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myself that the times do not make sense.
Mental disease in the individual is readily diagnosed and well understood; its
causes generally lie in the conflicts, inhibitions and frustrations of sex instinct, in
jealousies, unnatural fixations, the Oedipus complex, and other variants of adult
infantilism. Mental diseases in the masses--neurotic and psychotic epidemics--have only
recently received scientific recognition. The paranoid nature of Nazism convinced many
doubting psychologists of the fact of subjective plague. Nazism and fascism are
symptoms in Christendom. And we have not yet recovered.
But I can see that humanity has been swept by plagues for millenniums. I can see
the ways in which each of a score of civilizations has become inflated in the ego, lost
contact with the fundamental incentives, and so prepared itself for invasion by the rising
neighbor society, or for the barbarian cataract, or for collapse under Time's ruinous
erosion.
Health authorities make maps of areas and ages to show how these people were
felled by typhus, those by a-vitiminosis, others by syphilis, cholera, smallpox or malaria.
I can see that the day is coming when maps will trace the subjective viruses and show
how an overweening pride undid the Semitic conquerors, and how Napoleon's France fell
to the mass identification with a single Hero archetype, and how it was an inferiority
complex which gnawed away the German Reich. The maps will exhibit the lesson
backward through Egyptian dynasties and Assyrian kings till history goes out of sight.
For diseases of the mind are greater killers of nations than things which wriggle and
flagellate. And neither universal physical health nor economic stability is any panacea for
this other category of plague. Man's public mind must be healthful--and it has never been.
The adaptability of man is great enough so that he is able to maintain social forms
and carry out national programs with a seeming of normality long after his psychological
infection has spread beyond hope of recovery. Indeed, the unconscious mind of a dying
state often makes, in the persons of its ablest citizens, a final effort to overthrow the
ubiquitous abuse of instinct; such attempts have produced many "golden ages," "silver
ages," "restorations" and other luminous historical twilights. But adequate awareness of
malady is not possible, as yet, in the case of mass psychosis or neurosis, for, whatever the
disorientation or illusion may be, it is so widely shared that any evidence of insight is
regarded as itself a perturbation of the mind.
Mental epidemics are not like physical plagues. Symptoms there may well be, and
symptoms violently alarming to the afflicted group; but, when the sickness is severe
enough and general enough, its universal symptom is that it is concealed. It disguises
itself as "realism" and the very proof of good mental health--and there is no way for the
people to tell that they are mad. In this, it is the mere multiplication of individual process
already discussed here--the transmutation of instinct by ego so that the former is made
invisible, for the aggrandizement of the latter. All religions and all patriotisms are mental
epidemics. In order to expand certain values, they repress other values and truths. And all
foreigners can see both the ego and the blindness of other nations.
To the individual, the entering virus is a small thing, a conversion or an
indoctrination, the rearrangement of a few electrons in his brain; the act is customary and
the reward to the ego is large. Religion not only relieves him of the distressing
responsibility of being an animal, but elevates him to a godship--kept conditional, that the
church may hold dominion over him. Patriotism makes him that most superior and
distinguished of all human beings, a Spaniard, a Dutchman, an incomparable
Englishman--or an American, the inhabitant of God's Country. By these diseases he is
both subjectively and objectively separated from the human species and, unless he is one
among thousands, he is never sufficiently restored in health to join his kind again.
There are other plagues of the human psyche; but this pair has principally
sabotaged its peace. Because of them the human prospect is always uncertain and now
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