The Masses and the Elite

...Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some of us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be, that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government...

...Lippmann's conservatism from the kind of authoritarian politics that would substitute for the rule of an inept majority the rule of a competent elite...

...How timely are their words: As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence...

...In myth Prometheus was man...

...The leader is seen by his public as endowed with magical powers that will rescue them from the terrible forces that threaten them, but in reality he is trapped by the same forces that enslave the crowds which give him power...

...Comfort observes, "A considerable number of war crimes have originated in pressures from the executive, often from a single member, backed by expert assurance that they were necessary, even though deplorable...

...Under present conditions, where war is incompatible with individual and collective survival, such an attitude may be considered a valuable safeguard...

...Alex Comfort, documenting his assertion with clinical and political evidence, argues that "the delinquencies of states arise at two levels—in the psychopathy of publics, and in the psychopathy of individuals expressing their own and their culture's aggression through the mechanism of power...

...The revival of the counter-Enlightenment would not have been possible if there were not a certain truth in its claims...

...Just as the Enlightenment had assumed that social evil was derived from the tyranny of corrupt Clites, the counter-Enlightenment had insisted (and, as now exhumed, continues to insist) that the source of pathology is the revolt of the masses...

...Mehta Reprints Available A limited number of reprints of the two articles by Asoka Mehfa on Asia (DISSENT, Spring and Summer issues, 1955) are now available at 25 cents a copy...

...The elites which cluster around positions of power in the modern state are increasingly recruited from those who have an un quenchable thirst for domination...

...11 Today, the old problem of the judgment of governing groups is complicated by a clinical problem...

...In a society that tragically dehumanizes personal...

...At present, of course, the revival of counter-Enlightenment images has many special causes and functions...

...In a climate of distrust and fear, any individual and any group is a potential menace, but when these conditions are removed, people will respond with changes of "nature" that are incredible and profound...

...The involution of this image, made popular by writers as similar in mind and diverse in talent as Ortega y Gasset, Walter Lippmann and Peter Viereck, is based on an aristocratic conception of political life that sees humanity as divided into two species: the primitive formless mass, and the elite, which is evolved, refined and purified from the mass and, presumably, restrained by inner controls...

...In a highly industrialized society, where solidarity is largely created by impersonal and mechanical bonds, the myth of the good Public or its involution, the bad Masses, is an abstraction that creates a false social unity...

...Modern elites tend increasingly to be recruited from psychopaths of various kinds...

...on the other hand, no man is sufficiently normal to be entrusted safely with the power contained in the machinery of the modern state in any capacity—representative, expert or tyrant...

...Perhaps one may be forgiven for quoting at length from these authors who, the conservatives allege, were so distrustful of the masses...

...111 Today, anyone who suggests that there are qualities in human nature which justify esteem and confidence is likely to be dismissed as a utopian...

...Fortunately for the survival of democratic institutions, mass inertia has sometimes been a blessing as well as a curse...

...He is the objectification of the dark and violent forces within the crowd—both its master and its mirror image...

...As Dr...

...On the one hand, as Eric Hoffer points out, "The uncanny powers of a leader manifest themselves not so much in the hold he has on the masses as in his ability to dominate and bewitch a small group of able men...

...When the masses are quiet, settled into the forms of piety and authority set up for them, they are human...

...The liberal democracies are no more immune from abnormal and delinquent leadership than are the dictatorships...

...Dictatorship, in a sense, is an involution of the tragedy of Prometheus...

...But no one gains by substituting the pathology of elites for the pathology of the mass...

...Among the images dredged up from the counter-Enlightenment is the picture of the body politic as a chaotic mass—"the swinish multitude," as Burke called it—seething with appetite...

...Now many of them (in the grip of the anti-image) sedate their feelings of concern and guilt with the observation that such is the nature of things—that the masses are inherently depraved...

...tray the trust committed to them...

...who pretend to be champions for the right and the capacity of the people to choose their own rulers, yet maintain that they will prefer those only who will immediately and infallibly be...

...Today, this image of the massesasbarbarians is a negative vision, formed in reaction to the Progressive vision of an emancipated and omnipotent People marching inexorably Forward...

...As a nineteenth-century philosopher prophetically observed, "Only when the sense of association in society is no longer strong enough to give life to concrete realities is the Press able to create that abstraction, 'the public,' consisting of unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organization— and yet are held together as a whole...

...The men of the Progressive movement thought of themselves as children of the Enlightenment, armed with instrumentalism and the scientific method, fated to conquer ignorance, break the tyranny of vested interests and usher in the shining future...

...But any moralist is a utopian, whether he admits it or not...

...In an unfortunate though understandable reaction, many persons once gripped by the myth of populist goodness are now looking for salvation in elitist political thought...

...He who denies human "perfectability" is an immoral moralist because he prevents it from becoming real...

...He who revolts from the masses to the fantasy of an aristocratic refuge is exactly in the position of the man in the fable who sold his breeches to buy a wig...

...Walter Lippmann, persevering in his ideal of a Victorian political aristocracy, calls for strong executive leadership insulated from the pressures of the mass, and has a new vogue...

...Popular control over official behavior, though not the vogue these days and perhaps suffering from hardening of the institutions, is still the only means for civic liberty...

...On the other hand, he is helping perpetuate this condition—an eternity of barbarism that is necessary to maintain the institutions so dear to him...

...There is little protection against executive misjudgment and outright abnormality...

...The condition is not immutable, but only the effect of several causes, and, therefore, it may be mitigated by the removal of those causes...

...Nor can one ignore the narcotic function performed by the image of the masses-as-barbarians...

...Political myths bury their undertakers...

...The "masses" are not savages or beasts to be restrained by institutional devices, but human persons whose nature is social, who are capable of evil as well as good, who may be harried, intimidated and provoked into abnormality and delinquency, but who will find happiness only in the good...

...In our day, political writers and social psychologists have demonstrated the significance of nameless anxiety and displaced aggression in the making of dictatorships and have shown how the latter feed on mass tensions and the despair of meaningless lives...

...20 cents in bundles of 5 or more...

...kind's benefactor, doomed to suffer eternally for his gifts...

...There is no reason for their existence if it is true that men, or even the masses, are unchangeable...

...Mehta's articles, which form part of a pamphlet published in India, were received with great interest, and we have had many requests for copies...

...An administrative or military official can advise the government in the capacity of an expert and thereby disarm criticism...

...ity, sensitive observers must respond in some fashion to the evidence of cultural depression around them...

...However, to those who are beginning to follow the road to demophobia, one might pose a question originally raised by the authors of The Federalist (a document cherished by conservatives): What are we to say to the men who profess the most flaming zeal for republican government, yet boldly impeach the fundamental principle of it...

...In response, embattled liberals exhume their own departed heroes, and the air is filled with the noise of shades locked in combat, the wail of ghostly polemics, the rattle of old bones...

...Unfortunately, the only judge of the elite's competence is the elite itself...

...If he refuses to admit it, he is performing two functions: on the one hand, he is assenting to cultural forms that in fact do keep the masses of men in a vulgar, barbaric state...

...If the executive and the legislature face a public that is thoroughly unreliable, these officials are likely to show a diplomatic caution similar to the prudence of states that know they cannot possibly resist aggression by arms...

...In the Progressive era, some responded with naive and sentimental programs of social uplift...

...Few would deny the significance in our time of explosive publics and the violence of mass movements...

...when they are presumptuous and pass over these limits, they are barbarians...

...It is becoming increasingly common to hear talk of finding in the authority of an elite salvation from the mass (from "the element of terror in the destiny of our time," Ortega said...

...The forces of the gutter that critics attribute to the crowd operate even more intensely in the elites themselves...

...In this condition, the longer action is delayed, the deeper smoldering hatred penetrates the soul, until it is released by a volcanic political explosion...

...Even—or perhaps especially—the dictatorships are systems in which the leader, his circle of lieutenants and the masses are locked in symbiotic interdependence...

...Actually, disorder is not an inherent attribute of the mass but a condition within it...

...On the one hand, power attracts abnormal personalities...

...The insistence on the "imperfectability" of man, dinned into our ears lately, contains a staggering irony if one considers that it is educators, professors, journalists and other professional moralists who are writing in this vein and consequently declaring that their function in society is entirely useless...

...On the other hand, the leader and the masses are likewise dependent on each other...

...and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another...

...But the cry for the savior, which places the dictator in power, results in the enslavement and suffering of those who cry for salvation...

...At the turn of this century, archaic modes of political thought had supposedly been laid to rest forever...

...Now that Progressivism has run its course and reached its time of troubles, it is no wonder that the specter of the counter-Enlightenment should return to haunt it, and that the ghosts of Burke, Maistre and company should be conjured up to mock it...

...Even before the rise of totalitarian states, a number of nineteenth century writers had perceived the role in collective behavior of ressentiment: a state of enervating tension and grumbling, ruminating hostility that burns but does not act...

...Today it is not possible to insulate the governors from the governed...

...Only a difference in degree separates Mr...