THE CREATION of a race by History is clear. It is an example of the biological following the spiritual. For this process to reach its highest potential a certain time is necessary - two or three generations are needed for the type of the racial ideal to fasten on to a population-stream and give it its own distinct outer look, corresponding to its inner unique superpersonal soul.

People is a word on a different plane of thinking from this. We are familiar with its polemical use by the democratic mob to deny existence to qualitative elements and assert pure and simple quantity as "the People." We seek, however, facts. What is a people? What is its articulation?

Two French thinkers contributed to the 19th century valuable insight into the nature of all human groups whatever. Gustave le Bon and René Worms both saw and set forth with Cartesian clarity the organic nature of human groups, the superpersonal unity which was the custodian of the Destiny of the group. Worms applied it upward - to the State. Le Bon applied it downwards - to the crowd. Their presentation was not entirely free of materialistic tendencies - "Truth belongs to the individual, Error belongs to the Age," said Goethe - but they gave to the West a glimpse along the path of History. Their contribution was ignored by the Age of Rationalism. The pure materialism of William Paley was preferred: a people is "only a collection of the citizens who compose it." Again: "The happiness of a people is made up of the happiness of single persons." This stupid anti-factual picture could not be refuted, for it was a faith. The picture reflected the Spirit of the Age, and could only pass away with the expiration of that spirit. It was a picture that sprang from a certain soul, and even though it denied the soul, yet it was tied to the existence of that one certain soul.

The new age is one of Resurgence of Authority, both spiritual and political. This Age bases its political formula on facts, on the actualizing of the possible. It does not dream up an ideal picture, and then try to change the vocabulary of the world-of-action. It does not wish to delude itself into thinking that changing words will transform fact. It wishes to orient itself to facts, and above all to the repository of facts, History, and the driving force of facts, Destiny.

To understand what a people is, one must begin with the smallest human group, the crowd. It strikes one immediately that there are two types of crowds. There is the crowd assembled on an intellectual basis - the attendance at a lecture, at a drama, at a social function. Then there is the crowd assembled on a spiritual basis - a political meeting, a religious agitation, a protest, a riot.

The first type is a mere collection. The individuals repel one another, figuratively and literally. These crowds have as many viewpoints as there are individuals in them. They are not unities, but only potential unities. The outbreak of fire in a theater immediately turns such a collection of independent individuals into one soul, with one thought, a thought directed downwards, it is true, but it is a unity. The unity of panic is a fact which political and military leaders must know how to exploit. It is one way of inspiriting when other methods may fail.

The second type is not a collection, but a unity. The first is unarticulated - all the human atoms are on the same level. The second is articulated - it has a leader. If there is no leader, there is no unity, and a few mounted police may disperse it. No individual will risk anything for a mere gathering, because his individuality is uppermost. The unity of the crowd submerges the personalities of the components; the unity is a super-personal soul. The unity must be on the basis of an idea, a Cordless feeling strong enough to cause individuality to subside. When this idea is present, the human beings present become mere cells, as it were, of the higher organic unity. Men of strong intelligence who have been in crowds united for action have described how their own faculties were transformed and how the detachment that intelligence gives was suddenly in abeyance, overcome by a force as mystic in its power as in its origin.

This crowd is a people. It is a higher organism, it is informed by a superpersonal soul. The individuals will sacrifice themselves in the process of this higher soul actualizing itself, what they would never do alone.

The technique of this process is quite invisible, mystical, but its results are just as visible. Not only do crowds arise by themselves in conditions of great super-personal excitement when a leader appears, as Camille Desmoulins did to the gathering in the Palais Royal in 1789, to activate the mere sum into a unity - but they can be created. Thus, anyone so situated as to be able to bring a mass into one place can transform the mass into a unity by leadership. As far as the individuals are concerned, the crowd is an attitude of mind. The man in a crowd would not dream of thinking for himself - the results of thinking are presented to him by the leader, and thenceforth these thoughts are his.

With this emerges a very important fact about crowd unity. It only reached expression with the results of the new propaganda technics of the First World War. It is this: Through constant, unremitting propaganda of all possible types, and with unbroken continuity, the unity of the crowd can be maintained even though the members are physically separated. Mass propaganda converts the population of a continent into a crowd...

More: Reactor-Core.Org - Imperium: People

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