All these phenomena -- some harmless, some sinister, some grotesque -- have one basic element in common: the people participating in them have to some extent surrendered their independent individualities, become more or less de-personalised; while their impulses have to the same extent become synchronised, aligned in the same direction like magnetised filings of iron. The force which binds them together is variously called 'social infection', 'mutual induction', 'collective hysteria', 'mass hypnosis', etc.; the common element of all is identification with the group at the price of relinquishing part of one's personal identity. Immersion in the group mind is a kind of poor man's self-transcendence.
It has also been compared by Freud and others to a semi-hypnotic, or quasi-hypnotic, state.
The hypnotic state is easy to demonstrate, but difficult to define or explain. That, and the uncanny powers it confers on the hypnotist, may be the main reason why it has for so long been treated with scepticism and distrust by Western science -- whereas in tribal societies, and in the advanced civilisations of the East, it was used for both benevolent and malevolent purposes. Mesmer produced spectacular cures with its help, but he had no idea how it worked; his spurious explanations in terms of animal magnetism, combined with showmanship, brought hypnotism into further disrepute. In the course of the nineteenth century several eminent English surgeons carried out major operations painlessly under hypnosis, but their reports met with scepticism and hostility. Orthodox medicine refused to accept the reality of a phenomenon which could easily be demonstrated, and even for a while became a parlour game. Prejudice wore down only gradually; Charcot and his school in France, and Freud in his early period, produced hypnotic phenomena as a matter of routine, and used them as a therapeutical tool. But it was the Scottish physician James Baird who, in 1841 coined the word 'hypnotism', which sounded a little more respectable than the earlier terms -- mesmerism, magnetism, or sonmambulism.* At present, qualified medical hypnotists are employed in growing numbers by dental surgeons in lieu of anaesthetists, and the use of hypnotism in childbirth, psychotherapy and dermatology has become commonplace. So much so that we are apt to forget to wonder how it works. For, as already said, it is a phenomenon easy to produce but difficult to explain -- particularly in terms of flat-earth psychology.
* The last expression was coined by the Marquis Chastenay de Puysegur, a follower of Mesmer, who had noticed that his patients when in trance seemed to move and act like sleep-walkers.
An explanation, or at least description, as good as any other was given half a century ago by Kretschmer: 'In the hypnotic state the functions of the ego seem to be suspended, except those which communicate with the hypnotiser as though through a narrow slit in a screen.' [11] The slit focusses the beam of the hypnotic rapport. The rest of the hypnotised subject's world is screened off or blurred.
A more recent description by an Oxford experimental psychologist, Dr. Oswald, leads to essentially similar conclusions:
The human hypnotic trance [as distinct from cataleptic states induced in animals] has a name that grew out of a resemblance to sleep-walking. The human hypnotic trance is not a state of sleep. Nor, let it be emphasised, is it a state of unconsciousness. . . . It is not possible to categorise it in a manner that would be universally acceptable. It remains a very definite puzzle. It is certainly a state of inertia, but only in respect of spontaneous actions. In response to the hypnotist's commands, vigorous activity may ensue without disrupting the trance, or destroying the rapport. It is this rapport that is so characteristic. The hypnotised individual's own initiative is subservient to that of the hypnotist. Alternatives to that which the hypnotist suggests simply do not seem to arise. If you ask your friend to go and shut the door he may quietly do so, or he may comment that, since he sees no reason for you to be so idle, you might as well go and do it yourself. The hypnotised person just gets on and does it. [12]
Lastly, Drever's Dictionary of Psychology: 'Hypnosis: artificially induced state, similar in many respects to sleep, but specially characterised by exaggerated suggestibility, and the continuance of contact or rapport with the operator.' [13]
Freud in his book on Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego took the hypnotic state as his starting point. He regarded hypnotiser and hypnotised as a 'group formation of two', and thought that the hypnotic trance provided the clue to 'the profound alteration in the mental activities of individuals subjected to the influence of a group'. [14] Indeed, the 'hypnotic effect' of prophets and demagogues on their 'spellbound' followers has become so much of a cliché that one tends to overlook its literal, pathological relevance. Le Bon's classic analysis of the mentality of the heroic, murderous mobs of the French Revolution (which Freud and others took as their text) remains as true as it was a century and a half ago. As in the hypnotised subject, so in the individual subjected to the influence of the crowd, personal initiative is relinquished in favour of the leader and 'the functions of the ego seem to be suspended', except those which are 'in rapport with the operator'. This entails a state of mental inertia, a mild form of somnambulism or 'spellboundness' which, however, may at any moment burst into violent activity at the leader's command. Crowds tend to behave in a 'fanatical' (or 'heroic'), that is, single-minded way, because the individual differences between its members are temporarily suspended, their critical faculties anaesthetised; the whole mass is thus intellectually reduced to a primitive common denominator, a level of communication which all can share: single-mindedness must be simple-minded. But at the same time, the emotional dynamism of the crowd is enhanced by mutual induction between its members, and by the fact that the slits in the screen -- or blinkers -- are all aligned in the same direction. It is a kind of resonance effect, which makes the members of the crowd feel that they are part of an irresistible power; moreover, of a power which 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 res
ults 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.