Superstitious terrors are by no means confined to race; they are common to all races. For example, among the aborigines of Australia a native will die after the infliction of even the most superficial wound, if he is scared by the suggestion that the weapon which inflicted the wound has been sung over, and thus endowed with magical virtue. He simply lies down, refuses food, and pines away.
Similarly among some of the Indian tribes of Brazil, if the medicine-man predicted the death of anyone who had offended him, “the wretch took to his hammock instantly in such full expectation of dying, that he would neither eat nor drink, and the prediction was effectually executed.”
Speaking of certain African races Major Leonard observes: “I have seen more than one hardened old Haussa soldier dying steadily and by inches, because he believed himself to be bewitched; so that no nourishment or medicines that were given to him had the slightest effect either to check the mischief or to improve his condition in any way, and nothing was[304] able to divert him from a fate which he considered inevitable.
“In the same way, and under very similar conditions, I have seen Kru-men and others die, in spite of every effort that was made to save them, simply because they had made up their minds, not (as we thought at the time) to die, but that being in the clutch of malignant demons they were bound to die.”
The gregarious individual must obey the master leader on pain of death. In gregarious life the whole pack attacks the disobedient individual for challenging the chief, king, priest, the god-man, the lord of the horde. Obedience is a virtue, disobedience is a mortal sin, affecting the whole horde, hence a horrible death of the sinner is the sole punishment. The independent personality is inhibited, the individual falls into a state of social somnambulism, and the will-less, self-less subconscious, a semblance of personality, charged with self-preservation and fear instinct, obeys the commands of the master leader who is often a brutal type, a Nero, a Domitian, a Caracalla, a Caligula, a John the Terrible.
In a society where the socio-static press is always at work, where political pressure is far stronger than even in the ancient despotic monarchies, where a class government is in possession of all modern improvements, where gray uniformity and drowsy monotony reign supreme, obedience must be the rule. Blind, stupid obedience, that slavish obedience which[305] is peculiar to somnambulic subjects, characterizes such societies.
Servility is well illustrated by the following historical incident: Prince Sougorsky, ambassador to Germany in 1576, fell sick en route in Courland. The duke of the province often inquired as to his health. The reply was always the same: “My health matters nothing, provided the sovereign’s prospers.” The duke, surprised, said, “How can you serve a tyrant with so much zeal?” He replied, “We Russians are always devoted to our Czars, good or cruel. My master (Ivan the Terrible) impaled a man of mark for a slight fault, who for twenty-four hours, in his dying agonies, talked with his family, and without ceasing kept repeating, ‘Great God, protect the Czar!’”
The same is true of modern class societies where the Demos is the despot. God preserve the Demos! When the business demon of the Demos requires sacrifice, self immolation, anticipate his order. Pray for the Demos; Great God, protect the greedy Demos! The Demos is my Lord, to him is due my servile loyalty.
It is interesting to observe that the superstitious, the savage, the negro, and the soldier are excellent subjects for hypnotic purposes. Soldiers as experiments show, have a strong predisposition to hypnotic states. I was told by Professor Münsterberg that the hypnotic predisposition was strongly developed[306] in the German soldier. M. Liebault experimented on ten hundred and twelve persons, and found only twenty-seven refractory. Berenheim remarks on this that “It is necessary to take into account the fact that M. Liebault operates chiefly upon the common people.”
The great pressure exerted on the lower social strata, and especially on soldiers, the dull monotony of their life, the habit of strict obedience to command, predisposes them to social subconscious automatisms,—to the formation of mobs, clubs, unions, lodges, associations, parties, clans, sects, mobocracies. In all such organizations there is present the same servile spirit—the impersonal self and the gregarious fear instinct—the basis of subconscious, social somnambulism.
Man is a social somnambulist, he lives, dreams, and obeys with his eyes open. Whenever the impulse of self-preservation gets a special grip on the gregarious individual, when he becomes wild with terror in the bosom of the herd, then he may be regarded as a psychopathic victim.
The historian of the future will represent our age as dark, barbaric, savage, an age of the cruel Napoleonic wars, of commercial crises, financial panics, religious revivals, vicious, brutal, savage world wars,—mobs, crazes, plagues, social pests of all sorts and description....
[307]
A herd of sheep stand packed close together, looking stupidly into space.... Frighten them,—and if one begins to run, frantic with terror, the rest are sure to follow,—a stampede ensues, each sheep scrupulously reproduces the identical movements of the one in front of it. This susceptibility to imitation is but what we, in relation to man, term suggestibility, which consists in the impressing on the person of an idea, image, movement, however absurd and senseless, which the person in his hypnotized state reproduces like an automaton,—although he or she thinks it is done quite voluntarily. Suggestibility is natural to man as a social animal. Under specially favorable conditions this suggesti............