The Mob Mind

“One commonly hears it said today, by those who have made the catchwords of democracy their crowd cult, that the issue in modern society is between democracy and capitalism. In a sense this may be true, but only in a superficial sense; the real issue is between the personal self as a social entity and the crowd. Capitalism is, to my mind, the logical first fruit of so-called democracy. Capitalism is simply the social supremacy of the trader-man crowd. For a hundred years and more commercial ability – that of organizing industry and selling goods – has been rewarded out of all proportion to any other kind of ability, because, in the first place, it leads to the kind of success which the ordinary man most readily recognizes and envies – large houses, fine clothes, automobiles, exclusive clubs, etc.

Moreover, commercial ability is the sort which the average man most commonly thinks he possesses in some degree. While, therefore, he grumbles at the unjust inequalities in wealth which exist in modern society, and denounces the successful businessman as an exploiter and fears his power, the average man will nevertheless endure all this, much in the same spirit that a student being initiated into a fraternity will take the drubbing, knowing well that his own turn at the fun will come later. It is not until the members of the under crowd begin to suspect that their dreams of “aping the rich” may never come true that they begin to entertain revolutionary ideas. In other words, forced to abandon the hope of joining the present dominating crowd, they begin to dream of supplanting and so dispossessing this crowd by their own crowd.”

Everett Dean Martin, “Behavior of Crowds” (1920)