The Spanish intellectual and philosopher Ortega y Gasset records the ascendency of the 'mass man' in the modern era—'I doubt whether there have been other periods in history in which the multitude has come to govern more directly than in our own'—owing largely to the successes of 'liberal democracy' (a term which carries a pejorative connotation for the author) and technological progress broadly defined. This is seen as a highly lamentable fact of modernity because 'mass man' is brutal, oppressive, and—worst of all—mediocre.
The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them whenever it will. As they say in the United States: 'to be different is to be indecent'. The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear, of course, that this 'everybody' is not 'everybody'. 'Everybody' was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialized minorities. Nowadays, 'everybody' is the mass alone. Here we have the formidable fact of ours times, described without any concealment of the brutality of its features' (p. 14)
