 A philosopher, it is said, but I forget who he is after a long time reading him, remarked ever that a man is born to be a social animal. Looking at the crowd and crowd of people around oneself, we easily nod to it. And we find so many problems that we are faced with need to be solved by these crowds. If not, we can’t even sustain ourselves for a single day. For society, we have friends, colleagues, classmates, groups, nationalities... Thus, we can form a united organization to do something just for survival and existence. We help each other and gain what we want when necessary and give what we have when needed. Anyway, a single man is of necessity to find a crowd to be in and share meanwhile get. To defend against some intrusion, we need to form a crowd, in which the weak will feel the power and the timid can show audacity. “A crowd is as easily heroic as criminal. ”as Gustave Le Bon put. The individual is insignificant while the crowd is powerful. We force the animals and enemies away in crowds and the organized people are acting uniformly, which seemingly in so many people’s eyes show the strength overwhelming everything. To achieve this strength, they don’t hesitate for a moment to give up some human rights as long as they can still breathe the air. The strength is fascinating to many people and they think they are safe when in crowds. They give up or sacrifice a lot on the condition that they can get daily life needs, such as food and clothes. They would rather live badly than die a good death. This is the philosophy they hold for a living. You can deprive them of everything except what they need to sustain life on the only condition that they can feel the strength and power of the crowd they are in. Schopenhauer,in his tremendously wonderful book The Wisdom of Life says that when he is young, a man of noble character fancies that the relations prevailing amongst mankind, and the alliances to which these relations lead, are at bottom and essentially, ideal in their nature; that is to say, that they rest upon similarity of disposition or sentiment, or taste, or intellectual power, and so on. But, later on, he finds out that it is a real foundation which underlies these alliances; that they are based on some material interest. That’s why, personally, people, or most people, are snobbish as they measure a man, always, by the office he holds, or by his occupation, nationality, or family relations—in a word, by the position and character which have been assigned him in the conventional arrangements of life, where he is tickted and treated as so much goods. We can draw a safe conclusion that the reason why people want to be in a crowd is that people are material animals. And crowds can satisfy his material needs. But if a man who desires a colorful spiritual life needs to stay in a peaceful state and think deeply about his life and society, he, on the contrary, needs to stay alone, but not in a crowd. An intellectual man in complete solitude has excellent entertainment in his own thoughts and fancies, while no amount of diversity or social pleasure, theatres, excursions and amusements, can ward off boredom from a dullard. Such examples are numerous in both home and abroad. Take Yanhui as an example, who lives in a shabby room with a gourdful of water and a basket of food, but even in such poverty and loneliness, he is content and happy mentally. To achieve an independent personality, great men intend to keep a distance off crowds. A good, temperate, gentle character can be happy in needy circumstances, whilst a covetous, envious and malicious man, even if he be the richest in the world, goes miseable. When Socrates saw various articles of luxury spread out for sale, he exclaimed: how much there is in the world I do not want. This is the case that can illustrate that great men are different from the ordinary ones. What a man is and has in himself,——in a word personality, with all it entails, is the only immediate and direct factor in his happiness and welfare. What a man has in himself is then the chief element in his happiness, because reputation, rank, and fame consist of other people’s opinions. The second conclusion we can draw is that a man who wants to live a peaceful and meaningful spiritual life should try to get away from the crowds. No wonder in the history of mankind, so many great men expressed their satisfaction with solitude. Thus let me live, unseen, unknown, Thus unlemented let me die. Steal from the world, and not a stone Tell where I die |
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