In arguing that "I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law," Kant may be easily understood as justifying any crowd in seeking to make its peculiar maxims universal laws. Who but a Rationalist or a crowd-man presumes to have found the "universal law," who else would have the effrontery to try to legislate for every conscience in existence? But this presumption has its price. In thus universalizing my moral will, I wholly depersonalize it. He says:
It is of extreme importance to remember that we must not allow ourselves to think of deducing the reality of this principle from the particular attributes of human nature. For duty is to be a practical unconditional necessity of action; it must therefore hold for all rational beings (to whom an imperative can apply at all), and for this reason only be also a law for all human wills. On the contrary, whatever it deduces from the particular natural characteristics of humanity, from certain feelings and propensions, nay, even if possible from any particular tendency proper to human reason, and which need not necessarily hold for the will of every rational being, this may indeed supply us with a maxim but not with a law; with a subjective principle on which we may have a propension or inclination to act, but not with an objective principle on which we should be _enjoined_ to act, _even though all our propensions, inclinations, and natural dispositions were opposed_ to it. In fact, the _sublimity and intrinsic dignity_ of the command in duty _are so much the more evident the less subjective impulses favor it, and the more they oppose it_ [italics here are mine], without being able in the slightest degree to weaken the obligation of the law or to diminish its validity.
... An action done from duty derives its moral worth _not from the purpose_ which is to be attained by it, but from the maxim by which it is determined. It (this moral worth) cannot lie anywhere but in the _principle of The Will_, without regard to the ends which can be attained by such action.
This loss of the conscious self in the universal, this turning away from the empirically known, this demand that an _a priori_ principle be followed to its deadly practical conclusion _regardless of the ends_ to which it leads, is of utmost importance for our study. It is precisely what the paranoiac does after his own fashion. In crowd-thinking it is often made the instrument of wholesale destruction and human slaughter. The mob is ever motivated by this logic of negation, and of automatic behavior. It is thus that compulsive thinking sways vast hordes of men and women, impelling them, in the very name of truth or righteousness, to actions of the most atrocious character. It is this which robs most popular movements of their intelligent purposiveness, unleashes the fanatic and the bigot, and leads men to die and to kill for a phrase. This way of thinking points straight to Salem, Massachusetts, to the torture-chamber, the pile of fagots and the mill pond at Rosmersholm.