Chapter X
Society

We have seen that the interpenetrating of psychic forces creates at the same time individuals and society, that, therefore, the individual is not a unit but a centre of forces (both centripetal and centrifugal), and consequently society is not a collection of units but a complex of radiating and converging, crossing and
recrossing energies. In other words we are learning to think of society as a psychic process.

This conception must replace the old and wholly erroneous idea of society as a collection of units, and the later and only less misleading theory of society as an organism [1].
1. I speak off it as later because the biological analogy was different than the organism of mediaeval doctrine.

The old individualism with all the political fallacies it produced--social contract of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, majority rule of the nineteenth, etc.--was based on the idea of developed individuals first existing and then coming together to form society. But the basis of society is not numbers: it is psychic power.

The organic theory of society has so much to recommend it to superficial thinking that we must examine it carefully to find its fatal defects. But let us first recognize its merits.

Most obviously, an organic whole has a spatial and temporal individuality of its own, and it is composed of parts each with its individuality yet which could not exist apart from the whole. An organism means unity, each one has its own place, every one dependent upon every one else.

Next, this unity, this interrelating of parts is the essential characteristic. It is always in unstable equilibrium, always shifting, varying, and thereby changing the individual at every moment. But it is always produced and maintained by the individual himself. No external force brings it forth. The central life, the total life, of this self-developing, self-perpetuating being is involved in the process. Hence biologists do not expect to
understand the body by a study of the separate cells as isolated units: it is the organic connection which unites the separate processes which they recognize as the fundamental fact.

The interrelating holds good a society when we view it externally. Society too can be understood only by the study of its flux of relations, of all the intricate reciprocities which go to make the unifying. Reciprocal ordering--subordinating, superordinating, coordinating--purposeful self-unifying, best describe the social process. Led by James, who has shown us the individual as a self-unifying centre, we now find the same kind of activity going on in society, in the social mind. And this interrelating, this unity as unity, is what gives to society its authority and power.

Thus the term organism is valuable as a metaphor, but it has not strict psychological accuracy.

There is this world-wide difference between the self- interrelatings of society and of the bodily organism: the social bond is a psychic relation and we cannot express it in biological terms or in any terms of physical force. If we could, if "functional combination" could mean a psychological relation as well as a physiological, then the terms "functional" and "organic" might be accepted. But they denote a different universe from that of thought. For psychical self-unitings knit infinitely more closely and in a wholly different way. They are freed from the limitations of time and space. Minds can blend, yet in the blending preserve each its own identity. They transfuse one another while being each its own essential and unique self.

It follows that while the cell of the organism has only one function, the individual may have manifold and multiform functions: he enters with one function into a certain group of people this morning and with another function into another group this afternoon, because his free soul can freely knit itself with a new
group at any moment [citation omitted].

This self-detaching, self-attaching freedom of the individual saves us from the danger to democracy which lurks in the organic theory. No man is forced to serve as the running foot or the lifting hand. Each at any moment can place himself where his nature calls. Certain continental sociologists are wholly unjustified in building their hierarchy where one man or group of men is the sensorium, others the brewers and carriers, etc. It is exactly this despotic and hopeless system of caste from which the true democracy frees man. He follows the call of his spirit and relates himself where he belongs to-day, and through this relating gains the increment of power which knits him anew where he now belongs and so continually as the wind of spirit blows.

Moreover in society every individual may be a complete expression of the whole in a way impossible for the parts of a physical organism [citation omitted]. When each part is itself potentially the whole, when the whole can live completely in every member, then we have a true society, and we must view it as a rushing of life--onrush, outrush, inrush--as a mobile, elastic, incalculable, Protean energy seeking fitting form for itself. This ideal society is the divine goal towards which life is an infinite progress.
Such conception of society must be visibly before us to the exclusion of all other theories when we ask ourselves later what the vote means in the true democracy [1]
1. ... I have been told that the distinction between the organic and the psychic theory of society is merely academic.
But no one should frame amendments on the initiative and referendum without this distinction; no one without it can judge wisely the various schemes now being proposed for occupational representation--something every one of us will have soon to do.

Chapter XI
The Self-and-Others Illusion

It is now evident that self and others are merely different points of view of one and the same experience, two aspects of one thought.
Neither of these partial aspects can hold us, we seek always that which includes self and others. To recognize the community principle in everything we do should be our aim, never to work with individuals as individuals. If I go to have a talk with a mother about her daughter, I cannot appeal to the mother, the daughter, or my own wishes, only to that higher creation which we three make when we come together. In that way only will spiritual power be generated. Every decision of the future is to be based not on my
needs or yours, nor on a compromise between them or an addition of them, but on the recognition of the community between us. The community may be my household and I, my employees and I, but it is only the dictate of the whole which can be binding on the whole.
This principle we can take as a searchlight to turn on all of our life.

It is the lack of understanding of this principle which works much havoc among us. When we watch men in the lobbies at Washington working for their state and their town as against the interests of the United States, do we sometimes think, "These men have learnt loyalty and service to a small unit, but not yet to a
large one?" If this thought does come to us, we are probably doing those men more than justice. The man who tries to get something in the River and Harbor appropriation for his town, whether or not it needs it as much as other places, is pretty sure back in his own town to be working not for that but for his own pocket. It is not because America is too big for him to think of, that he might perhaps think of Ohio or Millfield, it is just because he cannot think of Ohio or Millfield. There he thinks of how this or the other local development, rise in land values etc., is going to benefit himself; when he is in Washington he thinks of what is going to benefit Millfield. But the man who works hardest and most truly for Millfield and Ohio will probably when he comes to Washington work most truly for the interests, not of Millfield and Ohio but of the United States, because he has learned the first lesson of life -- to think in wholes.

The expressions social and socially-minded, which should refer to a consciousness of the whole, are often confused with altruism. We read of "the socialized character of modern industry." There is a good deal of altruism in modern industry, but little that is socialized yet. The men who provide rest rooms, baths, lectures, and recreation facilities for their employees, do not by doing so prove themselves to be socially-minded; they are altruistically- minded, and this is involved in the old individualism [1].

1. It must be remembered, however, that these welfare arrangements are often accompanied by truly social motives, and experiments looking towards a more democratic organization of industries.

Moreover, in our attempts at social legislation we have been appealing chiefly to the altruism of people: women and children ought not to be overworked, it is cruel not to have machinery safeguarded, etc. But our growing sense of unity is fast bringing us to a realization that all these things are for the good of
ourselves too, for the entire community. And the war is rapidly opening our eyes to this human solidarity: we now see health, for instance, as a national asset.

All of us are being slowly, very slowly, purged of our particularistic desires. The egotistic satisfaction of giving things away is going to be replaced by the joy of owning things together. As our lives become more and more intricately interwoven, more and more I come to suffer not merely when I am undergoing personal suffering, more and more I come to desire not only when I am feeling personal desires. This used to be considered a fantastic idea not to be grasped by the plain man, but every day the plain man is coming more and more to feel this, every day the "claims" of others are becoming My desires. "Justice" is
being replaced by understanding. There are many people to-day who feel as keenly the fact of child labor as if these children were their own. I vote for prohibition, even although it does not in the least touch me, because it does touch very closely the Me of which I am now coming into realization.

The identification of self and others we see in the fact that we cannot keep ourselves "good" in an evil world any more than we can keep ourselves well in a world of disease. The method of moral hygiene as of physical hygiene is social cooperation. We do not walk into the Kingdom of Heaven one by one.

The exposition of the self-and-others fallacy has transformed the idea of self-interest. Our interests are inextricably interwoven.
The question is not what is best for me or for you, but for all of us. My interests are not less important to the world than yours; your interests are not less important to the world than mine. If the "altruistic" man is not a humbug, that is, if he really thinks his affairs of less importance to the world than those of others,
then there is certainly something the matter with his life. He must raise his life to a point where it is of as much value to the world as any one's else.

The self-and-others fallacy has led directly to a conception which has wrought much harm among us, namely, the identification of "others" with "society" which leads the self outside society and brings us to one of the most harmful of dualisms. The reason we are slow to understand the matter of the subordination of the individual to society is because we usually think of it as meaning the subordination of the individual to "others," whereas it does not at all, it means the subordination of the individual to the
whole of which he himself is a part. Such subordination is an act of assertion; it is fraught with active power and force; it affirms and accomplishes. We are often told to "surrender our individuality." To _claim_ our individuality is the one essential claim we have on the universe.

We give up self when we are too sluggish for the heroic life.
For our self is after all the greatest bother we ever know, and the idea of giving it up is a comfortable thought for sluggish people, a narcotic for the difficulties of life. But it is a cowardly way out. The strong attitude is to face that torment, our self, to take it with all its implications, all its obligations, all its
responsibilities, and be ourselves to the fullest degree possible.

I do not mean to imply, however, that unselfishness has become obsolete. With our new social ideal there is going to be a far greater demand on our capacity for sacrifice than ever before, but self-sacrifice now means for us self-fulfilment. We have now a vision of society where service is indeed our daily portion, but
our conception of service has been entirely changed. The other day it was stated that the old idea of democracy was a society in which every man had the right to pursue his own ends, while the new idea
was based on the assumption that every man should serve his fellow-men. But I do not believe that man should "serve his fellow-men"; if we started on that task what awful prigs we should become.
Moreover, as we see that the only efficient people are the servers, much of the connotation of humility has gone out of the word service! Moreover, if service is such a very desirable thing, then every one must have an equal opportunity for service.

We have had a wrong idea of individualism, which has made those who had more strength, education, time, money, power, feel that they must do for those who had less. In the individualism we see coming, all our efforts will be bent to making it possible for every man to depend upon himself instead of depending upon others.
So _noblesse oblige_ is really egoistic. It is what I owe to myself to do to others. _Noblesse oblige_ has had a splendid use in the world, but it is somewhat worn out now simply because we are rapidly getting away from the selfish point of view. I don't do things now because my position or my standing or my religion or _my_ anything else demands it, nor because others need it, but because it is a whole-imperative, that is, a social imperative. We cannot transcend self by means of others, but only through the
synthesis of self and others. Wholeness is an irresistible force compelling every member. The consciousness of this is the wellspring of our power.

An English writer says that we get leadership from the fact that men are capable of being moved to such service by the feeling of altruism; he attributes public spirit to love, pity, compassion and sensitiveness to suffering. This is no doubt largely true at the present moment, but public spirit will sometime mean, as it does to-day in many instances, the recognition that it is not merely that my city, my nation needs me, but that I need it as the larger sphere of a larger self-expression.

I remember some years ago a Boston girl just entering social work, fresh from college, with all the ardor and enthusiasm of youth and having been taught the ideals of service to others. She was talking to me about her future and said that she was sorry family circumstances obliged her to work in Boston instead of New York, there was so much more to reform in New York! She seemed really afraid that justice and morality had reached such a point with us that she might not be afforded sufficient scope for her zeal. It was amusing, but think of the irony of it: that girl had been taught such a view of life that her happiness, her outlet, her self-expression, depended actually on there being plenty of misery and wretchedness for her to change; there would be no scope for her in a harmonious, well-ordered world.

The self-and-others theory of society is then wrong. We have seen that the Perfect Society is the complete interrelating of an infinite number of selves knowing themselves as one Self. We see that we are dependent on the whole, while seeing that we are one with it in creating it. We are separate that we may belong, that we may greatly produce. Our separateness, our individual initiative, are the very factors which accomplish our true unity with men. We shall see in the chapter on "Political Pluralism" that "irreducible pluralism" and the self-unifying principle are not contradictory.

Chapter XII
The Crowd Fallacy

Many people are ready to accept the truth that association is the law of life. But in consequence of an acceptance of this theory with only a partial understanding of it, many people to-day are advocating the life of the crowd. The words society, crowd, and group are often used interchangeably for a number of people together. One writer says, "The real things are breathed forth from multitudes ... the real forces to-day are group forces." Or we read of "the gregarious or group life," or "man is social because he is suggestible," or "man is social because he likes to be with a crowd." But we do not find group forces in multitudes: the crowd and the group represent entirely different modes of association. Crowd action is the outcome of agreement based on concurrence of emotion rather than thought, or if on the latter, then on a concurrence produced by becoming aware of similarities, not by a slow and gradual creating of unity. It is a crowd emotion if we all shout "God save the King." Suggestibility, feeling, impulse -- this is usually the order in the crowd mind.

I know a little boy of five who came home from school one day and said with much impressiveness, "Do you know whose birthday it is to-morrow?" "No," said his mother, "whose?" "Ab'm Lincoln's," was
the reply. "Who is he?" said the mother. With a grave face and an awed voice the child replied, "He freed the slates!" and then added, "I don't know whether they were the big kind like mine or the little kind like Nancy's." But his emotion was apparently as great, his sentiment as sincere, as if he had understood what
Lincoln had done for his country. This is a good example of crowd suggestion because thought was in this case inhibited by contagious emotion.

Suggestion is the law of the crowd, interpenetration of the group. When we study a crowd we see how quickly B takes A's ideas and also C and D and E; when we study a group we see that the ideas of A often arouse in B exactly opposite ones. Moreover, the crowd often deadens thought because it wants immediate action, which means an unthinking unanimity not a genuine collective thought [1].

1. A good example of the crowd fallacy is the syndicalist theory that the vote should be taken in a meeting of strikers not by ballot but by acclamation or show of hands. The idea is that in an open meeting enthusiasm passes from one to another and that, therefore, you can thus get the collective will which you could not get by every man voting one by one.

The group on the other hand stimulates thought. There are no "differences" in the crowd mind. Each person is swept away and does not stop to find out his own difference. In crowds we have unison, in groups harmony. We want the single voice but not the single note; that is the secret of the group. The enthusiasm and unanimity of a mass-meeting may warm an inexperienced heart, but the experienced know that this unanimity is largely superficial and is based on the spread of similar ideas, not the unifying of
differences. A crowd does not distinguish between fervor and wisdom; a group usually does. We do not try to be eloquent when we appear before a board of a commission; we try merely to be convincing. Before a group it is self-control, restraint, discipline which we need, we don't "let ourselves go"; before a
crowd I am sorry to say we usually do. Many of us nowadays resent being used as part of a crowd; the moment we hear eloquence we are on the defensive. The essential evil of crowds is that they do not
allow choice, and choice is necessary for progress. A crowd is an undifferentiated mass; a group is an articulated whole.

It is often difficult to determine whether a number of people met together are a crowd or a group (that is, a true society), yet it is a distinction necessary for us to make if we would understand their action. It is not in the least a question of numbers; it is obvious that according to our present definition a group is not a
small number of people and a crowd a large number. If someone cries "Fire," and you and I run to the window, then you and I are a crowd. The difference between a group and a crowd is not one of degree but of kind. I have seen it stated in a sociological treatise that in any deliberative assembly there is a tendency for the wisest thought to prevail. This assumes that "any deliberative assembly" is more like a group that a crowd -- a very pleasant thing to assume!

Some writers seem to think that the difference between a crowd and a not-crowd is the difference between organized and unorganized, and the example is given of laborers unorganized as a crowd and of a trade-union as a not-crowd. But a trade-union can be and often is a crowd.

We have distinguished between the crowd and the group; it is also necessary to distinguish between the crowd and the mob. Often the crowd or mass is confused with the mob. The example given of the mass or crowd mind are usually a lynching-party, the panic-stricken audience in a theater fire, the mobs of the French Revolution. But all these are very different from a mass of people merely acting under the same suggestion, so different that we need different names for them. We might for the moment call one a crowd and the other a mob.

An unfortunate stigma has often attached itself to the crowd mind because of this tendency to think of the crowd mind as always exhibiting itself in inferior ways. Mass enthusiasm, it is true, may lead to riots, but also it may lead to heroic deeds. People talk much of the panic of a crowd, but every soldier knows that men are brave, too, in a mass. Students have often studied what they call the mass mind when it was under the stress of great nervous strain and at a high pitch of excitement, and then have said the mass acts thus and so. It has been thought legitimate to draw conclusions concerning the nature of the mass mind from an hysterical mob. It has been assumed that a crowd was necessarily, as a crowd, in a condition of hysteria. It has often been taken for granted that a crowd _is_ a pathological condition. And color has been given to this theory by the fact that we owe much of our knowledge of the laws of suggestion to pathologists.

But the laws of the mass can be studied in ordinary collections of people who are not abnormally excited, who are not subjects for pathologists. The laws of the mass as of the mob are, it is true, the laws of suggestion and imitation, but the mob is such an extreme case of the mass that is necessary to make some distinction between them. Emotion in the crowd as in the mob is intensified by the consciousness that others are sharing it, but the mob is this crowd emotion carried to an extreme. As normal suggestibility is
the law of the mass, so abnormal suggestibility is the law of the mob. In abnormal suggestibility the controlling act of the will is absent, but in normal suggestibility you have the will in control and using its power of choice over the material offered by suggestion. Moreover, it must be remembered that emotional disturbance is not always the cause of the condition of suggestibility: the will may lose its ascendancy from other causes than excitement; suggestibility often comes from exhaustion or habit.

The fact is we know little of this subject. Billy Sunday and the Salvation Army, political bosses and labor agitators, know how to handle crowds, but the rest of us can deal with individuals better than with the mass; we have taken courses in first-aid to the injured, but we have not yet learned what to do in a street riot or a financial panic.

Besides the group and the crowd and the mob, there is also the herd. The satisfaction of the gregarious instinct must not be confused with the emotion of the crowd or the true sense of oneness
in the group. Some writers draw analogies from the relation of the individual to the herd to apply to the relation of man to society; such analogies lead to false patriotism and wars. The example of the wild ox temporarily separated from his herd and rushing back to the "comfort of its fellowship" has adorned many a different tale.
The "comfort" of feeling ourselves in the herd has been given as the counterpart of spiritual communion, ut are we seeking the "comfort" of fellowship or the creative agonies of fellowship? The latter we find not in herd life, but in group life.

Then besides the group, the crowd, the mob, the herd, there are numbers as mere numbers. When we are a lot of people with different purposes we are simply wearied, not stimulated. At a bazaar, for instance, far from feeling satisfaction in your fellow- creatures, you often loathe them. Here you are not swayed by one emotion, as in a crowd, nor unified by some intermingling of thought as in a group.

It must be understood that I do not wish to make any arbitrary dictum in regard to distinctions between the crowd and the herd, the crowd and mere numbers, etc. I merely wish to point out that the subject has not yet received sufficient study. What is it we feel at the midnight mass of the Madeline? It is not merely the one thought which animates all; it is largely the great mass of people who are feeling the one thought. But many considerations and unanswered questions leap to our mind just here. All this is an interesting field for the further study and close analysis of psychologists.

We must not, however, think from these distinctions that man as member of a group and man as member of a crowd, as one of a herd or of a mob or of a mere assemblage, is subject to entirely different laws which never mingle; there are all the various shadings and minglings of these which we see in such varied associations as business corporation, family, committee, political meeting, trade-union etc. Our herd traditions show in our group life; there is something of the crowd in all groups and there is something of the
group in many crowds, as in a legislative assembly. Only further study will teach us to distinguish how much herd instinct and how much group conviction contribute to our ideas and feelings at any one time and what tendencies are when these clash. Only further study will show us how to secure the advantages of the crowd without suffering from its disadvantages. We have all felt that there was much that was valuable in that emotional thrill which brings us into a vaster realm although not a coordinated realm; we
have all rejoiced in the quickened heart-beat, the sense of brotherhood, the love of humanity, the renewed courage which have sometimes come to us when we were with many people. Perhaps the ideal group will combine the advantages of the mass and the group proper: will give us collective thought, the creative will and at the same time the inspiration for renewed effort and sustained self-discipline.

Crowd association has, however, received more study than group association because as a matter of fact there is at present so much more of the former than of the latter. But we need not only a psychology which looks at us as we are, but a psychology which points the way to that which we may become. What our advanced thinkers are now doing is to evolve this new psychology. Conscious evolution means giving less and less place to herd instinct and more and more to the group imperative. We are emerging from our
gregarious condition and are now to enter on the rational way of living by scanning our relations to one another, instead of bluntly feeling them, and so adjusting them that unimpeded progress on this higher plane is secured.

And now that association is increasing so rapidly on every hand, it is necessary that we see to it that this shall be group association, not crowd association. In the business world our large enterprises are governed by boards, not by one man: one group (corporation) deals with another group (corporation). Hospitals, libraries, colleges, are governed by boards, trustees, faculties.
We have committees of arbitration, boards of partial management (labor agreements) composed of representatives of employers and employed. Many forms of cooperation are being tried: some one must
analyze the psychological process of the generation of cooperative activity. All this means a study of group psychology. In the political world there is a growing tendency to put the administrative part of government more and more into the hands of commissions. Moreover, we have not legislatures swayed by oratory
and other forms of mass suggestion, but committee government. Of course legislative committees do not try to get the group idea, they are largely controlled by partisan and financial interests, but at any rate they are not governed wholly by suggestion. In the philanthropic world we no longer deal with individuals: we form a committee or association to deal with individuals or with groups of individuals. The number of associations of every kind for every purpose increases daily. Hence we must study the group.