EMOTIONAL CONFLICT,
LIBERTY and AUTHORITY
THEODORE SCHROEDER
14 West 12th Street
New York City
**
FROM
PS Y C H E A N D E R O.S
Vol. 2 (No. 1): 12-24
JAN-FEB., 1921
Emotional Conflict, Liberty and Authority
By THEODoRE SchroeDER, New York
“A man is never more unhappy than when he is divided by his desires.”
That is the essence of the emotional conflict from which all of us suffer, more or
less. What is true of individuals is equally true of social groups, whether the
cleavage is horizontal according to economic classes, or vertical, according to
national or racial boundaries. Our social conflicts present only a massing of
individuals who have grouped themselves according to the likeness of their per-
sonal conflict and the similarity of the intellectualization of the conscious aspect
of the conflict. Whether social, the unhappiness is proportionate to the intensity
of conflicting desires.
In the individual we usually find that the “discreditable” aspect of the
conflicting impulses is kept in hiding. That other aspect of our desires, which we
have not attained, and as yet cannot realize, is forced into consciousness and on
the public attention. We do this chiefly in response to the subconscious necessity
for a neutralizer or compensation for our guilt, our shame, our feeling of inferior-
ity. Thus, in as far as we are in the throes of a subjective conflict our
emotionally valued moral, religious and political creeds and ideals express
what we are not. The vehemence with which we manifest or uphold our
ideals measures the emotional valuation and regret of our shortcomings. To
be thus torn between regret for what we are, and anxiety as to what we wish to
be, or pretend, is the psychologic essence of our sorrow. What is true of us as
individuals, remains true also when we are acting in social groups. Thus it
comes that our emotionally valued laws, our governments and our moral and
religious pretenses are legal or moral fictions. To portray this emotional conflict
of individuals as that is manifesting itself in group-action, is the chief purpose of
this essay. First this will be stated in general terms and then illustrated by the
recital of details, showing some social fictions in conflict with the facts of practice.
At the end some remedy will be suggested.
Emotional Conflict in Social Relations
Our present institutions, all of them, I believe, reflect the collective
dominance by those qualities which grow out of the emotional, moralistic conflicts
of personal immaturity. Practically all is done on the level of childhood or
adolescent emotions and unreason. One aspect of this conflict presents the de-
mand to be free from parental authority and all authoritative dominance. On the
* Senault: Use of Passions, p. 475; Trans. A. D. 1671.
- 12
44-42
%.
44,22-
“-21-1/
EMOTIONAL CONFLICT, LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY 13
other hand the fact is that we have not the physical or intellectual resourcefulness
necessary to make ourselves a success under freedom. We are in fact emotionally
and economically dependent upon the good will and approval of our parental, or
some other and familiar “higher authority.” Whatever the objective reality of
our conscious thinking may be, we feel inadequate, and emotionally dependent.
Usually that will not allow us to break away from the more primitive habits of
traditional and institutional guidance, which belong to our childhood and to the
childhood of the race. º
Of course, various persons are thus dominated, in varying degrees of com-
pleteness and of awareness of that dominance. In this situation the natural
parent, and the state which serves the unemancipated “adult” children as a surro-
gate parent, both exhibit their own intellectual immaturity, by the all-but exclu-
sive use of physical violnece, both as a corrective and as a means to impose their
own immature demands. These demands, or claims of right, are often a mere
passionate and stupid wilfulness, conditioned by the same ignorance as that which
makes it impossible for the child to dominate, as if by superior intelligence.
Witness the childish behavior and infantile “bull-headedness” exhibited in con-
flicts between “captains of industry” and “labor leaders.” Or, observe the con-
flicts between our public officials and industrial radicals, such as Bolshevists,
Anarchists and Industrial Workers of the World. Or, examine the international
relations of the last five years. Are not all such contests conducted in the same
manner in which ignorant and passionate parents deal with childish misbehavior?
From the standpoint of my concept of evolutionary psychology it seems so.
In the individual’s emotional conflict, our most passionate public pretenses
always present one aspect of conflicting urges. That is to say: our moral passion-
ate self-valuations are passionate, precisely because they represent what we want
others to believe about us, and just because we have not yet achieved it. Where
the masses and their political leaders are still floundering among these emotional
disturbances of childhood, it is inevitable that public institutions and mass-action
should exhibit the same conflict. Political and social institutions merely intel-
lectualize or formulate that aspect of our conflict which does not yet represent a
social reality, and which conflict is sufficiently common to permit of effective
group-action. In other words, even collectively we are always pretending to be
what we are not. Readers will get my meaning only in so far as they remember
that I am using the psychologic approach to social problems. This means the
abandonment of political mindedness, for a better understanding of the behavior
of human impulses functioning in relation with popular creeds and institutions.
Fiction as Compensation
Thus we pretend to live under an idealized government described in our
moral and legal fictions, or in an ideal universe described in our theologies. For
I4 PSYCHE & EROS
the critical observers the actualities of life are always disproving our fictions.
However, this is never discovered by the great crowd and even seldom by their
industrial and political leaders, who are so largely obsessed by it. These exhibit
their obsessions in their mad scramble for power, as that supposedly can be
achieved through the control of the legal fictions. By means of these fictions they
hope to secure more than their share of the “loaves and fishes.” For a long, long
time the victims of these legal and moral fictions give the most passionate devotion
to their fictions, because they are a phantasmal compensation for a feeling of
inferiority, sometimes based in part upon their failure to secure satisfactory mate-
rial results with material realities. This devotion will be passionate just in propor-
tion as the subjective, individual disappointment or conflict is intense. That is to
say: we need a fiction just in the same proportion that our feeling of inadequacy
our emotional need for a pretense is great. Just because our actual lives so
greatly contradict the legal and moral fictions, are we in need of a compensating
delusional grandeur, as a neutralizer for the feeling of inferiority. Thus it
comes that practically all our institutions are built upon a social, economic, relig-
ious, moral or legal fiction, and therefore they all involve a contradiction. The
fiction is that we love liberty, equality and democracy. In practice we calmly
accept tyranny, privilege, slavery and aristocracy. The latter exist because we
have not outgrown the infantile autocratic cravings. The fiction indicates a wish
to be grown up. Thus we fool ourselves like the small boy who imagines himself
a man because he is allowed to wear long pants.
Supreme and Human Despots
A good illustration of the working of our emotional conflicts can be found in
our varying attitudes toward despots and despotism. In spite of His theoretic,
infinite, despotic efficiency, people profess to love the supposed omnipotent celestial
despot of the universe. We love this fiction of the infinite autocrat because He is
only an idealized self. In Him we see the omnipotent creature of our own
omniscient imagination, our own other self, a phantasmal self, projected into the
universe. Just in so far as we approach the feeling of hopelessness and helpfulness
in dealing with our worldly environment, we acquire the need for an identifica-
tion with a relative omnipotence in the heavens. This serves us as a neutralizing
compensation for our impotence and enslavement here on earth. That is why
times of distress produce most religiosity, and the personal moralistic conflicts of
hysteria tend to promote mysticism.
We love this imaginary omnipotence of our own creation also for the reason
that, unlike the earthly despot, we can defy Him with impunity. For example:
We can proclaim a religion of brotherly love and yet go merrily on making ever
greater military preparation to assure ourselves the profits of the next war.
While professing to possess the revealed will of God, quite uniformly we act upon
EMOTIONAL CONFLICT, LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY 15
the stronger of our contrary instincts. Thus we secure another neutralizer of our
feelings of inferiority by a practical demonstration of our own super-omniscience
and super-omnipotence.
The real human self, as we see that reflected in the enthroned and embattled
weaklings of earth, we hate with the furies of our own hell, and sometimes we
love it. We hate or love it with the exact intensity of our own feeling of
inferiority. I believe this is so largely because, relative to God, the earthly despot
is so very real, persistent and efficient in thwarting (and at times promoting) our
personal urge to omnipotence, and our desire to wield unlimited power. On
earth we hate despots other than ourselves, and love despotism when vested in, or
exerted for us. In the skies we pretend to love the despot, but by actions we
despise and repudiate his despotism. Because we can do this with obvious
impunity it gives us feelings of grandeur. The earthly despot tends to be relent-
less. Our defiance of the little autocrat of Podunk is always punished. The
Gods of our own creation always forgive. We hate the human despot not because
he is despotic, but because we personally feel humiliated by his relative efficiency.
That we do not hate him as a despot is shown by our joy when his despotism
overtakes our enemy, or otherwise promotes our personal ends.
Our Divine Right to Be Despots
The late Tsar, the Ex-Kaiser, and many of their predecessors and contem-
poraries pretended to live by a conceded claim to rule by divine right, to exercise
the political power of omnipotence. That was the fiction. The facts of practice
were that they were very dependent upon the good will of courtiers to whom they
made many concessions. Finally their dynasties were overthrown because they
came to function too much out of harmony with the increasingly conscious desires
of those whom they were least willing to take into account. Both before and after
the fall of these almighty ones, actual power was exercised by the few but has
always been actually vested in the mass. The few exercised the power in the
name of the one, so long as they were acting in approximate harmony with the
subconscious feeling-needs of the crowd. When its emotional necessities became
conscious as desires and became materially changed, then their institutional mani-
festations also changed. Now a new fiction is created to justify a new minority
in exercising the effective power. But this is no longer done in the name of God,
or of the one, but in the name of the many. Because the former despots refused
to facilitate the peaceful democratization of labor and of welfare, the neglected
ones proceded to do some forcible levelling downward. But the new authority
and power once again is in fact only the authority and power of an efficient few,
while the fiction will be that it is the power and authority of the mass. Inevitably
it becomes the power of the few because there has been no adequate preparation
for anything else, by means of the democratization of intelligence.
16 PSYCHE & EROS
In the merely political democracies a relative few also exercise most of the
power and reap most of the benefits of governments. The legal fiction is that
this is not true, or that it is done with the express consent of the governed.
However, that theory too is only a logical fiction for the solace of the disinherited.
The fact is that the great crowd knows practically nothing of what is done in its
name, nor how it is accomplished. Now as in all the past, we have a dictatorship
of cunning and economic might. The legal fiction and outward formalities are
that ours is a government of, for and by the people. But the dictatorship of our
capitalists is neither more nor less absolute than the dictatorships of Tsar, Kaiser,
Mikado, or Bolsheviki. Its methods are different and its personnel is a bit more
uncertain and more shifting, and for that reason less subject to control. The
dictatorship of our captains of industry, even as portrayed by their radical oppo-
nents, also has its fiction of the absolute. It can maintain its economic program
only at the price of conceding and augmenting the power of agencies beyond its
own immediate circle. This is done by promoting organized religious and moral-
istic prejudices that operate through, and measurably independently of the con-
trolling group and of the state machinery, to uphold the status quo. In the
future, as in the past, this will in the end produce a new might which will over-
throw the powers that nursed it into being. Thus some kind of revolution
belongs to the maturing of all youth.
In America, as elsewhere, the fiction is that authority and power are vested
in all the people, as the State. Here, as elsewhere, the practice is that even a small
unofficial minority can and frequently does usurp with impunity the accredited
functions of the State, whenever such usurpation does not run counter to any
conscious organized prejudice, nor run counter to the material interests of the
dominant capitalistic dictatorship.” This is shown by our mobbings and lynchings
of Socialists, Industrial Workers of the World, Anarchists, and religious heretics,
by the Christian amenity of burning and lynching negroes, as well as by the
Brotherhoods of Railroad Workers when they compel the government under
threat of disaster to grant an increase of wages. How different is our devotion to
law and order whenever such things happen to those who may be of value in
upholding the established order! Our love of law and order is the fiction. Our
love of those who have the economic might is the real motive power of our action.
When the other (hate) aspect of our personal conflict over economic might be-
comes dominant a violent revolution ensues, unless devotion to the actualities of
democracy facilitates a peaceful change.
Democratic Educational Fiction
The American Revolution was fought to establish a democratic fiction in
place of a theocratic fiction. The democratic fiction is partly contradicted by a
* Report on the illegal practices of the U. S. Department of Justice.
EMOTIONAL CONFLICT, LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY 17
protected claim of right, to continue exploitation, with only a change of bene-
ficiary and a change in the channels of its theoretic sanction. Beyond the fiction
everything went on substantially as before, manifestly because practically nobody
really wanted a democratization of welfare. The means of achieving aristocratic
privilege have been changed, but aristocracy and legalized privilege remain. We
have a fiction to the effect that we establish State schools and Universities so
that every one may have equal democratic opportunity for the higher education
and for higher democratic service. The facts of life are that only a few, the
children of the relatively privileged classes, ever can avail themselves of the
opportunity for higher education. Practically no one thinks of service to demo-
cratization. Those with whom the need is the greatest for a protective education
actually have the least chance to get that kind of superior development. See the
realities for education of the poorest class and the legal discrimination against
education of our negroes. Usually those who are educated think the least of
being useful to accelerate democratization. Evidently we are not yet ready for the
substance of democracy in education, and much less predisposed toward education
for an accelerated democratization of welfare. We pretend to believe in the
exalted virtue of education, and then pay our educators much less than we do our
electrocutioner, our hangman or our useless office holders. In truth, the fiction
of democratic education serves only as a means to prevent the achievement of a
fuller democracy in the facts of practice. We seek and give education to the few,
only the more efficient to obtain, to secure, or to maintain an aristocratic privilege.
(The army tests applied to 1,500,000 soldiers showed an average intelligence age
of 13 years.) The theory of an hereditary aristocracy is discontinued but the
economic substance of aristocratic privilege, its fruits, remains as hereditary as in
feudal days.
Legal Fiction of Equality
Our fiction is that government is founded upon equality and democracy, at
least in tangible essentials. In practice we pass without audible protest or even
with public acclaim the use of deportation and prison cells against those whose
chief offense may be no more than a demand that we live up to our fiction.”
Unfortunately for them they manifest our own degree of impatience in demanding
that we show in resisting the actual democratization of welfare. We feverishly
demand the supremacy of law and order, and yet practically never succeed in the
efficient use of the law to suppress the uttermost of mob rule when that is used to
uphold our pretenses and legal fictions.” Witness the free speech fights in San
Diego, Spokane, and a score of other cities.” In each of these equality of intel-
3 New Republic 21 (no. 264): 96-98; Dec. 24, 1919.
4 See: Report on the illegal practices of the U. S. Department of Justice, Nat.
Popular Gov't. League, 1920.
5 See my: Free Speech for Radicals. Enlarged Edition.
18 PSYCHE & EROS
lectual opportunity and physical protection was denied. Our ancestors wrote
guarantees of free speech into our Constitutions, so as to destroy the previous
British practice and theory. Then our courts interpret those guarantees in har-
mony with the old, old principles used by the Star Chamber Court and the
Inquisition. Our fictions make for equality and democracy. Our practice is the
maintenance of the material inequality, the very essence of aristocracy. By our
constitutions we proclaim everybody's right to know all that is to be known. In
practice, we preclude nearly all concrete and effective intellectual attack upon the
fictions of democracy, equality and freedom.
Our courts claim to enforce equality before the law but the idle poor who
refuse work at another's wages are put in jail as vagrants,° to protect us privileged
parasites in the continued enjoyment of much more wasteful idleness. Judges
love justice, except when they can inflict vengeance, savage vengeance, if the con-
vict has dared to question rudely the sanctity of the legal fiction under which the
judge functions. We legalize collective bargaining by stockholders of large and
small corporations, but sanction the starving of workers into submitting to a denial
of their claim of a right to do collective bargaining. We allow the laborer to
vote as a human being and talk and deal with his labor power as a “commodity.”
Others, without provoking resentment, speak of the laborer as “animated
machinery,” and deal with him accordingly. Real democrats and some others,
accept the fact that labor and labor-power are the inseparable attributes of a
human being. The denial of that fact produces no audible protest from our
“democratic” officials.
When the capitalist cannot patrioteer at his own price as a profiteer, it is
perfectly lawful and not unpatriotic for him to strike and sabotage on the public.
Even then the blame for his greed is often transferred to the alleged greed
of the laborer. But when mere working man seeks to play the same game, or
merely advocate the righteousness of that game for laborers we put him in jail or
allow a mob to kill him.” Again our practice denies the fiction that we maintain
equality before the law, or that we maintain actual democracy under law.
Unity of Super-Patriot and Rebel
Everybody is willing to function under the fiction of recognizing the supreme
authority of any existing state so long as it approximately fulfills the need for
phantasies of grandeur and does not thwart too many of the affective needs of
our autonomic system. A friendly group within the State organization always
° Laws of Kansas, 1917; Chap. 167, p. 214, Also: Amer. and Eng. Ency. of
Law, 29:368 et seq. Under less offensive statutes the same result is accomplished
in actual practice.
7 I have in mind the battle of Ludlow, the deportations from Bisbee, the
assassination at Centralia, etc., etc,
EMOTIONAL CONFLICT, LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY 19
becomes an alien and revolutionary group as soon as its special emotional and
material interests become sufficiently conscious and are sufficiently discredited by
the existing state organization. Especially is this so when the discredited minority
begins to approximate a power adequate to enforce its demands by the use of
physical force or by a new realization of economic might, such as is and has been
holding them in check.
The fiction is that we are patriotic lovers of our respective governments and
that devotion to established institutions is a moral virtue. The facts of practice
show that by their action peoples always repudiate a government whenever and
wherever it stands in the way of realizing a sufficiently strong and officially dis-
countenanced emotional interest. In such cases the international encouragement
of revolutions is righteous. Under other circumstances it is punished.
The psychology of the emotional conflict is such that those who are afflicted
with the most intense devotion to any cause or institutions, as in the case of the
most passionate hyper-patriots, are precisely the persons who can most easily be
made the most zealous rebels, whenever existing institutions no longer satisfy
their most ardent sentimentalisms. Temperamentally all these morbid ones are
practically alike even though their morbidity, for the moment, expresses itself in
seemingly irreconcilable theories or conduct. The morbid devotee of law and
order, or of patriotism, usually escapes with his morbidity unappreciated as such,
so long as his activities do not directly conflict with the material interests or
emotional necessities of the privileged beneficiaries of things as they are. When
the other aspect of this same morbid conflict of the emotions expresses itself in
equally impatient and no more violent demonstration directed against the bene-
ficiaries of supposed legalized injustice or of vested wrongs, then it becomes crime
or treason. Yet temperamentally the two are alike. Because of this the hyper-
patriot and super-radical so often exchange places, by making extreme reversals of
policy. This was conspicuous during the war in the cases of radical international
pacifist socialists who became most blatant militarists. We saw the same thing in
many ardent governmentalist patriots who became militant pacifists. Both were
simply expressing the other aspect of their pre-existing emotional conflicts.
Fighting for Fictions
Because mankind has been so largely functioning on the level of this conflict,
we have sought reform through the adoption of a new fiction, a new law, or a new
theory of government. Inevitably, therefore, our past revolutions have been
practical failures when judged from the standpoint of the objective reality of
their achievement. Subjectively they supplied a great satisfaction. We, the revo-
lutionists and their successors, have shown our relative omnipotence by over-
throwing the Almighty ones who had previously dominated in the name of God.
Then we proceed to establish a new fiction of another rule by divine right. This
2O PSYCHE & EROS
new fiction is expressed in the formula that “the voice of the people is the voice
of God.” Thus some assert their divine right to rule over the unnaturalized and
other disfranchised humans.
The chairman of the Republican National Committee recently improved
upon this theory of divine authority to tyrannize, in these words: “There is in
this country a religious faith which believes in the divine origin of the constitution
of the United States”:8 as interpreted, of course, by or for the chief beneficiaries
of things as they are. A multitude of constitutionally created petty officials are
thus made to have the divine right of former autocrats. Now then every official
tyranny, performed under claim of constitutional authority, has the same sanctity
as the acts of the Kaiser or of King John. Names have changed. Our emotional
conflicts and the necessity for similar childish superstitions remain much the same,
and receive similar interpretations and formulations.
Feudal serfdom was overthrown, but we fought only the fiction of that time,
by which feudal-mindedness then intellectualized its claim of right to exploit for
privilege. The serfs and rebels themselves had not outgrown the feudal-lord's
state of mind, or conflict. Hence they were satisfied with the overthrow of the
fiction. Because of their own subconscious desire to exploit, the former economic
essence of the slavery remained. The old conflict of desires continued to function
and created new fictions and new forms with which to maintain a continued
dominance by new modes of exploitation for the maintenance of aristocratic
privilege, in new exploiters.
Chattel slavery as a divinely appointed institution became the new or perhaps
only different and more delusive and lasting fiction. The serf, as a part of the
soil, was outlived by the slave as a chattel of his owner. Again we fought for the
overthrow of exploiters and not of exploitation. Again our efforts were aimed at
the fictions and forms surrounding exploitation, not at destroying the substance of
exploitation. Thus a divine property right in the body of the slave was supplanted
by a property right, generally held equally sacred to take from the worker the
product of his bodily exertion, above a mere living. Such a living the feudal
lord gave to his domestic animals, including the serf. Such a living the owner of
chattel slaves gave his domestic animals, including the slave. Such a living we still
allow our domestic animals and free laborers. But the substance of exploitation
continues under the new forms and new fictions. Also: the discrepancy between
the mode of life of the chief beneficiaries and chief victim of things as they are is
greater today than at any time in the history of the world. Compare Mr. Rocke-
feller with the producers of his wealth working in Colorado mines. Then make
a like comparison in the feudal ages.
This recital can be continued indefinitely because the conflict between our
8 New Republic 21 (no. 265): I45; Dec. 31, 1919. Also: La Follette's Maga-
zine, I2 (no. 1): 9; Jan., 1920.
EMOTIONAL CONFLICT, LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY 21
legal, moral, religious and social fictions and our actual practice is as broad as
human activity and the law itself, and as deep as the emotional conflicts for and
against dominance on the childish level. Also it is as near universal as the
emotional conflicts of immaturity which afflict us humans still living in the throes
of early racial adolescence. We are not yet willing (that is we are not emotion-
ally able) to subordinate our disturbed feelings and their fictions, to the arbitra-
ment of objective realities. Even where we have the desire to do so, we seem to
lack the intelligence. Perhaps even the wisest among us do not yet have a suffi-
cient understanding of the relations and behavior among humans to make the
more intelligent adjustment possible. Certainly the world is nowhere showing
any understanding or capacity for a peaceful adjustment to the natural process
which is working under or behind our legal fictions toward bringing about the
democratization of welfare.
In our social organism most of us are acting like Christian Scientists. The
fiction is that there is no pain, no social illness. The “malicious animal magne-
tism” of political heresy consists in effectively denying this fiction and proposing
to do something radical about it. The fact is that some parts of our social
organism are suffering intensely.
Concerning a Remedy
Our emotional valuation of virtue is always the exact measure of our
anxiety to dispense with it in our own lives, and to impose it upon others. Our
problem then is: How are we going about it to outgrow this emotional conflict,
these emotional valuations of our immaturity? How become grown up? How
eliminate the conflicts and their fictions? First of all, we must outgrow our
childish sentimental idealism, which makes us pretend to love the non-existent or
the impossible. When we become content with striving to attain what is practical,
according to our best understanding of the relations and behavior among things
and humans, and earnestly seek to enlarge that understanding then we may also
find it worth while, to strive only for the attainment of what is humanly possible.
So, instead of enforcing unintelligently conceived ideals and instead of justifying
infantile phantasies of omnipotence, all to be achieved by childish methods of vio-
lence, we will only seek to understand natural law as that is behaving in the
course of human evolution. Then we will help everybody else to make the best
possible adjustment thereto, by actually democratizing education, and by educat-
ing for an accelerated democratization. When most of us have achieved a com-
fortable mental and emotional adjustment to the natural law of democratization,
similarly understood, we will nesessarily also have secured a comfortable adjust-
ment to one another. When even an important minority of us shall have a fairly
clear idea of the behavior of natural law in the evolution of the social organism,
and such a minority shall be agreed to conform their personal lives therto, we will
22 PSYCHE & EROS
have little difficulty in persuading the rest of humanity to do likewise. Until
then we will uphold our fictions or fight to change them as children must do.
This is the only way known to most of us for “saving our face” from confessing
the shame of our shortcomings in our actual social life.
If we could somehow become efficient in the process of accelerating the
democratization of labor, of education, and of welfare, we could have a natural
healthy and peaceful “levelling” upwards. As we fail in this, the gulf between
the fortunate and the unfortunate classes will ever widen and the possibility of a
mutuality of understanding will become ever more remote and difficult. Ultimately
always comes a revolution by violence and a forcible “levelling” downwards
Which shall we have? Shall we continue to make the choice blindly and uncon-
sciously? Which are you promoting by your habitual, unpremeditated conduct,
or by your subconsciously conditioned sympathy or more conscious active aid; or
by your indifference?
From one avenue of approach we may describe the personal emotional con-
flict as being between a self-indulgence which requires a forfeiture of the good will
of others, and a self-denial which brings desired approval from a select few. Out
of this conflict in the social realm comes the seemingly irreconcilable sociologic
theories of individualism and collectivism. Individuals formulate one or the other
of these theories and give it more or less of moral valuation, depending upon
the intensity of their conflict. The choice depends upon which theory of social
relation seems most likely to insure a satisfaction of the immediate needs of the
autonomic system. The dualism of individualism and collectivism is the creature
of our internal conflict. In nature no such dualism exists. In fact these conflicting
theories merely present different and incomplete aspects of the same evolutionary
process.9
Still other persons, more conscious of both aspects of their conflicting desires,
evolve theories of the interaction between individualism and collectivism, as if
these were separable entities. Such persons tend to develope a moral value and
duty for theories of compromise, through which they hope to achieve autonomic
comfort. When individualism, collectivism, or compromises are sought to be
imposed as a moral duty or as a personal right, we may be reasonably sure that
those who seek to impose them are still floundering in the realm of the emotional
conflict and that the theories advanced are mere intellectualization by which they
hope to impose their will. When this is not so, then they will be content with
such results as can be achieved from imparting to the fullest of their “superior”
understanding and a willingness to enlarge that understanding by the acquisitions
from the store of knowledge of the most humble or even the most passionate. At
this stage of development we place a maximum of confidence upon a mutuality of
9Psychic Aspects of Social Evolution. Liberal Rev., June, July, 1917.
EMOTIONAL CONFLICT, LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY 23
understanding arrived at when all parties are obsessingly anxious both to under-
stand and to be understood. But this can only occur when both sides have the
benefit of approximate equality of intelligence and freedom from morbid or
specialized compulsions.
Those who are functioning above the level of the emotional conflict will
scarcely erect theories of individualism, collectivism, or compromise into some-
thing of moral virtue. Neither will they dream that such theories solve any
problem. Our problems are dominantly problems of the emotional conflict.
When this is not so we see all ultimate social and moral theories as being but
different incomplete aspects of the relations and behavior among things. From
this view-point we automatically recondition our desires to function in harmonious
adjustment to natural law, as that is understood from time to time. Furthermore,
such persons conspicuously seek to enlarge their understanding by new and ever
larger synthesis and to help others to a like understanding.
• Now the solution for social conflicts, like those of individual conflicts, is
seen to be in the outgrowing of the emotional conflicts that underlie. This means
a kind of sterilization of the emotions rather than their forcible suppression. In
the individual internal conflict it means the unification of seemingly opposing
tendencies, by getting onto an intellectual level above the desires and mental
processes which are characteristic of the emotional disturbances. That means at
least the elimination of that aspect of the conflict or impulse which is least in
harmony with the natural behavior of human beings acting in harmony with
social evolution. This theory applied to the social conflicts means a mutuality of
understanding to be arrived at above the level of the personal emotional urge, i.e.,
by means of an inductive study of the relations and behaviors of humans in
process of social evolution. Such a mutuality of understanding is impossible ex-
cept on the basis of an approximate equality of education and of understanding.
It can never occur while substantially all the cultured knavery and educated
"cunning is enlisted upon one side, in the making of special pleas for moralistic
theories that promote personal ends. Nor can it come into being while that same
group controls the education and the manufacture of those unenlightened formu-
lations of emotions, which are now flatteringly called “public opinion.” Mutual:
ity of understanding is something very different from tricking the other fellow
into theoretical or formal approval of the words of our creed or contract. He
must also knowingly approve all that it means to us. We must be willing and
eager to the uttermost to understand and to be understood. Such a meeting of
minds cannot occur in the economic realm until we have democratized education.
The test by which we may judge the willingness and the intelligence of our
desire to avoid social violence, is the zeal we put into the achievement of demo-
cratized education and education for accelerated democratization. If we are
unwilling to do something to promote that, then again our professions of a desire
24 PSYCHE & EROS
for peace is only another fiction by which we hope to have our way without our
victims understanding and valuing as we do all that we mean to accomplish
thereby. - -
When we have outgrown approximately all the emotional conflicts, we are
for the first time able to face ourselves and our problems with relatively imper-
sonal eyes, such as can see the problem as a whole, quite detached from and un-
influenced by specialized personal interest. This then is the grown up demo-
cratic method. In the sense of psychic evolution, it is the scientific approach to
all social problems. If those who now control the education, publicity and eco-
nomic might of the world, were sufficiently removed from infantile desires and
mental processes, to meet social problems in this manner, then there could not
have been a World War, nor could there be proletarian revolutions. Just to the
extent that we have not outgrown our juvenile conflicts, such wars and revolu-
tions are inevitable. The more we use infantile modes for the violent suppression
of economic and political heresy the more certain and the more violent will the
ultimate revolutions be, for such is the inevitable psychology of the emotional
conflict.
There can be no lasting peace until most of us are eager to submit our con-
tentions to the arbitrament of the facts, equally understood, and equally free
from fear. We cannot thus voluntarily submit our childish phantasies and feel-
ings of grandeur to the arbitrament of the economic realities of democracy, except
by the process of maturing our desires and mental processes, and simultaneously
outgrowing the subjective conflict. We cannot have the facts, that is, the rela-
tions and behavior among things and humans, equally understood without democ-
ratizing education. We cannot have peaceful social evolution without education
for democratization. What are YOU going to do about it?
BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF SCHROEDERIANA.
1913
Partial bibliography of the writings of Theodore Schroeder dealing
largely with problems of religion, of sex, and of freedom of speech.
Free speech league. (New York) April 1913, 8 p., 84 titles.
1919
Authorship of the book of Mormon. Psychologic tests of W. F. Prince,
critically reviewed by Theodore Schroeder * * * to which is now
added a bibliography of Schroeder on Mormonism. Reprint [except
bibliography]. American Journal of Psychology. (Worcester,
Mass.) XXX pp. 66-72. January, 1919.
Bibliography pp. 10-18, lists 65 titles, some of which duplicate ma-
terial as by revision, republication or translation.
SANKEY--Jon ES, NANCY ELEANOR, 1862–
Theodore Schroeder on free speech, a bibliography by Nancy E. Sankey-
Jones. (New York) Free speech league. 1919, 24p.
Lists 149 titles, some of which duplicate material by republication
or translation. *
1920
SANKEY--Jon ES, NANCY ELEANOR, 1862–
Theodore Schroeder's use of the psychologic approach to problems of
religion, law, criminology and philosophy. A bibliography by Nancy
E. Sankey-Jones. (Cos Cob, Conn.) 1920. -
Lists 75 titles, some of which duplicate material because of re-
visions, republications or translations.