The Revolt of the Masses

by José Ortega y Gasset

The characteristic of the hour is that the vulgar mind, knowing itself to be vulgar, has the gumption to proclaim the rights of such vulgarity and to impose them everywhere.

In the 18th Century, certain elite groups discovered that every human being, by the mere fact of birth, and without requiring any special qualification whatsoever, possessed certain fundamental political rights, the so-called rights of the man and the citizen; and further that, strictly speaking, these rights, common to all, are the only ones that exist. Every other right attached to special gifts was condemned as being a privilege.

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!

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 new generations are getting ready to take over command of the world as if the world were a paradise without trace of old footsteps, without traditional and complex problems.

"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 en-mustachioed Nietzsche from a crag of the Engadine.

Revolution is not the uprising against pre-existing order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one.

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.

In the disturbances caused by scarcity of food, the mob goes in search of bread, and the means it employs is generally to wreck the bakeries. This may serve as a symbol of the attitude adopted, on a greater and more complicated scale, by the masses of today towards the civilization by which they are supported.

not that the vulgar believes itself super-excellent and not vulgar, but that the vulgar proclaims and imposes the rights of vulgarity, or vulgarity as a right.

the average man has the most mathematical "ideas" on all that happens or ought to happen in the universe. Hence he has lost the use of his hearing. Why should he listen if he has within him all that is necessary? There is no reason now for listening, but rather for judging, pronouncing, deciding.

Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but determined to impose his opinions. This is the new thing: the right not to be reasonable, the "reason of unreason."

Civilization is before all, the will to live in common.

Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at its own expense, to leave room in the State over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority. Liberalism —it is well to recall this today— is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so acrobatic, so anti-natural. Hence, it is not to be wondered at that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth.

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, motor-cars, 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.