The Mass Psychology of Fascism - Anxiety Depression Self-Help

mystical feeling of the mass individual.
An organization of workers' youth had invited a Protestant pastor to a discussion of the economic crisis. He
appeared, flanked by about twenty Christian youths of about eighteen to twenty-five years. In his talk, he showed
a tendency to jump from partially correct statements of fact into mysticism. The causes of all the misery, he said,
were the war and the Young Plan. The world war was an expression of human sinfulness. The exploitation by the
capitalists also was a sin (this typical attitude illustrates the difficulty of counteracting the influence of a mystic:
he himself voiced an anti-capitalistic attitude, thus appealing to the anti-capitalistic feeling of Christian youths).
Capitalism and Socialism, he said, were essentially the same thing. The socialism of the Soviet Union was a kind
of capitalism; the socialist order meant hardships for certain classes as capitalism meant hardship for others. Any
kind of capitalism had to be "hit in the puss." The fight of bolshevism against religion was a crime. Religion, he
said, did not cause the misery, but the fact that capitalism misused religion. (The pastor was definitely
progressive.) What followed from all this? Since people were bad and sinful, the misery could not be eliminated
at all, one had to bear it and to make the best of it. The capitalist, he said, was not happy either. The inner misery,
which was the important thing, would not be eliminated by the third Five-year plan of the Soviet Union either.
Some revolutionary youths tried to explain their standpoint. It was not a matter of the individual capitalist, they
said, but of the "system." It was a question of whether the majority or only a small minority were suppressed. The
advice to bear the misery meant only its prolongation and an aid to reaction. And so on. At the end, everybody
agreed that a bridging of the gap was not [108] possible, that everybody was leaving with the same convictions
with which he had come. The attention of the pastor's youthful companions was glued to the lips of their leader.
They seemed to be just as poor as the Communist youths, and yet, every one of them agreed with the position that
there was nothing that could be done about the misery, that one had to make the best of it and "trust in God."
Afterwards, I asked a few Communist youths why they had not brought up what was the main point on the part
of the church, adolescent abstinence. They said that was too difficult and too dangerous; that would cause an
explosion and it was not customary to bring it up in political discussions.
At about the same time a mass meeting took place in a Western district of Berlin at which representatives of the
church and representatives of the Communist party presented their respective views. A good half of the audience
of about eighteen hundred consisted of Christians and middle class people. I presented the sex-economic
viewpoint in the form of a few questions:
1. The church contends that the use of contraceptives, like any interference with natural procreation, is against
nature. Now, if nature is so strict and so wise, why has it created a sexual apparatus which impels to sexual
intercourse not only when one wants children, but on an average of two to three thousand times in the period of
adult life?
2. Will the representatives of the church who are present here openly state whether they have sexual intercourse
only when they want to create children? (They were Protestant pastors.)
3. Why did God create two kinds of glands in the sexual apparatus, one for sexual excitation and one for
procreation?
4. Why do infants develop a sexuality, long before the function of procreation develops?
The stammering answers of the church representatives evoked a roar of laughter. I then explained the role of the
negation of the pleasure function on the part of the church and of reactionary science; that the suppression of
sexual gratification had precisely the function of making people submissive and resigned, incapable [109] of
rebelling against their economic position. With that, the whole audience was on my side. The mystics were
beaten.
Extensive experience in mass meetings shows that people readily understand the reactionary political role of
mysticism in connection with sexual suppression if one presents the right to sexual gratification clearly and
directly from the medical and social point of view. This fact requires detailed substantiation.
3. THE APPEAL TO MYSTICAL FEELING