Ortega y Gasset

In a right ordering of public affairs, the mass is that part which does not act of itself. Such is its mission. It has come into the world in order to be directed, influenced, represented, organised - even in order to cease being mass, or at least to aspire to this. But it has not come into the world to do all this by itself. It needs to submit its life to a higher court, formed by the excellent minorities. The question as to who these excellent individuals are may be discussed as much as you like. But that without them, whoever they be, humanity would cease to preserve its essentials, is something about which there should be no doubt, even if Europe has been sticking its head under its wing, in the manner of the ostriches, for a whole century, trying if she can avoid seeing such a plain truth.

For we are not dealing with an opinion based on facts more or less frequent and probable, but on a law of social “physics,” much more immovable than the laws of Newton’s physics. The day when a genuine philosophy reigns again in Europe - the only thing that can save her - it will be realised that the human being is, whether he wants it or not, a being constitutively forced to seek a higher instance. If he succeeds in finding it himself, he is an excellent person; if not, he is a mass-man and needs to receive it from the former.
For the masses to pretend to act for themselves is to rebel against their own destiny, and since that is what they are doing now, I speak of the rebellion of the masses. For, in the end, the only thing that can truly and substantially be called rebellion is that which consists in not accepting one's own destiny, in rebelling against oneself. Strictly speaking, the rebellion of the archangel Lucifer would have been no less so if, instead of striving to be God - which was not his destiny - he had strived on being the angel the most closed to God, which was not his destiny either. (If Lucifer had been a Russian, like Tolstoy, he would perhaps have preferred the latter form of rebellion, which is no more and no less against God than the other more famous one).

When the mass acts on its own, it does so in only one way, because it has no other: it lynches. It is no accident that Lynch's law [1] is American, for America is, in a sense, the paradise of the masses. Nor is it surprising that nowadays, when the masses triumph, violence triumphs and becomes the only ratio, the only doctrine. It has been a long time since I called attention to this advance of violence as a normal condition.

Today it has reached a peak, and this is a good symptom, because it means that it will automatically begin to decline. Today violence is already the rhetoric of time. The rhetoricians, the inane, have made it their own. When a human reality has completed its course, has been shipwrecked and has died, the waves spit it out on the shores of rhetoric, where, like a corpse, it remains for a long time. Rhetoric is the cemetery of human realities or, at best, a Home for the Aged. Reality is survived by its name, which, though only a word, is, in the end, nothing less than a word, and always retains some of its magical power.
But even if it is not impossible that the prestige of violence as a cynically established norm has begun to wane, we will continue under its regime, albeit in a different form.
I am referring to the greatest danger threatening European civilisation today. Like all the other dangers that threaten this civilisation, this one was born of civilisation itself. Moreover, it is one of her glories: it is the contemporary State. We find ourselves, then, with a replica of what was said in the previous chapter about science: the fecundity of its principles pushes it towards a fabulous progress; but this, inexorably, imposes specialisation, and specialisation threatens to stifle science.

The same is true of the State.

Think back to what the State was at the end of the 18th century in all the European nations. A quite small thing! The early capitalism and its industrial organisations, where technique, the new technique, the rationalised technique, triumphed for the first time, had produced a first growth of society. A new social class appeared, greater in number and power than the pre-existing ones: the bourgeoisie. This bourgeoisie possessed, first and foremost, one thing: talent, practical talent. It knew how to organise, discipline, give continuity and articulation to the effort. In the midst of it, like an ocean, the ‘State ship’ sailed its hazardous course.

The State ship is a metaphor reinvented by the bourgeoisie, which felt itself oceanic, omnipotent and pregnant with storms. That ship was something irrelevant or little more: it had hardly any soldiers, hardly any bureaucrats, hardly any money. It had been built in the Middle Ages by a class of men very different from the bourgeoisie: the nobles, people admirable for their courage, for their gift of command, for their sense of responsibility. Without them the nations of Europe would not exist. But with all these virtues of the heart, the nobles were, and always have been, lacking in virtues of the head. They relied on other organs.

Of very limited intelligence, sentimental, instinctive, intuitive; in short, ‘irrational’. That is why they could not develop any technique, which requires rationalisation. They did not invent gunpowder. They got beaten. Unable to invent new weapons, they let the bourgeois - taking it from the East or elsewhere - use gunpowder, and thereby automatically win the battle over the noble warrior, the ‘knight’, stupidly covered with iron, who could hardly move in battle, and to whom it had not occurred that the eternal secret of warfare does not consist so much in the means of defence as in those of attack; a secret which Napoleon was to rediscover.

As the State was a technique - of public order and administration - the ancien regime reached the end of the 18th century with a very weak State, harassed on all sides by a widespread social revolt. The disproportion between the power of the State and the power of society was such that, if we compare the situation with that of the time of Charlemagne, the 18th century State appears to be a degeneration. The Carolingian State was, of course, much less wealthy than that of Louis XVI, but, on the other hand, the surrounding society had no power at all. The huge gap between social power and State power made possible the revolution, or better, the revolutions (up to 1848).

But with the revolution, the bourgeoisie seized public power and applied its undeniable virtues to the State, and in little more than a generation created a powerful State, which put an end to revolutions. Since 1848, that is, since the beginning of the second generation of bourgeois governments, there have been no real revolutions in Europe. And certainly not because there were no motives for them, but because there were no means. Public power was levelled with social power. Goodbye for ever to revolutions! The only thing now possible in Europe is their opposite: the coup d’état. And everything that could later be called a revolution was nothing more than a coup d'état in disguise.

In our time, the State has become a formidable machine that functions prodigiously, with a marvellous efficiency due to the quantity and precision of its means. It is planted in the midst of society, and all it takes is to touch a button for setting in motion its enormous levers and operate with lightning speed on any part of the social body.

The contemporary State is the most visible and notorious product of civilisation. And it is very interesting, it is revealing, to note the attitude that the mass-man adopts towards it. He sees it, he admires it, he knows that it is there, securing his life; but he is not aware that it is a human creation invented by certain men and sustained by certain virtues and assumptions that existed in men yesterday and that may evaporate tomorrow. On the other hand, the mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and because he feels himself to be anonymous - a vulgar man - he believes that the State is his own thing. Suppose that a difficulty, a conflict or a problem arises in the public life of any country: the man of the masses will tend to demand that the State should immediately take it over, that it should take direct charge of solving it with its gigantic and unassailable means.

This is the greatest danger threatening civilisation today: the statification-nationalization of life, the interventionism of the State, the absorption of all social spontaneity by the State; that is to say, the annulment of the historical spontaneity which ultimately sustains, nourishes and drives human destinies. When the masses feel some misfortune or, simply, some strong appetite, the permanent and sure possibility of obtaining everything - without effort, struggle, doubt or risk - is a great temptation for them, by just touching a button and making the portentous machine work. The masses say to themselves: L’Etat, c’est moi, ‘The State is me’, which is a complete mistake.

The State is the mass only in the sense that it can be said of two men that they are identical, because neither of them is called John. The contemporary State and the mass coincide only in being anonymous. But the fact is that the mass-man really believes that he is the State, and will tend more and more to make it work under any pretext, to crush with it any creative minority which disturbs it in any order: in politics, in ideas, in industry.

The result of this tendency will be fatal. Social spontaneity will be broken up over and over again by the intervention of the State; no new seed will be able to bear fruit. Society will have to live for the State, man for the machine of government. And since in the end it is nothing but a machine whose existence and maintenance depend on the surrounding vitality that sustains it, the State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of the machine, more gruesome than the death of a living organism.

This was the lamentable fate of ancient civilisation. There is no doubt that the imperial State created by the Julii and the Claudii was an admirable machine, incomparably superior as an artifact to the old republican State of the patrician families. But, by a curious coincidence, no sooner had it reached its full development than the social body began to decay. Already in the time of the Antonines (second 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 becomes bureaucratised. What happens? The bureaucratisation of life leads to its absolute decline - in all areas. Wealth decreases and women have few children. Then the State, in order to provide for its own needs, forces the bureaucratisation of human existence even further. This further bureaucratisation leads to the militarisation of society.

The State’s most urgent need is its apparatus of war, its army. The State is, first and foremost, a producer of security (the security, be it remembered, from which the mass-man is born). Hence, above all, an army. The Severi, of African origin, militarised the world. Vain task! Misery increased, women were less and less fertile. There was even a shortage of soldiers. After the time of the Severi, the army had to be recruited from among foreigners.

What is the paradoxical and tragic process of statism? Society, in order to live better, creates the State as a tool. Then the State takes over, and society has to start living for the State. But, after all, the State is still composed of the people of that society. But soon these do not suffice to support the State, and foreigners had to be called in: first, Dalmatians, then Germans.

The foreigners become masters of the State, and the remnants of society, the original people, have to live as slaves to them, slaves to people with whom they have nothing in common. This is what State interventionism leads to: the people become the meat and dough that feed the mere artefact and machine that is the State. The skeleton eats up the flesh around it. The scaffolding becomes the owner and tenant of the house.

When this is known, it is a little shocking to hear Mussolini proclaim with exemplary smugness, as a prodigious discovery now made in Italy, the formula: “Everything for the State; nothing outside the State; nothing against the State.” This alone would suffice to reveal in Fascism a typical movement of mass-men. Mussolini found himself faced with a State admirably constructed - not by him, but precisely by the forces and ideas he was fighting against: by liberal democracy.

He merely uses it with no restraint. And without entering now into a detailed examination of his work, it is indisputable that the results obtained up to the present cannot be compared with those obtained in political and administrative working by the liberal State. If it has achieved anything, it is so minute, so little visible, and so lacking in substance, that it hardly balances the accumulation of abnormal powers which enable him to make use of that machine to its full extent.

Statism is the highest form taken by violence and direct action when these are set up as norms. Through and by means of the State, an anonymous machine, the masses act for themselves.
The European nations are facing a period of great difficulties in their internal life, with extremely severe problems of economics, law and public order. How can we not fear that, under the rule of the masses, the State will endeavour to crush the independence of the individual and of the group, and thus definitely spoil the harvest of the future?

A concrete example of this mechanism can be found in one of the most alarming phenomena of the last thirty years: the enormous increase in police forces in all countries. Social growth has inevitably rendered it necessary. However accustomed we may be to it, the terrible paradox should not escape our minds that the population of a great modern city, in order to move about peaceably and attend to its business, necessarily requires a police force to regulate the circulation.

But it is naïve for the party of “law and order” to think that these “forces of public authority”, created to preserve order, will always be content to impose the order people want. What is inevitable is that they will end up defining and deciding for themselves the order they will impose - which will, of course, be the one that suits them best. 

It might be well to take advantage of our dealing on this matter to observe the different reaction to a public need manifested by different types of society. When, around 1800, the new industry began to create a type of man - the industrial worker - more criminally inclined than traditional types, France hastened to create a large police force.

Around 1810, for the same reasons, there was an increase in crime in England, and then the English realised that they had no police force. The Conservatives were in power, so what were they going to do, create a police force? Nothing of the sort. They preferred to put up with crime as far as they could. “People accept to let disorder alone, considering it the price they pay for liberty.” “In Paris - wrote John William Ward - they have an admirable Police; but they pay dearly for its advantages. I would rather see half a dozen men cut throats every three or four years in Ratcliffe Road, than be subjected to house-visits, espionage, and all the machinations of Fouché.” [2] These are two different ideas of the State. The Englishman wants the State to have limits. [3]

Notes

[1] With the expression “Lynch’s law” reference is made to a punishment performed by a group of people upon individuals thought to have committed actions considered as crimes. It became a common phrase as early as 1782 following the use by a prominent Virginian named Charles Lynch to describe his actions in suppressing a suspected Loyalist uprising in 1780 during the American Revolutionary War.

[2] Joseph Fouché (1759-1820) was Minister of Police under Napoleon.

[3] The situation has changed in the course of time. In 1829, the then Home Secretary Robert Peel introduced the Metropolitan Police Act, and the Metropolitan Police was founded on 29 September 1829. In 2024 there were approximately 170,500 police officers in the United Kingdom, compared with around 155,000 in 2003. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/303963/uk-police-officer-numbers/)