Page:The Source and Aim of Human Progress.djvu/50

46 institutional structure of centralization predominated over the freedom of individual activity and the critical independence of personality.

Where social life runs in moulds, hardened by civilization or specialization, crystallized in caste, class, group, league, and various other organizations of a highly complex structure, there the social aggregate tends to develop more and more connective tissue fibre of the inactive, supporting type. This gradually crowds out the living elements, smothers the individual units, paralyzes the activities of the upper self with its controlling, rational consciousness, leaving exposed the lower, automatic consciousness with its characteristic abnormal suggestibility and docility to the stimuli and suggestions, coming from the external environment, and results in a permanent state of trance hypnosis, subject to all forms of gregarious plagues and mental epidemics. For all organic societies are based on subconscious activities which are but feebly held in check by a weak-minded upper self. Such human aggregates run wild in fads, crazes, manias, epidemics, plagues, mobs, riots, wars, without in the least making any real progress or in the least improving their wretched social state. It is not the humanistic type of society, but the organic, subconscious type of society which is the suggestible victim and miserable subject of hypnotization.

The fate of organic aggregates is sealed from the very start of their career. Organic societies, if left to themselves, may become stationary, or static, as it is sometimes termed, stagnating for centuries, like Egypt, India, China, and Byzantium, until destroyed by the onset of a young, vigorous society in which the structural elements have not yet gone far in their development, the living individual elements having still retained their social vitality and independent upper, personal consciousness, so that the social self has not yet sunk into the decadent, massive, subconscious with its characteristic abnormal suggestibility, and its hypnotic trance state. This young aggressive aggregate, once it has taken the course of organic, social development is, in its turn doomed to a similar fate. The ancient Babylonian and Hittite empires were destroyed by the Assyrian, the Assyrian and Egyptian empires by the Persian, the vast Persian empire by the Macedonian. After undergoing a process of segmentation the Macedonian empire succumbed to the iron grip of the Roman imperial rule. The Roman empire in its turn underwent a process of segmentation, in the western and eastern portion. The western portion fell a prey to the Germanic barbarians, while the eastern, the Byzantine empire, remained for centuries in a state of ossification, until destroyed by the onslaught of the Turks.