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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER XIV: WHO RULES THE WORLD?
Page 6
There has been so much talk of the decadence of Europe, that many have come to take it for a fact. Not that they believe in it seriously and on proof, but that they have grown used to take it as true, though they cannot honestly recall having convinced themselves decidedly in the matter at any fixed time. Waldo Frank's recent book The Rediscovery of America is based entirely on the supposition that Europe is at its last gasp. And yet, Frank neither analyses nor discusses, nor submits to question this enormous fact, which is to serve him as a formidable premiss. Without further investigation, he starts from it as from something incontrovertible. And this ingenuousness at the very start is sufficient to make me think that Frank is not convinced of the decadence of Europe; far from it, he has never set himself the problem. He takes it as he would take a tram. Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation. And as he does, so do many others. Above all, it is done by nations, whole nations. The world at the present day is behaving in a way which is a very model of childishness. In school, when someone gives the word that the master has left the class, the mob of youngsters breaks loose, kicks up its heels, and goes wild. Each of them experiences the delights of escaping the pressure imposed by the master's presence; of throwing off the yoke of rule, of feeling himself the master of his fate. But as, once the plan which directed their occupations and tasks is suspended, the youthful mob has no formal occupation of its own, no task with a meaning, a continuity, and a purpose, it follows that it can only do one thing- stand on its head. The frivolous spectacle offered by the smaller nations to-day is deplorable. Because it is said that Europe is in decadence and has given over ruling, every tuppeny-ha'penny nation starts skipping, gesticulating, standing on its head or else struts around giving itself airs of a grown-up person who is the ruler of his own destinies. Hence the vibrionic panorama of "nationalisms" that meets our view everywhere. In previous chapters I attempted to put in his classification a new type of man who to-day predominates in the world: I called him the mass-man, and I observed that his main characteristic lies in that, feeling himself "common," he proclaims the right to be common, and refuses to accept any order superior to himself. It was only natural that if this mentality is predominant in every people, it should be manifest also when we consider the nations as a group. There are then also relatively mass-peoples determined on rebelling against the great creative peoples, the minority of human stocks which have organised history.