The Revolt of the Masses

By Jose Ortega y Gasset, 1930

A century of security and prosperity (the nineteenth, that is) has produced a populace of spoiled brats.  That’s the main contention of Ortega y Gasset’s famous book.  The new type, which he calls “mass man”, is distinguished above all by ingratitude and complacency.  He has grown so used to stable government and a rising standard of living that he has come to imagine that these exist automatically without any human effort.  Being oblivious to the effort needed to maintain and run a civilization, he certainly feels no responsibility to contribute to the endeavor, but rather settles for demanding a greater and greater share of the spoils.  Mass man has no interest in the science that gives him his technology or in the history and culture that form his civilization.  The mass calls on the state to gratify its desires by bullying those who stand in its way, oblivious to the ruin this will eventually bring.

The noble man always serves some good or outside himself and judges himself by a harsh external standard.  (Noblesse oblige.)  Mass man is satisfied with himself as he is.  (He has self-esteem, we might say.)  He has opinions, picked up from the prejudices and buzzwords of his surroundings, on every topic.  He has no interest, however, in investigating whether his opinions are actually true.  He doesn’t feel the need to have what he regards as good reasons, much less to investigate the reasons for and against each view before coming to a decision on a particular issue.  He thinks his opinions have value just because they are his.  This is only a particularly obnoxious example of mass man’s total self-complacency.  Experts in narrow technical fields are some of the worst mass men, as their expertise in one field makes them even more smug and incurious in their ignorant appraisals of everything else.

This does indeed sound like an accurate description of the dominant character, at least in the West.  However, Ortega  y Gasset’s recommended solution is catastrophically wrongheaded.  To re-moralize Europe, he claims that Europeans need a goal, a project, to inspire them.  The best projects he imagines to be the consolidation of peoples into larger and larger aggregates, and so he recommends Europeans devote themselves to European Union.  What Ortega doesn’t realize is that the process of consolidation is more responsible than any other factor for the creation of mass man.  Centralization is a destructive, not a creative force.  A dozen cultures, a dozen histories, a dozen governments are reduced to one.  At each stage, the locus of decision making and creative activity becomes more remote from the average man.  Self-government is only meaningful at the city and county level.  Average people can only be involved in maintaining and advancing local culture.  To the extent that globalization produces a world culture, or even just a European culture, each of us, unless he is a rare genius, is reduced to being a mere consumer of this culture.  The reason mass man is indifferent to the work of maintaining a civilization is because centralization took away his opportunity to contribute so long ago that he no longer remembers what he’s missing.