From the sad conclusions.
A people is not simply a large number of people.
A people is memory.
Language.
Craft.
Song.
Celebration.
A shared gesture.
A way of greeting, keeping silence, burying the dead, rejoicing, baking bread, telling children stories and recognizing one’s own even in a foreign city.
A people is made of human beings.
Of separate faces.
Destinies.
Families.
Voices.
Living inner worlds.
But a mass is something else.
A mass is a nervous human stream, easily excited and just as easily frightened. Today it is ready to obey any attraction, listen to any loudmouth, follow the first energetic call and destroy everything with the face of historical necessity.
And tomorrow the same stream timidly scatters at the loud shout of some accidental functionary in uniform.
A person of the people remembers.
A person of the mass reacts.
A person of the people is still able to dream.
Dreams are supplied to the person of the mass by specialists in visions.
He no longer needs imagination.
Someone imagines for him.
Fears for him.
Hates for him.
Chooses for him whom to call an enemy, whom to call a hero, what to call truth and what to call dangerous delusion.
And then any clumsy nonsense, if it is presented confidently enough as obvious reality, supported by rumors, shouting, a couple of drunken witnesses and the proper intonation, suddenly begins to find general sympathy.
Not because people are stupid.
But because a person who has become mass stops being attentive to his own soul.
He no longer asks:
"What do I see?"
"What do I know?"
"What responds in me?"
"Who is thinking in me now — I, or the current?"
And this, my friends, is the saddest thing of all.
A people can be loved.
One can speak with a people.
A people can be awakened.
But a mass can only be awakened back into a human being...
