Collective Search for Identity

From the Preface: This book is about identity-seeking movements of modern society. It deals with such things as fashions, fads, poses, ritual, cultic movements, recreation, heroes and celebrities, and crusades, from the point of view of what they tell about the identity search of a mass society. My view, briefly, is that a collective identity search is symptomatic of the fact that some modern social systems deprive people of psychological "payoffs," the lack of which, expressed by terms such as alienation, meaninglessness, identity problem, motivates a mass groping for activities and symbols with which to restore or find new identity. People grope because they do not really know what is wrong, especially when there is physical prosperity yet a sense of being cheated. When mass movements become concerned with identity, they develop certain characteristics, such as "ego-screaming," concern with costume and self-ornamentation, style rebellion, concern with emotional gestures rather than practical effects, adulation of heroes, cultism, and the like, with which I shall deal. Such signs show that ordinary economic and political solutions are not what is wanted. People feel the futility and irrelevance of such measures, yet do not know quite what else to do.