Jose Ortega y Gasset THE REVOLT OF THE MASSES

"The self-satisfied Age"

TO RESUME; the new social fact here analyzed is this: European history reveals itself, for the first time, as handed over to the decisions of the ordinary man as such. Or to turn it into the active voice: the ordinary man, hitherto guided by others, has resolved to govern the world him-self. This decision to advance to the social foreground has been brought about in him automatically, when the new type of man he represents had barely arrived at maturity. If from the view-point of what concerns public life, the psychological structure of this new type of mass-man be studied, what we find is as follows: (1) An inborn, root-impression that life is easy, plentiful, without any grave limitations; consequently, each average man finds within himself a sensation of power and triumph which,

(2) invites him to stand up for himself as he is, to look upon his moral and intellectual endowment as excellent, complete. This contentment with himself leads him to shut himself off from any external court of appeal; not to listen, not to submit his opinions to judgment, not to consider others' existence. His intimate feeling of power urges him always to exercise predominance. He will act then as if lie and his like were the only beings existing in the world; and, consequently,

(3) will intervene in all matters, imposing his own vulgar views without respect or regard for others, without limit or reserve, that is to say, in accordance with a system of "direct action."

It was this series of aspects which made us think of certain defective types of humanity, such as the spoiled child, and the primitive in revolt, that is, the barbarian. (The normal primitive, on the other hand, is the most sub-missive to external authority ever known, be it religion, taboo, social tradition, or customs.) There is no need to be surprised at my Heaping up hard names against this type of human being. This present essay is nothing more than a preliminary skirmish against this triumphant man, and the announcement that a certain number of Europeans are about to turn energetically against his attempt to tyrannize.

For the moment it is only a first skirmish, the frontal attack will come later, perhaps very soon, and in a very different form from that adopted by this essay. The frontal attack must come in such a way that the mass-man cannot take precautions against it; he will see it before him and will not suspect that it precisely is the frontal attack. This type which at present is to be found everywhere, and everywhere imposes his own spiritual barbarism, is, in fact, the spoiled child of human history. The spoiled child is the heir who behaves exclusively as a mere heir. In this case the inheritance is civilization-with its conveniences, its security; in a word, with all its advantages. As we have seen, it is only in circumstances of easy existence such as our civilization has produced, that a type can arise, marked by such a collection of features, inspired by such a character. It is one of a number of deformities produced by luxury in human material. There might be a deceptive tendency to believe that a life born into a world of plenty should be better, more really a life than one which consists in a struggle against scarcity. Such is not the case, for reasons of the strictest and most fundamental nature, which this is not the place to enlarge upon. For the present, instead of those reasons, it is sufficient to recall the ever-recurrent fact which constitutes the tragedy of every hereditary aristocracy. The aristocrat inherits, that is to say, he finds attributed to his per-son, conditions of life which he has not created, and which, therefore, are not produced in organic union with his personal, individual existence. At birth he finds himself installed, suddenly and without knowing how, in the midst of his riches and his prerogatives. In his own self, he has nothing to do with them, because they do not come from him. They are the giant armor of some other person, some other human being, his ancestor.

And he has to live as an heir, that is to say, he has to wear the trappings of another existence. What does this bring us to? What life is the "aristocrat" by inheritance going to lead, his own or that of his first noble ancestor? Neither one nor the other. He is condemned to represent the other man, consequently, to be neither that other nor himself. Inevitably his life loses all authenticity, and is transformed into pure representation or fiction of an-other life. The abundance of resources that lie is obliged to make use of gives him no chance to live out his own personal destiny, his life is atrophied. All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself. The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities. If my body was not a weight to me, I should not be able to walk. If the atmosphere did not press on me, I should feel my body as something vague, flabby, unsubstantial. So in the "aristocratic" heir his whole individuality grows vague, for lack of use and vital effort. The result is that specific stupidity of "our old nobility" which is unlike anything else-a stupidity which, strictly speaking, has never yet been described in its intimate, tragic mechanism -that tragic mechanism which leads all hereditary aristocracy to irremediable degeneration. So much merely to counteract our ingenuous tendency to believe that a superabundance of resources favors existence. Quite the contrary. A world superabundant' in possibilities automatically produces deformities, vicious types of human life, which may be brought under the general class, the "heir-man," of which the "aristocrat" is only one particular case, the spoiled child another, and the mass-man of our time, more fully, more radically, a third. (It would, moreover, be possible to make more detailed use of this last allusion to the "aristocrat," by showing how many of his characteristic traits, in all times and among all peoples, germinate in the mass-man.

For example: Ills propensity to make out of games and sports the central occupation of his life; the cult of the body-hygienic regime and attention to dress; lade of romance in his dealings with woman; his amusing himself with the "intellectual," while at bottom despising him and at times ordering his flunkeys or his bravoes to chastise him; his preference for living under an absolute authority rather than under a regime of free-discussion, etc.) I persist then, at the risk of boring the reader, in making the point that this man full of uncivilized tendencies, this newest of the barbarians, is an automatic product of modern civilization, especially of the form taken by this civilization in the XIXth Century. He has not burst in on the civilized world from outside like the "great white barbarians" of the Th Century; neither has he been produced within it by spontaneous, mysterious generation, as Aristotle says of the tadpoles in the pond; he is its natural fruit. One may formulate, as follows, a law confirmed by paleontology and bio-geography: human life has arisen and progressed only when the resources it could count on were balanced by the problems it met with. This is true, as much in the spiritual order as in the physical. Thus, to refer to a very concrete aspect of corporal existence, I may recall that the human species has flourished in zones of our planet where the hot season is compensated by a season of intense cold. In the tropics the animal-man degenerates, and vice versa, inferior races-the pygmies, for example-have been pushed back towards the tropics by races born after them and superior in the scale of evolution.)

The civilization of the XIXth Century is, then, of such a character that it allows the average man to take his place in a world of superabundance, of which he perceives only the lavishness of the means at his disposal, nothing of the pains involved. He finds himself surrounded by marvelous instruments, healing medicines, watchful governments, comfortable privileges. On the other hand, he is ignorant how difficult it is to invent those medicines and those instruments and to assure their production in the future; lie does not realize how unstable is the organization of the State and is scarcely conscious to himself of any obligations. This lack of balance falsifies his nature, vitiates it in its very roots, causing him to lose contact with the very substance of life, which is made up of absolute danger, is radically problematic. The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-satisfied man." Consequently, when lie becomes the predominant type, it is time to raise the alarm and to announce that humanity is threatened with degeneration, that is, with relative death. On this view, the vital level represented by Europe at the present day is superior to the whole of the human past, but if we look to the future, we are made to fear that it will neither preserve the level reached nor attain to a higher one, but rather will recede and fall back upon lower lie]-lets. This, I think, brings out with sufficient clearness the superlative abnormality represented by the "self-satisfied man." He is a man who has entered upon life to do "what he jolly well likes." This, in fact, is the illusion suffered by the fils de famille. We know the reason why: in the family circle, everything, even the greatest faults, are in the long run left unpunished. The family circle is relatively artificial, and tolerates many acts ,which in society, in the world outside, would automatically involve disastrous consequences for their author. But the man of this type thinks that lie can behave outside just as he does at home; believes that nothing is fatal, irremediable, irrevocable. That is why lie thinks that he can do what he likes. An almighty mistake! "You will go where you are taken to," as the parrot is told in the Portuguese story. It is not that one ought not to do just what one pleases; it is simply that one cannot do other than what each of us has to do, has to be. The only way out is to refuse to do what has to be done, but this does not set us free to do something else just because it pleases us. In this matter we only possess a negative freedom of will, a noluntas. We can quite well turn away from our true destiny, but only to fall a prisoner in the deeper dungeons of our destiny. I cannot make this clear to each of my readers in what concerns his individual destiny as such, because I do not know each of my readers; but it is possible to make it clear in those portions, those facets, of his destiny which are identical with those of others. For example, every present-day European knows, with a certainty much more forcible than that of all his expressed "ideas" and "opinions," that the European of to-day must be a liberal.

Let us not discuss whether it is this or the other form of liberalism which must be his. I am referring to the fact that the most reactionary of Europeans knows, in the depths of his conscience, that the effort made by Europe in the last century, under the name of liberalism, is, in the last resort, something inevitable, inexorable; something that Western man to-day is, whether he lilies it or no. Even though it be proved, with full and incontrovertible evidence, that there is falsity and fatality in all the concrete shapes under which the attempt has been made to realize the categorical imperative of political liberty, inscribed on the destiny of Europe, the final evidence that in the last century it was right in substance still holds good. This final evidence is present equally in the European Communist as in the Fascist, whatever attitudes they may adopt to convince themselves to the contrary. All "know" that beyond all the just criticisms launched against the manifestations of liberalism there remains its unassailable truth, a truth not theoretic, scientific, intellectual, but of an order radically different and more decisive, namely, a truth of destiny. Theoretic truths not only are disputable, but their whole meaning and force lie in their being disputed, they sprint; from discussion. They live as long as they are discussed, and they are made exclusively for discussion.

But Destiny-what from a vital point of view one has to be or has not to be-is not discussed, it is either accepted or rejected. If we accept it, we are genuine; if not, we arc the negation, the falsification of ourselves. Destiny does not consist in what we feel we should like to do; rather is it recognized in its clear features in the consciousness that we must do what we do not feel like doing.

Well, then, the "satisfied man" is characterized by his "knowing" that certain things cannot be, and nevertheless, for that very reason, pretending in act and word to be convinced of the opposite. The Fascist will take his stand against political liberty, precisely because lie knows that in the long run this can never fail, but is inevitably a part of the very substance of European life, and will be re-turned to when its presence is truly required, in the hour of grave crisis. For the tonic that keeps the mass-man in form is insincerity, "the joke." All his actions arc devoid of the note of inevitability, they are done as the fils de famille carries out his escapades.

All that haste, in every order of life, to adopt tragic, conclusive, final attitudes is mere appearance. Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilized world. It would be a nice matter if we were forced to accept as the genuine self of an individual, whatever he tried to make us accept as such. If anyone persists in maintaining that he believes two and two make five, and there is no reason for supposing him to be insane, we may be certain that he does not believe it, however much he may shout it out, or even if he allows himself to be killed for maintaining it. A hurricane of farcically, everywhere and in every form, is at present raging over the lands of Europe. Almost all the positions taken up and proclaimed are false ones. The only efforts that are being made are to escape from our real destiny, to blind ourselves to its evidence, to be deaf to its deep appeal, to avoid facing up to what has to he. We are living in comic fashion, all the more comic the more apparently tragic is the mask adopted. The comic exists wherever life has no basis of inevitableness on which a stand is taken without reserves. The mass-man will not plant his foot on the immovably firm ground of his destiny, he prefers a fictitious existence suspended in air. Hence, never as now have we had these lives without substance or root-dracaenas from their own destiny-which let themselves float on the lightest current. This is the epoch of "currents" and of "letting things slide." Hardly anyone offers any resistance to the superficial whirlwinds that arise in art, in ideas, in politics, or in social usage's. Consequently, rhetoric flourishes more than ever. The surrealist thinks he has outstripped the whole of literary history when he has written (here a word that there is no need to write) where others have written "jasmines, swans and fauns." But what he has really done has been simply to bring to light another form of rhetoric which hitherto lay hidden in the latrines.

The present situation is made more clear by noting what, in spite of its peculiar features, it has in common with past periods. Thus, hardly does Mediterranean civilization reach its highest point-towards the Id Century B.C.-When the cynic makes his appearance. Diagnose, in his mud-covered sandals, tramps over the carpets of Airstrips. The cynic pullulated at every corner, and in the highest places. This cynic did nothing but saboteur the civilization of the time. He was the nihilist of Hellenism. He created nothing, lie made nothing. His role was to undo-or rather to attempt to undo, for lie did not succeed in his purpose. The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail. What would become of the cynic among a savage people where everyone, naturally and quite seriously, fulfils what the cynic farcically considers to. be his personal role? What is your Fascist if he does not speak ill of liberty, or your surrealist if he does not blaspheme against art?

None other could be the conduct of this type of man born into a too well-organized world, of which lie perceives only the advantages and not the dangers. His surroundings spoil hint, because they arc "civilization," that is, a home, and the fils de famille feels nothing that impels him to abandon his mood of caprice, nothing which urges him to listen to outside counsels from those superior to himself. Still less anything which obliges him to make contact with the inexorable depths of his own destiny.