Crowds

Walking. Stepping off the tram and getting onto the bridge I had to navigate through a heavy throng. Everyone jostling and pressing relentlessly without surcease. There was no regard for my being, much less my space; I felt accosted from all sides. I intuited a ravening pitiless purpose and hunger pent in and dammed up in these bodies hurrying along next to mine, and somehow felt keenly for the first time that I might easily be delivered to the tender mercies of a thousand tromping treads at the slightest slip or misstep. You might even say that at that moment, as I felt myself being shuttled along by the throng's remorseless systole and diastole, I had an honest to goodness philosophical thought. To see the social nature of humanity, I thought, look no further than at the milling crowd of people interacting anonyomusly without restraining relation to one other. How to they behave? They clamor shamelessly, men and women alike, devoid of all decency. They cut and bump and shove, they trip and tangle and tussle. They would fain make war on each other were it not for the looming threat of violence done by mob and police and penitentiary. In the crowd, the rule of all is the rule of each. No individual may flirt with the notion of relaxing his own vigilance, his own ruthlessness, lest he be cut and trampled in the automatic reflex that is weakness's due. There is no alternative. Taken to its logical extreme, a fire panic, the clamoring crowd is society's most absolute and merciless normative political institution: All against all, with a double-speedy death to the deviant. The ultimate crucible for the fostering of sociopathic reactionary behavior. Each will take what he can--this includes killing another on a lark--and give only what he must. It doesn't matter if you are a student, a doctor, a housewife, a priest or a whore. In the crowd each is a cretin in equal measure, revealed at last in all his despicable humanity. It is a valuable lesson for absorption by any would-be reformist and lover of man.