "Categorical Imperative," crowd-morals always and everywhere take the form of prohibitions, taboos, and ready-made standards, chiefly negative. Freud has made an analytical study of the Taboo as found in primitive society and has shown that it has a compensatory value similar to that of the taboos and compulsions of certain neurotics.

The crowd admits of no personal superiority other than that which consists in absolute conformity to its own negative standards. Except for the valuations expressed by its own dilemmas, "one man is as good as another"--an idea which it can be easily seen serves the purpose of compensation. The goodness which consists of unique personal superiority is very distasteful to the crowd. There must be only one standard of behavior, alike for all. A categorical imperative. The standard as set up is of the sort which is most congenial, possible of attainment, and even necessary for the survival of the members of some particular crowd. It is _their_ good, the converse and compensation of their own vices, temptations, and failures. The crowd then demands that this good shall be THE GOOD, that it become the universal standard. By such means even the most incompetent and unadventurous and timid spirits may pass judgment upon all men. They may cry to the great of the earth, "We have piped unto you and you have not danced." Judged by the measure of their conformity to the standards of the small, the great may be considered no better, possibly not so good as the little spirits. The well are forced to behave like the spiritually sick. The crowd is a dog in the manger. If eating meat maketh my brother to be scandalized, or giveth him the cramps, I shall remain a vegetarian so long as the world standeth. Nietzsche was correct on this point. The crowd--he called it the herd--is a weapon of revenge in the hands of the weaker brother. It is a Procrustean bed on which every spiritual superiority may be lopped off to the common measure, and every little ego consciousness may be stretched to the stature of full manhood.

V

THE CROWD A CREATURE OF HATE

Probably the most telling point of likeness between the crowd-mind and the psychoneurosis--paranoia especially--is the "delusion of persecution." In cases of paranoia the notion that the patient is the victim of all sorts of intrigue and persecution is so common as to be a distinguishing symptom of this disease. Such delusions are known to be defenses, or compensation mechanisms, growing out of the patient's exaggerated feeling of self-importance. The delusion of grandeur and that of being persecuted commonly go together. The reader will recall the passage quoted from the pamphlet given me by a typical paranoiac. The author of the document mentioned feels that he has a great mission, that of exposing and reforming the conditions in hospitals for the insane. He protests his innocence. In jail he feels like Christ among his tormentors. His wife has conspired against him. The woman who owns the hotel where he was employed wishes to put him out of the way. The most fiendish methods are resorted to in order to end his life. "Some one" blocked up the stovepipe, etc., etc.

Another illustration of a typical case is given by Doctor Brill. I quote scattered passages from the published notes on the case record of the patient, "E. R."

He graduated in 1898 and then took up schoolteaching.... He did
not seem to get along well with his principal and other
teachers.... He imagined that the principal and other teachers
were trying to work up a "badger game" on him, to the effect
that he had some immoral relations with his girl pupils....

In 1903 he married, after a brief courtship, and soon thereafter
took a strong dislike to his brother-in-law and sister and
accused them of immorality.... He also accused his wife of
illicit relations with his brother and his brother-in-law, Mr. S.

Mr. S., his brother-in-law, was the arch conspirator against
him. He also (while in the hospital) imagined that some women
made signs to him and were in the hospital for the purpose of
liberating him. Whenever he heard anybody talking he immediately
referred it to himself. He interpreted every movement and
expression as having some special meaning for himself....

Now and then (after his first release by order of the court) he
would send mysterious letters to different persons in New York
City. At that time one of his delusions was that he was a great
statesman and that the United States government had appointed
him ambassador (to Canada), but that the "gang" in New York City
had some one without ability to impersonate him so that he lost
his appointment. (Later, while confined to the hospital again)
he thought that the daughter of the President of the United
States came to visit him....

After the patient was recommitted to Bellevue Hospital, he told
me that I (Doctor Brill) was one of the "gang." I was no longer
his wife in disguise (as he has previously imagined) but his
enemy.

Brill's discussion of this case contains an interesting analysis of the several stages of "regression" and the unconscious mechanisms which characterize paranoia. He holds that such cases show a "fixation" in an earlier stage of psychosexual development. The patient, an unconscious homosexual, is really in love with himself. The resulting inner conflict appears, with its defense formations, as the delusion of grandeur and as conscious hatred for the person or persons who happen to be the object of the patient's homosexual wish fancy. However this may be, the point of interest for our study is the "projection" of this hatred to others. Says Brill:

The sentence, "I rather hate him" becomes transformed through
projection into the sentence, "he hates (persecutes) me, which
justifies my hating him."

The paranoiac's delusional system inevitably brings him in conflict with his environment, but his feeling of being persecuted is less the result of this conflict with an external situation than of his own inner conflict. He convinces himself that it is the other, or others, not he, who is the author of this hatred. He is the innocent victim of their malice.

This phenomenon of "projection and displacement" has received considerable attention in analytical psychology. Freud, in the book, _Totem and Taboo_, shows the role which projection plays in the primitive man's fear of demons. The demons are of course the spirits of the dead. But how comes it that primitive people fear these spirits, and attribute to them every sort of evil design against the living? To quote Freud:

When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her mother, it not
infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with
tormenting scruples, called "obsessive reproaches," which raise
the question whether she herself has not been guilty, through
carelessness or neglect, of the death of the beloved person. No
recalling of the care with which she nursed the invalid, or
direct refutation of the asserted guilt, can put an end to the
torture, which is the pathological expression of mourning and
which in time slowly subsides. Psychoanalytic investigation of
such cases has made us acquainted with the secret mainspring of
this affliction. We have ascertained that these obsessive
reproaches are in a certain sense justified.... Not that the
mourner has really been guilty of the death or that she has
really been careless, as the obsessive reproach asserts; but
still there was something in her, a wish of which she was
unaware, which was not displeased with the fact that death came,
and which would have brought it about sooner had it been strong
enough. The reproach now reacts against this unconscious wish
after the death of the beloved person. Such hostility, hidden in
the unconscious behind tender love, exists in almost all cases
of intensive emotional allegiance to a particular person;
indeed, it represents the classic case, the prototype of the
ambivalence of human emotions....

By assuming a similar high degree of ambivalence in the
emotional life of primitive races such as psychoanalysis
ascribes to persons suffering from compulsion neurosis, it
becomes comprehensible that the same kind of reaction against
the hostility latent in the unconscious behind the obsessive
reproaches of the neurotic should also be necessary here after
the painful loss has occurred. But this hostility, which is
painfully felt in the unconscious in the form of satisfaction
with the demise, experiences a different fate in the case of
primitive man: the defense against it is accomplished by a
displacement upon the object of hostility--namely, the dead. We
call this defense process, frequent in both normal and diseased
psychic life, a "projection."... Thus we find that taboo has
grown out of the soil of an ambivalent emotional attitude. The
taboo of the dead also originates from the opposition between
conscious grief and the unconscious satisfaction at death. If
this is the origin of the resentment of spirits, it is
self-evident that the nearest and formerly most beloved
survivors have to feel it most. As in neurotic symptoms, the
taboo regulations evince opposite feelings. Their restrictive
character expresses mourning, while they also betray very
clearly what they are trying to conceal--namely, the hostility
toward the dead which is now motivated as self-defense....

The double feeling--tenderness and hostility--against the
deceased, which we consider well-founded, endeavors to assert
itself at the time of bereavement as mourning and satisfaction.
A conflict must ensue between these contrary feelings, and as
one of them--namely, the hostility, is altogether, or for the
greater part, unconscious, the conflict cannot result in a
conscious difference in the form of hostility or tenderness, as,
for instance, when we forgive an injury inflicted upon us by
some one we love. The process usually adjusts itself through a
special psychic mechanism which is designated in psychoanalysis
as "projection." This unknown hostility, of which we are
ignorant and of which we do not wish to know, is projected from
our inner perception into the outer world and is thereby
detached from our own person and attributed to another. Not we,
the survivors, rejoice because we are rid of the deceased, on
the contrary we mourn for him; but now, curiously enough, he has
become an evil demon who would rejoice in our misfortune and who
seeks our death. The survivors must now defend themselves
against this evil enemy; they are freed from inner oppression,
but they have only succeeded in exchanging it for an affliction
from without.

Totem, taboo, demon worship, etc., are clearly primitive crowd-phenomena. Freud's main argument in this book consists in showing the likeness between these phenomena and the compulsion neurosis. The projection of unconscious hostility upon demons is by no means the only sort of which crowds both primitive and modern are capable. Neither must the hostility always be unconscious. Projection is a common device whereby even normal and isolated individuals justify themselves in hating. Most of us love to think evil of our enemies and opponents. Just as two fighting schoolboys will each declare that the other "began it," so our dislike of people often first appears to our consciousness as a conviction that they dislike or entertain unfriendly designs upon us. There is a common type of female neurotic whose repressed erotic wishes appear in the form of repeated accusations that various of her men acquaintances are guilty of making improper advances to her. When the "white slavery" reform movement swept over the country--an awakening of the public conscience which would have accomplished a more unmixed good if it had not been taken up in the usual crowd-spirit--it was interesting to watch the newspapers and sensational propagandist speakers as they deliberately encouraged these pathological phenomena in young people. The close psychological relation between the neurosis and the crowd-mind is shown by the fact that the two so frequently appear at the same moment, play so easily into each other's hands, and are apparently reactions to the very same social situation.

In Brill's example of paranoia, it will be remembered that the patient's delusions of persecution took the form of such statements as that the "gang" had intrigued at Washington to prevent his appointment as ambassador, that certain of his relatives were in a "conspiracy against him." How commonly such phrases and ideas occur in crowd-oratory and in the crowd-newspaper is well known to all. We have already seen that the crowd in most cases identifies itself with "the people," "humanity," "society," etc. Listen to the crowd-orator and you will also learn that there are all sorts of abominable "conspiracies" against "the people." "The nation is full of traitors." The Church is being "undermined by cunning heretics." "The Bolshevists are in secret league with the Germans to destroy civilization." "Socialists are planning to corrupt the morals of our youth and undermine the sacredness of the home." "The politicians' gang intends to loot the community." "Wall Street is conspiring to rob the people of their liberties." "England plans to reduce America to a British colony again." "Japan is getting ready to make war on us." "German merchants are conducting a secret propaganda intending to steal our trade and pauperize our nation." "The Catholics are about to seize power and deliver us over to another Inquisition." "The liquor interests want only to make drunkards of our sons and prostitutes of our daughters." And so on and so forth, wherever any crowd can get a hearing for its propaganda. Always the public welfare is at stake; society is threatened. The "wrongs" inflicted upon an innocent humanity are rehearsed. Bandages are taken off every social wound. Every scar, be it as old as Cromwell's mistreatment of Ireland, is inflamed. "The people are being deceived," "kept down," "betrayed." They must rise and throw off their exploiters, or they must purge the nation of disloyalty and "anarchy."

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. This suspiciousness, this habit of misrepresentation and exaggeration of every conceivable wrong, is not only a great hindrance to the conflicting groups in adjusting their differences, it makes impossible, by misrepresenting the real issue at stake, any effective struggle for ideals. As the history of all crowd movements bears witness, the real source of conflict is forgotten, the issue becomes confused with the spectacular, the unimportant, and imaginary. Energy is wasted on side issues, and the settlement finally reached, even by a clearly victorious crowd, is seldom that of the original matter in dispute. In fact, it is not at all the function of these crowd-ideas of self-pity and persecution to deal with real external situations. These ideas are propaganda. Their function is to keep the crowd together, to make converts, to serve as a defense for the egoism of the crowd-man, to justify the anticipated tyranny which it is the unconscious desire of the individual to exercise in the moment of victory for his crowd, and, as "they who are not for us are against us," to project the crowd-man's hatred upon the intended victims of his crowd's will to universal dominion. In other words, these propaganda ideas serve much the same end as do the similar delusions of persecution in paranoia.

This likeness between the propaganda of the crowd and the delusions of paranoia is illustrated daily in our newspapers. The following items cut from the New York _Tribune_ are typical. The first needs no further discussion, as it parallels the cases given above. The second is from the published proceedings of "a committee," appointed, as I remember it, by the assembly of the state of New York, to conduct an investigation into certain alleged seditious and anarchist activities. These articles well illustrate the character of the propaganda to which such a committee almost inevitably lends itself. Whether the committee or the newspapers were chiefly responsible for such fabrications, I do not know, but the crowd character of much of the attempt to stamp out Bolshevism is strikingly revealed in this instance. No doubt the members of this committee, as well as the detectives and the press agents who are associated with them, are as honestly convinced that a mysterious gang of radicals is planning to murder us all as is the paranoiac W. H. M. fixed in his delusion that his enemies are trying to asphyxiate him. It will be remembered that Brill's patient "E. S." interpreted "every movement and expression as having some special meaning for himself." This kind of "interpretation" has a curious logic all its own. It is what I would call "compulsive thinking," and is characteristic of both the delusions of paranoia and the rumors of the crowd.

First clipping:

INVENTOR IS DECLARED INSANE BY A JURY.

W. H. M. declares rivals are attempting to asphyxiate him. W. H.
M., an inventor, was declared mentally incompetent yesterday by
a jury in the Sheriff's court.... Alienists said M. had
hallucinations about enemies who he thinks are trying to
asphyxiate him. He also imagines that he is under hypnotic
influences and that persons are trying to affect his body with
"electrical influences."

Second clipping:

RADICALS HERE SEEK SOLDIERS FOR "RED GUARD."

Several hundred men, formerly in United States Service, signify
willingness to aid in project. A "Red Guard" composed of men who
have served in the American military establishment is
contemplated in the elaborate revolutionary plans of Bolshevik
leaders here. This was learned yesterday when operatives of the
Lusk committee discovered that the radicals were making every
effort to enlist the aid of the Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines
Protective Association in carrying out a plot to overthrow the
government by force. As far as the detectives have been able to
ascertain, the great mass of fighting men are not in sympathy
with the Reds, but several hundred have signified their
willingness to co-operate.

Just how far the plans of the Reds have progressed was not
revealed. It is known, however, that at a convention of the Left
Wing Socialists in Buffalo the movement designed to enlist the
support of the Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines Protective
Association was launched. This convention was addressed by
prominent Left Wingers from Boston, New York, Philadelphia,
Pittsburgh, and Paterson. They asserted that trained military
men must be obtained for the organization if the plans were to
be successful.

It was from this meeting, which was held in secret, that
agitators were sent to various parts of the state to form
soviets in the shops and factories. This phase of the radical
activity, according to the investigators, has met with
considerable success in some large factory districts where most
of the workers are foreign-born. In some places the soviets in
the shops have become so strong that the employers are alarmed
and have notified the authorities of the menace. When sufficient
evidence has been gathered, foreign-born agitators working to
cause unrest in factories will be apprehended and recommended
for deportation.

Later report:

DENIES FORMATION OF "RED GUARD" IN U. S.

Alfred Levitt, secretary of the Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines
Protective Association, yesterday emphatically denied that the
organization was to be used as a "Red Guard" by the radicals
when they started their contemplated revolution. He said he
never had heard any of the members of the association discuss
the formation of a "Red Guard" but admitted that many of them
were radicals.

In the two instances given above, fear, suspicion, hatred, give rise in one case to a delusional system in the mind of an isolated individual, and in the other to the circulation of an unfounded rumor by men who in their right minds would, to say the least, carefully scrutinize the evidence for such a story before permitting it to be published. As several months have passed since the publication of this story and nothing more has appeared which would involve our returned service men in any such treasonable conspiracy, I think it is safe to say that this story, like many others circulated by radicals as well as by reactionaries during the unsettled months following the war, has its origin in the unconscious mechanisms of crowd-minded people. Every sort of crowd is prone to give credence to rumors of this nature, and to accuse all those who can not at once give uncritical acceptance to such tales of sympathy with the enemy. Later we shall have something to say about the delusional systems which appear to be common to the crowd-mind and the paranoiac. In this connection I am interested in pointing out only the psychological relation between what I might call the "conspiracy delusion" and unconscious hatred. Commonly the former is the "projection" of the latter.

One of the differences between these two forms of "projection" is the fact that the hatred of the crowd is commonly less "rationalized" than in paranoia--that is, less successfully disguised. Like the paranoiac, every crowd is potentially if not actually homicidal in its tendencies. But whereas with the paranoiac the murderous hostility remains for the greater part an unconscious "wish fancy," and it is the mechanisms which disguise it or serve as a defense against it which appear to consciousness, with the crowd the murder-wish will itself appear to consciousness whenever the unconscious can fabricate such defense mechanisms as will provide it with a fiction of moral justification. Consequently, it is this fiction of justification which the crowd-man must defend.

The crowd's delusion of persecution, conspiracy, or oppression is thus a defense mechanism of this nature. The projection of this hatred on those outside the crowd serves not so much, as in paranoia, to shield the subject from the consciousness of his own hatred, as to provide him with a pretext for exercising it. Given such a pretext, most crowds will display their homicidal tendencies quite openly.

Ordinary mobs or riots would seem to need very little justification of this sort. But even these directly homicidal crowds invariably represent themselves as motivated by moral idealism and righteous indignation. Negroes are lynched in order to protect the white womanhood of the South, also because, once accused, the negro happens to be helpless. If the colored people were in the ascendancy and the whites helpless we should doubtless see the reverse of this situation. A community rationally convinced of the culprit's guilt could well afford to trust the safety of womanhood to the justice meted out by the courts, but it is obvious that these "moral" crowds are less interested in seeing that justice is done than in running no risk of losing their victim, once he is in their power. A recent development of this spirit is the lynching in a Southern town of a juror who voted for the acquittal of a black man accused of a crime.

It may be taken as a general law of crowd-psychology that the "morality" of the crowd always demands a victim. Is it likely that one of these mobs would "call off" an interesting lynching party if at the last minute it were demonstrated that the accused was innocent? The practice of lynching has been extended, from those cases where the offense with which the accused is charged is so revolting as justly to arouse extreme indignation, to offenses which are so trivial that they merely serve as a pretext for torture and killing.

The homicidal tendencies of the crowd-mind always reveal themselves the minute the crowd becomes sufficiently developed and powerful to relax for the time being the usual social controls. Illustrations of this may be seen in the rioting between the white and the colored races--epidemics of killing--such as occurred recently in East St. Louis, and in the cities of Washington, Chicago, and Omaha. The same thing is evident in the "pogroms" of Russia and Poland, in the acts of revolutionary mobs of Germany and Russia, in the promptness with which the Turks took advantage of the situation created by the war to slaughter the Armenians. This hatred is the specter which forever haunts the conflict between labor and capital. It is what speedily transformed the French Revolution from the dawn of an era of "Fraternity" to a day of terror and intimidation. It is seen again in the curious interest which the public always has in a sensational murder trial. It is evident in the hostility, open or suppressed, with which any community regards the strange, the foreign, the "outlandish"--an example of which is the frequent bullying and insulting of immigrants in this country since the war. Much of the "Americanization propaganda" which we have carried on since the war unfortunately gave the typical crowd-man his opportunity. One need only listen to the speeches or read the publications of certain "patriotic" societies to learn why it was that the exhortation to our foreign neighbors to be loyal did so much more harm than good.

The classic example of the killing crowd is, of course, a nation at war. There are, to be sure, wars of national self-defense which are due to political necessity rather than to crowd-thinking, but even in such cases the phenomena of the crowd are likely to appear to the detriment of the cause. At such times not only the army but the whole nation becomes a homicidal crowd. The army, at least while the soldiers are in service, probably shows the crowd-spirit in a less degree than does the civilian population. The mental processes of an entire people are transformed. Every interest--profit-seeking excepted--is subordinated to the one passion to crush the enemy. The moment when war is declared is usually hailed with tremendous popular enthusiasm and joy. There is a general lifting of spirits. There is a sense of release, a nation-wide exultation, a sigh of relief as we feel the deadening hand of social control taken from our throats. The homicidal wish-fancy, which in peace times and in less sovereign crowds exists only as an hypothesis, can now become a reality. And though it is doubtful if more than one person in a million can ever give a rational account of just what issue is really at stake in any war, the conviction is practically unanimous that an occasion has been found which justifies, even demands, the release of all the repressed hostility in our natures. The fact that in war time this crowd hostility may, under certain circumstances, really have survival value and be both beneficial and necessary to the nation, is to my mind not a justification of crowd-making. It is rather a revelation of the need of a more competent leadership in world politics.

Unconsciously every national crowd, I mean the crowd-minded element in the nation, carries a chip on its shoulder, and swaggers and challenges its neighbors like a young town-bully on his way home from grammar school. This swaggering, which is here the "compulsive manifestation" of unconscious hostility characteristic of every crowd, appears to consciousness as "national honor." To the consciousness of the nation-crowd the quarrel for which it has been spoiling for a long time always appears to have been "forced upon it." Some nations are much more quarrelsome than others. I cannot believe that our conviction that Imperial Germany was the aggressor in the great war is due merely to patriotic conceit on our part. The difference between our national spirit and that of Imperial Prussia is obvious, but the difference in this respect, great as it is, is one of degree rather than of kind, and is due largely to the fact that the political organization of Germany permitted the Prussian patriots to hold the national mind in a permanent crowd state to a degree which is even now hardly possible in this republic. My point is that a nation becomes warlike to precisely the extent that its people may be made to think and behave as a crowd. Once a crowd, it is always "in the right" however aggressive and ruthless its behavior; every act or proposal which is calculated to involve the nation-crowd in a controversy, which gains some advantage over neighboring peoples, or intensifies hatred once it is released, is wildly applauded. Any dissent from the opinions of our particular party or group is trampled down. He who fails at such a time to be a crowd-man and our own sort of a crowd-man is a "slacker." Everyone's patriotism is put under suspicion, political heresy-hunting is the rule, any personal advantage which can be gained by denouncing as "enemy sympathizers" rival persons or groups within the nation is sure to be snatched up by some one. The crowd-mind, even in times of peace, distorts patriotism so that it is little more than a compulsive expression and justification of repressed hostility. In war the crowd succeeds in giving rein to this hostility by first projecting it upon the enemy.

Freud in his little book, _War and Death_, regards war as a temporary "regression" in which primitive impulses which are repressed by civilization, but not eradicated, find their escape. He argues that most people live psychologically "beyond their means." Hence war could be regarded, I suppose, as a sort of "spiritual liquidation." But if the hostility which the war crowd permits to escape is simply a repressed impulse to cruelty, we should be obliged to explain a large part of crowd-behavior as "sadistic." This may be the case with crowds of a certain type, lynching mobs, for instance. But as the homicidal tendencies of paranoia are not commonly explained as sadism, I can see no reason why those of the crowd should be. Sadism is a return to an infantile sex perversion, and in its direct overt forms the resulting conflicts are conscious and are between the subject and environment. It is where a tendency unacceptable to consciousness is repressed--and inadequately--that neurotic conflict ensues. This conflict being inner, develops certain mechanisms for the defense of the ego-feeling which is injured. The hatred of the paranoiac is really a defense for his own injured self-feeling. As the crowd always shows an exaggerated ego-feeling similar to the paranoiac's delusion of grandeur, and as in cases of paranoia this inner conflict is always "projected" in the form of delusions of persecution, may we not hold that the characteristic hostility of the crowd is also in some way a device for protecting this inflated self-appreciation from injury? The forms which this hatred takes certainly have all the appearance of being "compulsive" ideas and actions.

We have been discussing crowds in which hostility is present in the form of overt destructive and homicidal acts or other unmistakable expressions of hatred. But are there not also peaceable crowds, crowds devoted to religious and moral propaganda, idealist crowds? Yes, all crowds moralize, all crowds are also idealistic. But the moral enthusiasm of the crowd always demands a victim. The idealist crowd also always makes idols of its ideals and worships them with human sacrifice. The peaceable crowd is only potentially homicidal. The death-wish exists as a fancy only, or is expressed in symbols so as to be more or less unrecognizable to ordinary consciousness. I believe that _every crowd is_ "_against some one_." Almost any crowd will persecute on occasion--if sufficiently powerful and directly challenged. The crowd tends ever to carry its ideas to their deadly logical conclusion.

I have already referred to the crowd's interest in games and athletic events as an innocent symbolization of conflict. How easy it is to change this friendly rivalry into sudden riot--its real meaning--every umpire of baseball and football games knows. As an illustration of my point--namely, that the enthusiasm aroused by athletic contests is the suppressed hostility of the crowd, I give the following. In this letter to a New York newspaper, the writer, a loyal "fan," reveals the same mentality that we find in the sectarian fanatic, or good party man, whose "principles" have been challenged. The challenge seems in all such cases to bring the hostility into consciousness as "righteous indignation."

_To the Editor_:

SIR,--The article under the caption "Giants' Chances for Flag to
be Settled in Week," on the sporting page of the _Tribune_, is
doubtless intended to be humorous.

The section referring to the Cincinnati baseball public is
somewhat overdrawn, to say the least, and does not leave a very
favorable impression on the average Cincinnatian, such as
myself. I have been a reader of your paper for some time, but if
this sort of thing continues I shall feel very much like
discontinuing.

W. L. D.

The extremes to which partisan hatred and jealousy can lead even members of the United States Senate, the intolerance and sectarian spirit which frequently characterize crowds, the "bigotry" of reformist crowds, are matters known to us all. Does anyone doubt that certain members of the Society for the Prevention of Vice, or of the Prohibitionists, would persecute if they had power? Have not pacifist mass meetings been known to break up in a row? The Christian religion is fundamentally a religion of love, but the Church has seldom been wholly free from the crowd-spirit, and the Church crowd will persecute as quickly as any other. In each period of its history when Christian believers have been organized as dominant crowds the Church has resorted to the severest forms of persecution. Popular religion always demands some kind of devil to stand as the permanent object of the believer's hostility. Let an editor, or lecturer, or clergyman anywhere attack some one, and he at once gains following and popularity. Evangelists and political orators are always able to "get" their crowd by resorting to abuse of some one. Let any mass meeting become a crowd, and this note of hostility inevitably appears.

Notice the inscriptions which commonly appear on the banners carried in political or labor parades. On the day after the armistice was signed with Germany, when the most joyous and spontaneous crowds I have ever seen filled the streets of New York, I was greatly impressed with those homemade banners. Though it was the occasion of the most significant and hard-won victory in human history, there was hardly a reference to the fact. Though it was the glad moment of peace for which all had longed, I did not see ten banners bearing the word "Peace," even in the hands of the element in the city who were known to be almost unpatriotically pacifist. But within less than an hour I counted on Fifth Avenue more than a hundred banners bearing the inscription, "To Hell with the Kaiser."

That the man chiefly responsible for the horrors of the war should be the object of universal loathing is only to be expected, but the significant fact is that of all the sentiments which swept into people's minds on that occasion, this and this alone should have been immediately seized upon when the crowd spirit began to appear. I doubt if at the time there was a very clear sense of the enormity of Wilhelm's guilt in the minds of those laughing people. The Kaiser was hardly more than a symbol. The antagonist, whoever he be, was "fallen down to hell," our own sense of triumph was magnified by the depth of his fall. Just so the Hebrew Prophet cried "Babylon is fallen," so the early Christians pictured Satan cast into the bottomless pit, so the Jacobins cried "_A bas les Aristocrats_," our own Revolutionary crowds cried "Down with George III," and the Union soldiers sang, "Hang Jeff Davis on a Sour Apple Tree." I repeat that wherever the crowd-mind appears, it will always be found to be "against" some one.

An interesting fact about the hostility of a crowd is its ability on occasion to survive the loss of its object. It may reveal the phenomenon which psychologists call "displacement." That is to say, another object may be substituted for the original one without greatly changing the quality of the feeling. A mob in the street, driven back from the object of its attack, will loot a store or two before it disperses. Or, bent on lynching a certain negro, it may even substitute an innocent man, if robbed of its intended victim--as, for instance, the lynching of the mayor of Omaha. Such facts would seem to show that these hostile acts are really demanded by mechanisms within the psyche. Many symbolic acts of the person afflicted with compulsion neurosis show this same _trait of substitution_. If inhibited in the exercise of one mechanism of escape, the repressed wish will substitute another. Also anyone associated by the unconscious reasoning with the hated object, or anyone who tries to defend him or prove him innocent, may suffer from this crowd's hatred. Freud has analyzed this phenomenon in his study of taboo. He who touches the tabooed object himself becomes taboo.

I have said that the hostility of the crowd is a sort of "defense mechanism." That this is so in certain cases, I think can be easily demonstrated. The following news item is an example of the manner in which such hostility may serve as a "defense mechanism" compensating the self-feeling for certain losses and serving to enhance the feeling of self-importance:

CHARGES BAKER HAD 57 BRANDS OF ARMY OBJECTOR.

----, OF MINNESOTA, DEFENDING MARINES FATHERS' ASSOCIATION
PROTEST; ASSAILS FREEING OF "SLACKERS."

WASHINGTON, _July 23_.--A bitter partisan quarrel developed in
the House today when Representative ----, of Minnesota, attacked
Secretary Baker and the President for the government's policy
toward conscientious objectors. The attack was the result of
protests by the Marines Fathers' Association of Minneapolis,
Minnesota, representing between 500 and 600 young marines now in
France, all from the Minneapolis high schools and the University
of Minnesota, and many in the famous 6th Regiment of Marines
that took a big part in stopping the Germans at Chateau Thierry.

Upon learning of the treatment accorded conscientious objectors
in this country while their sons were dying in France, the
association asked Representative ---- to fix the responsibility
for the government's policy. Representative ---- fixed it today
as that of Secretary Baker and President Wilson, charging that
they extended the definition of those to be exempted from
military service laid down by Congress in an act of May 17,
1917.

"One variety of conscientious objector was not enough for Mr.
Baker," declared Representative ----. "He had 57 kinds...."

Representative ----, of Arizona, defended Secretary Baker,
asserting that of 20,000 men who were certified as conscientious
objectors, 16,000 ultimately went to war. The case of Sergt.
Alvin C. York, the Tennessee hero, who had conscientious
objections at first, but soon changed his mind, was cited in
defense of the War Department's policy.

Let us pass over the obviously partisan element in this Congressional debate--a crowd phenomenon in itself, by the way--and consider the mental state of this Fathers' Association.

In spite of the fact that the treatment of those who refused military service in this country was so much more severe than the manner with which the British government is reported to have dealt with this class of persons, that many people, including the Secretary of War, whose loyalty except to partisan minds was above suspicion, sought in the name of humanity to alleviate some of the conditions in our military prisons, it was not severe enough to satisfy these "fathers." It is doubtful if anything short of an _auto da fe_ would have met their approval. Now no one believes that these simple farmers from the Northwest are such sadists at heart that they enjoy cruelty for its own sake. I imagine that the processes at work here are somewhat as follows: