When they believe it, they are
usually deceiving themselves. Programs do not invent themselves
synchronously in a multitude of minds. That is not because a multitude
of minds is necessarily inferior to that of the leaders, but because
thought is the function of an organism, and a mass is not an organism.
This fact is obscured because the mass is constantly exposed to
suggestion. It reads not the news, but the news with an aura of
suggestion about it, indicating the line of action to be taken. It
hears reports, not objective as the facts are, but already stereotyped
to a certain pattern of behavior. Thus the ostensible leader often
finds that the real leader is a powerful newspaper proprietor. But if,
as in a laboratory, one could remove all suggestion and leading from
the experience of a multitude, one would, I think, find something like
this: A mass exposed to the same stimuli would develop responses that
could theoretically be charted in a polygon of error. There would be a
certain group that felt sufficiently alike to be classified together.
There would be variants of feeling at both ends. These classifications
would tend to harden as individuals in each of the classifications
made their reactions vocal. That is to say, when the vague feelings of
those who felt vaguely had been put into words, they would know more
definitely what they felt, and would then feel it more definitely.
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