236 Ideals in the Modern World
sacrifi cing when they did what they did and witnessed what they
witnessed. But they were functioning for a high purpose: they
were being heroes. Hitler’s crowds, Freud’s thinking suggests,
were leaving behind the disunited self and achieving sublime
unity of being. They were transcending the pull of the past and
living in the pre sent. They were living with full intensity, and their
lives were charged with meaning. “Why do we not get drunk?”
The entire nation of Germany did, and then woke up, not to the
continuation of a thousand- year Reich but to what may well amount
to a thousand years of guilt and sorrow— the most horrible morning
after in recent history.
The idea that one could pass authentically and legitimately out
of the State of Self into the State of Soul is not available to Freud.
To Freud, the crowd off ers transcendence of mundane being, but
at a high cost. In exchange for unity of Self, we regress into our least
thoughtful, potentially most barbarous way of being. The leader is
always at the heart of the crowd for Freud and, he implies, the leader
becomes a leader through his ability to sanction regression. We be-
come more primitive, more childlike, but thanks to the blandish-
ments of the leader, we do so in the name of elevated ideals and so
with a clean conscience.
Freud cannot readily imagine a crowd like the one Jesus creates
when he asks the disciples to divide loaves and fi shes. The mem-
bers of that crowd, presumably, reach into their pockets and pouches
and takes out what little belongs to them and they share it. What
once was a crowd is now a community. Where id was there ego shall
be? To Freud this is an ultimate goal. The goal of Jesus (and the
Buddha and, in some mea sure, Confucius) is rather diff erent. Where
the grasping Self was, acting only in its own interests, there com-
munal Soul shall be. This is the ideal of Jesus at its height. But for
Freud such an aspiration is too high. The better, Freud never wea-
ries of telling us, is almost inevitably the enemy of the good.