B1233 <=> B1235 (BTG XLVIII From the Author, p. 1234)

In the average man the results of his mentation and feelings often lead to this, that, as it might be expressed, “a fly becomes an elephant and an elephant a fly.”

The manifestations in the common presences of the said people of this maleficent property is particularly intensely actualized just during such events as wars, revolutions, civil wars, and so on.

Just during these events, the state, even constated by them, is particularly sharply manifested, under the action of which they all with few exceptions fall, and which they call “mass psychosis.”

The essence of this state consists in this, that average people receiving in their already feeble mentation, which at such times becomes still more feeble, shocks from the maleficent stories of some or another lunatic, and becoming in the full sense of the word victims of these malicious stories, manifest themselves completely automatically.

During the period when they find themselves under the action of such a scourge – a scourge which has already become for contemporary ordinary people their inalienable inherency – there already entirely ceases to exist in their common presences that sacred what is called “conscience,” the data for the possibility of the acquisition of which Great Nature endowed them with, as godlike beings in differentiation from mere animals.

Informed people sincerely regret just this inherency in contemporary people, because, according to historical data and also to experimental elucidations of numerous genuine learned beings of past epochs, Great Nature has already long ceased to have need for such a phenomenon as mass psychosis for Her equilibrium. Rather the contrary, such a periodically arising inherency in people compels Her always to new adaptations, as for instance increasing the birth rate, changing the what is called “tempo of the general psyche” and so on and so forth.