José Ortega y Gasset: Mass Man’s Highway to Dystopia

by Pedro Blas González (April 2026)

The most immediate result of this unbalanced specialization has been that to-day, when there are more “scientists” than ever, there are much less “cultured” men than, for example, about 1750. —José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote a dissertation entitled “The Horrors of the Year One Thousand: Critique of a Legend” (“Los terrores del año mil: Critica de una leyenda”). Ortega’s dissertation, which earned him a doctorate from the University of Madrid, was completed in 1904. The work was an analysis of French medieval history.

While Ortega’s dissertation about the world in Anno Domini one thousand is the work of a twenty-one-year-old thinker, it does contain the fertile ingredients of his mature thought.

The year one thousand, the Spanish philosopher tells us, signified a fin de siècle, the end of a millennium and the beginning of another. This meant that human limitations and possibilities might become rearranged in a manner that people might not recognize or become frightened by. That is what some historians allege. Today we imagine that during the year one thousand Europeans, who lived in a civilization that kept a calendar, would have been justified in thinking that unprecedented changes would take place in the new millennium. Ortega y Gasset suggests that that was not the case.

Like any thinker who is worth reading, Ortega is prescient, perspicuous. It is next to impossible in an age of anti-philosophy, as is late postmodernity, a time permeated with the absence of philosophical reflection through the systematic destruction of reason, to conceive thought-proper. Thought-proper cannot take place in a radicalized ideological age. Instead, thought-proper is how thinkers in previous ages earned their bread and butter. Awe and wonder, humility, and the quest to understand man’s place in the big picture are staples of genuine metaphysical and philosophical reflection. That is, thought-proper entertains metaphysical and existential concerns that situate man in the objective scheme of human reality.

The year one thousand forced people to forage through human life, reality, and the world by utilizing their eyes and ears. Ortega argues that the year one thousand was a time when human perception had to be keen, piercing—penetrating. Perception that is optimum delivers us from avoidable pitfalls and keeps us out of harm that we can circumvent or avoid. Keen perception was the vehicle that yielded people in the year one thousand the possibility of communing with human reality, whether they liked it or not.

Optimum perception, that is, the innate ability to cultivate self-awareness, begets thought-proper. We forge ideas by respecting the trajectory that our perceptions of the world, other people, life, and death put us in contact with. This higher deliverance that perception can assume in our life is what we eventually come to recognize as thought. Only through conception, thought that is consolidated from basic, though, optimum perceptions, can we attain thought-proper.

People in the year one thousand could little afford to ignore what their perceptions told them about the world, other people, danger, and their own lives. From a heightened awareness of life, the passage of time, place, and loss, people in the year one thousand learned to smell a rat through a suit of armor.

For people in the year one thousand evening meant the coming of darkness, uncertainty that would envelope their world with the sounds of nature, and an uneasy rest. For people in the year one thousand, perception of the world around them became focused. In the year one thousand people understood that felicity is not incomparable with pain and suffering.

Life as Vision of Eternity in the Year One Thousand

In the year one thousand the near-past informed the present. For people in that time, the present was like a slow-moving river. Memory was of supreme importance. Forgetfulness was next to impossible, given that there were few distractions that worked to erode memory of the past.

In the year one thousand, heightened perception of the world ushered values that enabled people to identify universal patterns and consistency that permit for a stable life. The human condition, which has shown its talons to man from the earliest days of man’s trek through Earth, was center stage for people in the year one thousand.

In the year one thousand people could not afford to doubt that objective reality signals an objective realm that demands our respect. People who respect nature are rewarded with a sense of self. Early man accepted these conditions velis nolis.

Ortega’s The Revolt of the Masses (1930)

In The Revolt of the Masses Ortega writes the following about spoiled mass man in the twentieth century, circa the year nineteen hundred and thirty: “But the new masses find themselves in the presence of a prospect full of possibilities, and furthermore, quite secure, with everything ready to their hands, independent of any previous efforts on their part, just as we find the sun in the heavens without our hoisting it up on our shoulders.”

Ortega’s description of the revolt of the masses, which is not a political revolt, but rather a moral/spiritual irrational rebellion against free will and meritocracy, is the opposite of the heightened perception that people in the year one thousand cultivated.

Let me explain.

The living conditions that people enjoyed in 1930, when Ortega published The Revolt of the Masses, were so favorable, in comparison to previous ages, that mass man began to assume that material progress was a natural process they could take for granted. In addition to improved material conditions, Ortega argues that modernity ushered a moral/spiritual ennui that made mass man anxious to remove the ‘shackles’ of tradition and the past. The Spanish philosopher explains: “In order to understand this formidable fact, it is important from the start to avoid giving to the words ‘rebellion,” ‘masses,” and “social power” a meaning exclusively or primarily political.”

Ortega argues in The Revolt of the Masses that the heightened perception of man in the year one thousand, which served as the ground for the development of conception, is turned into base mendacity and conformism by mass man in our time. Mass man, Ortega suggests, gives up on the idea of meritocracy, while embracing an affected worldview and values that go against human reality.

Mass man is not the protagonist of his own life: “There are no longer protagonists; there is only the chorus,” Ortega writes. Mass man embraces the debasement of qualitative essences and values, in what it considers a form of emancipation, and thus becomes a homogenous blob of undifferentiated people who presume safety in numbers.

Hyperreality, Late Postmodernity, and Mass Man

Let us fast forward to 2026.

Mass man’s highway to dystopia has delivered late postmodern man into a condition that can only be described as hyper-reality. Though, we must clarify that hyperreality must be stripped of its sophomoric science-fiction connotations as simulation and matrix. Those monikers, which are popular today, do not address the essence of the problem of mass man in late postmodernity: subjectivism that destroys objective values that serve as archetypes of human reality and the human person. Subjectivism creates vague and pseudo notions of human reality that keep man from attaining self-actualization.

Throughout Ortega’s complete works (12 volumes), the Spanish philosopher cites the marked distinction between subjectivity and subjectivism. Subjectivity recognizes the human subject (person) as a being capable of self-reflection. Subjectivity discovers itself in objective reality, which complements man as a subjective being. Subjectivity affirms objective reality. On the other hand, subjectivism, which must not be confused with subjectivity, is the relativistic denial of objective reality and values.

Late postmodern dystopia is the embrace of appearance(s), no matter how mendacious and vile, over man’s traditional, hard-earned grasp of objective reality. The massive radical social/political disinformation that the legacy media has unleashed on late postmodern mass man has conditioned people to accept a hyperreal world of make-belief.

While destroying man’s capacity for self-reflection as persons (subjects), late postmodernism is the triumph of corrosive subjectivism. Ortega anticipated this infantile, though aberrant condition of mass man. He explains:

Hence for the first time we meet with a period which makes tabula rasa of all classicism, which recognizes in nothing that is past any possible model or standard, and appearing as it does after so many centuries without any break in evolution, yet gives the impression of a commencement, a dawn, an initiation, an infancy.

The denial of even the rudimentary structure of human reality makes late postmodern mass man a prisoner of chic mendacity. No doubt, late postmodern mass man has been turned into a jejune, albeit arrogant, prisoner of self-serving falsehoods that work in the service of radical ideology.

Cultural and social-political mendacity and moral-spiritual aberrations turn sinister, when these staples of mass man make demands on reason and intelligence. Ortega writes: “Now, on the other hand, the mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the café.”

The late postmodern equivalent of notions born in the café in Ortega’s time is the educational system–at all levels–social-media, and the legacy media, which serve as the hub of disinformation–in all aspects of life today.

Ortega reserves his most critical contention of mass man for intellectuals (pseudo and real). Radicalized intellectuals are the most dangerous fomenters of disinformation. The Spanish thinker’s philosophical prescience deserves the last word:

As we shall see, a characteristic of our times is the predominance, even in groups traditionally selective, of the mass and vulgar. Thus, in the intellectual life, which of its essence requires and presupposes qualification, one can note the progressive triumph of the pseudo-intellectual, unqualified, unqualifiable, and, by their very mental texture, disqualified.

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Pedro Blas González is Professor of Philosophy in Florida. He earned his doctoral degree in Philosophy at DePaul University in 1995. Dr. González has published extensively on leading Spanish philosophers, such as Ortega y Gasset and Unamuno. His books have included Unamuno: A Lyrical Essay, Ortega’s ‘Revolt of the Masses’ and the Triumph of the New Man, Fragments: Essays in Subjectivity, Individuality and Autonomy and Human Existence as Radical Reality: Ortega’s Philosophy of Subjectivity. He also published a translation and introduction of José Ortega y Gasset’s last work to appear in English, “Medio siglo de Filosofia” (1951) in Philosophy Today Vol. 42 Issue 2 (Summer 1998). His most recent book is Philosophical Perspective on Cinema.

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