The Individual and the Mass

If it is true that we live in a mass society, we must immediately admit one fact: there are some individuals who are more affected by it than others, but there are not, nor can there be, privileged persons. There cannot he, on the one hand, the anonymous and vulgar mass which lacks idealistic motives, and on the other a few individuals who succeed in keeping intact their nobility and the cult of the highest values. The mass and the few are inextricably mixed. At certain times we feel ourselves to be individuals endowed with feelings, needs, and spiritual demands which are not those of the anonymous crowd. And we, speak of the mass situation in so far as we experience the confusion between, and the mutual involvement of, the anonymous and the personal. We feel a contrast between our individual beings and a social situation in which necessity, automatism, and collective servitude are especially refractory both to the individual’s personal demands and to the “aristocratic v...