Page:The Source and Aim of Human Progress.djvu/30

26 rite and taboo. "Brute force" as the English anthropologist well puts it "lurks behind custom in the form of what Bagehot has called 'persecuting tendency.'" Society enmeshes the individual in a close and strongly woven network of taboos, customs, commandments, and traditions, all maintained by force and fear.

Fear of the outraged sense of the community inhibits even the very thought of breach of a taboo or violation of custom. The taboo is based on some subconscious fear of some unknown mystic force, or some vague apprehension of a spirit power avenging the awful transgression. The taboo is essentially the fear of the unseen, of the unknown. "A taboo is anything that one must not do lest ill-luck befall. And ill-luck is catching, like an infectious disease. Hence, if some one has committed an act that is not merely a crime, but a sin, it is every one’s concern to wipe out that sin, which is usually done by wiping out the sinner. Mobbish feeling always inclines to violence." This fear of communal anger, manifested at the breaking of some taboo, and resting on social self-preservation and mystic fear of the unknown and the unseen, is at the basis of all social institutions. Self-preservation and fear are at the heart of gregarious man; the two interpenetrate every fibre of his subconscious being.

Plato with his deep insight into the nature of man and society finds fear of such vital importance that he makes the knowledge of what to fear and what not to fear as fundamental in the education of the citizen. Self preservation with its companion the fear instinct dwell in the subconscious depths of gregarious man, and once aroused from slumber and started on their mad career cannot be arrested, they both become uncontrollable, giving rise to social plagues, mental crazes, epidemics and panics highly contagious and virulent in character. This was well brought out in the skillfully conducted campaigns by the various governments in appealing to the masses with their characteristic suggestible subconsciousness, stirring to the very depths the reflex consciousness of gregarious man by all sorts of direct and indirect suggestions of fear of attacks and patriotic reactions of self-defence against such attacks until the evil genii of self-preservation and fear became loose, resulting in a sweeping conflagration of a war of nations with all the horrors of diseases, mutilation, and extermination of millions of human lives; over seventeen and a half millions, according to latest accounts, having perished in this world-massacre of the human race.

Of all the mental epidemics that befall aggregate humanity and its subconscious activities the worst are the mob feelings of the