THE INDIVIDUALITY OF GROUPS. Groups may display the same individuality and sense of selfhood as is exhibited by individuals. And the members of the group may come to regard the group life as something quite as important and inalienable as their own personalities and possessions. Indeed in defense of the integrity of the group life, as in the case, for example, of national honor, the individual life and possession may come to be reckoned as naught. Man's gregariousness and his instinctive sympathy with his own kind make it easy for the individual to identify his own life with that of the group. What threatens or endangers the group will in consequence arouse in him the same emotions as are aroused by threats or dangers that concern his own personality. An insult to the flag may send a thrill of danger through the millions who read about it, just as would an insult to themselves or their families.
Group feeling may exist on various levels. It may be nothing more momentous than local pride, having the tallest tower, the finest amusement park, the best baseball team, or being the "sixth largest city." It may be a belligerent imperialism, a "desire for a place in the sun." It may be a desire for independence and an autonomous group life, manifested so strikingly recently by such small nationalities as Poland and Czecho-Slovakia and influential in keeping Switzerland alive as a nationality through hundreds of years, though surrounded by powerful neighbors.[1] While a group does not exist save as an abstraction, looked at as a whole it may exhibit the same outstanding traits, or the same types of selfhood as an individual. It may be fiercely belligerent and dogmatic; it may, like literary exponents of the German ideal, desire to spread its own conception of Kultur throughout the world.[2] It may be insistent on its own position, or its own possessions or its own glory. It may be fanatic in aggrandizement. It may be interested in the welfare of other groups, as in the case of large nationalities championing and protecting the causes of small or oppressed ones, such an ideal as was expressed, for example, by President Wilson in his address to Congress on the entrance of America into the Great War: