Revolt of the Masses
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
[1930]
There is one fact which, whether for good or ill, is of utmost
importance in the public life of Europe at the present moment. This
fact is the accession of the masses to complete social power....
In order to understand this formidable fact, it is important from
the start to avoid bringing to the words "rebellion," "masses,"
and "social power" a meaning exclusively or primarily
political. Public life is not solely political, but equally, and
even primarily, intellectual, moral, economic, religious; it
comprises all our collective habits, including our fashions both of
dress and of amusement....
The select man is not the petulant person who thinks himself
superior to the rest, but the man who demands more of himself than
the rest, even though he may not fulfil in his person those higher
exigencies. For there is no doubt that the most radical division
that 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
moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any
effort towards perfection...
I believe that the political innovations of recent times signify
nothing less than the political domination of the masses. The old
democracy was tempered by a generous dose of liberalism and
enthusiasm for law.... Today we are witnessing the triumphs of a
hyperdemocracy in which the mass acts directly, outside the law,
imposing its aspirations and its desires by means of material
pressure....
The present-day writer... has to bear in mind that the average
reader, if he reads does so with the view not of learning something
from the writer, but rather of pronouncing judgment on him.... The
characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing
itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights
of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.
It is precisely because man's vital time is limited, precisely
because he is mortal, that he needs to triumph over distance and
delay. For an immortal being, the motor-car would have no meaning.
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.... Hence the strange combination of a
sense of power and a sense of insecurity....
The mass-man is he whose life lacks any purpose, and simply goes
drifting along. Consequently, though his possibilities and his
powers be enormous, he constructs nothing. And it is this type of
man who decides in our time....
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 found impossible to
educate them.....
The whole of history stands out as a gigantic laboratory in which
all possible experiments have been made to obtain a formula of
public life most favorable to the plant "man." And beyond
all possible explaining away, we find ourselves face to face with
the fact that, by submitting the seed of humanity to the treatment
of two principles, liberal democracy and technical knowledge, in a
single century the species in Europe has been triplicated. Such an
overwhelming fact forces us, unless we prefer not to use our reason,
to draw these conclusions: first, that liberal democracy based on
technical knowledge is the highest type of public life hitherto
known; secondly, that that type may not be the best imaginable, but
the one we imagine as superior to it must preserve the essence of
those two principles; and thirdly, that to return to any forms of
existence inferior to that of the 19th century is suicidal.
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....
They are only concerned with their well-being, and at the same
time the remain alien to the cause of that well-being. 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
savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something
transcendental. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving
as an 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--the noble life. Nobility is defined by the demands it
makes on us--by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. "To
live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and
law." (Goethe)...
The world as organized by the 19th century, when automatically
producing a new man, has infused into him formidable appetites and
powerful means of every kind for satisfying them.... After having
supplied him with all these powers, the 19th century has abandoned
him to himself, and the average man, following his natural
disposition, has withdrawn into himself.... The masses are incapable
of submitting to direction of any kind.... It is illusory to imagine
that the mass-man of today, however superior his vital level may be
compared with that of other times, will be able to control, by
himself, the process of civilization. I say process, and not
progress. The simple process of preserving our present civilization
is supremely complex, and demands incalculably subtle powers.
It is not a question of the mass-man being a fool. On the
contrary, today he is more clever, has more capacity of
understanding than his fellow of any previous period.... This is
what in my first chapter i laid down as the characteristic of our
time; 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 type of man dominant today is a primitive one... he does not
see the civilization of the world around him, but he uses it as if
it were a natural force. The new man wants his motor-car, and enjoys
it, but he believes that it is the spontaneous fruit of an Edenic
tree. In the depths of his soul he is unaware of the artificial,
almost incredible, character of civilization, and does not extend
his enthusiasm for the instruments to the principles which make them
possible.