The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  Lonely successes. In our discussion of the comics, of Tootle, and of “Willy Kepper,” we saw how modern popular culture stresses the dangers of aloneness and, by contrast, the virtues of group-mindedness. In a thoughtful article, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” Robert Warshow deals with a number of recent gangster films from this perspective.9 He notes that, inevitably, the gangster’s success spells his undoing. For it cuts him off from the group—not only the law-abiding community but also his own gang. At the peak of success he is therefore miserable and frightened, waiting to be cut down from the heights.

  We can interpret this as a cautionary tale about what happens if one goes off on one’s own pursuits. Success is fatal. According to the code of the movies one is not permitted to identify with the lonely escapist; his lot is pictured, like that of Dorothea in the novel, as a set of miseries and penances. The movie Body and Soul points a similar moral. The hero is a Jewish boy from the East Side who gets to be boxing champion and proceeds to alienate all surrounding groups: his family circle and faithful girl; his unambitious, devoted retinue; the East Side Jews who see him as a hero. He agrees for a large sum to throw his last fight and bets against himself; his losing will complete his alienation from these groups. En route to the fight he is told that the Jews see him as a hero, a champion in the fight against Hitler. Recalled to “himself,” he double-crosses his gangster backers by winning the fight; and, poor again, he is restored to the primary group of family, girl, and Jews.

  A movie or book occasionally comes along that departs from this formula. The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, a popular book and movie, pictures its architect hero as standing out, in violent integrity, against the pressure for group adjustment and, in the end, successfully bringing the jury of his peers along with him. He does take all: the heights of fame, his rival’s wife, the death of his rival. What is most striking in all this, however, is the unintended caricature, both of group adjustment and of group resistance. The group is made out not tolerant but mean, inartistic, and corrupt. And group resistance is seen in terms of nobility on the part of the sadistic hero, who wants to deny any ties to humanity, any dependency. This superman for adults is the very apotheosis of the lonely success, to be admired perhaps by the reader but too stagey to be imitated.

  In all likelihood, moreover, the Ayn Rand audience that applauds fiery denunciations of group-mindedness and submission to others is quite unaware of its own tendencies to submission in the small, undramatic situations of daily life. In that sense The Fountainhead is escapist.

  GOOD-BYE TO ESCAPE?

  So far, in these illustrations, we have seen little that would correspond to the unambiguous escapes of the inner-directed. Rather, we have seen popular culture used, often quite desperately, for training in group adjustment. In the same way, we may find popular culture used as training in the orientation of consumers, which is hardly a less serious problem (in many ways it is the same problem) for the other-directed person. Despite appearances, the other-directed person seems often unable to get away from himself or to waste time with any gestures of abundance or abandon. (Of course, if we compared patterns of alcoholic escape, we might come up with somewhat different results.)

  The inner-directed person, if influenced by Protestantism, is of course also unable to waste time. The mobile youth from the lower classes shows his commitment to inner-direction by cutting himself off from hard-drinking horse-play-indulging pals: he continues the production of an inner-directed character through practicing a kind of mental bookkeeping by which the demons of Waste and Sloth are ruthlessly driven out. Such a person has little leisure, unless he can justify it as self-improving, and a life that has never an idle moment must have many a tense one. On the face of it the other-directed person is no puritan; he seems much less preoccupied with waste; his furnishings, manners, and morals are more casual. But an attenuated puritanism survives in his exploitation of leisure. He may say, when he takes a vacation or stretches a weekend, “I owe it to myself”—but the self in question is viewed like a car or house whose upkeep must be carefully maintained for resale purposes. The other-directed person has no clear core of self to escape from; no clear line between production and consumption; between adjusting to the group and serving private interests; between work and play.

  One interesting index of this is the decline of evening dress, especially among men, and conversely, the invasion of the office by sport clothes. This looks like an offshoot of the cult of effortlessness, and of course men say “it’s too much trouble” in explaining why they don’t change for dinner or the evening. But the explanation lies rather in the fact that most men today simply do not know how to change roles, let alone mark the change by proper costuming. Another reason may be the fear of being thought high-hat; one can wear gaudy shirts but not stiff ones. Thus the sport shirt and casual dress show that one is a good fellow not only on the golf course or on vacation but in the office and at dinner too.

  Women are still permitted to dress for the evening, a sign, perhaps, of their laggard response to changing modes. They are more involved than men in the dying patterns of conspicuous consumption. However, they probably make more of an actual shift from housework and babies to dinner party than many men do, who exchange office gossip both at work and play: moreover, they really like the shift, dragging the men, who would just as soon be in the office, along with them. I have observed that women’s shop talk of children and domestic matters is often—though certainly not always!—conducted with more skill, interest, and realism than that of men since the change of role refreshes both work and play.

  What is it that drives men who have been surrounded with people and their problems on the day shift to seek often exactly the same company (or its reflection in popular culture) on the night shift? Perhaps in part it is the terror of loneliness that the gangster movies symbolize. But certainly it makes for strain. Though popular culture on one level fills in between people so as to avoid any demand for conversational or sexual gambits, on another level the popular-culture performance is not simply a way of killing time: in the peer-group situation, it makes a demand that it be appraised. The other-directed girl who goes in company to the movies need not talk to the others during the picture but is sometimes faced with the problem: should she cry at the sad places or not? What is the proper reaction, the sophisticated line about what is going on? Observing movie audiences coming out of a “little” or “art” theater, it is sometimes apparent that people feel they ought to react, but how?

  In contrast to this, the inner-directed person, reading a book alone, is less aware of the others looking on; moreover, he has time to return at his own pace from being transported by his reading—to return and put on whatever mask he cares to. The poker game in the back room, with its praise of masks, fits his habituation to social distance, even loneliness. His successor, dreading loneliness, tries to assuage it not only in his crowd but in those fantasies that, like a mirror, only return his own concerns to him.

  III. The Two Types Compared

  We have completed our direct confrontation of the two types; and it now becomes necessary to redress the balance against other-direction, which, I know, has come off a bad second in these pages. It is hard for us to be quite fair to the other-directed. The term itself suggests shallowness and superficiality as compared to the inner-directed, even though direction in both cases comes from outside and is simply internalized at an early point in the life cycle of the inner-directed.

  There are factors outside of terminology that may lead readers to conclude that inner-direction is better. Academic and professional people are frequently only too pleased to be told that those horrid businessmen, those glad-handing advertisers, are manipulative. And, as we all know, the businessmen and advertisers themselves flock to plays and movies that tell them what miserable sinners they are. Of course it is especially gratifying to look down one’s nose at Hollywood, soap opera, and other phenomena of mass culture.

  Inner-directed person
s of high status, moreover, are associated with the Anglo-Saxon tradition and with the reverence we pay to those among the aged who are still powerful. Furthermore, since the inner-directed face problems that are not the problems of the other-directed, they seem to be made of sterner and more intrepid stuff. As we already find the Victorians charming, so we can patronize the inner-directed, especially if we did not personally suffer from their limitations, and view the era depending on inner-direction with understandable nostalgia.

  Furthermore I do not want to be understood as saying it is wrong to be concerned with the “others,” with human relations. That we can afford to be concerned with such problems is one of the important abundances of a society of advanced technological accomplishment. We must ask anyone who opposes the manipulation of men in modern industry whether he prefers to return to their brutalization, as in the early days of the industrial revolution. In my scheme of values, persuasion, even manipulative persuasion, is to be preferred to force. There is the danger, in fact, when one speaks of the “softness of the personnel,” that one will be understood to prefer hardness. On the contrary, one of the main contentions of this book is that the other-directed person, as things are, is already too hard on himself in certain ways and that his anxieties, as child consumer-trainee, as parent, as worker and player, are very great. He is often torn between the illusion that life should be easy, if he could only find the ways of proper adjustment to the group, and the half-buried feeling that it is not easy for him. Under these conditions it would only complicate his life still further to hold up the opposite illusion of stern inner-direction as an ideal, though this is just what many people propose. In fact, just because he is other-directed he is often over-ready to take some intransigent and seemingly convinced person as a model of what he himself ought to be like; his very sympathy and sensitivity may undo him.

  It is easy to score verbal triumphs over American personnel practices and popular culture, for age-old snobberies converge here. Thus, a critique of the glad hand can be made from many points of view, radical or reactionary. The context out of which I have written is, however, somewhat different—it is an effort to develop a view of society which accepts rather than rejects new potentialities for leisure, human sympathy, and abundance. Both the glad hand and the search for lessons of adjustment in popular culture are themselves often poignant testimonials to these potentialities. The values of the era of the invisible hand accompanied scarcity, and thus require re-interpretation before they become relevant to an era of abundance. The promising alternative to other-direction, as I shall try to make clear in Part III, is not inner-direction, but autonomy.

  PART II: POLITICS

  VIII

  Tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed political styles: indifferents, moralizers, inside-dopesters

  In some countries, the inhabitants seem unwilling to avail themselves of the political privileges which the law gives them; it would seem that they set too high a value upon their time to spend it on the interests of the community … But if an American were condemned to confine his activities to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence; he would feel an immense void in the life which he is accustomed to lead, and his wretchedness would be unbearable.

  Tocqueville, Democracy in America

  I turn in this part of the book to an introductory effort to apply to American politics the theory of character developed in the preceding part. First, however, the problems and limitations of this sort of approach to politics must be pointed out. My general thesis is that the inner-directed character tended and still tends in politics to express himself in the style of the “moralizer,” while the other-directed character tends to express himself politically in the style of an “inside-dopester.” These styles are also linked with a shift in political mood from “indignation” to “tolerance,” and a shift in political decision from dominance by a ruling class to power dispersal among many marginally competing pressure groups. Some of these shifts may be among the causative factors for the rise of other-direction.

  Having said this, I must immediately make certain qualifications. Once again, I call to the reader’s attention the limitations of social class and region which bound the picture of character in America I have presented. Furthermore, as I have also said before, real people are blends, more complicated and various—things of shreds and patches—than any scheme can encompass. They may, for example, be on the whole other-directed, but politics may be a sphere in which they are more inner-directed than otherwise. Or, people may manage to be productive in politics—to have a style that is superior to that of the moralizer and that of the inside-dopester—even though in their life as a whole they appear to be “lost”: politics may be their most healthy activity; or politics may be a sphere in which, for any number of reasons, they are less adequate than in others.

  But these problems of character are not the only factors that forbid us to explain or predict specific political behavior on psychological grounds alone. To take only one instance, the chronic mood of crisis in which contemporary politics is generally framed, and the general lack of imaginative alternatives, may be enough, or virtually enough, to explain the failure of people to develop new political styles—to bring new motivations to politics and new ways of defining what politics is, even though their character may have changed.

  My investigation is not directly concerned with the political as defined from the point of view of the state or from the point of view of the groups, parties, and classes into which the state is divided for purposes of formal political analysis, but is concerned instead with the process by which people become related to politics, and the consequent stylizing of political emotions. Obviously, the line between these two spheres cannot be too neatly drawn; the great tradition of modern political science that runs from Machiavelli and Hobbes to Tocqueville and Marx is concerned with both. This is one reason why, in speaking of the political consequences of character, I use the impressionistic term “style.”1 If politics is a ballet on a stage set by history, style tells us neither whence the dancers come nor whither they move but only in what manner they play their parts and how the audience responds.

  When I proceed, later on, from the problem of style to the problem of power, the connection between character structure and political structure will become even more tenuous than the word “style” implies. It is obvious, on the one hand, that many people today flee from the realities of power into psychological interpretations of social behavior in order either to avoid the challenge of contemporary political faiths or to restore a wished-for malleability to politics by reliance on a new analytical gadget. Nevertheless, it should be equally obvious that a political realism that ignores the dimension of character, that ignores how people interpret configurations of power on the basis of their psychic needs, will only be useful in very short-run interpretations and not always even there.

  I. The Indifferents

  OLD STYLE

  Just as the notion that all adult members of a community must be involved in its policy-making is recent, so is the view that political indifference and apathy constitute problems. Thus, in ancient oriental societies where only the dynasty and a small group of advisers and nobles were called into the sphere of participation, the rest of the population could not properly be termed apathetic: it was just politically asleep. Likewise, in the Greek city-state we can think of apathy as a problem only among the citizens—women, aliens, and slaves were simply excluded from the sphere of political involvement.

  The few tradition-directed people in America are numbered among political indifferents of this type. Theirs is the classic indifference of the masses of antiquity or the Middle Ages—the people who, throughout history, have accepted, with recurrent cynicism and sporadic revolts, the tyranny of an elite. They have no means of being articulate politically, nor have they any conception of what this would involve. They lack the elementary political tools of literacy, political education, and organizati
onal experience.

  In the United States today the number of such tradition-directed indifferents is small. There are few “reservations” where people can avoid being affected by inner-directed or other-directed values or both. However, among some immigrant groups and rural Negroes, the old indifference of tradition-direction remains, at least to a degree. I will take one example from an interview2 with a middle-aged cleaning woman from the British West Indies, now living in Harlem. Though she has been strongly affected by inner-direction, her political attitudes (allowing for guarded response) do seem representative of certain themes of an indifference resting on tradition-direction.

  Q. Do you consider yourself a person who’s very interested in politics, not so interested, or hardly interested at all?

  A. Nooooo. My husband yes. He’s a talker. He can hold debates.

  Q. Do you make up your mind about what’s going on? Like do you know who you want to win the election?

  A. No. I believe the best man wins.

  Q. You don’t think it makes any difference who wins, then?

  A. No difference. The best man wins. They’re all alike anyway when they get in. All the same. They do the same things. A Republican gets in, or a Democrat. They’re all the same.

  Q. Do you ever hear things on the radio about politics that make you mad?

  A. No, I not interested so I no get mad. Q. Do you hear anything else over the radio that makes you mad—not politics? A. No.