Public Opinion

José Ortega y Gasset – The Revolt of the Masses

The Revolt of the Masses (1930)

(Reading: The Revolt of the Masses)

INTRO

Agglomeration

Demographic Growth in Europe

Between 1800 and 1914, the population in Europe grew from 180 to 460 million.

People everywhere …

The masses have conquered spaces reserved for minorities

Sport arenas vs museums

THE MASS

Who is the mass?

Do the terms “mass” or “crowd” correlate with “class” or “income”?

Minorities vs masses

“It becomes the common social quality, man as undifferentiated from other men, but as repeating in himself a generic type.”

Modern Times

  • The growth of life
  • XIX Century – scientific and industrial revolution
  • The century of empiricism, industrial explosion and economic expansion
  • More sciences, more data, more professions, …
  • What the individual could learn, read, see, buy, …
  • The Record
  • The Comfort

The Hyperdemocracy

  • The rule of the bigger number …
  • Nobody can beat the mass with numbers …
  • “The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will … The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified, select … Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, run the risk of being eliminated.”
  • “In the XVIIIth Century, certain minority groups discovered that every human being, by the mere fact of birth, and without requiring any special qualification whatsoever, possessed certain fundamental political rights, the so-called rights of the man and the citizen and further that, strictly speaking, these rights, common to all, are the only ones that exist.”
  • “And note this, that when what was before an ideal becomes component port of reality, it inevitably ceases to be an ideal.”
  • “Now, the meaning of this proclamation of the rights of man was none other than to lift human souls from their interior servitude and to implant within them a certain consciousness of mastery and dignity.”
  • “Well, do not be surprised if he acts for himself, if he demands all forms of enjoyment, if he firmly assists his will, if he refuses all kinds of service, if he ceases to be docile to anyone, if he considers his own person and his own leisure, if he is careful as to dress: these are some attributes permanently attached to the consciousness of mastership. Today we find them taking up their abode in the ordinary man, in the mass.”
  • Privileges – but not obligations – of the Aristocracy
  • ARISTOS – the bests

Dissection of the Mass-Man

  • Material comfort, public order, safety, economic stability, civil rights, ….
  • Spoilt Child syndrome:
    • “The free expansions of his vital desires, and therefore, of his personality: and his radical ingratitude towards what has made possible the ease of his existence.”
  • “Thus is explained and defined the absurd state of mind revealed by the masses; they are only concerned with their own well-being, and at the same time they remain alien to the cause of that well-being.”
  • “He is satisfied with himself exactly as he is.”
  • “Ingenuously, he will tend to consider and affirm as good everything he find within himself: opinions, appetites, preferences, tastes.”
  • “We distinguished the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter the one who makes no demands on himself, but contents himself with what he is.”
  • “Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us, by obligations, not by rights.”
  • The right to have and assert the own opinion
  • No effort is required to have an opinion – effort is required to develop ideas.
  • The idolatry of opinion strangles thinking.
  • The characteristic of our time: “Not that the vulgar believes itself super-excellent and not vulgar, but that the vulgar proclaims and imposes the rights of vulgarity, or vulgarity as a right.”

The Revolt of the Masses

  • Opinions replace ideas.
  • Decline of culture – Rise of the new barbarism
  • “Restrictions, standards, courtesy, manners, justice, reason! They are all summed up in the word civilization, which, through the underlying notion of civis, the city, reveals its real origin.”
  • “The direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilization … Of course, he is interested in anesthetics, motorcars, and a few other things. But this fact merely confirms his fundamental lack of interest in civilization. For those things are merely its products …”
  • “Historical Knowledge is a technique of the first order to preserve and continue a civilization already advanced.”
  • “The most cultured people to-day are suffering from incredible ignorance of history.”
  • “Hence, Bolshevism and Fascism, the two “new” attempts in politics that are being made in Europe and on its borders, are two clear examples of essential retrogression.”

The Psychological Structure of the Mass-Man

  • “An inborn, root-impression that life is easy, plentiful, without any grave limitation.”
  • “He stands for himself as he is, to look upon his moral and intellectual endowment as excellent, complete.”
  • “He will intervene in all matters, imposing his own vulgar views without limit to reserve”.
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