The herdist is the born enemy of all personal hierarchies

Great stress has been put in the past on facts related to character, such as introversion and extroversion, individualism and collectivism — aspects which do not lack a certain inner connection. Yet they should be supplemented by another pair of mutually antagonistic human trends which have been hitherto neglected by political psychologists. One of these trends stands for identity and uniformity, while its counterpart expresses the yearning for diversity.

The former is an animalistic instinct which we have in common with all gregarious animals. It urges us to seek the company of our “equals,” to move in the society of people of our own social status, of our tastes, our likes and dislikes, our race and political conviction, our cultural background, our financial strength, and perhaps even of our sex.

Aristotle says that man is a “political animal,” but this trait of our character is not necessarily a consequence of the fact that we are created in the image of God. God is not a “social animal,” yet sheep, wolves, and monkeys undoubtedly are, and so also in the insect world locusts,  bees, ants, and termites function as a group. The more “primitive” man is (in the characteriological not anthropological sense) the more he is guided and directed by the herd instinct, which prompts him to seek “congenial” company and to obey scrupulously the written or unwritten commands of the group.
The true “herdist” will carefully avoid acting or thinking originally, in order not to destroy the uniformity which is so dear to him, and he is also ready to rise immediately against anybody who dares to act independently and thus destroy the sacred unity of the uniform group to which he belongs. The loyal herdist will not rise alone against the sacrilegious offender; he will have the support of the rest of the circumscribed society and thus a mass action of collective protest will take place, forcing the “lonely individual” to conform or to withdraw. It must be fully borne in mind that no one of us is completely free from the influence of the herdist instinct and even the noblest among us yield to its dark appeal in one form or the other.

The herdist instinct is furthermore not only personal, in the sense that it clamors for a personal collectivism; it creates also a longing and desire for the visual or acoustic contemplation of identitarian or uniformistic phenomena. The true herdist, the man truly dominated by that inferior instinct, will not only rejoice in marching amongst twenty thousand uniformly clad soldiers, all stepping rhythmically in one direction, but he will find an almost equal gratification in contemplating the show from a balcony. He will not only be happy in sitting amidst two hundred other bespectacled businessmen, drinking beer and humming one chant in unison, but the aspect of a skyscraper with a thousand identical windows will probably impress him more than a picture by Botticelli or Zurbarán.

The herdist is the born enemy of all personal hierarchies as well as of most hierarchies of value. The modern political philosophies and the Industrial Revolution have strengthened the herdist element in all civilized countries; a Parteitag in Nuremberg, the beach of Brighton during a bank holiday, a military parade on the Red Square in Moscow or a subway train during the rush hours in New York afford voluntary or involuntary manifestations of the herdist spirit or the herdist order of our days. It is needless to emphasize that the herdist is a convinced egalitarian, that he has an inveterate suspicion regarding everything original or unique, a hatred for everything beyond his comprehension, a hostile uneasiness for things which are “low” or organically natural. The peasant with his strong personality is no less a target for his contempt  and scorn than the “stuffed shirt,” the “high-hatted” aristocrat, or the “high-brow” intellectual.

The ideal dwelling place for the herdist is the city, the megalopolis with its apartment houses, clubs, cinemas, theaters, offices, factories, and restaurants. Here the herdist has ample opportunity to live the life of the masses, to lead an impersonal and lonely existence in a truly dehumanized ant heap, to love and like nobody but himself and perhaps those similar to him.

This loneliness, this solitude amongst the many, is usually not even mitigated by an awareness of the presence of God.1 The herdist who tends in the political sphere to be a Leftist — i.e., a national or an international collectivist — feels little attracted by the idea of God’s existence who after all is “different” and represents the top of the pyramid of a hierarchic system which the herdist, disbelieving in souls, is unable to accept.2 The herdist is truly the homme médiocre whom Ernest Hello has described so aptly;3 he is simply forced to stand for mediocrity because it has as the “medium” (the “fifty-fifty”), the best chance to become the rallying point and the focus for the mass movement, the mass sentiment, or the mass norm.

The antagonist of the herdist, on the other hand, the “romantic” man, is not moved by identity and uniformity but by diversity. We must be careful not to confound the true “romantic” with the “rugged individualist” who puts up a desperate and losing struggle against an impending collectivism, or with the mentally unbalanced egotist who is extravagant in order to draw general attention. One hardly finds the latter type in a rural or “backward” surrounding. Gustave de Nerval promenaded his tame lobster in the streets of Paris and not in the loneliness of the Dauphiné.

Yet there is nothing freakish in a man who longs for people different from himself, different in sex, in race, in convictions. The ideal antiherdist longs for God and to be with Him. He may long for countries far away, for travel, adventure, and a life full of variety in externals or internals. The romantic is not moved by an element of fear as the herdist who is hiding his person in an anonymous collective, but he seeks the fullness of life with all its diverse aspects. At its loftiest, his aspiration is for the fuller life of the spirit. The Germans speak of das romantische Lebensgefühl and one might therefore name the moving power in the antiherdist, the romantic spirit, a label which might well serve its purpose.

 But while using this label we have to bear in mind that we do not imply a basic affinity between its meaning and the historic literary romanticism of Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century (and even far less so of French romanticism of almost the same period). Irving Babbitt in his brilliant Rousseau and Romanticism has very aptly characterized the spirit of the Romantic Movement in Europe and little can be added to his genial analysis of this disorganized outbreak of desperate vitality between arid classicism and deadly industrialism. The Pseudo-Romanticism of our days showed such mad outbursts as weird Californian sects, blue fingernails, tree sitting, and “jitterbug” dancing. The advent of national socialism and communism was marked by a curious and sudden increase of all kinds of extravagant fads even in the religious sphere of which the hysteria in connection with Rasputin and the cheese-eating Weissenberg sect were the most conspicuous.

It should not be forgotten that none of us lacks the herd instinct completely and that there is scarcely a human being who is totally devoid of the romantic spirit. But while the herd instinct of those “who want to march through life together, along the collective path, shoulder to shoulder, wool rubbing wool and the head down” (José Ortega y Gasset) — is of the animalistic order, the romantic spirit is purely human, divine.* The plenitude of life so eagerly sought by the Romantic, as here conceived, is inaccessible to the animal. The terrifying diversity of the total cosmos (visible as well as invisible) has no meaning for the termite or the herdist with their limited existences in their limited buildings.

The great achievements — sanctity, heroism, holy wisdom, the beatific vision — are not eagerly sought for by the herdist who like the beasts of the field longs to be a “secure” animal (to use an expression of Peter Wust) instead of being proud to remain an “insecure” animal, which man is by nature and in the order of things. Hostile to adventure, which after all was one of the great magnetic powers of the Middle Ages, the herdist moves cautiously in the broad stream of the mediocre masses avoiding all extremes except those in a frenzied mass hysteria. Yet Christianity is an extreme. The yoke of Christ is not a lesser menace to his meager and miserable personality than the iron postulates of the Cross — of the same Cross which is a flat denial of his shining rule of the “fifty-fifty,” and disturbing to all his cautious calculations and plannings. Only the select can be closely confronted with the Absolute without taking flight. Only the saints, but not the “commonsensical” herd, can and will surrender to the “Holy Folly of the Cross.” For this reason we have such hatred on the part of the mediocre man, who hates any sort of hierarchy, whether of the saints or of sanctity itself. Sanctity is not only an extraordinary condition but also an adventure. And adventure belongs to the domain of the “Romantic.” Adventure is a solitary enterprise, like sanctity, and therefore not congenial to the herd and the herdist.4 The herdist in turn is bent upon “imitation” (not in the sense of an Imitatio, a following, but of mere copying), and his imitation is partly the result of his lack of originality, his lack of creative power and his inner weakness which must be covered up by some sort of protective coloring, a mimicry which makes it difficult to distinguish him from the rest and from the “norm.”5One should, in that connection, certainly not forget the “greatest” adventure of the herdist, his banal excursions into the animalistic aspects of sex. Here he hopes to drown the despair over his loneliness in the herd. The Romantic may be alone, but he is never lonely, and that because of his knowledge of the presence of God. (Certainly, also, there is more loneliness in an apartment house or in a crammed subway than in a village with widely dispersed cottages.) Yet the restriction of adventure to the sexual sphere is the reason why our urban culture and civilization is so terribly oversexed. The great thirst does not go for “women” or “men” but for sex alone, sex for sex’ sake. It is not the attraction of the other sex, but sex as a drug and escape. It thus stands in the same category as the movies. Modern man, having abandoned the supernatural, here seeks for perhaps a last consolation, in order not to be completely overpowered by machine and monotony.

Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
The Menace of the Herd or
Procrustes at Large