In those who make the identification it induces a kind of busy, Panglossian fatalism. Looking out upon the world, they observe that circumstances seem to be conspiring to drive men in a certain direction. This movement is ‘historical,’ therefore possesses value—exists and therefore ought to exist. They accept what is. Indeed, they do much more than accept; they applaud, they give testimonials. If the real is the rational and the right, then it follows that a ‘historical’ action must have the same results as an action dictated by reason and the loftiest idealism.
Let us return, for a concrete example, to this matter of the centralization of power. The particular circumstances of our time (nationalistic sentiment, economic imperialism, threats of war and so forth) conspire to create a tendency towards the concentration and centralization of authority. The consequence of this is a curtailment of individual liberties and a progressive regimentation of the masses, even in countries hitherto enjoying a democratic form of government.
The rational idealist deplores this tendency towards tyranny and enslavement, and is convinced that its results can only be bad. Not so the man who is tief enough to regard historicalness as a value. His ultimate aim is probably the same as that of the rational idealist. But, believing as he does that the real is the rational, he persuades himself that the road which circumstances conspire to impose upon him must necessarily lead him to the desired goal. He believes that tyranny will somehow result in democracy, enslavement in the liberation of the individual, concentration of political and economic power in self-government all round. He is ready, in a word, to tolerate or even actively engage in any wickedness or any imbecility, because he is convinced that there is some ‘historical’ providence which will cause bad, inappropriate means to result in good ends.
The sooner we convince ourselves that ‘historicalness’ is not a value and that what we allow circumstances to make us do has no necessary connection with what we ought to do, the better it will be for ourselves and for the world we live in. At the present moment of time, the ‘historical’ is almost unmitigatedly evil. To accept the ‘historical’ and to work for it is to co-operate with the powers of darkness against the light.
Chapter VIII DECENTRALIZATION AND SELF-GOVERNMENT
The Anarchists propose that the state should be abolished; and in so far as it serves as the instrument by means of which the ruling class preserves its privileges, in so far as it is a device for enabling paranoiacs to satisfy their lust for power and carry out their crazy dreams of glory, the state is obviously worthy of abolition. But in complex societies like our own the state has certain other and more useful functions to perform. It is clear, for example, that in any such society, there must be some organization responsible for co-ordinating the activities of the various constituent groups; clear, too, that there must be a body to which is delegated the power of acting in the name of the society as a whole. If the word ‘state’ is too unpleasantly associated with ideas of domestic oppression and foreign war, with irresponsible domination and no less irresponsible submission, then by all means let us call the necessary social machinery by some other name. For the present there is no general agreement as to what that name should be; I shall therefore go on using the bad old word, until some better one is invented.
From what has been said in the preceding chapters it is clear that no economic reform, however intrinsically desirable, can lead to desirable changes in individuals and the society they constitute, unless it is carried through in a desirable context and by desirable methods. So far as the state is concerned, the desirable context for reform is decentralization and self-government all round. The desirable methods for enacting reform are the methods of non-violence.
Passing from the general to the particular and the concrete, the rational idealist finds himself confronted by the following questions. First, by what means can the principle of self-government be applied to the daily lives of men and women? Second, to what extent is the self-government of the component parts of a society compatible with its efficiency as a whole? And, thirdly, if a central organization is needed to co-ordinate the activities of the self-governing parts, what is to prevent this organization from becoming a ruling oligarchy of the kind with which we are only too painfully familiar?
The technique for self-government all round, self-government for ordinary people in their ordinary avocations, is a matter which we cannot profitably discuss unless we have a clear idea of what may be called the natural history and psychology of groups. Quantitatively, a group differs from a crowd in size; qualitatively, in the kind and intensity of the mental life of the constituent individuals. A crowd is a lot of people; a group is a few. A crowd has a mental life inferior in intellectual quality and emotionally less under voluntary control than the mental life of each of its members in isolation. The mental life of a group is not inferior, either intellectually or emotionally, to the mental life of the individuals composing it and may, in favourable circumstances, actually be superior.
The significant psychological facts about the crowd are as follows. The tone of crowd emotion is essentially orgiastic and dionysiac. In virtue of his membership of the crowd, the individual is released from the limitations of his personality, made free of the sub-personal, sub-human world of unrestrained feeling and uncriticized belief. To be a member of a crowd is an experience closely akin to alcoholic intoxication. Most human beings feel a craving to escape from the cramping limitations of their ego, to take periodical holidays from their all too familiar, all too squalid little self. As they do not know how to travel upwards from personality into a region of super-personality and as they are unwilling, even if they do know, to fulfil the ethical, psychological and physiological conditions of self-transcendence, they turn naturally to the descending road, the road that leads down from personality to the darkness of sub-human emotionalism and panic animality.
Hence the persistent craving for narcotics and stimulants, hence the never-failing attraction of the crowd. The success of the dictators is due in large measure to their extremely skilful exploitation of the universal human need for escape from the limitations of personality. Perceiving that people wished to take holidays from themselves in sub-human emotionality, they have systematically provided their subjects with the occasions for doing so. The Communists denounce religion as the opium of the people; but all they have done is to replace this old drug by a new one of similar composition. For the crowd around the relic of the saint they have substituted the crowd at the political meeting; for religious procession, military reviews and May Day parades. It is the same with the Fascist dictators. In all the totalitarian states the masses are persuaded, and even compelled, to take periodical holidays from themselves in the sub-human world of crowd emotion. It is significant that while they encourage and actually command the descent into sub-humanity, the dictators do all they can to prevent men from taking the upward road from personal limitation, the road that leads towards non-attachment to the ‘things of this world’ and attachment to that which is super-personal.
The higher manifestations of religion are far more suspect to the tyrants than the lower—and with reason. For the man who escapes from egotism into super-personality has transcended his old idolatrous loyalty, not only to himself, but also to the local divinities—nation, party, class, deified boss. Self-transcendence, escape from the prison of the ego into union with what is above personality, is generally accomplished in solitude. That is why the tyrants like to herd their subjects into those vast crowds, in which the individual is reduced to a state of intoxicated sub-humanity.
It is time now to consider the group. The first question we must ask ourselves is this: when does a group become a crowd? This is not a problem in verbal definition; it is a matter of observation and experience. It is found empirically that group activities and characteristic group feeling become increasingly difficult when more than about twenty or less than about five individuals are involved. Groups which come together for the purpose of carrying out a specific job of manual work can afford to be larger than groups which meet for the purpose of pooling information and elaborating a common policy, or which meet for religious exercises, or for mutual comfort, or merely for the sake of convivially ‘getting together.’ Twenty or even as many as thirty people can work together and still remain a group. But these numbers would be much too high in a group that had assembled for the other purposes I have mentioned. It is significant that Jesus had only twelve apostles; that the Benedictines were divided into groups of ten under a dean (Latin decanus, from Greek δέκα, ten); that ten is the number of individuals constituting a Communist cell. Committees of more than a dozen members are found to be unmanageably large.
Eight is the perfect number for a dinner party. The most successful Quaker meetings are generally meetings at which few people are present. Educationists agree that the
