Individual Spiritual Rebirth Beyond Collective Conformity
Curiously enough, the Churches too want to avail themselves of mass action in order to cast out the devil with Beelzebub—the very churches whose care is the salvation of the individual soul. They too do not appear to have heard anything of the elementary axiom of mass psychology, that the individual becomes morally and spiritually inferior in the mass, and for this reason they do not burden themselves over much with their real task of helping the individual to achieve a metanoia, or rebirth of the spirit—deo concedente {"God willing"}. It is, unfortunately, only too clear that if the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is a sum total of individuals in need of redemption. I can therefore see it only as a delusion when the Churches try—as they apparently do—to rope the individual into social organization and reduce them to a condition of diminished responsibility, instead of raising them out of the torpid, mindless mass and making clear to them that they are the one important factor, and that the salvation of the world consists in the salvation of the individual's soul. It is true that mass meetings parade such ideas before us and seek to impress them on us by dint of mass suggestion, with the unedifying result that when the intoxication has worn off, the masked individual promptly succumbs to another even more obvious and still louder slogan. Their individual relation to God would be an effective shield against these pernicious influences. Did Christ ever call his disciples to him at a mass meeting? Did the feeding of the 5000 bring him any followers who did not afterwards cry "Crucify him!" with the rest, when even the rock named Peter showed signs of wavering? And are not Jesus and Paul prototypes of those who, trusting their inner experience, have gone their own individual ways, disregarding public opinion?
This argument should certainly not cause us to overlook the reality of the situation confronting the Church. When the Church tries to give shape to the amorphous mass by uniting individuals in the community of believers with the help of suggestion and tries to hold such an organization together, it's not only performing a great social service, but it also secures for the individual inestimable boon of a meaningful life form. These, however, are certain gifts which as a rule confirm certain tendencies and do not change them. As experience unfortunately shows, the inner individual remains unchanged however much community they have. Their environment cannot give them a gift that which they can win for themselves only with effort and suffering. On the contrary, a favorable environment merely strengthens the dangerous tendency to expect everything to originate from outside—even that metamorphosis which external reality cannot provide, namely, a deep seated change of the inner individual, which is all the more urgent in a view of the mass phenomena of today and the still greater problems of the increase of population looming up in the future. It is time we asked ourselves exactly what we are lumping together in mass organizations and what constitutes the nature of the individual human being, i.e., of the real individual and not the statistical one. This is hardly possible except through a new process of self- nourishment.
All mass movements, as one might expect, slip with the greatest ease down an inclined plane represented by large numbers. Where the many are, there is security; what the many believe must of course be true; with the many want must be worth striving for, and necessary, and therefore good. In the clamor of the many there lies the power to seize wish-fulfillments by force; sweetest of all, however, is that gentle and painless slipping back into the kingdom of childhood, into the paradise of parental care, to happy-go-luckiness and irresponsibility. All the thinking and looking after are done from the top; to all questions there is an answer; and for all needs the necessary provision is made. The infantile dream state of the masked individual is so unrealistic that they never think to ask who is paying for this paradise. The balancing of accounts is left to a higher political or social authority, which welcomes the task, for its power is thereby increased; And the more power it has, the weaker and more helpless the individual becomes.
Wherever social conditions of this type develop on a large scale, the road to tyranny lies open and the freedom of the individual turns into spiritual and physical slavery. Since every tyranny is ipso facto immoral and ruthless, it has much more freedom in the choice of its methods than an institution which still takes account of the individual. Should an institution come into conflict with the organized State, it is soon made aware of the very real disadvantage of its morality and therefore feels compelled to avail itself of the same methods as its opponent. In this way the evil spreads almost out of necessity, even when direct infection might be avoided. The danger of the infection is greater when decisive importance is attached to large numbers and statistical values, as is everywhere the case in our Western world. The suffocating power of the masses is paraded before our eyes in one form or another every day in the newspapers, and the insignificance of the individual is rubbed into them so thoroughly that they lose all hope of making themselves heard. The outworn ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity help them not at all, as he can direct this appeal only to his executioners, the spokesman of the masses.
Resistance to the organized mass can be affected only by the human who is as well organized in their individuality as the mass itself. I fully realize that this proposition must sound well-nigh unintelligible to the person of today. The helpful medieval view that an individual is a microcosm, a reflection of the great cosmos in miniature, has long since dropped away from them, although the very existence of their world-embracing and world-conditioning psyche might have taught them better. Not only is the image of the macrocosm imprinted upon them as a psychic being, but they also create this image for themselves on an ever-widening scale. They bears this cosmic "correspondence" within and by virtue of their reflecting consciousness, on the one hand, and, on the other, thanks to the hereditary, archetypal nature of their instincts, which bind them to their environment. But their instincts not only attach them to the macrocosm; They also, in a sense, tear them apart, because their desires pull them in different directions. In this way they fall into continual conflict with themselves and only very rarely succeed in giving their life an undivided goal—for which, as a rule, they must pay very dearly by repressing other sides of their nature. One often has to ask oneself in such cases whether this kind of one-sidedness is worth forcing at all, seeing that the natural state of the human psyche consists in a certain jostling together of its components and in the contradictoriness of their behavior—that is, in a certain degree of disassociation. Buddhism calls it attachment to the "ten thousand things." Such a condition cries out for order in synthesis.
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