IV
LIVING DOWN CELLAR IN ONE'S OWN MIND
What I saw a little three-year-old girl the other day doing with her dolly—dragging its flaxen-haired head around on the floor and holding on to it dreamily by the leg, is what the average man's body can be seen almost any day, doing to his mind.
One feels almost as if one ought to hush it up at first until a few million more men have made similar practical observations in the psychology and physiology of modern life when one comes to see what our civilization is bringing us to—what it really is that almost any man one knows, including the man of marked education—take him off his guard almost any minute—is letting his body do to his mind.
A very large part of even quite intelligent conversation has no origination in it and is just made up of phonograph records. You say a thing to a man that calls up Record No. 999873 and he puts it in for you, starts his motor and begins to make it go round and round for you. He just tumtytums off some of his subconsciousness for you. Whether he is selling you a carpet sweeper or converting your soul, it is his body that is using his brain and not his brain that is using his body.
With the average man one meets, his body wags his brain when he talks, as a dog wags his tail. The tongue sends its roots not into the brain but into the stomach. (Probably this is why Saint Paul speaks of it so sadly and respectfully as a mighty member—because of its roots.)
The main difficulty a man has in having a new brain track, or in being original or plastic in a process of mind is the way his body tries to bully him when he tries it. The body has certain tracks it has got used to in a mind and that it wants to harden the mind down into and then tumtytum along on comfortably and it does not propose—all this blessed meat we carry around on us, to let us think any more than can be helped.
I saw some wooden flowers in a florist's window on The Avenue the other day—four or five big blossoms six inches across—real flowers that had been taken from the edge of a volcano in South America—real flowers that had chemically turned to wood—(probably from having gas administered to them by the volcano!)—and I stood there and looked at them thinking how curious it was that spiritual and spirited things like flowers instead of going out and fading away like a spirit, had died into solid wood in that way. Then I turned and walked down the street, watching the souls and bodies of the people and the people were not so different many of them as one looked into their faces, from the wooden flowers, and I could not help seeing, of course, no one can—what their bodies—thousands of them—were apparently doing to their souls. After all the wooden flowers were not really much queerer for flowers than the people—many of them—were for people.
From the point of view of the freedom and the plasticity of the human mind, from the point of view of spiritual mastery, of securing new brain tracks in men and women and the consciousness of power, of mobilizing the body and the soul both on the instant for the business of living, it is not a little discouraging after people are twenty-one years old to watch what they are letting their bodies do to them.
Left to itself the body is for all practical purposes so far as the mind is concerned a petrifaction-machine, a kind of transcendental concrete mixer for pouring one's soul in with some Portland Cement and making one's living idea over into matter, that preserve them and statuefy them in one—just as they are. Unless great spiritual pains are taken to keep things moving, the body operates practically as a machine for petrifying spiritual experiences, mummifying ideas or for putting one's spiritual experiences on to reels and nerves that keep going on forever.
There is ground for belief (and this is what I am trying to have a plan to meet, in these chapters) that the reason that most of us find talking with people and arguing with them and trying to change their minds so unsatisfactory, is that we are not really thorough with them. What we really need to do with people is to go deeper, excavate their sensory impressions, play on their subconscious nerves, use liver pills or have a kidney taken out to convince them. Talk with almost any man of a certain type, no matter what he is, a banker, a lawyer, or a mechanic, after he is thirty years old, and his mind cannot really be budged. He is not really listening to you when you criticize him or differ with him.
The soul—the shrewder further-sighted part of a man, up in his periscope has a tendency to want to think twice, to make a man value you and like you for criticizing him and defend himself from you by at least knowing all you know and keep still and listen to you until he does, but his body all in a flash tries to keep him from doing this, hardens over his mind, claps itself down with its lid of habit over him. Then he automatically defends himself with you, starts up his anger-machine, and nothing more can be said.
What a man does his not-listening with is not with his soul, but with his machine. The very essence of anger is that it is unspirited and automatic. The spirited man is the man who has the gusto in him to listen, in spite of himself to what his fists and his stomach do not want to let him hear.
Of course when a man keeps up a thing of this sort for a few years—say for twenty or thirty years—the inevitable happens and one soon sees why it is that the majority of people—even very attractive people one goes around talking with and living with, after thirty years, become just splendid painted-over effigies of themselves. One has no new way of being fond of them. One looks for nothing one has not had before. They go about—even the most elegant of them—thinking with their stomachs.
Thoughts they get off to us sweetly and unconsciously as if they were fresh from heaven—as if they had just been caught passing from the music of the spheres, are all handed up to them on dumb waiters from below.
V
BEING HELPED UP THE CELLAR STAIRS
Most of us feel that the national crisis that lies just ahead calls in a singular degree for new and creative ideas and brain paths, both for our leaders and our people.
We realize—whatever our personal habits may be that the great mass of the driving ahead that is to be done in this nation in its new opportunity, must come whether in business, invention or affairs, from picked men here and there in every business and in every calling, who insist on thinking with their heads instead of with their stomachs.
The question of how these men who seem to strike out, who seem to do more of their thinking above the navel than others, manage to do it—the question of how other people—a hundred million people can be got to follow in these new brain tracks for a nation—these new ways for a nation to get its way, is a question of such immediate personal and national concern to all of us, that I would like to try to consider for a little what can be done toward giving new brain tracks to the nation and what kind of people can do it.
The men who do it, who are going to begin striking down through the automaton in all of us, are going to begin taking hold of people's minds and re-routing and recoördinating their ideas and are going to be the more important and most typical men of our time. The man I know who comes nearest to doing it, to practicing the new profession of being a lawyer backward, who has a technique for giving his clients real inspirations in believing what they do not like to believe about themselves, in seeing through themselves, is P. Mathias Alexander, in the extraordinary work he is doing in London, for people in the way of reëducating and recoördinating their bodies.
I took home from a bookshop one day not long ago, after reading an article about it by Professor James Harvey Robinson in theAtlantic, Mr. Alexander's quite extraordinary book, which after starting off with an introduction by Professor John Dewey, of Columbia, leads one into a new world, to the edge, almost the precipitous edge of a new world.
I am inclined to believe that the deepest and most penetrating knowledge of that curious and delicate blend of spirit and clay we call a human being, and the most masterful technique for getting conscious control of it and of the helpless civilization in which it still is trying to live, are going to be found before many years to be in the brain and the hand of Mathias Alexander. It is hard to keep from writing a book about him when one thinks of him, but as I cannot write a book about him in the middle of this one, I am going to touch for a moment on the principle Alexander employs in breaking through new brain tracks in persons, and then try to apply the same principles to breaking through new brain tracks for a nation.
What Mr. Alexander does with people I have already hinted at in what I have said about our having a new profession in America—the profession of being a lawyer backward. Of course Mr. Alexander could not say of himself that he was in the profession of being a lawyer backward, but he does practically the same thing in his field that a lawyer backward would do. He makes it his business to change people's minds for them instead of petting their minds and he does the precise thing I have in mine except that he confines himself in doing it to what he calls psycho-mechanics—to a single first relation in which a man's mind needs to be changed—the relation of a man's mind to his body.
If a man's mind gets his body right, it will not need to be changed about many other things in which it is wrong. The first thing a man's mind should be changed about usually is his body.
This is the principle upon which Mathias Alexander in the very extraordinary work he is doing in London, proceeds.
When you are duly accepted as a client and have duly given credentials or shown signs that you want all the truth about yourself that you can get no matter how it hurts, or how it looks, you present yourself at the appointed time in Alexander's office, or studio, or laboratory, or operating room—whatever the name may be you will feel like calling it by, before you are finished, and Alexander stands you up before the back of a chair. Then he takes you in his hands—his very powerful, sensitive and discerning hands and begins—quite literally begins reshaping you like Phidias. You begin to feel him doing you off as if you were going to be some new beautiful living statue yourself before very long probably.
Then he stands off from you a minute, takes a long deep critical gaze at you—just as Phidias would, studies the poise and the stresses of your body, X-rays down through you with a look—through you and all your inner workings from the top of your head to the soles of your feet.
Then he lays hands on you once more and works and you feel him working slowly and subtly on you once more, all the while giving orders to you softly not to help him, not to butt in soul and body on what he is doing to them with your preconceived ideas—ideas he is trying to cure you of, of what you think you think when you are thinking with what you suppose is your mind, and what you suppose you are doing with what you suppose is your body. In other words, he gives you most strenuously to understand that the one helpful thing that you can do with what you call your mind or what you call your body is to back away from them both all you can. As it is you and your ideas mostly that are what is the matter with your mind and body, and with the way you admit they are not getting on together, Alexander's first lessons with you you find are largely occupied in getting your mind—your terrible and beautiful mind which does such queer things to you, to back away. What he really wants of you is to have you let him make a present to you outright of certain new psycho-physical experiences, which he cannot possibly get in, if you insist on slipping yours in each time instead. So he keeps working on you, you all the while trying to help in soul and body by being as much like putty—a kind of transcendental putty as you can, or as you dare, without falling apart before your own eyes. Then when you have removed all obstructions and preconceptions in your own mind—and will stop preventing him from doing it, he places your body in an entirely new position and subjects you to a physical experience in sitting, standing and walking, you have never dreamed you could have before.
This goes on for as many sittings as are necessary and until you walk out of the studio or the operating room during the last lessons feeling like somebody else—like somebody else that has been lent to you to be—somebody else strangely and inextricably familiar that you will be allowed to wear or be or whatever it is for the rest of your life. Incidentally you are somewhat taller, your whole body is hung on you in a new way, a mile seems a few steps, stairs are like elevators, you find yourself believing ideas you believed were impossible before, liking people you thought were impossible before—even including very conveniently much of the time, yourself. He has changed your mind about your body. You are no longer fooled about what you are actually doing with your subconscious or what it is actually doing with you.
It is not a psychic process ignoring mechanical facts in the mind, nor a purely physical process ignoring the psychic facts in the body. It is a putting of the facts in a man's mind and the facts in his body inextricably together in his consciousness—as they should be, in that he is no longer letting himself be fooled by his subconsciousness, swings free, and feels able to stop when he is being fooled about himself.
I have been reading over this chapter and all I can say to my readers is, as a substitute for leaving it out, that I hope it sounds to them like a fairy story. I like to think when I am going on from chapter to chapter in a book—I like to keep thinking of my readers how rational they are. The principles underlying what Mr. Alexander does with new brain tracks and what I am trying to do can be discussed in this book. The facts can be looked up and are suitable subjects not for books but for affidavits.
VI
REFLECTIONS ON THE STAIRS
It is a not unfamiliar experience for a man to go to a dentist, get into a chair and point to a toothache in the upper right or northeast corner of his mouth and have the dentist tell him that the toothache he thinks he is having there is really in the root of a tooth in the right lower or southwest corner. Then he pulls the southwest corner tooth and the northeast corner toothache is over.
(These figures or rather points of the compass may not be literally right, but the fact that they point to is.) Nearly every man has had things happen to him not very different from this. You have a bad lameness in your right knee and the wise man you go to, tells you that you are deceived about the real trouble being in your right knee, calls your attention to a place three and a half feet off way up on the other side of you, says you should have a gold filling put in a tooth there and your right knee will get well.
What seems to be true of people is that though in a less glaring and more subtle fashion, there are very few of us who are not subject either all or part of the time to more or less important and quite unmanageable illusions about things with which we are supposed to be—if anybody is—the most intimately acquainted. One keeps hearing every few days almost, lately, of how people's inner organs are not doing what they think they are, of how very often—even the most important of them have been mislaid—a colon for instance being allowed to do its work three inches lower than it ever ought to be allowed to try, and all manner of other mechanical blunders that are being made, grave mechanical inconveniences which are being daily put up with by people, when they move about or when they lie down, of which they have not the slightest idea.
The sensory impressions of what is really happening to us, of where it is happening and how and why are full—in many people of glaring and not infrequently dangerous illusions, but these physical illusions which we have are reflected automatically in our spiritual and intellectual ones. All kinds of false ideas people have about one another which we are not seeing about us on every hand, false philosophies and religions, heresy trials, lockouts and strikes—all the irrational things people say and do to each other thousands of miles away are being produced by the way people are being fooled by their own precious insides. Each man is doing things that are unfair and wrong thousands of miles away, because he is off on his facts as to what is going on the first few feet off, because the first hundred and fifty pounds of consciousness which have been assigned to him to know about personally and attend to personally he is letting himself be fooled with every day.
A man who is being fooled near by, regularly all the time, fooled from the sole of his poor tired feet to the poor helpless nib at the top of him which he calls his head, is naturally hard to argue with about the immortality of the soul, or the League of Nations. Reforms and reformers which overlook these facts must not be surprised if they seem to some of us a little superficial.
Of course the moral of all this is—as regards changing society or persuading and convincing persons, get down to first principles. Stop flourishing around with fine and noble philosophies and phrases on the surface of men's souls. See that their souls and their bodies are both intricately divinely stupendously blended together and get at them both together. If you are arguing with a man and do not make much headway, stop arguing with him. Cut out his tonsils.
Or it may be something else. Or send him to Alexander and have his back ironed out, if necessary so that his tonsils will work as they are.
Then argue with him afterwards and quote Shakespeare and the Bible to him, stroke his soul and see how it works.
VII
HELPING OTHER PEOPLE UP THE CELLAR STAIRS
It is getting almost dangerous to talk to me. I lay violent hands on people, when they disagree with me and send them to Alexander.
Everybody, anybody, my wife, my pastor, every now and then an editor, whole shoals of publishers.... I think what it would be like for us all, to ship The United States Senate in a body to him. On every side it keeps coming to me that the short, quick and thorough way for me to install my idea, to get my idea started and to install my idea of new brain tracks, new ways for this nation to get its way and deserve its way, is to have people the minute they don't agree with me, alexandered, at once.
Here is this book for instance. The proper course for me to take to get a man to accept the new brain track in it, is to send him a copy of the book to say yes or no to. Then if he does not agree with me and I am tempted to argue with him, I will drop the matter with him at once, send him to Alexander, have Alexander set him in a chair, tap him on the back, poke him thoughtfully, psycho-mechanically in the ribs, unlimber his mind from his body, untangle him psycho-physically, put him in shape so that he can think free, listen without obsessions and mental automatism—that is, get him so that he can set his mind on a subject instead of setting his stomach on it, and then I will ask him to read my book again.
In the meantime, of course, I should be going to Alexander and rewriting the book.
By the time the gentleman was cured I would have a cured book to send him, we would both be in a position to believe what we don't want to believe, to listen to each other indefinitely and we would be in a position to do team work together at once and take steps to install new brain tracks for nations immediately.
This brings me to the two horns of my dilemma.
In installing new brain tracks for nations it is not practicable for me to take up people who disagree with me—say a hundred million people or so and ship them to Alexander in London and have them done over by Alexander.
What is the best possible substitute arrangement that can be made for having a whole nation put into perfect psycho-mechanical shape by Alexander so that it will take the first new brain tracks kindly?
The principles for giving people new brain tracks toward their own bodies which Mr. Alexander has so successfully demonstrated, are the same principles which I have been trying for a long time to express and apply to ideas and to all phases of the personal and the national life.
Where I have been studying for years as an artist, the art of changing my own mind and other people's about ideas, of working out new spiritual experiences for myself and other people, Alexander in his workroom in London has been engaged in changing people's minds toward their bodies, in giving men new brain tracks toward their own bodies.
It is obvious that these principles—Alexander's principles for installing new physical experiences and mine for installing new spiritual ones, must be if they are fundamental or are worth anything, the same.
My own feeling is that if anybody can go to Alexander and can be done over by Alexander personally in London that is the best thing to do. But it is inconvenient for a hundred million people to crowd into Alexander's office in London, and it is comparatively convenient and roomy for a hundred million people if they want to, to crowd into a book. Before giving the principles, I would like to state the question—What are the steps we all can use—those of us who are not Alexander—to install new brain tracks in this nation?
The principles upon which, as it seems to me, new brain tracks for this nation should be installed and which I would like to deal with are these:
First. Get people first to recognize with regard to new brain tracks, the fact that they do not want them.
Second. Get their attention to what people with new brain tracks seem to be able to do in the way of getting in our present moving world, the things they want. People go to Alexander and ask him for new brain tracks. Something corresponding to this has to be got from people before offering them new brain tracks in a convention or in a book.
Third. Pick out the people next to the people the proposed new brain tracks are for, who seem to be the particular kind of people best calculated to make the necessary excavations in their brains, to loosen up ideas, or any hard gray matter there may be there, so that something can be put in.
The fourth step when we recognize that we want the facts against ourselves and see what we can do with them, is to ask people to let us have them.
VIII
HELPING A NATION UP THE CELLAR STAIRS
The Air Line League is a national organization of millions of American men and women belonging to all classes and all social and industrial groups, who become members of the League for the express purpose of asking people to help to keep them, in their personal and industrial relations, from being off on their facts, from being fooled by their subconscious and automatic selves.
Unless one is practically asked, it is not an agreeable experience telling a man how he looks, handing over to him the conveniences for his being objective, for his being temporarily somebody else toward himself, and yet if one can persuade any one to do it, it is probably the most timely and most priceless service rendered in the right spirit, any one man or group of men can ever render another.
The best way to secure the right people for this service is to ask them. The people who do not need to be asked and who would be only too cheerful to do it, who are lying awake nights to do it to us whether we want them to or not, are not apt to do it in a practical way.
The best way to ask the best people is to place oneself in a position, as in joining the Air Line League, where people will feel asked without any one's saying anything about it.
This is the first principle we propose to follow in the League. By the act of joining the League, by the bare fact that we are in it, we announce that we are askers, and listeners, that as individuals, and as members of a class, or of our capital groups or our Labor groups, we are as a matter of course open and more than open to facts—facts from any quarter we can get them which will help to keep us in what we are doing from being fooled about ourselves.
Having agreed to our principle, whether as individuals or groups, of being unfooled about our subconscious and automatic selves, who are the best people in a nation constituted like ours, to unfool us the most quickly, to get our attention the most poignantly, and with the least trouble to us and to themselves?
IX
TECHNIQUE FOR LABOR IN GETTING ITS WAY
The best people to advertise a truth are the people the truth looks prominent on—the people from whom nobody expects it.
In my subconscious or automatic self the decision has apparently been made and handed up to me, that there are certain books, I do not need to read.
My attention has never been really got as yet, to the importance of my reading one of Harold Bell Wright's novels. But if I heard to-morrow morning that Henry Cabot Lodge and President Wilson during the last few peaceful months had both read through Harold Bell Wright's last novel, I would read it before I went to bed.
Or Judge Gary and Mr. Gompers. Any common experience which I heard in the last few weeks Judge Gary and Mr. Gompers had had, a novel by Harold Bell Wright or anything—I would look into, a whole nation would look into it—the moment they heard of it—at once.
The first thing to do in making a start for new brain tracks for America is to pick out persons and brain tracks that set each other off.
Even an idea nobody would care about one way or the other becomes suddenly and nationally interesting to us when we find people we would not think would believe it, are believing it hard and trying to get us to believe it.
Suppose for instance that next Fourth of July (I pick out this day for what I want to have happen because I have so longed for years to have something strong and sincere said or done on it that would really celebrate it)—suppose for instance that next Fourth of July, beginning early in the morning all the Labor leaders of America from Maine to California, acting as one man broke away—just took one day off, from doing the old humdrum advertising everybody expects from them—suppose they proceeded to do something that would attract attention—something that would interest their friends and disappoint their enemies—just for twenty-four hours? Suppose just for one day all the Labor leaders instead of going about advertising to themselves and to everybody the bad employers and how bad employers are in this country would devote the Fourth of July to advertising a few good ones?
Then suppose they follow it up—that Labor do something with initiative in it—the initiative its enemies say it cannot have, something unexpected and original, true and sensationally fair, something that would make a nation look and that a hundred million people would never forget?
What does any one suppose would happen or begin to happen in this country, if Labor; after the next Fourth of July, started a new national crusade for four weeks—if the fifty best laborers in the Endicott Johnson Mills where they have not had a strike for thirty years should go in a body one after the other to a list of Bolshevist factories, factories that have ultra-reactionary employers, and conduct an agitation of telling what happens to them in their Endicott Johnson mills, an agitation of telling them what some employers can be like and are like and how it works until the Bolshevist workmen they come to see are driven by sheer force of facts into being non-Bolshevist workmen, and their Bolshevist or their reactionary employers are driven by sheer force of facts into being Endicott Johnsons, or into hiring men to put in front of themselves, who will be Endicott Johnsons for them.
All that is necessary to start a new brain track in industrial agitation in America to-day is some simultaneous concerted original human act of labor or capital, some act of believing in somebody, or showing that either of them—either capital or labor—is thinking of somebody, believing in somebody, and expecting something good of somebody besides themselves. Millions of individual employers and individual laborers about have these more shrewd, these more competent practicable and discriminating beliefs about employers and employees as fellow human beings, and all we need to do to start a new national brain track is to arrange some signal generous conclusive arresting massive move together to show it.
This is the kind of work the Air Line League proposes on a national scale like the Red Cross to arrange for and do.
The common denominator of democracy in industry is the human being, the fellow human being—employer or employee.
The best, most practicable way to make it unnecessary for America in shame and weakness to keep on deporting Bolshevists, is to arrange a national advertisement, a parade or national procession as it were in this country soon, of team work in industry and of how—to anybody who knows the facts—it carries everything before it.
The best possible national parade or pageant would be up and down through ten thousand cities to expose every laborer to long rows of employers who stand up for workmen, expose every employer to long rows of workingmen from all over the country who stand up for employers.
Of course this is physically inconvenient, but it would pay hundreds of times over to conduct a national campaign of having laborers bring other laborers into line and of having employers shame other employers into competence.
The best substitute for this national demonstration, this national physical getting together like this, is as I have said before, a book read by all, by employers and employees looking over each other's shoulders, each conscious as he reads that the other knows he reads, knows what he knows and is reading what he knows.
X
TECHNIQUE FOR CAPITAL IN GETTING ITS WAY
I should hate to see Capital, in the form of a National Manufacturers' Association, realizing the desperateness of the labor situation and that something has got to be done at last which goes to the bottom, slinking off privately and confessing its sins to God.
I would rather see a confession of the sins of Capital toward Labor for the last forty years and of its sins to-day made by Capital in person to Labor.
God will get it anyway—the confession—and it will mean ten times as much to Him and to everybody if He overhears it being given to Labor.
Of course Labor has been doing of late wrong things that it is highly desirable should be confessed and naturally Capital thinks that a good way to open the exercises would be with a confession from Labor to Capital to the effect that Labor admits that Labor like the Trusts before it had had moments or seizures in which it has held up the country, broken its word, betrayed the people and acted the part the people hate to believe of it—of the bully and the liar.
Not only the Capital Group but the Public Group feel that a confession from Labor before we go on to arrange things better is highly to be desired.
But the practical question that faces us is—supposing that what is wanted next by all, is a confession from Labor, what is the practical way from now on, to get Labor to confess?
Some supposing might be done a minute.
Suppose I have a very quick temper and five sons and suppose the oldest one has my temper and is making it catching to the other sons, what would any ordinary observer say is the practical course for the poor wicked old father to take with the boy's temper of which he has made the boy a present?
My feeling is when my boy loses his temper with me at dinner for instance in the presence of the other boys, that poking a verse in a Bible feebly out at him and saying to him, "He that keepeth his temper is greater than he that taketh a city," would be rude. The way for me to give him good advice about losing his temper is to sit there quietly with him while he is losing his, and keep mine.
If Capital wants to get its way with Labor—and thinks that the way to begin with the industrial situation in this country, after all that has happened, is with a vast national spectacle of Labor confessing its sins, the most practical thing to do is for Capital to give Labor an illustration of what confessing sins is like, and how it works.
The capitalists among us who are the least deceived by their subconscious or automatic minds, are at the present moment not at all incapable of confiding to each other behind locked doors that the one single place, extreme labor to-day has got its autocracy from, is from them.
Labor is merely doing now with the scarcity of labor, the one specific thing that Capital has taught it to do and has done for forty years with the scarcity of money and jobs.
It seems to me visionary and sentimental and impracticable for Capital to try to fix things up now and give things a new start now, by slinking off and confessing its sins to God.
Labor will slink off and confess its sins to God, too.
That will be the end of it.
It may be excellent as far as it goes, but in the present desperate crisis of a nation, with the question of the very existence of society and the existence of business staring us in the face, it really must be admitted that as a practical short cut to getting something done, our all going out into a kind of moral backyard behind the barn and confessing our sins to God, is weak-looking and dreamy as compared with our all standing up like men at our own front doors, looking each other in the eye and confessing our sins to one another.
I am not saying this because I am a moral person. I am not whining at thirty thousand banks pulling them by the sleeves and saying please to them and telling them that this is what they ought to do.
I am a practical matter of fact person, speaking as an engineer in human nature and in what works with human nature and saying that when capitalists and employers stop being sentimental and off on their facts about themselves and about other people, when they propose to be practical and serious, and really get their way with other people they are going to begin by being imperfect, by talking and acting with labor, like fellow-imperfect human beings.
In the new business world that began the other day—the day of our last shot at the Germans, the only way a man is going to long get his way is to be more human than other people, have a genius for being human in business, for being human quick and human to the point where others have talent.
XI
PHILANDERING AND ALEXANDERING
By philandering I mean fooling oneself with self-love.
By Alexandering I mean going to one's Alexander whoever he or she or it is, some one person—or some one thing, which either by natural gift or by natural position is qualified to help one to be extremely disagreeable to oneself—and ask to be done over—now one subject and now another.
Nearly all men admit—or at least they like to say when they are properly approached, or when they make the approach themselves, that they make mistakes and that they are poor miserable sinners. Everybody is. They rather revel in it, some of them, in being in a nice safe way, miserable sinners. The trouble comes in ever going into the particulars with them, in finding any particular time and place one can edge in in which they are not perfect.
This fact which seems to be true of employers and employees, of capital and labor in general, brings out and illustrates another general principle in making the necessary excavations in one's own mind and other people's for new brain tracks—another working principle of technique for a man or a group in a nation to use in getting and deserving to get its way.
There are various Alexandering stages in the technique of not being fooled by oneself.
Self-criticism.
Asking others to help—one's nearest Alexander.
Self-confession to oneself.
Self-discipline.
Asking others to help.
The way to keep from philandering with one's own self-love or with one's own group or party—is to look over the entire field—the way one would on other subjects than being fooled by one's own side, strip down to the bare facts about oneself and facts about others for one's vision of action and fit them together and act.
In getting one's way quickly, thoroughly, personally—i.e., so that other people will feel one deserves it and will practically hand it over to one, and want one to have it, the best technique seems to be not only to utilize self-criticism or self-confession, as a part of getting one's way, but self-confession screwed up a little tighter—screwed up into self-confession to others.
I need not say that I am not throwing this idea out right and left to employers with any hopeful notion that it will be generally acted on offhand.
It is merely thrown out for employers who want to get their way with their employees—get team work and increased production out of their employees before their rivals do.
It is only for employers who want their own way a great deal—men who are in the habit of feeling masterful and self-masterful in getting their own way—who are shrewd enough, sincere enough to take a short-cut to it, and get it quick.
XII
THE FACTORY THAT LAY AWAKE ALL NIGHT
There is a man at the head of a factory not a thousand miles away, I wish thirty thousand banks and a hundred million people knew, as I know him—and as God and his workmen know him.
Some thirty years ago his father, who was the President of the firm, failed in health, lost his mind slowly and failed in business. The factory went into the hands of a receiver, the family moved from the big house to a little one—one in a row of a mile of little ones down a side street, and the sixteen year old son, who had expected to inherit the business stopped going to school, bought a tin dinner pail and walked back and forth with the tin dinner pail with the other boys in the street he lived in, and became a day laborer in the business he was brought up to own.
In not very many years he worked his way up past four hundred men, earned and took the right to be the President of the business he had expected to have presented to him.
Eight or ten years ago he began to have strikes. His strikes seemed uglier than other people's and singularly hopeless—always with something in them—a kind of secret obstinate something in them, he kept trying in vain to make out. One day when the worst strike of all was just on—or scheduled to come on in two days, as he looked up from his desk about five o'clock and saw four hundred muttering men filing out past his windows, he called in Jim—into his office.
Jim was a foreman—his most intimate friend as a boy when he was sixteen years old. He had lived in the house next door to Jim's and every morning for years they had got out of bed and walked sleepily with their tin dinner pails, to the mill together talking of the heavens and the earth and of what they were going to do when they were men.
The President had some rather wild and supercilious conversation with Jim, about the new strike on in two days and it ended in Jim's dismissing the President from the interview and slamming himself out of the door, only to open it again and stick his head in and say, "The trouble with you, Al, is you've forgotten you ever carried a dinner pail."
The President lay awake that night, came to the works the next morning, called the four hundred men together, asked the other officers to stay away, shut himself up in the room with the four hundred men and told them with a deep feeling, no man present could even mistake or ever forget, what Jim had said to him about himself—that he had forgotten how he felt when he carried a dinner pail, told them that he had lain awake all night thinking that Jim was right, that he wanted to know all the things he had forgotten, that they would be of more use to him and perhaps more use than anything in the world and that if they would be so good as to tell him what the things were that he had forgotten—so good as to get up in that room where they were all alone together and tell him what was the matter with him, he would never forget it as long as he lived. He wanted to see what he could do in the factory from now on to get back all that sixteen-year-old boy with the dinner pail knew, have the use of it in the factory every day from now on to earn and to keep the confidence the sixteen-year-old boy had, and run the factory with it.
Jim got up and made a few more remarks without any door-slamming. Fifteen or twenty more men followed with details.
This was the first meeting that pulled the factory together. In those that followed the President and the men together got at the facts together and worked out the spirit and principles and applied them to details. The meetings were held on company time—at first every few days, then every week, and now quite frequently when some new special application comes up. Nine out of ten of the difficulties disappeared when the new spirit of team work and mutual candor was established and everybody saw how it worked.
No one could conceive now of getting a strike in edgewise to the factory that listened to Jim.
I am not unaccustomed to going about factories with Presidents and it is often a rather stilted and lonely performance. But when I first went through this factory with the President that listened to Jim, stood by benches, talked with him and his men together, felt and saw the unconscious natural and human way conversations were conducted between them, saw ten dollars a day and a hundred dollars a day talking and laughing together and believing and working together, it did not leave very much doubt in my mind as to what the essential qualities are that business men to-day—employers and workingmen—are going to have and have to have to make them successful in producing goods, in leading their rivals in business and in getting their way with one another.
Naturally as a matter of convenience and a short cut for all of us, I would like to see Capital take what is supposed to be its initiative—be the side that leads off and makes the start in the self-discipline, self-confession and conscious control of its own class, which it thinks Labor ought to.
Whichever side in our present desperate crisis attains self-discipline and the full power in sight of the people not to be fooled about itself first, will win the leadership first, and win the loyalty and gratitude and partiality and enthusiasm of the American people for a hundred years.
The first thing for a man to do to get his way with another man—install a new brain track with him that they can use together, is to surprise the man by picking out for him and doing to him the one thing that he knows that you of all others would be the last man to do.
It looks as if the second thing to do is to surprise the man into doing something himself that he knew that he himself anyway of all people in the world, is the last man to do.
First you surprise him with you. Then with himself. After this of course with new people to do things, both on the premises, the habit soon sets in of starting with people all manner of things that everybody knew—who knew anything—knew the people could not do.
This is what the President of the factory not a thousand miles away accomplished all in twenty-four hours by not being fooled about himself. He took a short cut to getting what he wanted to get with his employees, which if ten thousand other employers could hear of and could take to-morrow would make several million American wage earners feel they were in a new world before night.
The thing that seemed to me the most significant and that I liked best about the President of the Company who listened to Jim, was the discovery I made in a few minutes, when I met him, that unlike Henry Ford, whom I met for the first time the same week, he was not a genius. He was a man with a hundred thousand duplicates in America.
Any one of a hundred thousand men we all know in this country would do what he did if he happened on it, if just the right Jim, just the right moment, stuck his head in the door.
Here's to Jim, of course.
But after all not so much credit to Jim. There are more of us probably who could have stuck our heads in the door.
The greater credit should go to the lying awake in the night, to the man who was practical enough to be inspired by a chance to quit and quit sharply in his own business, being fooled by himself and who got four hundred men to help.
Incidentally of course though he did not think of it, and they did not think of it, the four hundred men all in the same tight place he was in of course, of trying not to be fooled about themselves, asked him to help them.
Of course with both sides in a factory in this way pursuing the other side and asking it to help it not to be fooled, everything everybody says counts. There is less waste in truth in a factory. Truth that is asked for and thirsted for, is drunk up. The refreshment of it, the efficiency of it which the people get, goes on the job at once.