Page:The Source and Aim of Human Progress.djvu/38

34 culture, of great achievements in philosophy and science and of general world 'Kultur' and culture broke treaties, attacked, destroyed, deported, and enslaved whole populations. Women and babes were drowned like rats in the middle of the ocean by sneaking submarines. Zeppelins and aeroplanes showered explosive missiles on defenceless people, on civilian populations. Nations gloried in such brutal acts. Every fiendish deed was greeted with an ever rising wave of patriotic enthusiasm. For such cowardly, inhuman, and diabolical acts, the craven miscreants were decorated and honored as heroes by their alleged superiors. Man could not have fallen to any lower level of vice and depravity.

"The very elements of nature were let loose for the ruin of nations. Man gloried in his fiendish, military, inventive power of depredation and destruction. Science supplied virus, venom, toxins, poison, gas, rifles, cannons, tanks, and long range guns. Hell was let loose on earth. Professors of philosophy and science carrying high the patriotic banner of Kultur and culture gloried in the system of compulsory, universal, military service, first made in Germany; they exulted in the degrading, vicious process of training by which the individual is hypnotized into submission to a brutal organization of military junkers, hallowed by the name of state and Fatherland. It was the darkest period in the history of mankind. Man was crazed with the lust of blood, frenzied with rapine and murder."

Such are the terrible consequences when in fear of attack or invasion the subconscious becomes awakened to its irrational self-defence by the impulse of self-preservation and the fear instinct. The prestige of the gregarious aggregate, the overwhelming awe and terror of the herd, mob, community, the loss of individuality in the mob and the crowd, along with the conditions favorable to a dissociation of the upper, reflective self from the suggestible, automatic, reflex subconsciousness go to form the main sources of all mental epidemics, scourges, plagues, panics, frenzies, and manias, political, religious, and military. With the increase in mass of the human aggregate the mob-energy grows like the momentum of an avalanche in its downward course. Witness the overwhelming migratory obsession of swarming multitudes of hordes of barbarians, an obsession akin to the uncontrollable, migratory instinct of birds, or of buffaloes, an obsession which has seized periodically on barbaric tribes, such as the migrations of Semites, Aryans in the early dawn of history, the Lust-Wanderung of Celts, Goths, Normans, and Germans, Huns, Mongols,