Circumstances in an organization to which I belong were such that my mind went back to the book The Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset to help understand the situation. It is one of the most prescient books of the last century. In it, Ortega seeks to understand the cultural implications of the rise of what he calls “mass man.”
“Europe is suffering from the greatest crisis that can afflict peoples, nations, and civilization….It is called the rebellion of the masses. … This fact is the accession of the masses to complete social power.”
The ‘mass man’ “does not want to give reasons or be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions. This is the new thing: the right not to be reasonable, the ‘reason of unreason.’” As he said elsewhere, “the vulgar proclaims and impose the rights of vulgarity, or vulgarity as a right.” The spirit of the masses “inevitably leads it to one single process of intervention [in social affairs]: direct action [i.e. violence,] … the Magna Carta of barbarism.”
What happens when mass man takes over the state? The mass “has a deadly hatred of all that is not itself. … When the mass acts on its own, it does so only in one way, for it has no other: it lynches.” Ortega goes on to say, the mass man “sees it [the State], admires it, knows that here it is, safeguarding his existence; but he is not conscious of the fact that it is a human creation invented by certain men and upheld by certain virtues and fundamental qualities which the men of yesterday had and which may vanish into air tomorrow.” Eventually, this lack of consciousness will strangle the state.
A similar process spells the end of science. And civilization dies.
Ah, the wonder of democracy as a philosophical ideal!
[Quotes from chapters 1, 8 and 13]
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