In modern times we witnessed the fall of the Chinese empire at the hands of the Japanese, the great crash of the mighty Russian and structurally well organized German empire, along with Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires, all falling together into heaps of ruins in the great hurricane of the world war.
As long as societies choose the course of organic growth, of differentiation and specialization, becoming more and more inflexible, unyielding, and rigid, developing an hypertrophy of social connective tissue—laws, regulations, ordinances, commands, commandments, rites, ceremonies, formalities, and all sorts of prohibitions and taboos, and becoming crystallized into leagues, associations, and organizations with their respective constitutions, rules, and by-rules, all tending to stifle and smother the individual consciousness, so long will society be doomed to a state of subconscious activity with a predisposition to social somnambulism, getting, in consequence, afflicted with various forms of social diseases, often malignant in character, subject to riots, mobs, mental epidemics, crazes, and war-manias, and if not reformed by some radical revolution into a humanistic social type, ending in decay and death. Complexity of social organization is accompanied by a corresponding diminution of vitality and ultimate loss of life of the social aggregate. As Professor Minot tersely puts it: "With complication of organization the cells lose something of their vitality, something of their possibilities of perpetuation; and as the organization of cells becomes higher and higher (that is more differentiated), this necessity for change (differentiation and organization) becomes more and more imperative. But it involves the end. Differentiation leads up to its inevitable conclusion—to death." A social aggregate which has chosen the fatal path of organic evolution must succumb to the same law of organic development to which all organisms are subject, namely greater and greater organization, increase of structure, greater differentiation, decrease of critical, personal, consciousness, loss of individual liberty, increased activity of the subconscious forces, falling into a state of somnambulism which can only be redeemed by revolution or by death.
A chronological table will show the uninterrupted chain of European mental epidemics:
Pilgrimage epidemic |
1000 to 1095 |
Crusade epidemic, Eastern and Western Crusades |
1095 to 1270 |
