THE MASS MIND

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 178, 30 July 1932, Page 13 (Supplement)

THE MASS MIND

“The characteristic of the hour it that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to bo commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will,’’ says Professor Ortega y Gasset, in “The Revolt of the Masses.’’ “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. Anbody who is not like everybody, who doos not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is dear, of course, that this ‘everybody’ is not ‘everybody.’ ‘ Everybody ’ was normally the complex unitv of the mass and the divergent, specialised minorities. Nowadays, ‘everybody’ is the mass alone. Here we have the formidable fact of our times, described without any concealment of the brutality of its features.” “What would b» the sincere reply of any representative man of to-day if a question were put to him—‘at what period <»f history would you have liked to live?’’’ he asks. “I think there can be no doubt about, it; any past, time, without exception, would give him the feeling of a restricted space in which he could not breathe. That is to say, the man of to-day feels that his life is more a life than any past one, or, to put it the other way about, the entirely of past t ime seems small to actual humanity. This intuition as regards present-day existence renders null by its stark clarity any consideration about decadence that is not very cautiously thought out.” The author doubts the capacity of the mass mind to solve present problems. “It is necessary.” ho writes, “that some mind or other should hold and exercise authority, so that the people without opinions —the majority—can start having opinions. For without these, the common life of humanity would be a chaos, a historic, void, lacking in any organic structure. Consequently, without a

mritua) power, without someone to jmmand. and in proportion as this is icking chaos reigns over mankind ”