state carries on a big lottery enterprise. President
Eliot once said in a speech about the moral progress of
mankind that a hundred years ago a public lottery was
allowed in Boston for the purpose of getting the funds
for erecting a new Harvard dormitory, and he added
that such a procedure would be unthinkable in New
England in our more enlightened days. Yet in the
most civilized European countries, whenever a cathe-
dral is to be built, or an exhibition to be supported, the
state gladly sanctions big lottery schemes to secure the
financial means. The European governments argue
that a certain amount of gambling instinct is ingrained in
human character, and that it is wiser to create a kind of
official outlet by which it is held within narrow limits, and
by which the results yielded are used for the public good.
This may be a right or a wrong policy, but in any
case, it shows that the desire for gambling is no less
marked on the other side of the ocean. In the same
way, while private bookmakers are not allowed at most
European races, the official "totalisators" offer to the
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
gamblers the same outlets. Every tourist remembers
from the European casinos in the summer resorts the
famous game with the little horses, a miniature Mo-
naco scheme. And in the privacy of the too often not
very private clubs extremely neat card games are in order
which depend still more upon chance than the Ameri-
can poker. Moreover, the Europeans have not even
the right to say that American life indicates a desire
for harvest without ploughing. Every observer of
European life knows to what a high degree the young
Frenchman or Austrian, Italian, German, or Russian
approaches married life with an eye on the dowry.
Hundreds of thousands consider it as their chief chance
to come to ease and comfort. The whole temper of the
nations is adjusted to this idea, which is essentially
lacking in American society. It is evident that no
method of getting rich quick is more direct, and from a
higher point of view more immoral, if taken as a motive
for the choice of a mate, than this plan which Europe
welcomes. The same difference shows itself in smaller
traits. Europe invented the tipping system, which also
means that money is expected without an equivalent in
labour. Tipping is essentially strange to the American
character, however rapid its progress has been on the
Atlantic seaboard.
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Of course it would be absurd to ignore the existence
and even the prevalence of similar attitudes in America.
If the dowry does not exist, not every man marries
without a thought of the rich father-in-law. For-
bidden gambling houses are abundant, private betting
connected with sport is flourishing everywhere; above
all, the economic organization admits through a back-
door what is banished from the main entrance, by
allowing stocks to be issued for very small amounts.
In Germany the state does not permit stocks smaller
than one thousand marks, equal to two hundred and
fifty dollars, with the very purpose of making specula-
tive stock buying impossible for the man of small
means. The waiter and the barber who here may buy
very small blocks of ten-dollar stocks have no such
chance there. Stock buying is thus confined to those
circles from which a certain wider outlook may be ex-
pected. The external framework of the stock market is
here far more likely to tempt the man of small savings
into the game, and the mere fact that this form has
been demanded by public consciousness suggests that
the spirit which craves lotteries is surely not absent in
the new world, even though the lottery lists in the
European newspapers are blackened over before they
are laid out in the American public libraries. A certain
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
desire for gambling and quick returns evidently exists
the world over. But if the Americans are really spec-
ulating more than all the other nations, a number of
other mental features must contribute to the outcome.
One tendency stands quite near to gambling, and yet
is characteristically different, the delight in running
risks, the joy in playing with dangers. Some races,
in which the gambling instinct is strong, are yet afraid
of high risks, and the pleasure in seeking dangerous
situations may prevail without any longing for the re-
wards of the gambler. It seems doubtful whether this
adventurous longing for unusual risks belongs to the
Anglo-Saxon mind. At least those vocations which
most often involve such a mental trend are much more
favoured by the Irish. It is claimed that they, for
instance, are prominent among the railroad men, and
that the excessive number of accidents in the railroad
service results from just this reckless disposition of the
Irishmen. It tempts them to escape injury and death
only by a hair. Where this desire to feel the nearness
of danger, yet in the hope of escaping it, meets the crav-(
ing for the excitement of possible gain, a hazardous
investment of one's savings must be expected.
Yet it would be very one-sided and misleading if this
group of emotional features were alone made respon-
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THE MIND OF THE INVESTOR
sible for the lamentable recklessness in the market.
We must first of all necessarily acknowledge the tre-
mendous powers of suggestion which the whole Ameri-
can life and especially the stock market contains. The
word suggestion has become rather colourless in popular
language, but for the psychologist, it has a very def-
inite meaning. Suggestion is always a proposition
for action, which is forced on the mind in such a way
that the impulse to opposite action becomes inhibited.
Under ordinary circumstances, when a proposition is
made to do a certain thing through the mechanism of
the mind, the idea of the opposite action may arise. If
some one tells the normal man to go and do this or
that, he will at once think of the consequences, and in his
mind perhaps the idea awakes of the dangerousness or
of the foolishness, of the immorality or of the uselessness
of such a deed, and any one of these ideas would be a
sufficient motive for ignoring the proposed line of be-
haviour and for suppressing the desire to follow the poor
advice. But often this normal appearance of the
opposite ideas fails. If they arise at all, they are too
faint or too powerless to offer resistance, and often they
may not even enter consciousness. They remain sup-
pressed, and the result is that the idea of action finds
its way unhindered, and breaks out into the deed which
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
normally would have been checked. If this is the case,
the psychologist says that the mind was in a state of
increased suggestibility.
The degree of suggestibility, that is of willingness to
yield to such propositions for action and of inability to
resist them, is indeed different from man to man. We
all know the stubborn persons who are always inclined
to resist whatever is proposed to them and who do not
believe what is told them, and we know the credulous
ones who believe everything that they see printed.
But the degree of suggestibility changes no less from
hour to hour with the individual. In a state of fatigue
or under the influence of alcohol or under the influence
of strong emotions, in hope and fear, the suggesti-
bility is reenforced. The highest degree of suggesti-
bility is that mental state which we call hypnotism, in
which the power to resist the proposed idea of action is
reduced to a minimum. But the chief factor in mak-
ing us suggestible is the method by which the idea of
action is proposed, and in psychology we speak of sug-
gestion whenever an action is proposed by methods
which make the mind yielding. It certainly is not
objectionable to exert suggestive influence. Sugges-
tions are the leading factors in education, in art, and in
religion. The authoritative voice with which the
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THE MIND OF THE INVESTOR
teacher proposes the right thing has a most valuable
suggestive power to suppress in the child the opposite
misleading impulse. But surely suggestions can be-
come dangerous and destructive. If actions are
proposed in a form which paralyzes the power to be-
come conscious of the opposite impulses, the voice of
reason and of conscience is silenced, and social and moral
ruin must be the result.
Everybody at once thinks of the endless variety of
advertisements. An announcement which merely
gives information is of course no suggestion. But if
perhaps such an announcement takes the form of an
imperative, an element of suggestion creeps in. To be
sure we are accustomed to this trivial pattern, and no
one completely loses his power to resist if the proposi-
tion to buy comes in the grammatical form of a com-
mand. If we had reached the highest degree of sug-
gestibility, as in hypnotism, we could not read "Cook
with gas " without at once putting a gas stove into our
kitchen. Yet even such a mild suggestion has its in-
fluence and tends slightly to weaken the arguments
which would lead to an opposite action. The adver-
tisements, however, which the brokers send to our
house and which are spread broadcast in the homes of
the country to people who have no technical knowledge
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
of stock-buying are surely not confined to such child-
like and bland forms of suggestion. The whole group-
ing of figures, the distribution of black and white in the
picture of the market situation, the glowing story of
the probable successes with the bewildering hints of
special privileges, must increase the suggestibility of
the untrained mind and reenforce powerfully the sug-
gestive energy of the proposition to buy. The whole
technique of this procedure has nowhere been brought
to such virtuosity as in our country. The fact which
we mentioned, that the new industrial and mining en-
terprises can offer shares small enough to be accessible
to the man without means, has evidently been the chief
reason for developing a style of appeal which would be
unthinkable in the countries where the investors are
essentially experienced business men.
But the skill of the prospectus with its sometimes half
fraudulent features would, after all, not gain such in-
fluence if suggestion were not produced from another
side as well, namely, through the instinct of imitation.
The habit of making risky investments is so extremely
widespread that the individual buyer does not feel him-
self isolated, and therefore dependent upon his own
judgments and deliberations. He feels himself as a
member of a class, and the class easily becomes a crowd,
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THE MIND OF THE INVESTOR
even a mob, a mob in which the logic of any mob reigns,
and that is the logic of doing unthinkingly what others
do. It is well known that every member of a crowd
stands intellectually and morally on a lower level than
he would stand if left to his spontaneous impulses and
his own reflections. The crowd may fall into a panic
and rush blindly in any direction into which any one
may have happened to start and no one thinks about
it, or it may go into exaltation and exuberantly do what
no one alone would dare to risk. This mass conscious-
ness is also surely a form of increased suggestibility.
The individual feels his own responsibility reduced be-
cause he relies instinctively on the judgment of his
neighbours, and with this decreased responsibility the
energy for resistance to dangerous propositions dis-
appears. Men buy their stocks because others are
doing it.
But finally, may we not call it suggestion, too, if the
individual even tremblingly accepts the risks of peril-
ous deals, because he feels obliged to grasp for an un-
usually high income in order to live up to the style of
his set? Of course there is no objective standard of
living if we abstract from that where the income simply
secures the needs of bare existence. Above that, every-
thing depends upon the habits of those around us. If
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
the community steadily screws up these habits, makes
life ostentatious for those of moderate means as well
as for the rich, hysterically emphasizes the material
Values, the will to be satisfied with the income of safe
investments has to fight against tremendous odds.
The truly strong mind will keep its power to resist, but
the slightly weak mind will find the suggestion of the
surrounding life more powerful than the fear of possible
loss. If all the neighbours in the village have automo-
biles, the man who would enjoy a quiet book and a
pleasant walk much more than a showy ride will yield,
and spend a thousand dollars for his motor car where
fifty dollars for books would have brought him far more
intense satisfaction. In no country have fashion and
ostentatiousness taken such strong possession of the
masses, and the willingness to be satisfied with a mod-
erate income is" therefore nowhere so little at home.
Yet neither gambling and taking risks, nor suggest-
ibility and imitation, are the whole of the story. We
must not forget the superficiality of thinking, the un-
critical, loose, and flabby use of the reasoning power
which shows itself in so many spheres of American mass
life. It is sufficient to see the triviality of argument
and the cheapness of thought in those newspapers
which seek and enjoy the widest circulation. It is dif-
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THE MIND OF THE INVESTOR
ficult not to believe that fundamentally sins of education
are to blame for it. The school may bring much to the
children, but no mere information can be a substitute
for a training in thorough thinking. Here lies the
greatest defect of our average schools. The looseness
of the spelling and figuring draws its consequences.
Whoever becomes accustomed to inaccuracy in the ele-
ments remains inaccurate in his thinking his life long.
If the American public loses a hundred million dollars
a year by investments in worthless undertakings, surely
not the smallest cause is the lack of concise reasoning.
Wrong analogies control the thought of the masses.
Any copper stock must be worth buying because the
stock of Calumet-Hecla multiplied its value a hun-
dredfold. But the irony of the situation lies in the fact
that, as experience shows, those who are the clearest
thinkers in their own fields are in the realm of invest-
ments as easily trapped as the most superficial reasoners.
It is well known that college professors, school teachers,
and ministers figure prominently on the mailing lis s of
unscrupulous brokers, and their hard-earned savings
are especially often given for stocks which soon are not
worth the paper on which they are printed. Some-
times, to be sure, this unpractical behaviour of the
idealists really results from an unreasonable indifference
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
to commercial questions. The true scholar, whose life
is tuned to the conviction that he has more important
things to do in the world than to make money, readily
falls into a mood of carelessness with regard to the
money which he does chance to make. In this state of
indifference he follows any advice and may easily be
misled.
But it seems probable that the more frequent case is
the opposite one. Just because the teacher and the pas-
tor have small chance to save anything, they give their
fullest thought to the question how to multiply their
earnings, and their mistake springs rather from their
ignorance of the actual conditions. They think that
they can figure it out by mere logic and overlook the
hard realities. They resemble another group of victims
who can be found in the midst of commercial life, the
over-clever people who rely on especially artificial argu-
ments. They feel sure that they see some points which
no one else has discovered, and while they may have
noticed some small reasonable points, they overlook
important conditions which the simpler-minded would
have seen. They know everything better than their
neighbours, and whatever their friends buy or sell they
at once have a brilliant argument to prove that the
step was wrong. They generally forget that the lis-
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THE MIND OF THE INVESTOR
tener must be suspicious of their wisdom, as they them-
selves have never earned the fruit of their apparent
wisdom. They all, however, may find comfort in
the well-known fact that hardly any great financier
has died, not even a Harriman or a Morgan, with-
out there being found in his possession large quan-
tities of worthless stocks and bonds. But the variety
of intellectual types, the careless and the uncritical,
the over-clever and the illogical thinkers, could easily
protect themselves against the dangers of the short-
comings in their mental mechanism if their minds
had not another trait, which, too, is more frequent in
America than anywhere else in the world the lack of
respect for the expert.
The average American is his own expert in every field.
This is certainly not a reproach. It supplies American
public life with an immense amount of energy and
readiness to help. Above all, historically, it was the
necessary outcome of the political democracy. In
striking contrast to the European bureaucracy, any
citizen could at any time be called to be postmaster or
mayor or governor or member of the cabinet. A
true American would find his way, however complex
the work before him. That was, and is, splendid. Yet
the development of the recent decades has clearly
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
shown that the danger of this mental attitude after all
appears to the newer American generation alarmingly
great in many fields. Civil service has steadily grown,
the influence of the engineer and the expert in every
technical and practical field has more and more taken
control of American life, because the go-as-you-please
methods of the amateur have shown increasingly their
ineffectiveness. Education has slowly been removed
from the dilettantic, unprepared school boards. The
reign of the expert in public life seems to have begun.
But in private life such an attitude is still a part of the
mental equipment of millions. They ignore the physi-
cian and cure themselves with patent medicines or
mental healing: they ignore the banker and broker and
make their investments in accordance with their own
amateurish inspiration. They pick up a few data, ask
a few friends who are as little informed as themselves,
but do not think of asking the only group of men who
make a serious, persistent study of the market their
lifework.
They call this independence, and it cannot be denied
that some features of our home and school education
may have fostered this tendency not to submit to the
judgment of those who know better. They have
grown up in schools in which the kindergarten method
THE MIND OF THE INVESTOR
never stopped, in which they were permitted to select
the studies which they liked, and to learn just what
pleased them; they were brought up in homes in which
they were begged and persuaded, but never forced to do
the unwelcome; in short, they have never learned to
submit their will to authority. It cannot be surprising
that they fancy that it is the right kind of mental set-
ting to feel one's self the ultimate authority in every
field, and it would be harmless indeed if the patent
medicines would really cure as well as the prescriptions
of the physician, and if the wildcat schemes would
really yield the same safe income as those investments
recommended by the reliable banker. It is then, after
all, no chance that this commercially clever American
nation wastes more in anti-economic fancies than any
other people on the globe. It is the outcome of psy-
chological traits which are rooted in significant con-
ditions of our educational and social life. Yet as soon
as these connections are recognized and these reasons
for waste are understood, it ought not to be difficult
fundamentally to change all this and to make the
savings of the nation everywhere really sources of
national income.
[269]
SOCIETY AND THE DANCE
IX
SOCIETY AND THE DANCE
THE story of the dance is the history of human
civilization, of its progress and regress. To be sure, as
the human mind remains ultimately the same, mankind
has often unintentionally returned again to the old
forms. The pirouette, which the artists of the ballet in-
vented a hundred years ago, and which was applauded
as the wonder of its time, as we now know, was danced
by old Egyptians. Not seldom the same outer forms
referred to very different mental motives. We learn
that many people danced half naked as an expression
of humility. Who would claim that the lack of cos-
tume in the ballet of to-day is a symbol of humility,
too? Moreover, the right perspective can hardly be
gained as long as we take the narrow view and think
only of those few forms of dance which we saw yester-
day in the ballroom and the day before yesterday on
the stage of the theatre. The dance has not meant to
mankind only social pleasure and artistic spectacle,
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
it originally accompanied the social life and surrounded
the individual in every important function.
Dancing certainly began as a religious cult. It was
the form in which every increase of emotion expressed
itself, grief as well as joy, awe as much as enthusiasm.
The primitive peoples danced and in many places still
dance when the seasons change or when the fields are
to be cultivated, when they start on the hunt or go to
war, when health is asked for the sick, and when the
gods are to be called upon. The Iroquois Indians have
thirty-two chief types of dances, and even among
civilized nations, for instance the Bohemians, a hun-
dred and thirty-six dances may be discriminated.
Moreover, at first, the dance is really one with the song;
music and dancing were only slowly torn asunder.
And if we look over the whole world of dance, it almost
appears as if what is left to us is after all merely a poor
remnant. Yet in these very days much seems to suggest
that the dance is to come to its own again. At least,
he who observes the life along Broadway may indeed
suspect that dancing is now to be intertwined again
with every business of life, and surely with every meal
of life. No longer can any hostelry in New York be
found without dancing, and wider still than the dance
sweeps the discussion about it. The dance seems once
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SOCIETY AND THE DANCE
more the centre of public interest; it is cultivated from
luncheon to breakfast; it is debated in every newspaper
and every pulpit.
But is not all this merely a new demonstration that
the story of the dance is the story of civilization?
Can we deny that this recent craze which, like a danc-
ing mania, has whirled over the country, is a significant
expression of deep cultural changes which have come
to America? Only ten years ago such a dancing fever
would have been impossible. People danced, but they
did not take it seriously. It was set off from life and
not allowed to penetrate it. It had still essentially the
rdle which belonged to it in a puritanic, hardworking
society. But the last decade has rapidly swept away
that New England temper which was so averse to the
sensuous enjoyment of life, and which long kept an
invisible control over the spirit of the whole nation.
Symptoms of the change abound: how it came about
is another question. Certainly the increase and the
wide distribution of wealth with its comforts and lux-
uries were responsible, as well as the practical comple-
tion of the pioneer days of the people, the rich blossom-
ing of science and art, and above all the tremendous
influx of warm-blooded, sensual peoples who came in
millions from southern and eastern Europe, and who
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
altered the tendencies of the cool-blooded, Teutonic
races in the land. They have changed the old Ameri-
can Sunday, they have revolutionized the inner life,
they have brought the operas to every large city, and the
kinometograph to every village, and have at last played
the music to a nation-wide dance. Yet the problem
which faces every one is not how this dancing craze
arose, but rather where it may lead, how far it is
healthy and how far unsound, how far we ought to
yield to it or further it, and how far we ought to resist.
To answer this question, it is not enough to watch
the outside spectacle, but we must inquire into the
mental motives and mental consequences. Exactly
this is our true problem.
Let us first examine the psychological debit account.