“In a Crowd”

In writing of The School of Life, Henry Van Dyke made this observation:

“You may have to live in a crowd, but you do not have to live like it. …” This is one of the most important lessons to teach our children, and one that all of us must learn. People like to live as individuals—they like to live like they personally like to live—or at least so they say. But they don’t always act that way—for there seems to be a compulsion to follow the crowd. As one evidence of this, consider the compulsion when it comes to following fashion. But as to following the crowd or living as an independent individual, we need not follow precisely the same pattern. There are bad examples as well as good ones, and we have to discriminate between the two. But there is something formidable called crowd psychology, when many seem to move compulsively, not necessarily having thought things through. And one of the urgent lessons to learn is that a wrong isn’t right just because many do it. A wrong isn’t right just because a crowd does it. And no member of a crowd is relieved of personal responsibility when he does with others what he wouldn’t do himself. A crowd is composed of individuals, and basically its acts are the acts of individuals. And before a boy or a girl (or an adult) does something he shouldn’t, takes something he shouldn’t, uses something he shouldn’t, behaves as he shouldn’t, in a crowd or with other company, he ought to pause and ask himself honestly: “Would I do this if I were alone, if I were thinking my own thoughts, and considering the consequences, without the compulsion of other people?” We are, all of us, going to carry our own record with us, our own memories, our own responsibility, whether we act in a crowd or as an individual. Abraham Lincoln had something to say on this subject: “Stand with anybody that stands right,” he said. “Stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.”¹ “You may have to live in a crowd, but you do not have to live like it. …”