Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 55
2. The Part Played by Beliefs with Regard to Our Ideas and Sentiments
— The Psychology of Incomprehension.
As soon as a belief is securely established in the understanding it becomes the regulator of life, the touchstone of judgment, the director of intelligence. The mind can receive nothing new that does not conform to the new faith. Like Christianity in the Middle Ages and Islam among the Arabs, the prevailing faith sets its imprint on all the elements of civilisation, and notably on philosophy, literature, and the arts. It is the supreme criterion; it explains everything. The rationale of all our knowledge, for the sage as well as for the fool, consists in nothing else than in carrying the unknown to the known; that is to say, to what we think we know. Comprehension supposes the observation of a fact, and then its co-ordination with the small number of ideas already possessed by the individual. We thus relate unknown facts to facts we believe ourselves to understand, and each brain accomplishes this relation according to the sub-conscious concepts which rule it. From the most inferior mind to the highest the mechanism of explanation is always the same, and consists invariably of introducing a new idea in the midst of already acquired conceptions.
And it is precisely because we co-relate our perceptions of the world to particular ancestral conceptions that the individuals of the different have such different judgments. We perceive things only by deforming them, and we deform them according to our beliefs.
Beliefs that have become transformed into sentiments act not only upon our conduct in life, they influence also the sense we attach to words. The causes of the dissensions and the struggles which divide humanity are engendered for the most part by the same phenomena, but according to diverse mental constitutions and strongly differing ideas. Follow from century to century, from race to race, and from one sex to the other, the ideas evoked by the same words. Consider, for example, what are represented, to minds of differing origin, by the following words — religion, liberty, republic, bourgeoisie, property, capital, labour — and you will see how profound are the abysses which separate these mental representations.2 The different classes of the same society, individuals of different sex, seem to speak the same language, but it is only in appearance. The nuances of signification of this language are as numerous as the social and mental categories that employ it. Sometimes these Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 56
nuances escape them reciprocally to the extent of leading them to absolute incomprehension.
The different classes of society, and still more the different nations, are as widely separated by divergence of conception as by divergence of interests; this is why the conflict of classes and races, and not their chimerical concord, has always constituted a dominant fact of history. This discordance can only increase in the future. Far from tending to equalise men, civilisation tends to differentiate them more and more. Between a powerful feudal baron and the least of his retainers there was infinitely less mental difference than there is to-day between an engineer and the labourer he directs.
Between different races, different classes, different sexes, agreement is only possible on technical subjects into which the instinctive sentiments do not enter. In morals, in religion, in politics, on the contrary, agreement is impossible, or is only possible when the individuals in question have the same origin; and then they agree, not by reasoning, but by the identity of their conceptions. Persuasion is never rooted in reason. When people are gathered together to consider a question of politics, religions, or morals, they are the dead, not the living, who discuss. They are the souls of their ancestors that speak from their mouths, and their words are the echoes of the eternal voices of the dead, to which the living are always obedient.
Words, then, have senses very different according to our beliefs, and for this reason they evoke in our minds very different sentiments and ideas. Perhaps the most arduous effort of thought is to succeed in penetrating to the minds of individuals who constitute types differing from our own. We succeed in so doing with difficulty enough in the case of compatriots who differ from us only in age, sex, or in education; how shall we succeed in the case of men of different race, above all when centuries separate us? To make another person understand one must speak in his own tongue, with the nuances of his own personal conceptions. One may live for years beside another being without ever understanding him, as parents do by their children. All our usual psychology is based on the hypothesis that all men experience identical sentiments under similar exciting influences, and nothing is more erroneous.
We can never hope to see things as they really are, since we are aware only of states of consciousness created by our senses. We can no more hope that the deformation undergone may be identical for all men, for this deformation Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 57
varies according to their various inherited or acquired conceptions; that is to say, according to race, sex, environment, and so forth; and for this reason one may say that an almost total incomprehension most often qualifies the relations between individuals of different race, sex, or environment. They may employ the same words; they never speak the same language.
Our vision of things, therefore, is always a deformed vision, but we have no suspicion of this deformation. We are even generally persuaded that it cannot exist; it is almost impossible for us to admit that other men can think and act otherwise than exactly as we ourselves think and act. This incomprehension has for its final result an absolute intolerance, above all in respect of beliefs and opinions which repose entirely on the sentiments.
All those who profess different opinions to our own in religion, morals, art, or politics immediately become, in our eyes, persons of dubious character, or, at least, lamentable imbeciles. We also consider it our strict duty, as soon as we possess the power, rigorously to persecute such dangerous monsters. If we no longer burn them and guillotine them, it is because the decadence of manners and the regrettable mildness of the laws oppose such proceedings.
As for individuals of very different race: we freely admit, at least in theory, that they cannot think exactly as we do, but not without commiserating their lamentable blindness. We also consider it a benefit to them to convert them to our manners and customs and laws by the most energetic means, when by chance we become their masters. Arabs, negroes, Annamese, ‘Malagasy, and go forth, oil whom we aspire to impress our manners, laws, and customs —
whom, as the politicians say, we desire to assimilate, have learned by experience what it costs to think otherwise than their conquerors. They continue certainly to retain their ancestral conceptions, but they have learned to hide their thoughts, and have acquired at the same time all implacable hatred for their new masters.
Incomprehension presents itself in different degrees among the different peoples. Among those who travel little or not at all — for example, the Latins
— it is absolute, and their intolerance is accordingly complete. Our incapacity to understand the ideas of other peoples, civilised or not, is amazing. It is also the principal cause of the lamentable state of our colonies. The most eminent Latins, and even men of genius such as Napoleon, do not differ from the common run of men in this particular. Napoleon never had the vaguest notion Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 58
of the psychology of a Spaniard or an Englishman. His judgments upon them were about as valuable as that one read, recently, in one of our great political journals, as to the conduct of England with regard to the African savages. “She intervenes always,” said the worthy editor, with indignation, “to prevent the tribes from getting rid of their kings, and setting up republics.” Nothing could be more incomprehensible and ingenuous.
The works of our historians teem with similar appreciations, and it is partly because their works are full of such that I have arrived at this conclusion, for which I have been reproached by the illustrious philologist Max Müller: that historical works are nothing but pure romances, absolutely removed from all reality. That which we learn from them is never the soul of history, but only that of the historian.
And again, because the concepts of the nations have no common denominator, and because the same words evoke such different ideas in different minds, I have come to yet another conclusion, apparently paradoxical: that written works are absolutely untranslatable from one language to another.
This is true even of modern languages, and how much more of languages representing the ideas of extinct peoples? There are hosts of examples; I will confine myself, in passing, to citing one.
When the translations of Ibsen’s plays were represented in Paris, the critics immediately discovered in them profound and mysterious symbols, until one day a Scandinavian critic demonstrated to them that these profound and mysterious symbols were of their own fabrication, that Ibsen was a very simple and straightforward dramatist for people who lived in Scandinavian society, and that his personages meant to say only what they said. When, for example, in one of his plays, certain of his characters are advised to hunt the wolves in which Scandinavia abounds, what is meant is merely that they had best live the life of hunters, and this very ordinary remark had by no means the Socialistic meaning which was ascribed to it by the equally subtle and incomprehensive critics.
It is only, I repeat, between individuals of the same race, long subjected to the same conditions of life and the same environment, that a little comprehension may exist in reciprocal relations. Thanks to the hereditary mould of their ideas, the words they exchange are then able to evoke ideas almost similar.
Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 59
3. The Ancestral Formation of the Moral Sense.
The part played by certain moral qualities in the destiny of peoples is altogether preponderant. I shall have occasion to show this presently, in studying the comparative psychology of the different nations. For the moment I would only indicate the fact that the moral qualities, like beliefs, are bequeathed by heredity, and form, consequently, part of the ancestral soul. It Is in this soil, that our forefathers have bequeathed to us, that the motives of our actions germinate, and our conscious activity serves us only to perceive their fruits. The general rules of our conduct have for their habitual guides the sentiments acquired by heredity, and are rarely influenced by reason.
These sentiments are very slowly acquired. The moral sense has but little stability until, being fixed by heredity, it has become unconscious, and consequently escapes from influences of reason, always egotistical, and most often contrary to the interests of the race. The principles of morality which education instils have a very slight influence; I would say none at all if it were not necessary to take into account those beings of neutral character, whom Professor Ribot calls “amorphous subjects,” and who are on that vague border-line from which the least factor may incline them towards good or evil.
It is, above all, with regard to these neutral characters that codes of law and policemen are of use. They refrain from doing what the law and the police forbid, but they do not attain to a more elevated morality. An intelligent education — that is, an education altogether neglecting the discussions and dissertations of philosophy — may show them that it is entirely to their interest not to enter the policeman’s sphere of action. Such a demonstration will strike them far more than vague generalisations and the fatiguing dissertations on which moral instruction is nowadays based.
The doctrine of Kant, which is to-day the basis of all the courses of philosophy in our educational establishments, and which one finds even in the manuals intended for children, may seem sufficiently elevated; but it is not, as M. Maurice Barrés justly observes, of the least practical value, for it addresses itself to an abstract and ideal person, always and everywhere identical with himself, whereas the real man, the only man we have to live with, varies according to time and race.
So long as our reason does not intervene our moral sense remains instinctive, and our motives of action do not differ from those of the most unthinking Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 60
crowds. These motives are unreasoned, in the sense that they are instinctive, and not the product of reflection. They are not irrational, in the sense that they are the result of slow adaptations, induced by anterior necessities. It is in the popular mind that they are manifested in all their force, and this is why the instinct of the crowds is so profoundly conservative, and so ready to defend the collective interests of a race as long as the theorists and orators do not trouble it.
Notes.
1. We need not go back to heroic times for an example of faith immune against all discussion. We need only look about us to discover a host of people possessing, like sprouts of an hereditary stock of mysticism, faith upon faith derived from this mystic stock, and which no argument can Shake. All the little religious sects which have sprung up during the last twenty-five years, as they sprung up at the close of Paganism — Spiritualism, Theosophy, Esoterism,
&c.— can boast of numerous disciples who present this mental state in which faith can no longer be destroyed by any argument whatever. The celebrated affair of the spirit-photographs is full of instruction on this point. The photographer B. publicly declared that all the photographs of phantoms supplied to his ingenuous clients were obtained by photographing dummies.
The argument would seem conclusive. But in spite of the avowals of the factitious photographer, despite the production in public of the dummies which had served as models, the spiritualist clients maintained with energy that they recognised perfectly in the photographs the features of their defunct relatives.
This marvellous obstinacy of faith is extremely instructive, and helps us thoroughly to understand the power of a belief.
2. The refraction of ideas, that is to say, the deformation of concepts according to race, age, sex, education, is one of the least explored questions of psychology. I have touched on it in one of my latter works, in showing how institutions, religions, languages, and arts become transformed in passing from one people to another. I have recently sketched the programme of this study for a young and intelligent psychologist, M. E. Renoult, living on account of his profession among the lower classes, who furnished me with some interesting documents for the above work, and notably on the psychology of the working man. If he succeeds in bringing this task to a successful end he will have Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 61
rendered a great service to psychology and sociology.
Chapter 2: Tradition as a Factor of Civilisation — The Limits of Variability of the Ancestral Soul.
1. The Influence of Tradition in the Life of Nations.
We may abjure the fetters of tradition that bind us; but how few, at any period, is the number of those — artists, thinkers, or philosophers — capable of shaking off the yoke! It is given to very few to disengage themselves in any degree from the ties of the past. The persons who call themselves freethinkers may be counted perhaps by millions; in reality, there are scarcely a few dozen to an epoch. The clearest scientific truths often establish themselves only with the greatest difficulty, and even when they are so established it is by the reputations of those that uphold them.1 rather than by demonstration. The doctors for a whole century denied the phenomena of magnetism, although they might observe them everywhere, until a scientist of great prestige affirmed that these phenomena were real.
In everyday parlance the word “freethinker” is merely a synonym for
“anti-clerical.” The provincial apothecary, who passes for a freethinker because he does not go to mass, and persecutes the parish priest by laughing at his dogmas, is, at the bottom, as little of a freethinker as the priest. They belong to the same psychological family, and are equally guided by the thoughts of the dead.
We must be able to study, in detail, the everyday opinions which we form on everything, to see how true is the preceding theory.
These opinions, which we suppose to be so free, are imposed on us by our surroundings, by books, by journals; and according to our hereditary traditions we accept or reject them en bloc, and most often reason plays no part whatever in this acceptance or refusal. Reason is invoked often enough, but in reality it plays as small a part in the formation of our opinions as in the determination of our actions. To discover the principal sources of our ideas we must go to heredity for our fundamental opinions, and to suggestion for our secondary opinions, and it is for this reason that individuals of the same profession in the different social classes are so much alike. Living in the same environment, incessantly mouthing the same words, the same phrases, the same ideas, they Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 62
finally end by possessing ideas as banal as identical.
In matters of institutions, beliefs, arts, or of any elements whatever of civilisation, we are always heavily weighed upon by our surroundings, and above all by the past. If we do not as a rule perceive this to be so it is because our facility in giving new names to old things deludes us into believing that in changing these words we have also changed the things they represent.
To make the weight of ancestral influences clearly sensible, we must take some well-defined element of civilisation — for instance, the arts. The weight of the past appears clearly in these, and also the struggle between tradition and the modern ideas. When an artist imagines he is shaking off the burden of the past, he is in reality only returning to more ancient forms, or altering the most necessary elements of his art; replacing, for example, one colour by another, the pink of the face by green, or abandoning himself to all those fantasies, the spectacle of which we have been afforded by our recent annual exhibitions.
But even in his incoherent ramblings the artist is only confirming his impotence to throw off the yoke of tradition. A penetrating writer, Daniel Lesueur, has a page on these atavistic influences, which I reproduce here, because it very clearly develops the preceding remarks: —
“Powerlessness to create outside the limits of everyday things. Tyranny of the memory, which deceives the artist in every attempt, and sends him straying back to the ancient altars, to the forms that bygone generations adored.
“The less audacious resign themselves to this servitude of inspiration, the prisoner of ancient dreams. With a humble and fervent brush, with a chisel that has never trembled with the mystic fear of an unknown ideal, they represent the visions and the symbols, they eternise the legends, they set up the gods that no longer have worship, that no longer give oracles, and that every new incarnation brings a little closer to the earth.
“Again, by a plainly inevitable aberration, certain minds, impatient of the yoke, exasperated by the haunting of this past without which all becomes petrified — in art more than in any other branch of human evolution certain artists, finally exasperated, have sought to react by denying this too rigid reign of the traditions of splendour, by insulting the conventional beauty, the classic perfection, and the ideals of the academics and schools.
“How shall we describe the work of our modern artists, masters of technique, Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 63
but destitute of inspiration, who imagine themselves to produce original work by calmly parodying the sincere awkwardness and the anguished uncertainties of sublime initiators?
“They, too, are copyists, but they are going in the wrong direction. These revolutionaries have no more true independence than those who have submitted to the traditional. On them, as on the latter, weighs the formidable yoke of the past.
“Symbolists by intention, in literature as in painting, they symbolise nothing but vanished dreams and dead emotions.
“This malady of exasperated Impotence reaches a crisis only in the case of poets, painters, and sculptors. The architects have up to the present escaped the fever. They do not appear to suffer in any way from their frightful incapacity to conceive of anything outside of the forms which the centuries have established. Theirs is a placid impotence, a serene nullity. They raise tip their neo-Grecian palaces, their Renaissance railway stations, and their pseudo-Gothic villas with the most touching unconsciousness.” 2. The Limits of Variability of the Ancestral Soul.
Such is the influence of the past; and we must bear it always in mind, if we would understand the evolution of all the elements of a civilisation: how our institutions, our beliefs, and our arts form and develop themselves, and the enormous influence which the bygone centuries exert over their growth. The modern man has made the most conscientious efforts to escape from the Past.
Our great Revolution thought to cast it off for ever. But how vain are such attempts! A people may be conquered, enslaved, annihilated; but where is the power shall change its soul?
But this hereditary soul, from whose influence it is so difficult to escape, has taken centuries to form itself. Many different elements have found place in it, and under the influence of certain exciting causes the most hidden of these elements may come to the surface. A complete change of environment may develop in us germs that are at present dormant. Hence those which I have spoken in possibilities of character of which in another work, and which certain circumstances may bring to light. Thus it is that the peaceable nature of a chef de bureau, a magistrate, or a shopkeeper, may contain a Robespierre, Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 64
a Marat, a Fouquier-Tinville, and certain exciting elements will bring these latent personalities to the front. Then we see Government clerks shooting hostages, artists ordering the destruction of monuments, and after the crisis, having come to themselves again, asking themselves of what aberration they have been the victims. The bourgeois of the Convention, having returned, after the Terror, to their peaceful occupation as notary, professor, magistrate, or advocate, more than once asked themselves, in stupefaction, how they could have followed such bloody instincts, and immolated so many victims. It is not without danger that one disturbs the sediment deposited by our ancestors in the depths of our beings. We do not know what will arise from it: whether the soul of a hero or the soul of a bandit.
3. The Conflict Between Traditional Beliefs and Modern Necessities —
The Modern Instability of Opinion.
Thanks to those few original minds to which every period gives birth, every civilisation escapes, little by little, from the fetters of tradition; very slowly, it is true, because such minds are rare. This double necessity of fixity and variability is the fundamental condition of the birth and development of societies. A civilisation only becomes established when it creates a tradition, and it progresses only when it succeeds in modifying this tradition a little in each generation. If it does not so modify tradition it does not progress; like China, it remains stationary. If it attempts to modify it too quickly it loses all fixity; it becomes disintegrated, and is quickly doomed to disappear. The strength of the Anglo-Saxons consists in this: that while accepting the influence of the past they understand how to escape its tyranny in the necessary degree. The weakness of the Latins, on the contrary, is that they desire entirely to reject the influence of the past, and entirely to rebuild, without ceasing, all their institutions, beliefs, and laws. For this sole reason they have been living, for a century in a state of revolution and incessant upheavals, from which they do not appear to be emerging.
The great danger of the present is that we have scarcely any common beliefs.
Collective and identical interests are becoming further and further supplanted by dissimilar and particular interests. Our institutions, our laws, our arts, our education, have been established on beliefs which are crumbling every day, and which science and philosophy cannot replace; and of old it was never their Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 65
part to do so.
We certainly have not escaped from the influence of the past, since man cannot avoid that influence; but we no longer believe in the principles on which our entire social edifice is built. There is a perpetual discord between our hereditary sentiments and the ideas of the present day. In morals, in religion, in politics, there is no recognised authority as there used to be of old, and no one can hope nowadays to enforce any one aim on these essential things. It follows that the Governments instead of directing opinion, are obliged to submit to it, and to obey its incessant fluctuations.
The modern man, and above all the of Latin race, is bound by his unconscious desires to the past, although his reason incessantly seeks to escape from its yoke. While awaiting the appearance of fixed beliefs, he possesses only those beliefs which, by the sole fact that they are not hereditary, are transient and momentary. They are generated spontaneously by the events of the day, like waves raised by the tempest. They are often vehement, but they are also ephemeral. Whatever circumstances may give rise to them, they are propagated by contagion and imitation. By reason of the neurotic condition of certain peoples to-day, the slightest cause provokes excessive sentiments.
Explosions of hate, fury, indignation, enthusiasm, thunder forth at the most trivial event. A few soldiers are surprised by the Chinese in Langson; an explosion of fury overthrows the Government in a few hours. A village, hidden away in a corner of Europe, is destroyed by floods; there follows an explosion of national sympathy, which displays itself in subscriptions, charity bazaars, and what not, and makes us send to a distance sums of money which we need only too much to alleviate our own misery. Public opinion no longer knows anything but extreme sentiment or profound indifference. It is terribly feminine, and, like woman, has no control over its reflex movements. it veers without ceasing to every wind of external circumstance.
This extreme mobility of sentiments which are no longer directed by any fundamental belief renders them highly dangerous. In default of authority deceased, public opinion becomes more and more the master of all things, and, as it has at its service an all-powerful press to excite it or follow it, the rôle of the Government becomes day by day more difficult, and the policy of statesmen more vacillating. We may discover many useful qualities in the popular mind, hut never the thought of a Richelieu, nor even the lucid views Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism, 66
of a modest diplomatist having some consistency in his ideas and conduct.
This power of public opinion, so great, and so fluctuating, extends not only to politics, but to all the elements of civilisation. It dictates to artists their works, to judges their decrees, to governments their conduct. One of the most curious examples of its invasion of the courts, formerly presided over by the firmest characters, is afforded by the very instructive case of Dr. Laporte. It will remain an example to be cited in all the treatises of psychology.
He was called out at night to an extremely difficult accouchement. Not having any of the necessary instruments at hand, and seeing hat the patient was at the point of death, the doctor made use of an instrument of iron borrowed from a workman in the neighbourhood, which differed from the classic instrument only in insignificant details. But as the makeshift instrument did not come out of a surgeon’s case (a mysterious thing, enjoying a certain prestige) the gossips of the neighbourhood immediately declared that the surgeon was an ignorant fool and a butcher. They stirred up all the neighbours by their clamouring; the rumour spread, the papers recorded the matter; public opinion waxed indignant; a magistrate was found to commit the unfortunate doctor to prison; then a tribunal, to condemn him to a new imprisonment, after a long remand. But in the meantime the affair was taken in hand by eminent specialists, who entirely reversed the opinion of the public, and in a few weeks the murderer had become a martyr. The case was carried to the Court of Appeal, and the magistrates, continuing to follow the opinion of the public, this tune acquitted the accused.
The dangerous character of this influence of the tides of popular opinion consists in the fact that they act unconsciously on our ideas, and modify them without our suspecting it. The magistrates who condemned Laporte, as well as those who acquitted him, certainly obeyed public opinion without realizing the fact; Their subconsciousness became transformed in order to follow it, and their reason only served them to find justifications for the reversal of judgment, which really took place, unknown to themselves, in their own minds.
These popular movements, so characteristic of the present hour, deprive all governments of al