The long-term transformation of Western society, which began almost a thousand years ago, has reached into new and unexpected territories of human life, and begun a new chapter of a famed theory that was introduced in a book published at the outset of the most uncertain and dangerous moments of the last
century.

When Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote his extraordinary “The Revolt of the Masses” in 1928, he changed the way history, since the Renaissance in Europe, was understood. This book was written only a few years after Stalin had taken power in Russia, and five years before Hitler hijacked the Weimar Republic in Germany, but Ortega presciently identified these men and their regimes as the mechanisms by which millions of Ukrainian farmers and other Russian cultural and political figures would be starved to death or executed in the 1930’s, millions of Jews would be murdered shortly afterwards in the Holocaust, and millions of others from around the world would die in the violence of World War II.

But Ortega’s prophesy about these men and their regimes was only incidental to his larger insight that, since the beginning of the Renaissance, a new order of kings, emperors and nobility which had replaced the prior feudal era, was itself gradually being replaced, generation by generation, by a transfer of power to the masses of so-called ordinary men and women who made up the populations of each country and empire. Absolute monarchies and the unquestioned power of the Church were being replaced with larger and larger numbers of those from existing peasantry and serfs who now moved to cities and acquired wealth and education while making and trading goods and services. A small so-called middle class was created and grew rapidly, and as these individuals and their families acquired property and wealth, they exerted more and more political and economic power in their societies. As the printing press and other early technological advances led into a full-scale industrial revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, this process accelerated.

Political revolutions occurred in one British North American colony in 1776, in France in 1789, and throughout the western world in the years that followed (although only the American revolution was maintained continuously through the 20th century). But beyond these localized political upheavals, a larger and transnational social revolt was occurring.

Ortega identified a new kind of man, the “mass man” as he called him. This person was now “relieved” of most of the shackles of the prehistoric and feudal periods. The “divine right of kings” was no longer observed in most places. Mass man had growing economic and political power as he was liberated into new eras of social opportunity. But Ortega saw this mass man as capable of two kinds of general behavior. The first was “indirect action” in which the masses of individuals could behave cooperatively in society with rules, customs, laws and formalized recognition of the rights of others. Societies and their governments were thus conducted by “liberal democracy” with representatives who were elected or appointed to make decisions for the larger population.

The second form of behavior, Ortega said, was “direct action” in which mass man acted through mobs, totalitarian force and with violence, almost always under the incitement and manipulation of dictators or demagogues. Into this latter category were two new groups, fascists and communists, that he singled out in his book and whom he had predicted would lead the world to a catastrophe.

When that catastrophe, World War II, did happen and ended, an incipient new world order began to emerge. A so-called Cold War followed between the now-thriving capital democracies and communist totalitarianism, but this confrontation ended about 1990 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Communist China survived, but adopted a non-democratic capitalist economic system. A brief period of U.S. hegemony followed, but the world order begun with the creation of United Nations in the 1940’s and expanded to worldwide economic
organizations in the decades that followed, began breaking up as the undeveloped and mostly undemocratic regimes which made up the greater number of nations in the world, brought international cooperation and the advance of human rights to a halt.

A new threat to an evolving world order now emerged from the Middle East where feudal Islamic regimes, their treasuries filled with billions of U.S. dollars and other Western currencies from the continual sale of their vast (but not limitless) oil reserves, built totalitarian fundamentalist regimes to challenge the economic and military dominance of North America, Europe and the emerging Asian superstates of China and India. This challenge, which continues to this day, took on transnational forms as groups of Islamofascist terrorists organized worldwide and made periodic assaults on the U.S. and Europe.

At the same time, Russia, rising from the ruins of the old and failed Soviet Union, began to revive (again with an infusion of revenues from the sale of its oil and gas reserves) its aggressive behavior to its neighbors (many of which were formerly part of the Soviet Union). North Korea, one of the most despotic and ruthless regimes in history, began to threaten everyone in its sight. Rogue regimes in Iran, Venezuela and other parts
of South America also have appeared, giving a renewed authoritarian flavor to much of contemporary politics. A race to proliferate nuclear weapons is now underway in many of the most aggressive rogue regimes, including Iran and North Korea, and threaten worldwide stability.

Beneath the surface of this, however, a vast new form of communications was created in the last decades of the 20th century, and this phenomenon, still in its early stages, threatens to upend the entire process of human political (as well as personal) conduct in the 21st century.

The internet was created by the U.S. military as an adjunct to the new science of computers. The first actual computer was created on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia just after World War II. Initially, these devices were very large and slow-moving, although their potential was soon realized to be very great. Today, much more sophisticated computers are changing the nature of economic and
political life.

Ironically, just as the computer appeared, Ortega y Gasset died. His great pre-war reputation had been diminished by his role (or non-role) in the Spanish Civil War that preceded World War II, and because many of his writings (including sections in “The Revolt of the Masses”) expressed politically “incorrect” and outmoded social views, his work was put away into critical academic closets and was neglected.

But his immensely powerful insight into the long-term development of human society, now no longer limited to Europe and Western civilization, continues to illuminate and explain the most profound developments in the world.

This historical process now has an extraordinary new tool in which to express itself and impose itself on human society. With the computer came new territories of human communication, the so-called cybersphere which “invisibly” covers the entire earth and enables virtual instant communication between almost every human being alive.

Almost overnight, it seems, traditional communication forms and institutions are disappearing, being replaced with innovations in the cybersphere. Books, newspapers, commercial television and the film industry have been the basis of communication in the developed nations of the West, but they are either disappearing or being radically transformed in amazingly short intervals.

More provocative, the exploration of the myriad of new “continents” of the cybersphere is not only fundamentally altering human communications and trade, it is altering the nature of human political and communal activity. The ease with which totalitarian regimes were able to control their “masses” in the immediate past is being abolished. Just as repressive regimes learn one new technique to control the cybersphere, a new technique to thwart them appears. The “masses” now have a powerful new weapon with which to maintain their independence of totalitarian regimentation.

When George Orwell wrote his iconic novel “1984″ in 1948, he was writing a critique of Soviet communist authoritarianism. Defensively, the Left attempted to interpret this immensely popular book as the takeover and suppression of human life by technology. But this was not Orwell’s intention, nor did the new post-war technologies do anything but liberate individuals from many of the chronic problems of the past.

The Islamofascist regime now in power in Iran is learning this lesson the hard way. The recent “election” there was transparently false in its outcome, and the regime, through violent intimidation (the oldest method of suppression), has only been able to halt a natural revolt temporarily. The regime’s credibility with its masses is fast evaporating, and it’s only a matter of time before a new (and probably more powerful) eruption takes place.

Ortega y Gasset’s trajectory for the revolt of the world’s masses, short of a worldwide nuclear or pandemic catastrophe that would alter human life indelibly, is irreversible and unstoppable. As he pointed out in 1928, however, it always has two sides to its coin. There is no guarantee that the forces of “direct action” will not be able, even if temporarily, to prevail and bring great suffering to the world as we know it, and as we
now begin to imagine it can be.

“The Revolt of the Masses” was written in the most uncertain and dangerous moments of the last century. We are now entering the most uncertain and dangerous moments of this new century. Paraphrasing Winston Churchill at the beginning of World War II, we can only hope that the new worlds we are discovering in the many “continents” of the cybersphere, and those who explore and inhabit them, will be able, in due course and time, to rescue our old world from itself.

-Copyright (c) 2009 by Barry Casselman. All rights reserved.