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The second major symptom about today's youth, according to Lindner, lies in "the abandonment of that solitude which was at once the trademark of adolescence and the source of its deepest despairs as of its dubious ecstasies. And frequently this solitude was creative. From it some times came the dreams, the hopes and the soaring aims that charged life henceforward with meaning and contributed to giving us our poets, artists, scientists . . . But youth today has abandoned solitude in favor of pack-running, of predatory assembly, of great collectivities that bury, if they do not destroy, individuality. Into these mindless associations the young flock like cattle. The fee they pay for initiation is abandonment of self and im mersion in the herd . . . This innovation can yield no social gain. For it is in solitude that the works of hand, heart and mind are always conceived. In the crowd, herd or gang, it is a mass mind that operates—a mind without subtlety, without compassion, uncivilized."
Violence Without Conscience. An anxious and concerned public, Lindner says, has received from the "experts" only absurd theories and warmed-over nostrums:
"Throw away the comic books," "Close down the TV stations," "Return to breastfeeding," and "Get tough with them." But, he adds, "really to understand what is happening to youth requires psychological knowledge. Both the basic tendencies of modern youth—to 'act out' and to drift into herds—are symptoms of a psychiatric condition, worldwide in scope, related di rectly to the social and political temper of our times. There is only one mental aberration in which these two symptoms coexist: in the psychopathic personality, essentially antisocial, conscienceless, inclined to violence in behavior, and liable to loss of identity in the group, gang, mob or herd. The psychopath is a rebel without a cause—hence, in a chronic state of mutiny. He strives solely for the satisfaction of his moment-to-moment desires. Raw need is all that drives him . . .
"The youth of the world today is touched with madness, literally sick with an aberrant condition of mind formerly confined to a few distressed souls but now epidemic over the earth."
How did youth get that way? "It is not youth alone that has succumbed to psychopathy, but nations, populations—indeed, the whole of mankind. The world, in short, has run amuck." And how did the world get that way? Dr. Lindner answers that one of the major factors producing psychopathy is damage to the ego. He sees a loss of individuality and consequent damage to the ego in the 20th century's mass political movements, social and industrial giants, wars and economic upheavals. "From loss of identity has come insecurity, and this has bred the soul-destroying plague we know as mass psychopathy. Mass man is the psychopath par excellence."