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Uncontrollable processes
The French scientist Gabriel Tard (1843-1904) said that crowd consists of many faces, gathered in the definite place and being united by common feeling, belief and action. Crowd is irrational and can be easily influenced. They repeat the same actions, the same cries. The more the crowd is, the lower its level is. In the crowd a professor is not different from a chimney man. Crowd loses its ability to control themselves as they do not think – they feel. The individuals in the crowd lose their feeling of responsibility; they are overwhelmed with intolerance, dogmatism, power. They are ruled by crowd spiritual unity law. At this moment uncontrolled spontaneity of the crowd can turn into its opposite. It is enough if the leader of the crowd is a populist who can easily influence the crowd manipulating its irrationalism, spiritual unity, as the crowd is ready to follow him, go where he says. Crowd in Latin “populias”. A populist leader – a crowd leader. The outstanding crowd leaders were Hitler and Mussolini. It is well- known where they led their nations. That is why elements of spontaneity and sensible organization are interconnected in social life. An individual needs an organized collective to solve the problems which he can solve by himself. The problems can be different- from political interests to family life. Individual life of every man is “served” by a great number of other people, and here, the organization and order are needed. However, relations of individuals are objective; they not only cooperate, but also collide on the basis of personal interests, - business, career, love. Needeing each other they disagree and start struggle. That is why a man in his individual actions anticipates counteraction and counteracts himself. These mutual objections stimulate life forces, providing their mobilization to achieve the aims. Balance between counteraction and cooperation is the main condition of progress. In economics counteraction and cooperation are called competitiveness and cooperation. The scientists are looking for psychological reasons why people unite in community. One of them was, already mentioned, Gabriel Tard. According to him, society is a product of interaction of individual consciousness. This interaction is expressed by exchange of knowledge, beliefs, ideas, wishes and etc. An elementary fact of social life Tard considers attitude of our “I” to other “I” and their influence on each other, but more important is their imitation to each other. When people imitate each other it becomes social behavior. Society is developing in such a way because outstanding people make up something new, and people imitate them, a province to the capital, etc. We, however, will not follow Tard in imitation as the main law of social life, which is one idea in the general picture of social life. |
As history shows society can not be sound without the “play” of uncontrollable forces. The uncontrollable processes in the society are made by autonomous, free actions of many individuals each of whom has his aim. These processes can not be controlled and often can not be predicted. Creative personalities, who are able to create, solve unusual social problems; reveal themselves better in uncontrollable processes. It is important to mention, there should not be too much spontaneity which can cause unpredictable consequences. For example, crowd.