The Mass Psychology of Fascism - Anxiety Depression Self-Help

and directly express the economic situation. It fails, however, when human thinking and acting contradict the
economic situation, when, in other words, they are irrational. Vulgar Marxian and economism, systems which
repudiate psychology, are at a loss when confronted with this contradiction. The more mechanistic and
economistic the orientation of a sociologist, the less he knows human structure, the more will his mass
propaganda take the form of superficial psychologism. Instead of comprehending and trying to eliminate the
psychological contradiction in the mass individual, he will engage in Couéism or explain the fascist movement as
a "mass psychosis." Since the economistic sociologist neither knows nor acknowledges psychic processes, "mass
psychosis," to him, does not mean, as it does to us, a gigantic social fact of historical significance, but nothing but
a socially insignificant, negligible item.
[16] The province of mass psychology, then, begins precisely at the point where the immediate socio-economic
explanation fails. Does this mean an antithesis between mass psychology and socio-economics? No. For the
irrational thinking and behavior of the masses which contradicts the existing socio-economic situation is itself the
result of an earlier socio-economic situation. It has been customary to explain the inhibition of social
consciousness by so-called tradition. But thus far nobody has taken the trouble to find out what "tradition" is,
what psychological processes it reflects. Economism has hitherto overlooked the fact that the important question
is not that the working individual has consciousness of social responsibility; that goes without saying. The
question is, what inhibits the development of the consciousness of responsibility?
Ignorance of the character structure of the human masses again and again results in sterile explanations. The
Communists, for example, explained the rise of fascism by the faults of Social-Democratic politics. Such an
explanation led into a blind alley, for it was an essential characteristic of Social Democracy to spread illusions.
Such an explanation could not lead to a new policy. Similarly unproductive were such explanations as that
political reaction had, in the form of fascism, "misguided" or "hypnotized" the masses. To do that is, and always
will be, the function of fascism. Such explanations are unproductive because they do not point a new way.
Experience shows that no "disclosures" of this kind will convince the masses, that, in other words, the socioeconomic
explanation alone is insufficient. Would it not be logical to ask, what is it in the masses themselves that
made it impossible for them to recognize the function of fascism? The typical formulae, "The workers must
realize . . ." or "We did not understand . . ." are of no help. Why did the workers fail to realize and why did we not
understand? Another sterile explanation formed the basis of the discussion between the Left and the Right wings
in the workers' movement: The Right contended that the workers were not willing to fight; the Left countered by
saying that it was not so, that the workers were revolutionary and the contention of [17] the Right was a betrayal
of the revolution. Both statements, with their either-or alternatives, were mechanistically rigid. What would have
corresponded to reality would have been the finding that the average worker is neither unequivocally
revolutionary nor is he unequivocally conservative. Rather, he is in a conflict: on the one hand, his psychological
structure derives from his social position, which tends to make him revolutionary, on the other hand, from the
total atmosphere of authoritarian society, which tends to make him conservative. Thus, his revolutionary and his
conservative tendencies are in conflict with each other.
It is of decisive importance to see this conflict and to find out in what concrete forms the reactionary and the
revolutionary elements operate in the worker. The same applies, of course, to the member of the middle classes.
That he rebels against the "system" in a crisis, is immediately understandable. What is not understandable socioeconomically
is the fact that he, although already pauperized, nevertheless is afraid of progress and becomes
extremely reactionary. He, too, labors under a conflict between rebellious feelings and reactionary ideology.
A war, for example, is not satisfactorily explained sociologically by the specific economic and political factors
which lead to its actual outbreak, factors like the German designs in 1914 on the ores of Briey and Longy, the
Belgian industrial areas, and Asiatic colonies, or, in the second world war, the interests of Hitler's imperialism in
the oil wells of Baku, the industries of Czechoslovakia, etc. True, the economic interests of German imperialism
were the present-day factor. But we must also consider the mass-psychological basis of world wars and ask
ourselves: What produced the mass-psychological soil on which an imperialistic ideology could grow and could