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 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 Bombay, London, New York or Tokyo and contrast it with the picture obtaining in smaller towns and cities where the civic organisation is simpler and the tempo of life far less hectic. Getting on or off electric trains and escalators the people are seen running about like frightened sheep. There is a massive and depressing anonymity about the whole picture. Whether you enter a restaurant, a cafeteria, a cinema hall, a railway station or even a ball room in any of the big cities, you see the ubiquitous mass man. This mass man is a drab figure in a human sense because he has given up for the sake of the organisation even some of the desirable and essential traits of his individual personality. He is an automation thinking, acting and even feeling as thousands surrounding him do. This is the mass man of the technological age even like the mass product of the machines which the technological age has brought with it. When the mass man’s powers of individual thinking and feeling get increasingly blunted, he becomes in the process much less curious and imaginative. With the decrease and even loss of the imaginative faculty the urge for strong individual creative expression also diminishes to a great extent and this is probably what Macaulay anticipated when he said that as civilisation advances poetry declines.

But then one has to view these things against the ground 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.