individual freedom in order to remain within the group. This sacrifice of freedom on the part of individuals in the groups leads its members to resist all efforts at fundamental changes in the group code. Because all have made certain sacrifices, reasons are developed why such sacrifices must be insisted upon at all times. The “logic-proof” compartment is the result of this unwillingness to accept changes.
“What has been so painstakingly built up is not to be lightly destroyed. Each group, therefore, within itself, considers its own standards ultimate and indisputable, and tends to dismiss all contrary or different standards as indefensible.
“Even an honest, critical understanding of the demands of the opposing crowd is discouraged, possibly because it is rightly felt that the critical habit of mind is as destructive of one crowd-complex as the other, and the old crowd prefers to remain intact and die in the last ditch rather than risk dissolution, even with the promise of averting a revolution. Hence the Romans were willing to believe that the Christians worshiped the head of an ass. The medieval Catholics, even at Leo’s court, failed to grasp the meaning of the outbreak in North Germany. Thousands saw in the reformation only the alleged fact that the monk Luther wanted to marry a wife....”1
The main satisfaction, Mr. Martin thinks, which the individual derives from his group association is the satisfaction of his vanity through the creation of an enlarged self-importance.
The Freudian theories upon which Mr. Martin relies very largely for his argument lead to the conclusion that what Mr. Henry Watterson has said of the suppression of news applies equally to the suppression of individual desire. Neither will suppress. With the normal person, the result of this social suppression is to produce an individual who conforms with sufficient closeness to the standards of his group to enable him to remain comfortably within it.