Conscription of Thought (1917)

Social psychologists, notably Mr. Trotter in his account of herd psychology, have described the peculiar mental effect of war upon the civilian population. Vague unlocalized anxiety and fear; dread of isolation, and desire for company to reinforce confidence and opinion; quick and easy accessibility to rumor, indeed, an eager hospitality to it; extreme credulity as to both good news and bad; a suspicious attitude which finds spies and enemies everywhere; scandalmongering of pessimistic inventions as to incompetency in high places and disloyalty in all places—these are some of the observed facts of mass-psychology in times of great emotional stir when the issue hangs in abeyance.

There is no need to reduce the variety of manifestations to any single principle. But running through them all is a demand for solidarity in order to prosecute war, combined with an emotional instability in the face of the shifting panorama of success and failure, an instability which is continually eating into solidarity. We have not suffered as yet in this country from a bad attack of war nerves; the scene is too remote. On a small scale, however, practically all of the phenomena of Europe in the first year of the war have been duplicated.

The most striking effect up to the present has been a morbid sensitiveness at any exhibition of diversity of opinion. One of the accompaniments of abnormal emotional states is likely to be an extraordinary sense of mental lucidity. The more irrational the condition, the greater the attendant sense of self-possessed rationality. So it is with us at present. Our reactions to dissent and criticism are mainly reactions of irritation, due to the hypersensitiveness of nerves on edge. But we justify our attacks and suppressions on the rational ground that social cohesion is a necessity, and that we are simply taking measures to secure union. That this rationalization is a piece of self-inflicted camouflage appears as soon as we call to mind the lessons of experience regarding the inefficiency of all prior attempts to dragoon thought and feeling.

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