The gregarious tendency in man, according to Mr. Trotter, results in five characteristics which he displays in common with all gregarious animals.
- “He is intolerant and fearful of solitude, physical or mental.”8 The same urge which drives the buffalo into the herd and man into the city requires on the part of the latter a sense of spiritual identification with the herd. Man is never so much at home as when on the band wagon.
- “He is more sensitive to the voice of the herd than to any other influence.” Mr. Trotter illustrates this characteristic in a paragraph which is worth quoting in its entirety. He says: “It (the voice of the herd) can inhibit or stimulate his thought and conduct. It is the source of his moral codes, of the sanctions of his ethics and philosophy. It can endow him with energy, courage, and endurance, and can as easily take these away. It can make him acquiesce in his own punishment and embrace his executioner, submit to poverty, bow to tyranny, and sink without complaint under starvation. Not merely can it make him accept hardship and suffering unresistingly, but it can make him accept as truth the explanation that his perfectly preventable afflictions are sublimely just and gentle. It is this acme of the power of herd suggestion that is perhaps the most absolutely incontestable proof of the profoundly gregarious nature of man.”
- “He is subject to the passions of the pack in his mob violence and the passions of the herd in his panics.”
- “He is remarkably susceptible to leadership.” Mr. Trotter points out that the need for leadership is often satisfied by leadership of a quality which cannot stand analysis, and which must therefore satisfy some impulse rather than the demands of reason.