The Freedom of Being Unknown
A passage from The Metropolis and Mental Life, on the distance required by life among a multitude of people.
In formal terms, the mental attitude of metropolitan residents toward one another may be called reserve.
If our continual external contact with countless people were answered by as many inner responses as in a small town, where we know almost everyone we encounter and have a positive relationship with each, we would become inwardly atomized and fall into an utterly inconceivable mental condition.
Partly this psychological circumstance, partly our right to distrust the elements of metropolitan life that brush past us in fleeting encounters, compels us to that reserve. As a result, we often do not even know by sight neighbours who have lived in the same house for years, and so often appear cold and unfeeling to small-town residents.
Indeed, unless I am mistaken, the inner side of this outward reserve is not merely indifference but, more often than we realize, a slight aversion, a mutual estrangement and repulsion that could turn at once into hatred and conflict upon close contact, whatever occasioned it.
The whole inner organization of such an extensive life of social intercourse rests on an extremely varied gradation of sympathies, indifferences and aversions, from the briefest to the most enduring.
The sphere of indifference here is not as large as it appears on the surface. Our mental activity responds to almost every impression from another person with a feeling of some definite kind; only the unconsciousness, transience and changeability of these feelings seem to dissolve them into indifference.
In fact, such indifference would be as unnatural to us as the blurring produced by indiscriminate mutual suggestion would be intolerable. Antipathy, the latent and preliminary stage of active antagonism, protects us from these two characteristic dangers of the metropolis. It creates the distances and aversions without which this kind of life could not be lived at all. Their degrees and combinations, the rhythm of their appearance and disappearance, and the forms in which they find satisfaction constitute, together with the motives that unite people in the narrower sense, an inseparable whole in the shaping of metropolitan life. What immediately appears as dissociation in this life is, in reality, merely one of its elementary forms of socialization.
Yet this reserve, with its undertone of concealed aversion, appears in turn as the form or garment of a much more general mental character of the metropolis.
For it grants the individual a kind and degree of personal freedom for which there is no parallel in other circumstances. It thus reaches back to one of the great developmental tendencies of social life in general, one of the few for which an approximately general formula can be found.