The Ghost in the Machine (38 page)

ex hypothesi cannot do wrong
.
Identification absolves from individual responsibility; as in the hypnotic
rapport, initiative and responsibility for the subject's actions are
surrendered to the hypnotiser. This is the exact opposite of 'hierarchic
awareness', of the consciousness of individual freedom within the
limitations of a rule-governed hierarchy. Hierarchic awareness shows the
two faces of Janus; crowd mentality is like a single, blinkered profile.

 

 

It not only implies the suspension of personal responsibility, but also
of the self-assertive tendencies of the individual. We have met this
paradox before. The total identification of the individual with the group
makes him unselfish in more than one sense. It makes him indifferent
to danger and less sensitive to physical pain -- again a mild form of
hypnotic anaesthesia. It makes him perform comradely, altruistic, heroic
actions -- to the point of self-sacrifice -- and at the same time behave
with ruthless cruelty towards the enemy or victim of the group. But the
brutality displayed by the members of a fanatic crowd is impersonal and
unselfish; it is exercised in the interest or the supposed interest
of the whole; and it entails the readiness not only to kill but also
to die in its name. In other words,
the self-assertive behaviour of
the group is based on the self-transcending behaviour of its members
,
which often entails sacrifice of personal interests and even of life in
the interest of the group. To put it simply:
the egotism of the group
feeds on the altruism of its members
.

 

 

This becomes less paradoxical when we realise that the social group
is a holon with its own specific structure and canon of rules -- which
differ from the rules that govern the individual behaviour of its members
(cf.
pp. 54 f
.).
A crowd is of course a very primitive holon -- the human equivalent of a
herd or flock. But it remains nevertheless true that the crowd as a whole
is not simply the sum of its parts, and that it displays characteristic
features not found on the level of its individual parts.*

 

* In a recent paper (in press) on 'The Evolution of Systems of Rules
of Conduct' Professor F.A. von Hayek defines as his aim 'to
distinguish between the systems of rules of conduct which govern
the behaviour of the individual members of a group (or of the
elements of any order) and the order or pattern of actions which
results from this for the group as a whole. . . . That [they]
are not the same thing should be obvious as soon as it is stated,
although the two are in fact frequently confused. [15]

 

At times the rules which govern individual and group behaviour
may even be in direct opposition. Years ago, when I wrote novels,
I made one character -- a Roman lawyer in the first century B.C. --
write a treatise which bore the title: 'On The Causes Which Induce
Man To Act Contrary To The Interests Of Others When Isolated, And
To Act Contrary To His Own Interests When Associated In Groups Or
Crowds'. [16]

 

 

Needless to say, once the fury of the group is unleashed, its individual
members can give their aggressive impulses free rein. But this is
a secondary kind of aggressiveness, catalised by a previous act of
identification, as distinct from primary aggressiveness, based on personal
motives. The physical manifestations of such secondary aggressiveness
may be indistinguishable from those of primary aggression -- just as the
anger aroused by the villain in the film produces the physical symptoms
of anger directed at a real person. But in both cases we are dealing
with aggression as a secondary process derived from identification --
with the group in the first case, with the screen-hero in the second.

 

 

Sociologists who regard war as a manifestation of man's repressed
aggressive urges make one feel at once that they have never served in
the ranks, and have no idea of the mentality of private soldiers in war
time. There is waiting -- somebody has said that it occupies ninety
per cent of a soldier's time; there is grumbling and grousing, much
preoccupation with sex, intermittent fear, and, above all, the fervent
hope that it will soon be over, followed by the return to civvy street
-- but
hating
does not enter into the picture. In modern warfare,
the enemy is mostly invisible, and 'fighting' is reduced to the impersonal
manipulation of long-range weapons. In classical warfare, attacks were
carried out by units -- that is groups -- against positions held by other
groups; the features of individual enemies whom one had killed or may
have killed were hardly ever perceived; trying to kill them was under
the circumstances a sine qua non of survival, but primary aggression
played no significant part in the picture. Nor did 'defence of home
and family'. Soldiers do not fight at their homesteads, but at places
hundreds or thousands of miles away, to defend the homes, families,
territory, etc., of the group of which they are a part. The professed and
occasionally real hatred of Boches or Wops, Fascists or Reds, is again
not a matter of personal primary aggression; it is directed against a
group, or rather against the common denominator which all members of the
group share. The individual victim of such hatred is punished not as an
individual, but as a symbolic representative of that common denominator.

 

 

In the First World War soldiers in opposite trenches were capable
of fraternising during Christmas, and of starting shooting at each
other once Boxing Day was over. War is a ritual, a deadly ritual,
not the result of aggressive self-assertion, but of self-transcending
identification
. Without loyalty to tribe, church, flag or ideal,
there would be no wars; and loyalty is a noble thing. I do not mean, of
course, that loyalty must necessarily be expressed in group violence --
merely that it is a precondition of it; that self-transcending devotion,
all through history, has acted as a catalyst for secondary aggression.

 

 

 

Sweet Caesar's Wounds

 

 

Shakespeare has expressed this seemingly abstract point with
a persuasiveness which no psychological treatise can hope to
achieve. In Mark Antony's oration to the throng of Roman
citizens there is a decisive moment, when he deliberately quells
their first, superficial resentment against the conspirators. He
makes his audience form a ring about the corpse of Caesar -- not
yet appealing for revenge, but arousing first their pity:

 

Ant.   If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.
You all do know this mantle; I remember
The first time ever Caesar put it on,
'Twas on a summer's evening in his tent,
That day he overcame the Nervii:
Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through . . .
And in his mantle muffling up his face,
Even at the base of Pompey's statue
(Which all the while ran blood) great Caesar fell.
O what a fall was there, my countrymen!
Then I, and you, and all of us fell down. . . .

 

Having thus identified I and 'you' and 'all of us' with the dead leader,
and shown them 'sweet Caesar's wounds, poor, poor, dumb mouth, and bid
them speak for me', he has got the crowd into exactly the mood he wanted:

 

O now you weep, and I perceive you feel
The dint of pity: these are gracious drops,
Kind souls, what weep you, when you but behold
Our Caesar's vesture wounded? Look you here,
Here is himself, marr'd as you see with traitors.
1.C.   O piteous spectacle!
2.C.   O noble Caesar!
3.C.   O woeful day!
4.C.   O traitors, villains!
1.C.   O most bloody sight!
2.C.   We will be reveng'd!
All.   Revenge! About! Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill!
Slay!  Let not a traitor live!

 

And so mischief is afoot once more, wing'd by the noblest sentiments.

 

 

 

The Structure of Belief

 

 

A mob in action displays an extreme form of group mentality. But to
be affected by it, a person need not be physically present in a crowd;
mental identification with a group, nation, church or party is often quite
sufficient. If our imagination can produce all the physical symptoms
of emotion in reaction to the perils of personae which exist merely as
printer's ink, how much easier, then, to have the experience of belonging,
of being part of a group, though it is not physically present. One can
be a victim of group mentality even in the privacy of one's bath.

 

 

A mob in action needs a leader. Religious or political movements need
leaders to get under way; once established, they still benefit, of
course, from efficient leadership, but the primary need of a group,
the factor which lends it cohesion as a group, is a creed, a shared
system of beliefs, a faith that transcends the individual's personal
interests. It may be represented by a symbol -- the totem or fetish which
provides a mystic sense of union among the members of the tribe. It may
be the conviction that one belongs to a Chosen Race whose ancestors
made a covenant with God; or to a Master Race whose ancestors were
equipped with a gene-complex of special excellence; or whose Emperors
were descended from the sun. It may be the conviction that observance
of certain rules and rites qualifies one for membership in a privileged
élite in after-life; or that manual work qualifies for membership in
the élite class of history.

 

 

How do these powerful collective belief-systems come into being? When
the historian attempts to trace them back to their origin, he inevitably
ends up in the twilight of mythology. If a belief carries a strong emotive
power, it can always be shown to spring from archaic sources. Beliefs are
not invented; they seem to materialise as the humidity in the atmosphere
condenses into clouds, which subsequently undergo endless transformations
of shape.

 

 

Rational arguments have little impact on the true believer, for the creed
to which he is emotionally committed can be contradicted by evidence
without losing its magic power. From prehistoric days until quite recent
times, that magic was derived from religious beliefs. To dispense with God
was unthinkable even to the Founding Fathers of modern science: Copernicus
was an orthodox Thomist, Kepler a Lutheran mystic, Galileo called God
the Chief Mathematician of the Universe; Newton believed, with Bishop
Usher, that the world was created in 4004 B.C. The movements towards
social reform were just as firmly based on the ethics of Christianity.

 

 

The Age of Enlightenment, culminating in the French Revolution, was
a decisive turning-point in the history of man. It was dramatised by
Robespierre's symbolic gesture of deposing God and enthroning the Goddess
of Reason in the vacant chair. She proved to be a dismal failure. The
Christian mythos had a continuous ancestry which can be traced back,
through Greece, Palestine and Babylon, to the myths and rites of neolithic
man; it provided an archerypal mould for man's self-transcending emotions,
his craving for the absolute. The progressive trends and ideologies of
the nineteenth century proved to be a poor substitute. From the point
of view of material welfare, public health and social justice, the
last hundred and fifty years of secular reforms certainly brought more
tangible improvements in the lot of the common man than fifteen hundred
years of Christianity had done; yet their reflection in the group mind
was a different matter. Religion may have been opium to the people, but
opium addicts are not given to much enthusiasm for a rational, healthy
diet. Among the intellectual élite, the rapid advance of science
created a rather shallow optimistic belief in the infallibility of Reason,
in a clear, bright, crystalline world with a transparent atomic structure,
with no room for shadows, twilights and myths. Reason was thought to
be in control of emotion, as the rider controls the horse -- the rider
representing enlightened, rational thought, the horse representing
what the Victorians called 'the dark passions' and 'the beast within
us'. Nobody foresaw, no pessimist ventured to guess, that the Age of
Reason would end in the greatest emotional stampede in history, which
left the rider crushed under the hoofs of the beast. Yet once more the
beast was motivated by the noblest ideals -- by the secular messianism
of the Classless Society and of the Millennial Reich; and once more
we are apt to forget that the vast majority of men and women who fell
under the totalitarian spell was activated by unselfish motives, ready
to accept the role of martyr or executioner, as the cause demanded.

 

 

 

Both the Fascist and the Soviet myths were not synthetic
constructions, but revivals of archetypes, both capable of absorbing
not only the cerebral component but the total man; both provided
emotional saturation.

 

 

The Fascist myth is undisguised and explicit. The opium is doled
out to the masses quite openly. The archetypes of Blood and Soil,
of the dragon-slaying Superman, the deities of Walhalla and the
satanic powers of the Jews are systematically called up for national
service. One half of Hitler's genius consisted in hitting the right
unconscious chords. The other half was his alert eclecticism, his
flair for hypermodern avant-garde methods in Economy, Architecture,
Technology, Propaganda and Warfare. The secret of Fascism is the
revival of archaic beliefs in an ultra-modern setting. The Nazi
edifice was a skyscraper fitted with hot water pipes which drew on
underground springs of volcanic origin. [17]

 

 

The Soviet myth had an equally profound appeal to a large section of
humanity. The classless Communist society was to be a revival of the
Golden Age of mythology at the highest, ultimate turn of the dialectical
spiral. It was a secular version of the Promised Land, the Kingdom of
Heaven. One of the salient features of this archetypal myth is that the
advent of the Millennium must be preceded by violent upheaval: the ordeal
of forty years in the desert, the Apocalypse, the Last Judgment. Their
secular equivalent is the liquidation of the Bourgeois world through
Revolutionary Terror. Some of the early Russian and contemporary
Chinese literature extolling Revolutionary Justice being done to a
'putrefied and gangrened Capitalist society' reminds one indeed of the
Last Judgments of Grünewald or Hieronymus Bosch. The true believer has
a genuine horror of the 'Reformist' heresy, the belief in a bloodless
transition towards socialism (which caused the Communists to denounce
Socialists, and later the Chinese to denounce the Russians, as traitors
to the cause). No apocalypse, no kingdom come.