Collective Behavior or Collective Lunacy?

                        Have you  ever attempted  to take time out of the hustle  and bustle  of a busy day  at one side  of the  street  or motor park  and pause  for one  second to observe  the purposeless stir of the crowd? Where are the people hurrying to? Why should two men stand there exchanging angry words   rather than go ahead to do a business of some sort? Or take a quite corner at the post office. Watch the activities at the counter with regards to the reactions of customers and counter clerks to one another. Do these performances make sense? Why anybody who expects first come is first served cursed out by the clerk? Why should a spectator stand there swinging his legs and making facial expressions at a football match while the players pant up and down the field? What is the meaning of all the team the stampede attending the departure of a passenger train? There are  few facts of collective behavior- the  way you  and I  behave  when we are  lost in the crowd when we live  50 per cent  in the world  of sanity and 49 percent in the world of the insane. At this moment we act with the conviction that nobody is watching us. Things happen without making lasting impressions on our mind, and we react as if driven upon by remote control.

                  The crowd has no permanence or social classification. There is high  degree of anomity among  its members.  It is by  accident  and not  by  design that people  intimate  with each other  happen  to meet  in the crowd and when  they meet  they find very little  time to give  each other  attention. Members of the crowd are indifferent or apathetic to each other and their emotion can be worked up at the slightest oppournity. The cloak of polished and dignified bearing people   put on   comes like a flash; it vanishes the moment people’s attention is diverted from them. Nobody knows how clumsily a king behaves when he is alone in his room, as distinct from the courtly way he carries himself while riding   outside in a stage- coach. These variations in moods are dependent upon the degree of consciousness we garner at each time. Between and unconsciousness there is a very narrow margin as between sanity and insanity. In fact, society seems to define a normal person in terms of one   who is 50 per cent conscious. Sanity is only a degree of insanity. Were  we to have  an impartial  judges  who is outside  the world watching all our  actions, nobody  can predict  what verdict he will pass  on our  degree of insanity. The fact  that we are  the judge  of our own  conduct does not prove anything  in so far  as the eyes  sees not itself.