MAN IN THE MASS
M.
V. RAJAGOPAL, M. A. (cantab), I. A. S.
With
the increasing complexity of social organisation
which has characterised the growth of civilisation, man tends to lose more and more of his
individuality and become one in the mass. In education, technology, Government
and similar spheres of modern activity there is increasing stress on the organisation as a whole and the consequent need for the
individual to adapt himself to the group and become one in it and also of it.
Even the so-called superman is in a real sense a myth because he again depends
on the sustained goodwill of a mass of people called his followers and he must
constantly be watching the moods and methods of the mass and making adjustments
of his own techniques and even values to sustain his pre-eminence. In that
sense even he becomes a man of the mass though not in the mass. Again in
political life, one has to belong to a group or a party in order to make
himself felt. As a mere individual, however brilliant or outstanding he may be,
he is likely to be lost in the wilderness so far as modern organisation
is concerned and even good ideas and actions may come to nothing merely because
they do not belong to a group. In the professional spheres also it is the same.
Even in highly specialised services which include
people of strong individualistic stamp, there are organisations and associations to which everyone must
belong and thus become one in the mass. In other words, the modern age is the
age of the average man. The particular acquirements of an individual become
obliterated in a group and the distinctiveness of each individual thus
vanishes. As Le Bon says what is heterogeneous becomes submerged in what is
homogeneous.
This
submergence of the individual in the mass has its advantages as well as
disadvantages. The advantages are obvious, namely namely
that by organisational coherence the common cause
gains strength which the individual at his best cannot achieve successfully.
That is aim and objective of trade unions, chambers of commerce, professional
guilds and student bodies. By allowing himself to be one in the mass in this
manner the modern man has acquired for himself an
enormous strength of collective bargaining and achieving his ends in common
with a multitude of others. In this sense it is an effective insurance against
any kind of unjust exploitation by powerful individuals or smaller groups and
therefore good.
The
disadvantages, however, are not only more but quite as obvious. From the point
of view of the individual himself, particularly the more talented and thinking
sort, it is not so desirable to become so completely lost in the mass.
Particularly, if we think of the mass in terms of race, nation, caste or
community all of which presume certain irrational motions of superiority. The
man in the mass surrenders his personality for an inchoate, ever-changing and
unstable personality of the mass and he surrenders his mind to the group mind
which is no mind at all. The man in the mass surrenders his individual reason
to the collective unreason and this is an attitude very contrary to the
individual’s true nature and he does acts of which as an isolated individual he
is not only incapable but would positively shun. Also the man in the mass is
highly suggestible and excitable. He needs little or no proof and even less
conviction to act. In this sense the man in the mass has been the ideal
material for tyrants, dictators and other ambitious leaders not only in the
political sphere but also in the social and religious spheres. History abounds
in such examples in almost all the countries of the world at all times. The
French Revolution which started with the noble ideals of philosophers like
Rousseau, namely liberty, equality and fraternity, turned into an engine of
tyranny and oppression because the revolution degenerated into frenzied mob
action manipulated by a few intelligent and unscrupulous individuals. The most
careful psychological investigations have proved that an individual immersed
for some length of time in a mass in action soon finds himself either by the
magnetic influence exercised by the mass or by the contagious frenzy of less
thinking individuals around him, in a state of mind which very much resembles
the state of fascination in which a hypnotised
individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotiser.
The conscious personality of the man in the mass is entirely obliterated. His
will and discernment are lost. His feelings and thoughts are bent in the
direction determined by the group.
While
on this point, I am reminded of a personal experience as an Executive
Magistrate dealing with a Law and Order situation. It was a mass agitation in a
little town against the cancellation of a scheduled halt of the Express Train.
There was no doubt some inconvenience caused to the public of this town as well
as of some villages in the hinterland, but it became rather a question of
prestige and a few people so appealed to the mass-instinct of local pride that
a state of frenzy was created to achieve an objective which could have been
easily achieved by a factual and forceful representation to the Railway
authorities or to the State Government. In fact that was the way the problem
was solved eventually but in the meanwhile many undesirable things happened,
thanks to the man in the mass. One day during this agitation (I think it was a
Sunday) the crowd which had gathered at the Railway Station to stop the trains
by mass force was noticed by me to be much larger than usual. I gathered that
as the local High School was closed for the day, its alumni had been persuaded
to swell the mass and they had readily obliged. The boys were in front and the
leaders were at a safe distance behind. The first intention of the crowd was to
stop the Mail Train which was due in another hour or so by making people lie across the rails. I was therefore concentrating all my
attention on preventing this move. But suddenly a man in the mass noticed a
Railway Official going towards the cabin room probably to clear the train and
he shouted that the cabin room should be brought down. The crowd suddenly
surged in a mass towards the cabin room in a state of frenzy and before I knew
where I was, a shower of stones brought the cabin room down in a shivering mass
of broken glass and other valuable equipment. After doing this the crowd was
running back to its original purpose of stopping the train because it was now
almost time for the train to pass through. I was also running with the crowd,
but found one young man who could not run quite as fast and therefore lagging behind.
I overtook him and gently drew him across because I had seen him furiously
engaged in the destructive act a few minutes earlier and in spite of it I
rather liked the young man’s face because the last thing which his features
suggested was that he was a rowdy or a desperado. After answering a few
questions by me about his home-town, his parents and his school, he broke down
and started crying like a child for I think he sincerely realised
that what he had done was utterly wrong and he was also probably under the
notion, mistaken of course, that I had put him under arrest. He said that he
threw stones because he found everybody around him throwing stones and he was
carried away by the common frenzy. He now realised it
was a ghastly mistake but then at the confused moment he did not. I let him go
home and I hope he really did. This is what happens when I said that the man in
the mass surrenders his individual reason to the collective unreason.
I
must narrate another incident from the same event to show how the man in the
mass can lose his reasoning power so as to act against his own vital interests
for a paltry cause which the mob has viewed entirely out of perspective. Even
as the Mail Train was sighted at the outer signal, a hefty young fellow appeared
from nowhere and threw himself across the rails. It was with the greatest
difficulty that he could be dragged off the rails and within some seconds later
the Mail Train had roared its way through. Two months later, a charming young
couple came to see me at the Travellers’ Bungalow
where I was camping and the young lady had a little child in her arms. I recognised the man immediately. The man told me that he had
come to thank me for saving his life on that day as otherwise he would have
left his young wife a widow and his little son fatherless from the day of his
birth. I asked him what made him think of such a reckless sacrifice for an
objective which was so limited and easily realisable
in a hundred other peaceful ways. He said he had been carried away by the
repeated shouting of the crowd “we shall stop the train”. I cite this as an
instance of the general observation I made earlier regarding the suggestibility
to which the man in the mass is so easily vulnerable.
Apart
from the loss of reasoning power, the modern man in the mass loses something
even more valuable from my point of view and that in his individual
personality. To realise the truth of this we have
only to look at mass life in cities like
But then one has to view these things against the background of contemporary realities, what we usually call the facts of life. The mass man, to my mind, has come to stay and should, therefore, be accepted. But the problem and the challenge is whether we should shrug our shoulders and resign ourselves to him as a guest who has gate-crashed or we should do something to rehabilitate the individual man even within the narrow limits of our present social, economic and technological organisation. I, for one, hope that in this conflict the mass man will not win with hands down.