XV
TECHNIQUE FOR NOT BEING FOOLED BY ONESELF
The next twenty-eight pages of this book might be entitled: "An Article that Expected to Appear in theSaturday Evening Post."
When the twenty-eight pages, which had been conceived and written to be read in this way, were completed, they were too late to submit to thePost, and too late to change.
The reader is therefore requested to bear in mind (as I do) that he is getting the next eleven chapters for nothing—that they have not been paid for and it can only be left to people's imaginations whether theSaturday Evening Postwould approve or believe what I believe, or feel hurt if other people believe it.
The suggestion that before the new profession of being a lawyer backwards is started we shall all try in the present crisis of the nation, doing what we can as amateurs, putting in at once any little odd jobs of criticism on ourselves which may come our way, brings up the whole matter of an amateur technique for not being fooled by oneself.
It is easy enough to talk pleasantly about a man's power of self-criticism or of self-discipline as the source of ideas, as a secret of increased production in factories, or power over others in business, and as a general rule for success whether in trade or in statesmanship, I say it is, but what is there anybody can really do after all about having or exercising this power of self-criticism?
If the readers of theSaturday Evening Postwere to come to me in a body in this part of my book and ask me what there is, if anything, they—the readers of theSaturday Evening Postcan do, and do now to acquire a technique—a kind of general amateur technique for not being fooled about themselves, I am afraid I would have a hard time in holding back from giving good advice. Even at this moment without being asked at all, I have a faint hopeful idea—I feel it at this moment floating about my head—a kind of nimbus of wanting to tell other people what they ought to do about not being fooled by themselves. But I have ripped the Thing off. I cannot believe that only this far—in a few pages or so about it, I have made people's not being fooled by themselves alluring enough to them. It has occurred to me that perhaps if I want to have people in this country really allured by the prospect of not being fooled by themselves, the best thing for me to do is to pick out some man in the country everybody knows who is especially lacking in a technique for not being fooled by himself—some one man all our people have a perfect passion,—almost an epidemic of not wanting to be like, and try to make my idea alluring with him.
Naturally of course I have picked out Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson of Austin, Texas, Postmaster Imperturbable of The United States.
It is true that other readers of theSaturday Evening Postbesides Mr. Burleson might have been picked out. But everybody knows Mr. Burleson. Everybody writes letters. Mr. Burleson is the great daily common intimate personal experience of a hundred million people. Everybody who puts letters into Mr. Burleson's Post Office—everybody who waits for his letters to get to him after Mr. Burleson is through with them, must feel as I do, that Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson of Austin, Texas, as a kind of national pointer to this nation of things that other people do not want to have the matter with them, could hardly be excelled.
I am using Mr. Burleson gratefully for a few moments as an example of three things of personal importance to all amateurs interested in the technique of self-criticism.
1st. What Mr. Burleson could get out of criticizing himself.
2nd. What Mr. Burleson could get out of letting other people criticize him.
3rd. How he could get it. Technique and illustration.
XVI
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A LETTER
If the autobiography of a letter trying to work its way through from Philadelphia to Northampton, Massachusetts, could be written down—if all the details of just what happened to it slumped into corners on platforms—what happened to it in slides, in slots and pigeon-holes, in mail bags on noisy city sidewalks, in freight cars on awful silent sidings in the night, in depots, in junctions—if all the long story of this one letter could be written like the Lord's Prayer on a thumb nail and could be put in that little hole of information stamped on the envelope—what is it that the little autobiography of the letter would do to Albert Sidney Burleson?
The autobiography of one letter put with millions of others like it every day, put with flocks of letters from along the Ohio, from along the Mississippi, from the Grand Canyon, the Tombigbee and the Maumee, waving their autobiographies across a nation from Maine to California, would point to Albert Sidney Burleson and with one great single wave of unanimity all in a day, would put him out of his office in Washington by ten-thirty A.M., start him off from the station by his own rural parcel post to Austin, Texas, before night.
I say by rural parcel post because he would probably arrive there quicker than if he were sent like a mere letter.
Why is it that if one were trying to think up some way in these present quarrelsome days, of making a hundred million people all cheerful all in a minute, all sweet and harmonious together, the most touching, the most national thing the hundred million people could be asked to do would be to take up gently but firmly and replace carefully in Austin, Texas, the most splendidly mislaid man, at the moment anyway, this country can produce.
Because Mr. Burleson is the kind of man who believes what he wants to believe and who keeps fooled about himself.
An entirely worthy man who had certain worthy parlor store ideas about how money could be saved in business, made up his mind that if he was placed by the people at the head of the people's Post Office, he would save their money for the people instead of running their Post Office for them.
This is all that has happened. This was Mr. Burleson's preconception of what he was for and what a Post Office was for and not a hundred million people could pry him out of it. Mr. Burleson ran his Post Office to suit himself and his own boast for himself, and the people naturally in being suited with their Post Office had to take anything that was left over that they could get after Mr. Burleson was suited with it.
Mr. Burleson has had a certain hustling automatic thoughtless conception of Albert Sidney Burleson and what he is like and what he can do, and so far as anyone can see he has not spent three minutes in seven years in thinking what other people's conceptions of him are.
I am as much in favor as any one of saving money in a Post Office. But I want my letters delivered, and I feel that most people in America would agree with me that the main thing we want from a Post Office is to have it, please, deliver our letters for us.
If the manuscript of this article, which is sure to be rushed at the last minute and which should plan to leave New York for Philadelphia Wednesday night and be (with a special delivery stamp on it) in Philadelphia in the compositor's hands on Thursday morning—should take as has happened before, from one and a half days to two days or three days (with its special ten cents on it to hurry it) to get there, what would any one suppose I would do?
Of course I could ask to have the article back a week and put in another column on Mr. Burleson.
But I am not going to. Mr. Burleson and the readers of thePostare both going to get out of that extra column.
I am going to do what I have done over and over before.
Instead of mailing as one would suppose this manuscript at nine o'clock Wednesday evening and having it in the compositor's hands the next morning with eight cents for postage and ten cents for special delivery, I am going to go down to the Pennsylvania Station in the afternoon at six o'clock, with my eighteen-cent letter in my hand, buy a three dollar ticket to Philadelphia for it, hire a seat in the Pullman for it, hire a seat in the dining-car for it, put it up at the Bellevue-Stratford for the night and then go out and lay it on the editor's desk myself in the morning, see it in his hand myself and get a receipt from his eye.
Then I am going to pay my letter's bill at the Bellevue-Stratford, buy a three dollar ticket to New York and a place in the Pullman for myself, G. S. L. on return, as the human envelope Mr. Burleson has required me to be, ship myself back to New York as the empty, as the container this article came in, and one more intimate painful twelve dollars and thirty-seven cents worth of an eighteen-cent experience with Albert Sidney Burleson will be over.
Last time I did this I was early for my train at the Pennsylvania Station and walked out at the Eighth Avenue end, looked up wistfully at Mr. Burleson's new Greek Palace he puts up in when he comes to New York and I came with deep feeling upon the following Beautiful Emotion Mr. Burleson has about himself—four or five hundred feet of it, in letters four feet high all across the top.
NEITHER SNOW NOR RAIN NOR HEAT, NOR GLOOM OF NIGHT STAYS THESE COURIERS FROM THE SWIFT COMPLETION OF THEIR APPOINTED ROUNDS.
Of course I realized in a minute that this was said by Herodotus, or Homer or somebody, and was intended as a courteous reference probably to camels and not as would be supposed to Burleson and his forty thousand mighty locomotives hurrying his orders up and down three thousand miles of sunsets across the land.
But I must say that what Herodotus claimed for the camels when I read it as I did that day in huge marble letters four feet high from Thirtieth to Thirty-second Street, seemed just a little boastful for Mr. Burleson as I stood there and gazed at it holding tight my letter in my hand I was spending twenty-four hours and twelve dollars to keep him from mailing for me.
XVII
THE MAN FIFTY-THREE THOUSAND POST OFFICES FAILED ON
There is one thing I find when I am writing in a national magazine, trying to express myself on an idea I would like to believe but do not want to be fooled about, to four or five million people. I can not help feeling that out of all these four or five million people, at the very least anyway there really must be three million and five hundred thousand who are being very much less fooled about me and about my idea than I am. Every day as I sit down to write one more chapter I try to catch up to them. Of course anybody can see I am not equal to it, but it does give one a chance, and it gives the book a chance before I am through, to have some sense in it.
I cannot help thinking what Albert Sidney Burleson, who has a hundred million people to choose from, who has millions of people who are less fooled about him than he is, to catch up to every day, after all these seven long years they have put on him, ought to amount to.
And what his Post Office ought to amount to.
Of course we are all human and know how it is, in a way. We know that the first thought that would come to Mr. Burleson as to any man when he finds he is being criticized—that people in fifty-three thousand Post Offices are criticizing him and acting with him as if he were fooled about himself, is the automatic thought of self-defense. The second thought, which is what one would hope for from a General, even a Postmaster General, is that one resents it in oneself, that in an important opening for a man like being called foolish, one stops all one's thinking-works, and slumps ingloriously, automatically and without a quaver into self-defense.
One would think a man who could get to be a Postmaster General would have the presence of mind when he says "Ouch!" to a nation that steps on his toes, to fix his face quick, smile and say, "Thank you! Thank you! I will see what there is in this!"
Why should a man when God is blessing him as he does Mr. Burleson, even out of the mouths of his enemies, butt in in the way he does and interrupt truths with enough juice in them to make one Burleson, even one Burleson into twenty great men before a nation's eyes?
A whole Cabinet—at least a whole Democratic Cabinet—could have been made time and time again out of the great-man-juice, the truth-pepsin great men are made out of, this country has wasted on Burleson in the past seven years.
XVIII
CAUSES OF BEING FOOLED ABOUT ONESELF
I would like to give a diagnosis of this quite common disease, touch on the causes and see how they can be removed.
There seem to be, speaking roughly and as far as my own observation of psychology goes, six main ways in which the average man is fooled about himself and needs to change his mind about himself.
He is possessed with loco-mindedness or spotty-mindedness, sees things as they look to one kind or group of people—sees things in spotlights of personality, of place or time—all the rest black.
Or he suffers from what one might call Lost-Mindedness—is always getting lost in anything he does, somewhere between the end and the means. He either loses the means in contemplating with unholy contemplation the end, like an idealist, or he loses the end in contemplating the means.
The Habit of Flat-Thinking—of not thinking things out in four dimensions.
The Habit of Evaporated Thinking. If I were to generalize in what I have to say about men who are fooled by themselves instead of rounding my idea out with some particular man everybody knows, like Mr. Burleson for instance, it would be evaporated thinking.
The Habit of Not Having any Habits—leaving out standardized elements in things and not being machine-minded enough.
Automatism, or Machine-Mindedness.
These six forms of being fooled by oneself all boil down in the end—in their final cause, I suspect to the last one, to automatism or lack of conscious control of the mind.
XIX
LOCO-MINDEDNESS
Loco-mindedness in a Post Office consists in Mr. Burleson's running the Post Office for one kind of people—the kind of people he has noticed.
There are supposed to be various kinds of people who use a Post Office.
There are the people who write hundreds of letters a day—letters that are being waited for accurately and by a particular mail—like telegrams.
There are people who sit down with a pen and a piece of paper, stick out their tongues and chewing on one end of the pen, and slaving away and sweating ink on the other, scrooge out a letter once in three weeks that they have put off six months.
I have no grudge against these people, but it seems to me that running a Post Office exclusively for them as Mr. Burleson does, is a mistake. Even if they constitute ninety-eight per cent of the people, they only mail one-tenth of one per cent of the letters. They may not care whether or not their letters arrive as a matter of course, the way they used to in our Post Office until a little while ago, as accurately as telegrams in their first mail in the morning, but probably they would not feel hurt if they did. But millions of people in business who write scores or hundreds of letters a day, who find themselves being put off with a Post Office that is run apparently for people who write two letters a month, are hurt.
In Northampton, Massachusetts, the letter from New York one used to receive at breakfast, hangs around a junction somewhere now, waits for a letter three hundred miles away—a letter from Pittsburgh to catch up to it, and they both come together sweetly and with Mr. Burleson's smile on after luncheon at half past two in the afternoon.
I do not deny that from the narrower business point of view of running a Post Office the way some women would run—or rather used to run a parlor store—with a bell on the door, there is something to be said for Mr. Burleson's philosophy. Nor do I deny that a store can be run and run successfully and rightly on how much of its customer's money it can save on each purchase.
But the point is that if I go into a store in Northampton and cannot get the things I want there I go into some other store.
I cannot go out from our Post Office in Northampton and go over and get what I want at some other Post Office a little further down the street.
When I and people in fifty-three thousand Post Offices, say Aouch! Mr. Burleson says Pooh!
Business correspondence between Washington and New York which used to be a twenty-four hour affair is now half a week.
Letters thousands of men in New York used to receive in their offices in the early morning before interviews began and when they had time to read letters and to jot an answer to them at the foot of the page, are not received and placed before them for their answers until the late morning or early afternoon when they have other things to do and cannot even read them.
So one's letters wait over a day—a night and a day, or until one gets back from Chicago.
Why is it Mr. Burleson takes millions of dollars' worth a day out of the convenience, out of the profit and out of the efficiency of business in America and then with a huge national swoop of compliment to himself points out to people how he has saved them fifty cents?
Why is it that Mr. Burleson charges us a thousand dollars apiece, in our own private business, to save us fifty cents apiece in public?
Who asked him to?
It is true that there are people in America who really prefer to do business at a puttering kind of a store no matter how much time it costs them. They take naturally to a cash and carry store or to a store that lovingly saves one forty cents' worth of money by taking four dollars' worth of one's time.
It is probably true that some people want a cash and carry freight-car Post Office and want Mr. Burleson to save their money for them. Millions of people would make more money by not having their Post Office save money for them. Mr. Burleson insists his business is to save people's money for them whether they can afford to have him save it or not.
The first cause of Mr. Burleson's being fooled about himself is that he is spotty-minded about people, the fact that he has been running the Post Office with reference to one special slow canal-minded kind of America. His mind is jet black about all the rest.
Perhaps Mr. Burleson is not the only one of us in America who is loco-minded or spotty-minded in business, who is running his business into the ground by noticing only one kind of people.
XX
FLAT-THINKING
THINKING IN ME-FLAT
What nature seems to have really intended, is that human beings should do their thinking in four dimensions.
The thickness is what I think.
The breadth is what other people think.
The length is what God thinks.
Then when a man has taken these three and put them together and sees them as a whole, that is to say when I have taken what I think, and what I think other people think, and what I think God thinks, and put them together as well as I can, the result is—who I am and what I amount to.
Most people tend most of the time, unless very careful, to think in the first or "I think" dimension, stop on the way to God in the "I think" thickness, and get lost in it, or they get lost in the "They Think" breadth, lost in what other people think and never get to God at all.
The trouble with the Post Office has been that Mr. Burleson likes to think in the first or "I think" dimension, does not care what other people think and skips right past them straight to God.
Probably it would be unfair to say that the Post Office is egotistical, self-centered, sitting and looking at its own navel full of the bliss and self-glorification of Mr. Burleson's being the Hero of economy and winning his boast of saving the money of the people, but it does seem as if it would cool off the Post Office some in its present second-rate business idea—its idea of freeing the letter-making business from doing anything more for the people than can be helped—if Mr. Burleson would stop and sit down and have a long serious think about what fifty thousand Post Offices think.
There have been days—with my half-past two letters when if I had Roger Babson's gift for being graphic I would have charted Mr. Burleson's Post Office like this:
Chart of Post Office
XXI
LOST-MINDEDNESS
OR LOSING THE END IN THE MEANS
I have wanted, before dropping the causes of people's being fooled about themselves, to dwell for a moment on lost-mindedness, or losing the end in the means.
To avoid evaporated thinking or generalizing I am illustrating my idea once more from Mr. Burleson as the great common experience of all of us which we daily have together, Mr. Burleson makes us see so many things together.
I wish something could be done to get our Postmaster General to sit down seriously with a two-cent stamp and look at it and study it.
It does not seem to me that Mr. Burleson has ever thought very much about the two-cent stamp, that he quite understands what, in a country like this, a two-cent stamp means.
Every now and then when I take one up and hold it in my hand, I look at it before putting my tongue to it and think what a two-cent stamp believes. It has come to be for me like a little modest seal for my country—like a flag or a symbol. A two-cent stamp is the signature of the nation, the tiny stupendous Magna Charta of the rights of the people.
As an elevator makes forty stories in a sky-scraper as good as the first one, the two-cent stamp represents the right of one town in this country, so far as the United States is concerned, to be as convenient and as well located as another. Three miles or three thousand miles for two cents.
In physical things it is true that America because it cannot help it has to put a penalty on a man in Seattle for being three thousand miles from New York, but so far as the truth is concerned, so far as thinking is concerned, it costs a man no more to think three thousand miles than to think three. The country pays for it for him.
America tells people millions of times a day on every postage stamp that it is the thought, the prayer, the desire of this country to have every man, no matter where his body is held down in it or how far his freight for his body has to be sent to him, as near in his soul to Washington as Rock Creek Park and as near to New York as Yonkers.
The two-cent stamp is the Magna Charta of the spiritual rights, the patriotic forces and the intellectual liberties of the people and when Albert Sidney Burleson, of Austin, Texas, by establishing a zone system for ideas, for conveying the ideas of the great central newspapers and magazines in which a whole nation thinks together—with one huge national thoughtless provincial swish of his own provincial mind coolly takes ten thousand cities that like to do their thinking when they like, in New York or in Philadelphia, Washington and Chicago, jams them down into their own neighborhoods, glues them to their own papers, tells all these thousand of cities that they have got to be, no matter how big they are, villages in their thinking, cut off from the great common or national thinking, Mr. Burleson commits a wrong against the unity, the single-heartedness and great-mindedness of a great people struggling to think together and to act together in the welter of our modern world, the people will never forget.
Why in a desperate crisis of the world when of all times this nation has got to be pulled together, should people who are accustomed to taking a bird's-eye view of the nation like theLiterary Digestbe fined for it? Why fine the readers of theReview of ReviewsorCollier'sorScribner'sfor living in one place rather than another? I like to think of it Saturday night, half the boys of a nation three thousand miles reading over each other's shoulders the same pages together in theYouth's Companion.
Every man is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—that is to life, to the liberty to live where he wants to and to the happiness of not being fined for it.
A man's body by reason of being a body has to put up with the inconvenience of not being everywhere, but his soul—what he knows and feels and believes and sees in common with others, has a right not to be told it cannot see things the rest of us are seeing all together, has a right not to be told he will have to read something published within a rim of five hundred miles of his own doorbell—that his soul has got to live with a Seattle lid on, or a Boston lid on.
As a symbol of the liberty and unity of the people in this country, the flag is pleasant of course to look at, and it flourishes a good deal, but it does not do anything and do it all day, every day, the way the little humble pink postage stamp does, millions of it a minute, to make people feel close to one another, make people act in America as if we were in the one same big room together, in the one great living-room of the nation.
There is not anything it would not be worth this people's while to pay for making men of all classes and of all regions in this country think and hope and pray together in the one great living-room of the nation—some place where three million people act as one.
It is what we are for in this country to prove to a world that this thing can be done, and that we are doing it, to have some place like a great national magazine where three million people can show they are doing it.
And now Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson, of Austin, Texas, steps up to a great national magazine, a great hall where a nation thinks the same thought, holds a meeting once a week together like theSaturday Evening Post, likeCollier's—dismisses two or three million people from everywhere who get together there every Saturday night, and tells them to go home and read theHampshire County Gazette.
It is not a worse case perhaps of lost-mindedness or of losing the end in the means than the rest of us are guilty of, but with such an inspiring example of what not to do, and of how it works to do it—to lose the end in the means, I have to mention it—not in behalf of Mr. Burleson, but in behalf of all of us.
XXII
I had not intended to illustrate my idea of amateur technique in self-criticism quite so much with Mr. Burleson, especially as I stand for a bi-partisan point of view. I wish there were some way of dealing with Mr. Burleson as a Republican for fifteen minutes and then as a Democrat for fifteen minutes, and in dealing as I am, in what might be called a nationally personal subject, a technique for self-criticism in all of us, I only hope my Democratic friends will give me credit for making use of Mr. Burleson not as a Democrat (it is just their luck that he's a Democrat), but as a specimen human being I am trying to get hundreds of thousands of Republicans that are just like him, not to be like any longer. I have only used our Postmaster General in this rather personal fashion because he is so close and personal to us, because in a time when we are all in peculiar danger of being fooled by ourselves he constitutes, in plain sight a kind of national Common Denominator of the sins of all of us.
We are all concerned. We all want to know.
It is easy enough to say pleasantly as if it settled something that the reason Mr. Burleson keeps doing things and keeps picking at most people so through fifty-three thousand Post Offices day after day, all day, and night after night, all night, is that he is fooled about himself.
But why? What are the causes and the remedies people in general can look up and have the benefit of? When we are being fooled about ourselves, when we believe what we want to believe, and are not willing to change our minds about ourselves, what is there we can do?
XXIII
SELF-DISCIPLINE BY PROXY
My own experience is that my own faults really impress me most when I see them in other people.
I cannot help feeling hopefully that out of the five or six million people who are supposed to read a national magazine, there may be a few scattered hundred thousands who will catch themselves suspecting they may have moments of being like me in this.
Self-discipline sets in, as far as I can make out, in most of us in a rather weak and watery way—that is: we usually begin with seeing how unbecoming other people make our faults look. Then we begin disciplining our faults in other people, get our first faint moral glow, and then before we know it, having once got started chasing up our faults in other people we get so interested in them we cannot even leave them alone in ourselves.
Disciplining other people in itself as an object almost never does any good. Mr. Burleson is not going to get anything much out of this article, but I am the better man for it, and there are others, a million or so perhaps, who are helping me chase up our faults in him, who will chase them back to their own homes from the Post Office.
There are few of us who do not have, certain people, certain times, and certain subjects, with which we can be trusted to be unerringly fooled about ourselves.
And when we consider how Albert Sidney Burleson has missed his chance, when we consider what he could have got out of fifty-three thousand wistful silenced Post Offices in the way of pointers in not being fooled about himself, we cannot but take Mr. Burleson very gravely and a little personally. We cannot but be grateful to Mr. Burleson in our better business moments as America's best, most satisfactory, most complete exhibit of what is the matter with American business.
I leave with the reader the Thought, that probably the majority of men who have been watching Mr. Burleson for seven years wasting fifty-three thousand Post Offices, and all the fifty-three thousand Post Offices could do for him to make a successful man out of him, will go down to their offices next Monday morning, and instead of worming criticism out of everybody in sight, instead of using their business and everybody who approaches them in the business to produce goods, will use the business to produce the impression that they are perfect and that nobody can tell them anything—will just sit there all glazed over with complacency cemented down into their self-defending minds, imperious, impervious, as hard to give good advice to, as hard to make a dent in as beautiful shining porcelain-lined bathtubs.
It would be only fair and would save a good deal of time in business for some of us who like to try new ideas, if there were some way of telling these men—if some warning could be given to us not to bother with them—if these men with brilliantly non-porous minds, could be fitted up so that one could tell them at sight—by their heads looking the way they are—by their being bald—by their having brilliantly non-porous heads—just nice perfectly plain shiny knobs of not-thinking.
One could tell them across a room.
But the man with the most refreshingly eager mind toward new ideas, I know, the mind the most brilliantly open—which fairly glistens inside with eagerness, glistens outside, too.
The only thing there is to go by, in telling a man with a non-porous mind, is to try gently—changing it, and see what happens.
XXIV
MACHINE-MINDEDNESS
The various forms I have mentioned of the malady of being fooled by oneself, all practically boil down to one in the end—one cause which we have to recognize and avoid—automatism, the lack of conscious control of the mind—letting oneself be rolled under the little wheels in one's head.
The main central cause operating with people when they are being fooled about themselves, is machine-mindedness.
A man's body being a great storehouse of psycho-mechanical processes and habits makes his mind react automatically, and when some one calls him a fool or acts with him as if possibly he might have moments of being fooled about himself, the man's whole nature like a spring snaps his mind back into self-defense, and instead of being grateful and thoughtful as a rational or second-thought person always is, he lets his subconscious self take hold of him, tumtum him along into showing everybody how perfect he is.
Everybody knows how it is.
XXV
NEW BRAIN TRACKS IN BUSINESS
Speaking roughly, there are two kinds of men who are markedly successful in business—the men who give people what they want, and the men who make people want things they have thought they did not want before. Moving pictures, watermelons, pianolas, telephones, forks, flying machines and locomotives, appendicitis, Christianity and chewing gum, umbrellas and even babies—have all been brought to pass by convincing other human beings that they do not know what they want, by a process which is essentially courting, that is: by a combination of fighting and affection which arrests, holds and enthralls people into adding new selves to themselves.
I confess to a certain partiality for men who get rich by making people different because I am an evolutionist and the chances are that anything you do to most people that makes them different, improves them.
But comparisons are irrelevant and I am not willing to back down from my good opinion of American human nature in business and admit that men who prosper by making people want telephones, or things they have not wanted, are the business superiors of men who prosper by just piling up on people more and more and better—things they want already.
The superior business man is the man who has a superior knowledge of himself, who searches out and uses the gift he is born with in himself and who gets other people to use theirs. Because it happens that I am an inventor, or what is called an artist, and because though I cannot remember, without the slightest doubt, I began, to advertise that I was here, or about to be here, before I was born, and because I would be bored to death handing out to people things I know they want, or presenting to people truths they merely believe already, it would be shallow for me to say that the men in American business who do not make people want things, and who just heap up on them what they want, are not successful men, are not equally important, equally essential to the state and are not doing for themselves and others just what the country, if it was a wise country and was around asking people to do things, would ask them to do.
On the other hand, I believe that in the present new tragic economic crisis with which all kinds of business men, whatever they are like, are being brought sharply face to face at a time when new brain tracks in business are especially called for—a time when practically millions of people have got to have them and use them whether they want to or not, I have thought it would be to the point to consider in the chapters that follow, what new brain tracks are like, how they work, and what people who have been accustomed not to have new brain tracks or to find them awkward, can do to get them and to make them work.
I
BIG IN LITTLE
A nation, in order to be a safe nation for itself, or safe for other nations in this world, must have a technique for getting and for getting a world to want it to get—its own way.
I am interested in a technique for a nation's getting its way and deserving to get its way because I want to get mine, and because being human and having quite a good deal of human nature taken out of the same stuff—out of the same mixed hot and cold ingredients as other people's, I have quite naturally come to think that what works for me, if I cut down to the quick and am honest with myself, in getting what I want, will probably, with proper shadings, of course, work for anybody.
I have thought I would see if I could not work out in this book, a technique which could be used modestly by one man, tried out in miniature as it were—a technique for getting and deserving to get one's own way.
I pick out one man, to try out the principle on, because it is safer and fairer to try out a principle other people are supposed to be asked to risk, on one man first.
Because I happen to know him better than I know anybody else, and because my experience is, he will stand more from me than anybody else, I have picked out myself.
When the technique has been tried out on one man the people who know him will believe it and try it. Then we will try it on one hundred men one after the other. Then as I have been working it out in this book, try it on the body-politic, the soul and body of a nation, try it on a hundred million people.
Then with a technique for having a body and for not being fooled by ourselves and having some substance in what we say and what we do, we would have the spectacle of a hundred million people making themselves felt in political conventions, making themselves felt in The White House and even being noticed perhaps in time at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue by the great I AM, or I CAN'T, or I WON'T tucked under the come of all of us—called The United States Senate.
II
CONSCIOUS CONTROL OF BRAIN TRACKS
My experience is that the first thing for me to attend to and know, in getting people to let me have my way, is to know when and how to discover and open up in people new brain tracks and when and how to make my main dependence on their old ones.
Getting what one wants from people turns on seeing the situation—the brain track situation in one's own mind at a particular time, and in other people's, as it really is.
In other words, the way to get one's way with people is to know and extend one's consciousness down deeper into one's subconsciousness in one's own mind, so that one draws on the conscious and the subconscious in one's own mind at will, so that gradually having the habit of drawing on the conscious and the subconscious in one's own mind at will, one soon makes oneself master of the conscious and the subconscious in the minds of others.
I do not precisely know this, of course, because I have never practiced having my own way with other people as much as I would like, but my theory and my observation of others who have practiced on me leads me, in speaking for all of us to believe this: The way for a man to do who wants to get his own way with people is to heighten his consciousness, deepen his consciousness down into his subconsciousness, live more abundantly in soul and body, deeper down and higher up and further over into himself than others. Then he gets his way with others because everybody wants him to, almost without knowing it or anybody's else knowing it.
A man who does this becomes like any other great force of nature. The indication seems to be that what the artist in a man or the engineer in him does with the genius in him namely: the driving down of an artesian well of consciousness into his subconsciousness, the using of his new brain tracks and old ones together—is the secret of getting one's way for all of us, whether with Nature or with one another.
Of course, the hard part of this program to arrange for is the new brain tracks to put with the old ones both in getting our own way with other people and with ourselves.
This part of my book deals with what is a very personal problem for most of us—what new brain tracks are really like, how they work, and what people can do to get them.
III
WHAT IS CALLED THINKING
The one special trait that stands out in all new brain tracks in common, is that nobody wants them. The way people really act—even the best of us, when some one steps up to them with new tracks for their brains, is as if they had no place to put them.
The plain psychological facts about them when one fronts up with them are rather appalling. They first appear when one begins to observe closely what one actually does with one's own personal listening and what other people, when one checks them up, do with their listening to us.
In making as I have tried to make during the last six months, a few special studies in not being fooled by myself, studies in changing what I call my mind, I have come to feel that any man who will try several hours each day a few harmless experiments on his friends and on himself and his other enemies, will come to two or three thoughts about Man as a rational being which would have seemed dreams to him six months ago.
The first fact is this:
Nearly everything that is the matter with the world can be traced back to the fact that people have, when one studies them closely, two sets of ears—one set that they look as if they used, put up more or less showily before everybody on the outside, and another entirely secret or real set inside, that they seriously connect up with their souls and themselves and really do their living with.
I first came on them—on these two sets of ears, in my experiences as a young man in speaking to audiences. In the vague helpless way a young lecturer has, I studied as well as I could what seemed to me to be happening to my audiences—what they seemed to be doing to themselves, but it was a good many years before I really woke up to what they were doing to me, to the way their two sets of ears made them treat me.
I would watch people sometimes all suddenly in the middle of a sentence shutting up their real ears or inside ears at me and then holding their outside ones up at me kindly as if I cared, or as if I doted on them—on outside ears, on ears of any kind if I could get them and I would feel hurt but I did not wake up to what it meant.
As I remember it the first thing that made me really wake up to the truth about ears was the fact that I never seemed to want to speak if I could help it, to an audience all made up of women, like a Woman's Club, or all made up of men, or to an audience all made up of very young people or of very old people, or of people who presented a solid front of middle age.
The trouble with a one-sexed audience or a one-classed audience seems to be that they all stop right in the middle of the same sentence sometimes and change to their outside ears all at once and before one's eyes. In any audience representing everybody when any one person feels like it, and goes off on some strange psychological trail of his all alone, one can keep adjusted and one soon begins to find that an audience of men and women both is easier to stand before than one which gives itself up to easy one-sex listening, because the ducks and dodges people make in one's meaning, the subterranean passages, tunnels and flights people go off on, from what one says, all check each other up and are different. When the women go under the men emerge. The same seems to be true in speaking to mixed ages. Fewer passages are wasted. Middle-aged people who remember, and look forward in listening always help in an audience because they seem to like to collect stray sentences cheerfully thrown away by people who have not started remembering much yet, or by people who do not do anything else.
I do not want, in making my point, to seem to exaggerate, but so far as what people do to me is concerned if people would get up and go out of a hall each sentence they stop listening or stop understanding, it would not be any worse—the psychological clang of it—than what they do do. It would merely look worse. The facts about the way people listen, about the way they use their two sets of ears on one, snap one out of their souls, switch one over from their real or inside ears to their outside ones, in three adjectives, are beyond belief. And they all keep thinking they are listening, too. One almost never speaks in public without seeing or expecting to see little heaps of missed sentences lying everywhere all around one as one goes out of the hall.
What is true of one's words to people one can keep one's eye on, is still more true of words in books.
If I could fit up each reader in this book with a little alarm clock or music box in his mind, that would go off in each sentence he is skipping without knowing it, nobody would disagree with me a minute for founding what I have to say in this book about changing people's minds upon the way people do not listen except in skips, hops and flashes to what they hear, the way they do not see what they look at, or the way they think, when they think, when they think they think.
(For every time I say "they" in the last paragraph will the reader kindly read "we.")
If there were some kind of moody and changeable type all sizes, kinds and colors, and if this book could be printed with irregular, up and down and sidling lines—printed for people the way they are going to read it, if the sentences in this chapter could duck under into subterranean passages or could take nice little airy swoops or flights—if every line on a page could dart and waver around in different kinds and colors of type, make a perfect picture of what is going to happen to it when it is going through people's minds, there is not anybody who would not agree with me that all these people we see about us who seem to us to be living their lives in stops, skips and flashes probably live so, because they listen so.
If the type in the pages in this book dealing with Mr. Burleson could be more responsive, could act the way Mr. Burleson's mind does when he reads it—that is if I could have the printer dramatize in the way he sets the type what Mr. Burleson is going to do with his mind or not do with his mind with each pellucid sentence as it purls—even Mr. Burleson himself would be a good deal shocked to see how very little about himself in my book, he was really carrying away from it.
If in Mr. Burleson's own personal copy of this book, I were to have this next chapter about him that is going to follow soon—especially the sentences in it he is going to slur over the meaning of or practically not read at all—printed in invisible ink and there were just those long pale gaps about him, so that he would have to pour chemical on them to get them—so that he would have to dip the pages in some kind of nice literary goo to see what other people were reading about him, he would probably carry away more meaning than I or any one could hope for in ordinary type like this, which gives people a kind, pleasant, superficial feeling they are reading whether they are reading or not.