It is the ignoring of the group which is retarding our political development. A recent writer on political science says that a study of the interaction between individual and crowd is the basis of politics, and that “the will of nations or states is the sum of individual wills fashioned in accordance with crowd psychology.” In so far as this is true it is to be steadily opposed. Many writers imply that we must either believe in homogeneity, similarity, uniformity (the herd, the crowd), or lose the advantages of fellowship in order to discover and assert our own particularistic ideals. But our alternatives are not the individual and the crowd: the choice is not between particularism with all its separatist tendencies, and the crowd with its levelling, its mediocrity, its sameness, perhaps even its hysteria; there is the neglected group. Democracy will not succeed until assemblages of people are governed consciously and deliberately by group laws. We read, “No idea can conquer until a crowd has inscribed it on its banner.” I should say, “No idea can finally conquer which has not been created by those people who inscribe it on their banner.” The triumph of ideas will never come by crowds. Union, not hypnotism, is the law of development. There can be no real spiritual unity in the mass life, only in the group life.
Whether the people of America shall be a crowd, under the laws of suggestion and imitation, or follow the laws of the group, is the underlying problem of today.
The promise for the future is that there now is in associations of men an increasing tendency for the laws of the group rather than the laws of the crowd to govern. Our most essential duty to the future is to see that that tendency prevail. As we increase the conscious functioning of the group we shall inevitably have less and less of the unconscious response, chauvinists will lose their job, and party bosses will have to change their tactics. People as a matter of fact are not as suggestible as formerly. Men are reading more widely and they are following less blindly what they read.
This largely increased reading, due to reduction in price, spread of railroads, rural delivery, and lessening hours of industry, is often spoken of as making men more alike in their views. Tarde spoke of the “public,” which he defined as the people sitting at home reading newspapers, as a mental collectivity because of this supposed tendency. Christensen confirms this when he says that the people reading the newspapers are “a scattered crowd.” The usually accepted opinion is that the daily press is making us more and more into crowds, but that is not my experience. A man with his daily paper may be obeying the group law or the crowd law as he unites his own thoughts with the thoughts of others or as he is merely amenable to suggestion from others, and it seems to me we see a good deal of the former process. The newspaper brings home to us vividly what others are feeling and thinking. It offers many suggestions; we see less and less tendency to “swallow these whole,” the colloquial counterpart of the technical “imitation.” These suggestions are freely criticized, readers do a good deal of thinking and the results are fairly rational. The reader more and more I believe is selecting, is unifying difference. The result of all this is that men’s minds are becoming more plastic, that they are deciding less by prejudice and hypnotism and more by judgment. And it must be remembered that a man is not necessarily a more developed person because he rejects his newspaper’s theories than if he accepts them; the developed man is the group man and the group man neither accepts nor rejects, but joins his own thought with that of all he reads to make new thought. The group man is never sterile, he always brings forth.68
Democracy can never mean the domination of the crowd. The helter-skelter strivings of an endless number of social atoms can never give us a fair and ordered world. It may be true that we have lived under the domination either of individuals or of crowds up to the present time, but now is the moment when this must be deliberately challenged. The party boss must go, the wise men chosen by the reform associations must go, the crowd must be abandoned. The idea of the All has gripped us—but the idea has not been made workable, we have yet to find the way. We have said, “The people must rule.” We now ask, “How are they to rule?” It is the technique of democracy which we are seeking. We shall find it in group organization.
XIX
The True Democracy
Democracy is the rule of an interacting, interpermeating whole. The present advocates of democracy have, therefore, little kinship with those ardent writers of the past who when they said they believed in the people were thinking of workingmen only. A man said to me once, “I am very democratic, I thoroughly enjoy a good talk with a workingman.” What in the world has that to do with democracy? Democracy is faith in humanity, not faith in “poor” people or “ignorant” people, but faith in every living soul. Democracy does not enthrone the workingman, it has nothing to do with sympathy for the “lower classes”; the champions of democracy are not looking
