TRACTS FOR THE TIMES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 185, 6 August 1932, Page 8

TRACTS FOR THE TIMES.

THE MASS MIND. (By PRO BONO PUBLICO.) In a paper that arrived by last mail I read an interesting review of what must bo an interesting •book, "Tho Ravolt of tho Masses," by a Spanish professor. It isn't so much the book that intrigues me at the moment, however; it is a discovery made by the reviewer. 110 hails as an entirely new and great truth a passage in which the professor says that tho commonplace mind is dominating tho world to-day. It is true enough, but it isn't new. Every student of democracy has seen it coining, lias written of its possibilities and has deplored its consequences. It is an old subject with me, as you know, and it explains most of our present troubles, though not all of them and not even all the. more important ones. "Tho characteristic of the hour," says the professor, "is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has tho assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. As they say in the United States, 'to be different is to be indecent.' The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear, of course, that this 'everybody' is not 'everybody.' 'Everybody' was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialised minorities. Nowadays 'everybody' is tho mass alone. Here we have the formidable fact of our times, described without any concealment of the brutality of its features." It is not unnatural that a Spanish publicist should write in this strain, because the Spanish revolution is recent enough and the Spaniards are having their first vivid experience of the domination of the commonplace mind. .Accustomed to living under conditions determined by a ruling class, and accustomed consequently to having decisions made for them, the Spanish people are finding it strange to have to make up their own minds and make their own decisions. But I don't think they can yet realise what a dull and conservative thing a democracy can be. Of course I am not discussing the merits and demerits of the revolution. I don't know whether Spain is better off or worse off under the democracy than it was under the monarchy. The point is that a democracy always tends to become a tyranny, and a rather dull one, because it makes the mass mind doyiinant. Democracy can, and ultimately no doubt it will, save itself by the right sort of education, but in the meantime it isn't educated and isn't even trying to educate itcelf. Certainly democracv has its advantages, which quite probably outweigh its disadvantages, but it is a queer sort of imagination that identifies democracy as we know it now with progress.