[380] became horrible, atrocious practice, namely that there a resistance still was left. I know a man who is now in a very important position in Hamburg, an old friend of mine, who was for 12 years in concentration camps and prisons and who kept his resistance under all these conditions and was able to assert his spiritual freedom^a, his freedom of finite creativity under conditions in which many broke down, but not all of them, and perhaps comparatively few of them. And the finite freedom was still preserved in opposition to the conditioned reflexes. Now here you see--and that is why I emphasized this--because as the title of a book says: Ideas Have Consequences [by Weaver, with blurb on the jacket by P.T.--Ed.]. And the doctrine of conditioned reflexes, the test method, and all the rest, are not simply ideas which are harmless, but they CAN have

consequences if they are tools in the hands of people who are interested in transforming human beings into objects^b. All this happened, as I already pointed to, in a special type of society, a type which we call mass society. In a mass society, the individual characteristics are taken away. The word "mass" is a physical concept, and in a physical mass we have a quantity of moving matter in which all parties move in the same direction with the same gravity with which the mass itself is moving. The characteristic thing in a physical mass is that the independent movements of the particles have no effect on the movement of the mass as such. They are deprived of their independence, or the independence has become irrelevant for the mass. Now that is what happens in mass society. Mass society^c is a society in which the individual reactions which have the character of spontaneity or finite freedom^d, are of