Epilogue to The Devils of Loudun

Description

from the essay: "The professional moralists who inveigh against drunkeness are strangely silent about the equally disgusting vice of herd-intoxication - of downward self-transcendence into subhumanity by the process of getting together in a mob. "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." In the midst of two or three hundred, the divine presence becomes more problematical. And when the numbers run into the thousands, or tens of thousands, the likelihood of God being there, in the consciousness of each individual, declines almost to the vanishing point. For such is the nature of an excited crowd (and every crowd is automatically self-exciting) that,where two or three thousand are gathered together, there is an absence not merely of deity, but even of common humanity. The fact of being one of a multitude delivers a man from his consciousness of being an insulated self and carries him down into a less than personal realm, where there are no responsibilities, no right or wrong, no need for thought or judgment or discrimination - only a strong vague sense of togetherness, only a shared excitement, a collective alienation."