The Revolt of the Masses

by José Ortega y Gasset

Since the masses, by definition, neither should nor can direct their own personal existence, and even less rule society in general, we should say that Europe now is suffering from the greatest crisis that peoples, nations, and civilization can be afflicted with.

Undoubtedly, the most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every instant what they already are, without making an effort towards perfection; mere buoys adrift.

It is evident, for example, that the places were never designed for the multitude, for their dimensions are too limited, and the crowd continuously overflows them, manifesting to our eyes and in the clearest manner the new phenomenon: the mass, without ceasing to be mass, is supplanting the elite groups.

Now, on the other hand, the mass believes that it has the right to enact and to give force of law to themes born in the cafe. I doubt whether there have been other periods of history in which the multitude has come to govern more directly than in our own time. That is why I speak of hyper democracy.

We would have to wade into the ancient world till we reach the hour of its decline. The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing elite groups and put themselves in their place.

Why, then, the complaints of the liberals, the democrats, and the progressives of thirty years ago? Or is it that, like children, they want something, but not its consequences? You want the ordinary man to be master. Well, do not be surprised if he acts for himself, if he demands all forms of enjoyment, if he firmly asserts his will, if he refuses all kinds: of service, if he ceases to be docile to anyone, if he considers his own person and his own leisure, if he is careful as to his attire: these are some of the attributes perennially attached to the consciousness of mastership.

So, we have the surprising fact that these epochs of so-called plenitude have always felt in the depths of their consciousness a most peculiar form of melancholy. That desire slowly gestated, which in the 19th Century seems at last to realize, is what was named briefly for itself "modern culture." The very name is a disturbing one: that a time calls itself "modern," that is to say, final, definitive, in whose presence all the rest is mere preterit, humble preparation and aspiration towards this present!

This description was necessary in order to meet the pronouncements on decadence, and specifically on the decadence of the West, which have filled the air in the last decade.

we live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create. Lord of all things, he is not lord of himself. He feels lost amid his own abundance. With more means at its disposal, more knowledge, more technique than ever, it turns out that the world today goes the same way as the worst of worlds that have been; it simply drifts.

Under his mask of generous futurism, the progressive no longer concerns himself with the future; convinced that it holds in store for him neither surprises nor secrets, nothing adventurous, nothing essentially new; assured that the world will now proceed on a straight course, neither turning aside nor dropping back, he puts away from him all anxiety about the future and takes his stand in the definite present. It isn’t strange then that the world today seems empty of purposes, anticipations, and ideals. Nobody has concerned himself with supplying them. Such has been the desertion of the directing minorities, which is always found on the reverse side of the rebellion of the masses.

Public authority is in the hands of a representative of the masses.

When such a public authority attempts to justify itself it makes no reference at all to the future; but on the contrary, it shuts itself up in the present, and says with perfect sincerity: “I am an abnormal form of Government imposed by circumstances.” Meaning: imposed by the pressures of the moment, and not by anticipating the future.

That is the way public power has always been when exercised directly by the masses: omnipotent and ephemeral. The mass-man is the man whose life lacks projects, and just drifts along. As a result, though his possibilities and his powers are enormous, he builds nothing. And it is this type of man who is making the decisions in our time.

The fact is this: from the time European history begins in the 6th Century up to the year 1800 —that is, along twelve centuries— Europe does not succeed in reaching a total population greater than 180 million inhabitants. Now, from 1800 to 1914 —in a little more than a century— the population of Europe mounts from 180 to 460 million!

For that speed means that heap after heap of human beings have been dumped on to the historic scene at such an accelerated pace, that it has been difficult to saturate them with traditional culture. And in fact, the average type of European at present possesses a soul, healthier and stronger it is true than those of the last century, but much simpler. Hence, at times he leaves the impression of being a primitive man suddenly risen amid a very old civilization. In the schools, which were such a source of pride to the last century, it has been impossible to do more than instruct the masses in the technique of modern life; it has been impossible to educate them. They have been given tools to live intensely, but no feeling for their great historic duties; they have been hurriedly inoculated with the pride and power of modern instruments, but not with their spirit.

The actual abundance of possibilities will become real shortages, scarcity, anguished impotence—a real decadence. All that because the rebellion of the masses is the same thing with what Rathenau called “the vertical invasion of the barbarians.” It is of great importance, then, to understand thoroughly this mass-man that is pure potency for the greatest good and for the greatest evil as well.

Any keen mind of the years 1820, 1850, and 1880 could by simple a priori reasoning, foresee the gravity of the present historical situation, and in fact nothing is happening now which was not foreseen a hundred years ago. “The masses are advancing,” said Hegel in apocalyptic fashion. “Without some new spiritual influence, our age, which is a revolutionary age, will produce a catastrophe,” announced Comte. “I see the flood-tide of nihilism rising,” shrieked the mustachioed Nietzsche from a crag of the Engadine.

The world which enfolds the new man from his birth does not compel him to limit himself in any fashion; it sets up no veto against him; on the contrary, it incites his appetite, which in principle can increase endlessly. Now it turns out —and this is most important— that this world of the 19th and early 20th Centuries not only has the perfections and the completeness which it actually possesses, but furthermore suggests to those who dwell in it the radical assurance that tomorrow it will be still richer, ampler, more perfect, as if it enjoyed a spontaneous, inexhaustible power of increase.

This leads us to note down in our psychological chart of the mass-man of today two fundamental traits: the free expansion of his vital desires, and therefore, of his personality; and his radical ingratitude towards all that has made possible the ease of his existence. These traits together make up the well-known psychology of the spoilt child. And in fact it would entail no error to use this psychology as a "sight" through which to observe the soul of the masses of today.

As they do not see, behind the benefits of civilization, marvels of invention and construction which can only be maintained by great effort and foresight, they imagine that their role is limited to demanding these benefits peremptorily, as if they were natural rights.

Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence and not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savor for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. Hence, he does not look upon the necessity of serving as oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline of the noble life.

For me, then, nobility is synonymous with a life of effort, ever set on excelling oneself, in passing beyond what one is to what one sets up as a duty and an obligation. In this way the noble life stands opposed to the common or inert life, which reclines statically upon itself, condemned to perpetual immobility, unless an external force compels it to come out of itself. Hence we apply the term mass to this kind of man-not so much because of his multitude as because of his inertia.

All our communal life is coming under this regime in which appeal to "indirect" authority is suppressed. In social relations "good manners" no longer prevail. Literature as "direct action" appears in the form of insult. The restrictions of sexual relations are reduced. Restrictions, standards, courtesy, indirect methods, justice, reason! Why were all these invented, why all these complications created? They are all summed up in the word civilization, which, through the underlying notion of civis, the citizen, reveals its real origin. By means of all these there is an attempt to make possible the city, the community, common life. Hence, if we look into all these elements of civilization just enumerated, we shall find the same common basis. All, in fact, presuppose the radical progressive desire on the part of each individual to take others into consideration. Civilization is before all, the will to live in common.

All the increased material possibilities which life has experienced run the risk of being nullified when they are faced with the shocking problem that has come upon the destiny of Europe, and which I once again formulate: the direction of society has been taken over by a type of man who is not interested in the principles of civilization. Not of this or that civilization but —from what we can judge today— of any civilization. Of course, he is interested in anesthetics, automobiles, and a few other things. But this fact merely confirms his fundamental lack of interest in civilization. For those things are merely its products, and the fervor with which he greets them only brings into stronger relief his indifference to the principles from which they spring.

To this neglect is due in great part its peculiar errors, which today press upon us. In the last third of the century there began —though hidden from sight— that involution, that retrogression towards barbarism, that is, towards the naivety and primitivism of the man who has no past, or who has forgotten it. Hence, Bolshevism and Fascism, the two "new" attempts in politics that are being made in Europe and on its borders, are two clear examples of essential retrogression.

Both Bolshevism and Fascism are two false dawns. They do not bring the morning of a new day, but of some archaic day, spent repeatedly: they are mere primitivism.

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.

By mass —as I pointed out at the start— is not to be specially understood the workers; it does not indicate a social class, but a kind of man to be found today in all social classes, who by default represents our age, in which he is the predominant, ruling power.

Not by chance, not through the individual failings of each particular man of science, but because science itself —the root of our civilization— automatically converts him into mass-man, makes of him a primitive, a modern barbarian.

The investigator who has discovered a new fact of Nature must necessarily experience a feeling of power and self-assurance. With a certain apparent justice he will look upon himself as "a man who knows." And in fact there is in him a portion of something which, added to many other portions not existing in him, does really constitute knowledge. This is the true inner nature of the specialist, who in the first years of this century has reached the wildest stage of exaggeration. The specialist "knows" very well his own tiny corner of the universe; he is radically ignorant of all the rest.

For, previously, men could be grouped into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two categories. He is not learned, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his specialty; but neither is he ignorant, because he is "a scientist," and "knows" very well his own tiny portion of the universe.

Furthermore, the mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense and unassailable resources. This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State, that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long run sustains, nourishes, and impels human destinies.

But the mass-man does in fact believe that he is the State, tending more and more to set its machinery working on whatsoever pretext, to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it, disturbs it in any order of things: in politics, in ideas, and in industry.

Already in the times of the Antonines (2nd Century), the State overbears society with its anti-vital supremacy. Society begins to be enslaved, to be unable to live except in the service of the State. The whole of life is bureaucratized. What are the results? The bureaucratization of life brings about its absolute decay in all orders. Wealth diminishes, and births are few. Then the State, in order to attend to its own needs, forces on still more the bureaucratization of human existence.

For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his "ideas" are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality. The clear-headed man is the man who frees himself from those fantastic "ideas" and looks life in the face, realizes that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. As this is the simple truth —that to live is to feel oneself lost— he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground.