Excerpt from The Mob Mind Vs; Civil Liberty
In this discussion the word "crowd" must be understood to mean the peculiar mental condition which sometimes occurs when people think and act together, either immediately where the members of the group are present and in close contact, or remotely, as when they affect one another in a certain way through the medium of an organization, a party or sect, or the press.
Both the individual and society suffer, as we shall see, from crowd-behavior. I know of nothing which today so menaces not only the values of civilization, but also - it is the same thing in other words, perhaps - the achievement of personality and true knowledge of self, as the growing habit of behaving as crowds.
Our society is becoming a veritable babel of gibbering crowds. Not only are mob outbreaks and riots increasing in number, but every interest, patriotic, religious, ethical, political, economic, easily degenerates into a confusion of propagandist tongues, into extravagant partisanship, and intemperance. Whatever be the ideal to which we would attain, we find the path of self-culture too slow; we must become army worms, eating our way to the goal by sheer force of numbers. The councils of democracy are conducted on about the psychological level of commercial advertising and with about the same degree of sincerity. While it cannot be said that the habit of crowd-making is peculiar to our times - other ages, too, have indulged in it - it does seem that the tendency to crowd-mindedness has greatly increased in recent years.
Whether it is temperance, or justice, or greater freedom, moral excellence or national glory, that we desire, - whether we happen to be conservatives or radicals, reformers or liberals, we must become a cult, write our philosophy of life in flaming headlines, and sell our cause in the market.
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