Page:The Source and Aim of Human Progress.djvu/39

Rh Tartars in the early ages of our era; the flood of Arabs, obsessed with a fervor of military, religious mania; the Crusades of mediaeval European humanity, rolling waves after waves of crusaders in a fury of religious, delusional excitement, forcing their way towards the entrancing object, the grave of the Savior in Jerusalem; the bloody religious wars of the Reformation; the political revolutions in England and France with the terrible excesses of mob-rule; the mob spirit running riot in economical crisis, financial bubbles, industrial panics, religious revivals; Napoleonic wars; the recent exaltant, social mania of empire-building and world-dominion, infected by the most virulent pestilential germs of triumphant militaristic nationalism which first seized on the imperial aggregates of Central Germanic tribes, and spread like a virulent miasma to other nations, wafting its poisonous emanations across land and oceans, culminating in the worst world-epidemic,—the so called world-war.

The central and centralized, imperial governments, guided by the big interests of the country, induced in their unfortunate subjects this last pestilential epidemic of military mania by means of a persistent course of direct and indirect suggestion in which the conditions of normal and abnormal suggestibility were specially emphasized, laying bare the social subconscious, stimulating in it the fear of invasion and attack by neighboring nations, stirring up the impulse of self-preservation, rousing the entranced, hypnotized mind of the populace to a frenzy of self-defense, while the junkers, the officers, the soldiers, the professors, the journalists of the middle-classes were entranced with beatific visions of world-dominion. Nothing stirs so much to the very depths of its soul the poor, naked, irrational subconscious as self and fear. Nothing is so suggestive, so appealing to the social subconscious as fear and self which alone have the power to set society into intense excitement of maniacal fury.

With the growth of social institutions there is an ever increasing tendency towards formation of rigid rules and regulations for almost every step, for every act in all walks of life. Man's behavior is prescribed for every occasion of life. He is commanded by direct and indirect suggestion what to say and how to say it, what to do and how to do it, what to wear and how to dress, what to eat and drink and what manners to have at the table and in company, he is prescribed what to believe and what to think in fear of social condemnation and eternal damnation. Man is brow-beaten, leashed, muzzled, masked, and lashed by boards and councils, by leagues and societies, by church