The Mindless Masses

The Mindless Masses

(Sorry this is late. I work at a restaurant and it was a lot busier than I was expecting and I’m just getting off)

“The sin of public terror is that it divests a man of conscience, of himself.”

- Arthur Miller, Introduction to Collected Plays, 163

While reading The Crucible and the articles that followed the play, this quote kept resurfacing in my mind. Miller seems to have a deep criticism of group thought. We can see this in the way he has presents the public in the first act of the play. He allows us to see them as if they were only one character. We hear that they are growing uneasy due to reason and suspicion and that the Reverand must go to them and sway them to believe that the illness that has struck his daughter is not super natural. The public opinion is not divided. Miller suggests that what one person thinks is what all the others think. I believe he does this to suggest that group thought is void of reason or innovation and is instead concerned with fear and gossip.

This is what I think he means with the term “pubic terror.” When one thought or fear pervades an entire community, and each individual opinion becomes muddled by the groups. We saw this very clearly in “Inside Out: A memoir of the Blacklist,” when Bernstein’s friends began to avoid him simply because the climate of the society said that he should be. We can also see it in the first act of “The Crucible,” when the public is explained as being afraid that Betty is haunted and the only counterarguments stem from a few chosen characters.

I will continue thinking about this term and some of it’s consequences throughout the rest of the semester because it brings up quite a few questions for me. What is terror when it stems from outside of a person rather than from within and which is stronger? Is individuality a way to battle censorship and is that too simplistic of a thought? I am interested to see whether or not Miller will chose to change his presentation of “public terror” or if it is this terror that he wants to criticize throughout the play.