§ 2.The Engineer At Work.
The crowning glory of a nation is the independence and the spiritedness of its labor.
I rejoice daily that the war has made a man expensive, has made it impossible for men to succeed in business any longer as employers who do not love work, who cannot make other men love their work, and who have nothing in themselves or in their job or the way they make the job catching—who cannot get men to work for them except by offering them more money than they can earn.
The fact that no man is so cheap he can be had by merely being paid money—the fact that no man is so unimportant but he has to be approached as a fellow human being and has to be persuaded—and given something human and real, is the first faint flush of hope for our modern world. It lets in an inkling at last that the industrial world is going to be a civilization.
If men were made of india-rubber, or reinforced concrete, or wood or steel, no one could hope for better or more efficient men to manage big business than the typical big business men of the phase of American industry now coming to an end.
But of course in the crisis business is facing now, which turns on the putting forward of men who understand and can play masterfully upon the motives, temptations and powers of ordinary human nature the typical man we know at the Mahogany Desk, who has a machine imagination, who sees men as dots and dreams between piles of dollars and rows of machines, is a singularly helpless person and can only hold his own in his own business by giving way and putting forward in place of himself, men who are masters in human nature, experts and inventors in making men want to work.
The difference between the business world that is passing out and the one that is coming in, is that the masters of the world who have been proud before, to be called the captains of industry, are going to think of themselves and want others to think of them as the fathers of industry. The man who orders can no longer order. People will only work and work hard for the man who fills them with new conceptions, who stirs the depths of their lives with desire and hope.
The reason that reactionary capital is having trouble with labor, is that it is putting forward men who order instead of putting forward fathers and inventors.
The reason that the I. W. W. and other labor organizations are having trouble with capital, is that their leaders are not inventors. They are tired conventional men governed by automatic preconceptions, merely doing over again more loudly and meanly against society, the things that capital has already tried and has had to give up because it could not make them work.
Only inventors—executives who invent and fertilize opportunity for others—men who invent ways of making men see values—men who create values and who present people with values they want to work out, are going to get anything—either money or work, from now on, out of anybody.
§ 3.The Engineer and the Game.
The time has gone by when a man can say any longer he is not in business for the fun of it. He finds he cannot long compete with the men about him who are, with engineers and others who are in business for the great game of producing results, of doing difficult things, of testing their knowledge, their skill and their strength.
Making men want to work has come to be the secret of success in modern business and the employer who has nothing but wages to offer, nothing in his own passion for work which he can make catching to others, can only get second-rate, half-hearted men and plodders about him. A factory in which the workmen merely work for wages, cannot hope to compete with a factory fitted up with picked men proud of their work.
It is not going to be necessary to scold people into not being selfish, or whine people into loving their work. A man who is so thin-blooded that the one way he can get work out of himself is to make money—the man who grows rich by ordering, by gobbling, and by hiring gobblers and plodders, cannot function under the new conditions. The guarantee that we are going to have a civilization now, that business with joy in it and personal initiative and motive in the work itself, is going to take possession of the markets of the world is based on the fact that labor has to have its imagination touched in order to work efficiently, and an entirely new level and new type of man—the man who can touch men's imaginations, is being put forward in business to do it.
The Engineer is going to have somewhat the quieting effect upon institutions and upon the spirit of unrest in the people, when he is known to be in control of the great employers and has made them dependent on him, that the matter of fact and rather conclusive taxi meter in a cab has on the man inside, who wants to quarrel with his cabman.
A business world largely in control of men who have the spirit and the technique of engineers will make unrest more awkward, will make the red flag look stranger, feel stranger and lonelier every day.
§ 4.The American Business Sport.
If any man ever again in this world finds like Methuselah, the secret of eternal youth, the secret will be found to consist in being, I suspect, what the best American business man already is—what I would call a fine all-round religious sport.
Sport has certain well-known disadvantages. So has religion. The man who once grasps the secret of modern life as practiced by a really big engineering genius, insists upon having his business allowed all the advantages of sport and religion both.
To have something on which one spends ten hours a day, which has all the advantages without the disadvantages of being a sport, and all the advantages without the disadvantages of being a religion, is a find.
The typical engineer, like any other thorough-going man treats what he does as a sport. That is, he puts his religion for the fun of it into his business. His business becomes the continual lark of making his religion work. He dramatizes in it his belief in human nature and in God, his belief that human nature is not crazy and that God has not been outwitted in allowing so much of it to exist.
It has looked especially reckless during the last four years for God to let human nature try to keep on being human nature any longer. Now is the time of all others, and Germany is now the country of all others, to show with a whole world looking on how essentially sound human nature really is, and how being human (especially being human in a thing which everybody cares about and which everybody notices, like business) really works.
There has never been such a chance dreamed of for a nation before in history, the chance America has now of dramatizing to Germans, and dramatizing through the Germans to everybody, an idea of business efficiency that shall be in itself not only in its spirit but in its very substance, peace come into the world.
People shall not put up with mere leagues and truces, arbitration boards, fight-dove-tailings. They shall not sit at tables and twirl laws at people—to make them peaceful....
The only men in modern business who can now hope to get to the top are the men who are in a position to hire men who do not work for wages.
Making men want to work is the secret of the engineer in production.
The secret of modern industry is the secret of the man who loves his work. To the sporting man, the gentleman, the man who loves the game, the prize goes now in competition with Gobblers and Plodders.
The Engineer or Winner instead of the Compeller of Men is going to draw out new kinds and new sizes of laboring men in industry at every point. The Engineer we count on in the Try-Out Club is the man who superimposes upon the normal and suitable motive in his business of being selfish enough to make money to keep the business up, the motive of the gentleman, the professional man, the artist, the engineer, the sport—the motive of doing a thing for its own sake, and because one likes it.
The expression "I am not in business for the fun of it" is going by.
What we are going to do with the mere half-alive profit-plodders—the mere wage gobblers, is not to improve them by making moral eyes at them, or discipline them by putting down lids of laws over them or by firing taxes at them. We are going to discipline men like these by driving them into the back streets of business, as anæmic, second-rate and inefficient men in bringing things to pass.
A man who in a tremendous and absorbing adventure like real business is so thin-blooded or thick-headed that all he can get work out of himself for is money, will only be able to get the plodding kind of second-rate workers to work for him,i.e., he will be able to get only plodders who merely work for money, by paying higher wages than other people have to—by paying higher wages than they can earn.
In other words, civilized business, business with joy in it and personal initiative and human interest in the work itself, is going to drive uncivilized plodding half-hearted business out of the markets of the world.
The men who are expressing through the hearts of the people their best, more lasting and more powerful selves, in business, who are gathering around them other people who are doing it, the men who try out their best selves in business—who invent ways as executives to make their best selves work for them and for others, are having to-day before our eyes, the world placed in their hands. Men who represent vital forces like these, are as solid, unconquerable in human life as the force of gravity, the multiplication table they are. They find themselves dominating like radium, penetrating like fresh air, drawing all things to them like the sky, the stars, like spring, like the love of women and of children and the love of Christ.
The idea of having imagination about a customer and studying a customer as a means of winning his trade, his personal enthusiasm and confidence, is not considered sentimental.
Having imagination about one's employees so that they will work in the same spirit as the other partners, is no longer considered sentimental except by the type of employer now being driven to the wall because he has no technique for making anybody want to work for him. As things go to-day it is the leader in industry who is trying to keep up a fine comfortable feeling of being a captain of industry—the man who feels he owns everything and owns everybody in sight, who is visionary and sentimental, who is the Don Quixote of business now.
The employer who feels superior to individuals, who looks at men as dots and dreams—and who expects to deal with a man subconsciously and get on with him as if he were not there—the employer who is an absentee in soul and body, and who gives an order to his men and then goes off and leaves them like pumps, hydraulic rams, that of course cannot help slaving away for him until they are stopped—the employer who during the first stupid stages of our new machine-industry, has been allowed to be prominent for a time, now stands exposed as too wooden and incompetent to conduct the intimately personal, difficult and human institution a factory has got to be if it succeeds (in a country with men like ours) in producing goods.
From now on the big man in business is the man who gets work out of people that money cannot buy. The man who cannot get the work that money cannot buy in a few years now, is not going to stand the ghost of a chance.
People will not believe you if you tell them what the world was like when he did.
Mastering others so that they have to do what one says is superficial, merely a momentarily successful-looking way a man has of being a failure. This master has been tried. He has failed. He is the half-inventor of Bolshevism.
The real master is not the man who masters men, but who makes them master themselves. The masterful man in getting out of people what he wants, is the man who makes the people want him to have what he wants—makes them keep giving it to him fresh out of their hearts every day.
The wholesale national and international criticism the Red Cross workers made in the latter months of the Red Cross activities, of the touch-the-button and hand-down-the-order methods of many of the business men who controlled the activities at home and abroad—of the millions of workers in the Red Cross, has been itself a kind of national education in what certain types of American business men placed in power fell inadvertently into, in trying to treat millions of free people on the employer and employee plan.
But these men and their whole idea are going by. We are getting down to the quick, to the personal and the human, to the sense all good workers have of listening and being listened to and of not being overridden. Big business after this is going to be big in proportion as it makes people feel—employees and customers both, that they are listened to, that they are being dealt with as individual human beings and not as fractions of individuals, or as part of some big vague bloodless lump of humanity.
Studying one's customers so as to make them want to trade with one is here to stay.
To speak of studying with the best expert skill in the country one's employees so as to make them want to work, as humanity, is not quite bright. It is not humanity. It is business.
Making people trade with one instead of making them want to trade with one is recognized as second-rate business. So is making people work for one instead of making them want to work. The business man who depends for his business, on customers, or on workers who want to get away and are going to the first minute they can, naturally goes under first.
VI
THE PUT-THROUGH CLAN PUTS THROUGH
§ 1.What.
We are a people who think in action. Our way of making other nations think and of thinking ourselves is to do things.
The people who swept into and took over the Red Cross, who dramatized the American people in the war abroad—are the people who are going to make war at home impossible.
The big spiritual or material fact about the Red Cross is that it has been a dramatic organization, that for four years it has been an organization for acting out the feelings, desires, wills and beliefs of a great people toward men who were fighting for liberty.
The Red Cross has been a great emotional epic play, an expression in action, of the heart and brain of a mighty nation.
Emotions by great peoples have been spectacular before, and they have been sentimental and they have been occupied with enjoying themselves.
But in the Red Cross twenty million people have been as inspired as Saint Francis and as practical as a Steel Trust in the same breath.
The vision of the future of the Put-Through Clan that lies ahead is that it shall keep on dramatizing these qualities in the American character at home, selecting things to do which shall dramatize our people to one another, to themselves and to the people of other nations.
The way to make democracy work is for the people to use their brains, their spirit and their imagination to do team-work with the inventors and engineers who help express their democracy for them.
The platform of the Put-Through Clan is the right of all to be waited on.
Skilled labor has a right to be waited on by skilled capital.
Skilled capital has a right to skilled labor in return.
The new and stupendous force in modern life from now on is to be the skilled consumer—the organization of the consumer-group to coöperate with skilled capital and skilled labor, to make it impossible as it is now, for unskilled capital, capital which has not the skill to win the public, or to win its own labor, and for unskilled labor, labor which cannot earn its money and takes it whether it earns it or not, to compel the consumer by force and by holdups to buy goods they do not want at prices they are not worth from men with whom they do not want to deal. The skilled consumer will organize his skill and deal with the people he wants.
All the people of this country—the consumers (the real employers of all employers) have to do, is to whisper in one national whisper through a hundred thousand grocery stores and other stores what kind of employers and workmen, what kind of goods and factories they like, and the buyers and consumers of America instead of taking what is poked out at them because they have to, and being the fools and the slaves of capital and labor, will get with a whisper what they request, and we will return and will let employers and workmen return, to the status of human beings.
§ 2.How.
The test of a man's truth is his technique.
What Mathias Alexander believes about conscious control and making self-discipline work is true because he does not have to say it. He dramatizes it.
Alexander is right in his fundamental idea of giving conscious control to people through new brain tracks toward their bodies because they get up and walk away from him when they have been with him, with their new brain tracks on. New habits—new psycho-physical habits, like Culebra cuts are put right through them.
The man who conceives or invents may be wrong, the man who experiments or tries out, may need to be watched, but the man who puts through is inviolable.
The program, the spirit and the function of the Put-Through Clan in a town, is to embody truth so baldly and with such a shameless plainness that no matter how hard they try, people cannot tug away from it.
There are three courses we might take in the Put-Through Clan in dealing with our town. (1) We can stand for disciplining capital and labor into shape by passing laws and heaping up penalties. (2) We can let them see how much better they can make things by sicking them on to each other and having them discipline each other. (3) We can make fun of both of them until they make fun of themselves and each class begins disciplining itself. Then general self-discipline will set in. We propose to indulge—each group of us in the Put-Through Clan—the labor group in the town, the employer group and the public group, in self-disciplining ourselves, until the thing is made catching out of sheer shame and decency in others.
§ 3.Psycho-Analysis.
The scientific basis for psycho-analysis for a town, or for a labor union, or for a Republican or Democratic Party, is found in the facts that have been stated by Mathias Alexander in his book and demonstrated by his work.
Professor John Dewey in his introduction to Mr. Alexander's book speaks of what Mr. Alexander stands for, as Completed Psycho-analysis.
As Alexander's technique for pulling one particular man, soul and body, together, is precisely the technique I have in mind for pulling a nation together, I want to dwell on it a moment longer before applying it to the Put-Through Clan.
The first thing a man is always fooled about is his own body and in everything else he is fooled about, he just branches out from that.
The Put-Through Clan proceeds upon the idea that this is as true of his political or social or industrial body to which he belongs as it is of his first one.
Reform must be self-reform first.
If it is true that the majority of ideas and decisions most people think they make with their minds are really made for them and handed up to them by their bodies—if it is true that what people quite commonly use their minds for is to keep up appearances, to give rational-looking excuses and reasons for their wanting what their stomachs and livers and nerves make them want, the way to persuade people nowadays is to do what Christ did—get their minds out from under the domination of their bodies.
If it is true that when a man goes to his dentist with a toothache, he finds he does not know which side of his mouth it is on, it is likely to be still more true of all the rest of his ideas about himself—his ideas about his ideas.
If everything about us, about most of us is more or less like this, as Alexander says—wires or nerves all twisted, sensory impressions upside down, half of what is inside our bodies mislaid half the time, the way to change people's minds is to change them toward the bodies they are with and that they are nearest to, first. Then we can branch out and educate others—even educate ourselves.
Millions of grown people, in religion, business and politics to-day in America can be seen thinking automatically of the world about them in the terms of themselves, in the terms of their own souls sadly mixed up with their own bodies. We all know such people. The world is just an extension, a kind of annex or wing, built out from themselves full of reflections from their own livers, and fitted up throughout with air castles, dungeons, twilights, sunrises, after-glows, from their own precious interior decorations and bowels and mercies.
The basic fact about human nature the Put-Through Clan acts on is the simplest thing in the world. We are always having moments of seeing it. We all see how true it is in babies we have personally known. We recognize it without a qualm in a baby, that his emotions and reflections about life, about Time and Eternity, and about things in general are just reflections of a milk bottle he has just had, or of a milk bottle he has not just had and wants to know why.
I have often tried to translate a baby's cry in his crib, into English. As near as I can come to it, it is
"I don't think my mother knows WHO I AM!"
What a baby is really doing is disciplining other people.
Not so very different after all from Senator Lodge pivoting as he has for six months a whole world on himself and on his having his own little way with it, disciplining the rest of the Senate, forty nations and a President, and everybody in sight—except himself.
If a patient nation could put him in a crib, everybody would understand. Many people apparently are deceived by his beard, or by his degree at Harvard, or other clothes. But it is the same thing. What is really happening to him—to Senator Lodge is really a kind of spiritual neuritis. He is cramped, or as the vulgar more perspicuously and therefore more fittingly and elegantly put it, his mind is stuck on himself. He is imbedded in his own mereness and now as anybody can see there is nothing that can be done by anybody with anything, not with a whole world for a crowbar, to pry Lodge off himself.
Most of us know other people like this. Most of us have moments and subjects on which as we have remembered afterwards we have needed to be pried off. The same is true, of course, of a political body like the Republican or Democratic Party, or of a labor union.
The best that most of us—whole towns of us—can do is to get up as we propose for a whole town to do in the Put-Through Clan on the same platform, stand there cheerfully all together on the great general platform and admit in chorus sweetly, that we are all probably this blessed moment and every day being especially fooled more or less by ourselves about ourselves, about the things nearest to us—especially our own personal bodies and political and industrial souls and bodies. The only difference between people who are put into insane asylums and those of us who are still allowed from day to day a little longer to stay out, is that we can manage, if we try, some of us, to be more limber about calling ourselves fools in time. For all practical purposes in this world, it may be said that the people who are wise and deep about keeping themselves reminded that they may be crazy any minute, are sane.
What happens to people—to most people when they are grown up is that they stop being simple and honest like a baby. But they all have practically the same essential thought when they are being disagreeable. They are trying to make the world around them toe the line to their own interior decorations. What they think, what they feel, what they do in the little back parlors of their own minds must be daubed on the ceiling of the world.
The joy of toleration, of new ideas, of rows and tiers of their non-selves, and of their yet-selves reaching away around them that they can still know and share and can still take over and have the use of in addition to the mere self they already have, they hold off from.
This is where the baby has the advantage of them.
§ 4.Psycho-Analysis for a Town.
When a man thinks of himself and wants other people to think of him as an institution—as a kind of church—of course it makes him very unhappy to believe he is wrong, but the minute he thinks of himself as a means to an end, thinks of his personality as a tool placed in his hand for getting what he wants or what a world wants—the minute a man thinks of himself as a kind of spirit-auger, or chisel of the soul, or as a can-opener to truth, which if it is a little changed one way or the other, or held differently, will suddenly work—changing himself toward himself, and believing what he would rather not, becomes like any other invention or discovery, a creative pleasure.
In saying that the main thing the Put-Through Clan is for in a town, is to act as town-headquarters for the town's seeing through itself, as a means of making the town the best, the happiest town in the state—as a means of making it a town that deserves anything it wants, I am merely saying that the act of self-invention—the act of recreation once entered into as a habit is so refreshing and so extraordinary in itself, and so practical in its results, that when people once see how it really works—when towns and parties and industrial groups get once started in self-discipline, in self-confession, in psycho-analysis and in taking advantage of opposite ideas—there is going to be an epidemic in this country, a flu of truth.
A whole city or a whole town indulging in psycho-analysis finds it less embarrassing and not more embarrassing than one man does.
When it becomes the thing for a city or for a capital or labor group to see through itself and then collect on the benefit of it, the main thought cities and labor unions and employee managers will have about it will be a wonder they had not thought of it and done it before.
And it will be economical, too, if people take the seeing through them that has to be done by some one, and do it themselves.
Three per cent of the conveniences—the public X-ray machines for keeping people from being fooled about themselves will be enough.
The minute we begin turning the X-ray outfit around and begin trying it modestly on ourselves, a small cheap outfit will do.
It is a mere phonograph-record to say that nobody likes self-discipline. What people do not like, is trying it, or getting started.
There is a sense in which it is possible for a town like Northampton—twenty-five thousand people, to have—if it once gets started, almost an orgy of seeing what is the matter with it. It is easier to be humble in a crowd that is being humble, and a whole town disciplining itself instead of being more difficult to imagine, Would be easier, once start the novelty of one man's doing it.
Why should people think that a man who is capable of disciplining himself is doing it because he thinks he ought to, or why should they be sorry for him?
No one really thinks of being sorry for Marconi or Edison or Wilbur Wright, or Bell, or any big inventor in business or even for a detective like Sherlock Holmes, the whole joy and efficiency of whose life is the way he steals a march on himself.
The very essence and power of being an inventor or a detective or a discoverer, is the way it makes a man jump out around himself, the way he keeps on the qui vive not to believe what he likes, goes out and looks back into the windows he has looked out of all his life.
People must not take the liberty of being sympathetic with a man who does this and of thinking he is being noble and doing right.
It has never seemed to me that people who look noble and feel noble when they are doing right, can ever really do it. I am not putting forward in the present tragic crisis of my nation, the idea of self-criticism, of self-confession, and of self-discipline, with any weak little wistful idea that beautiful and noble people will blossom up in business all over the country and practice them. I am offering self-discipline as a substitute for disciplining other people in business, as a source of originality, power and ideas, and as a means of getting and deserving to get everything one wants. I am offering self-discipline because it works. People who get so low in their minds and who so little see how self-discipline works that they actually have the face to feel noble and beautiful about it when they are having some, cannot make it work. They must be leaving most of theirs out....
The psychology of self-discipline is the psychology of the inventor.
The inventor is the man who lives in the daily habit of criticising his own mind, and disciplining himself. The source of his creative and original power is that more than other men he keeps facing necessities in himself, keeps casting off old selves, old preconceptions and breaking through to new ones.
The spiritual and intellectual source of the grip of the inventor upon modern life, is that he is a scientist in managing his own human nature and his own mind, that he had a relentless rejoicing habit of disciplining himself.
In every renaissance, revival or self-renewal the world has had, people have had the time of their lives. The great days of history have been the eras of great candid truth-facing, self-discipline. Self-discipline and self-discovery go together.
There is a greater return on the investment in being born again, in getting what one wants, than in anything else in the world.
If one sees through himself, he can see through anybody. It explains and clears up one's enemies and clears one's own life for action.
§ 5.To-morrow.
I am not writing a beautiful wistful work on how I wish human nature would work or hope it is going to work, in America.
I am recording a grim, matter-of-fact, irresistible, implacable law in the biology of progress.
I am not nagging, teasing or apologizing. I am not saying what I say as religion or as the Lord said unto Moses, or even "as it seems to me."
I am not dealing in what I want to have happen.
I am dealing in truth as a force and not as a property.
I am foretelling what has got to happen. People who do not believe it will have to get out of the way of it.
The conscious control of capital, the conscious control of labor, the conscious control of the public group—the arrival and the victory of the men who get their way by self-control and who are invited by all to have control of others because they have control of themselves, is a law of nature.
I am not preaching or teasing.
I am not asking people's permission in this book for certain events.
This book is not an attempt to answer the question, "What is day after to-morrow's news?"
It is put forth as a prospectus of what has got to happen.
The truth is taking hold of us and is seizing us all.
It is for us to say.
This book is a scenario of a play for a hundred million people to put on the stage, and for five hundred million people to act.
§ 6.Who.
People will be unfair to themselves and unfair to me and will cheat a nation if any attempt should ever be made to take this book as a program—a program for anybody—and not a spirit.
The spirit is the program, and the people who naturally gather around the spirit and who secrete it will have to be the ones to embody and give it in the Put-Through Clan, its local and its national expression.
Picked persons, picked out by all for their known temperament and gift for team-work—that is for their put-through spirit or spirit of thoroughness in getting the victory over themselves and combining themselves with others, will need to be the dominating people.
The essence of the Clan is that it is to be vivified and penetrated throughout with personality, and with respect for personality.
This means automatically that the Put-Through Clan is not going to be dominated by people who will make it a moral-advice, do-you-good, hand-you-down-welfare institution.
The essential point in its program is self-discipline and any discipline there may be for others will wait until it is asked for and will be a by-product of the discipline we are giving ourselves.
In the operation of the Clan there are certain persons and types of persons to whom the Clan is always going to be distinctly partial. It is never going to treat people alike. People are not—for the time being—alike and are going to be treated as they are.
Democracy is impossible as long as people are not treated with discrimination—as long as people cannot feel and do not like to feel that what they are, makes a difference in what they get.
It is obvious that to begin with that the Put-Through Clan, composed as it is to be of the leading people in all groups—the people whose time has a premium placed on it in their own private business, will have a regular practice of giving the most attention and giving the most power, approval and backing to those persons with whom the least time brings the greatest return.
This means automatically extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionists in industry in getting what they want through the Put-Through Clan, will have to stand further down the queue than others.
I am only speaking for myself of course, as one person, as representative—possibly more possibly less of others in the Clan. Any scintilla or fleck of truth I can pick off from a revolutionary, I take but I will not take him. The same is true of a standpatter or reactionary. I want to know all he knows. If I take his truth I can use it, if I take him I will find him cumbersome. Life is too short to spend ten hours on him when ten minutes would do as much with some one who could listen or converse or with whom one could exchange thoughts and actions instead of papal bulls, orders and explosions.
People who do not listen—extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionists, really ought, in getting the attention and the backing they want in the Put-Through Clan, to have what comes last and what is left over from the day's work.
It is only fair that people should get attention in proportion as a little attention goes a great way.
If people do not listen it takes too much time to deal with them. Besides which, of course, giving what they want to people who do not listen—to people who in the very face of it, cannot be trusted to notice or consider others—people who are always getting up and going out, who move in an idle thoughtless rut of ultimatums, is dangerous.
People who are in the mood and the habit of ultimatums will naturally be picked out by the Put-Through Clan as the last people they will hurry with.
Extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionaries apparently will have to be carried and supported by society, kept on as it were on the spiritual town farm or under surveillance, or in the workhouse or slave pen of thinking they prefer, until they can come out and listen and treat the rest of us as fellow human beings.
On the same principle of time economy and of being fair to all, the Put-Through Clan will find itself coming to its decisions and giving its backing to people—to capital groups and labor groups in proportion as they are spirited.
The people who give the most return on the investment—the people who give the most quick thorough and spirited response—in the general interests of a world that is waiting to be decent must be the ones who shall be waited on first.
I have never been able to see why it is so generally supposed that people who have so little spiritual power that they cannot even summon up enough spirit not to be ugly, should be spoken of as spirited.
I would define spirited labor as labor which uses its imagination, labor which thinks and tries to understand how to get what it wants instead of merely indulging in wild destructive self-expression and worship of its own emotion about what it does not want.
Spirited labor is inventive and constructive toward those with whom it disagrees and wants to come to terms.
Revolutionaries and reactionaries are tired and automatic, tumtytumming people—who do not want to think.
I am not saying that spiritually tired people are to blame for being tired. I am pointing out a fact to be acted on.
Tired people always want the same thing. They want a thing to stay as it is—or they want it to stay just as it is—upside down. The same inefficiency, fear and weakness, meanness—merely another set of people running the inefficiency and trying to make fear, weakness, meanness work.
This is where the Put-Through Clan of the Air Line League comes in. The Put-Through Clan will throw the local and national influence of twenty million consumers on to the side of spirited or team-work capital and labor, and will discourage, make ridiculous and impossible, the scared fighting capital and the scared fighting labor with which we are now being troubled.
The real line of demarcation in modern industry is not between capital and labor, but between spirited capital and labor that want to work, create and construct, on the one hand, and unspirited capital and labor, working as little and thinking as little as they can, on the other.
The majority of revolutionaries are people who without taking any trouble to study or understand anything, or to change anything, just turn it thoughtlessly upside down—substitute their inefficiency for the other man's.
Extreme revolutionaries generally talk about freedom, but until they can get us to believe they are going to allow freedom to others, the world is not going to let them—of all people, have any.
The bottom fact about revolutionary labor like revolutionary capital is that it is tired. Revolutionary labor is not spirited. It is as soggy-minded, thoughtless and automatic to be a revolutionist to-day as it is to be a Louis XVI.
It takes originality to construct and to change things and change the hearts and minds of people and the spirit of a nation.
Anybody can be a revolutionist or a reactionary. All one has to do is to stop thinking and sag, or stop thinking and slash.
The mills of the gods grind slowly because they grind fine. The main difference between men and the gods is that when men do things on a large scale they are apt to slur things over and be mechanical, do things in huge empty swoops—pass over details and particular persons, and the gods when they do things on a large scale pay more attention to details, to microbes and to particular persons than ever.
In national issues of capital and labor, the opinions of employers and workmen who have worked out a way of meeting the crisis on a smaller scale, who understand one another on a five or six hundred scale instead of a two or three million scale, would be treated by the Air Line League as probably weighty and conclusive. Those classes of employers and employees who in a marked degree have failed to have the brains to understand each other even in the flesh and at hand with both persons in view themselves, must expect to have their national opinions about national labor and national capital discounted by the Clan. The Put-Through Clan nationally will grade the listening and ranking of the demands of industrial groups upon the assumption that people who slur over what is next door are not apt to be deep about things that are further away.
§ 7.The Town Fireplace.
The outstanding fact about our modern machine civilization and its troubles is that crowd-thinking has seized the people—that people see things and do things gregariously. We have herds of fractions of men, acting as fractions of men and not as human beings.
Each fraction is trying to get the whole country to be a fraction. Being a fraction themselves they want a fraction of a country.
Ten differing men can get together and agree.
Ten differing crowds of men—of the same men, will get together and fight.
Crowds are self-hypnotized. A man who would not be hypnotized off into a fraction of a man alone, with enough men to help him becomes a thousandth or ten thousandth of a man in twenty minutes.
If five crowds of a hundred thousand men each could sit down together around a fireplace and listen to the others—if each crowd of a hundred thousand could feel listened to absolutely—listened to by the other four hundred thousand, for one evening, democracy would be safe for the world in the morning.
As it is, each crowd sits in Madison Square Garden alone—holds a vast lonely reverie all alone, hypnotizes itself and then goes out and fights.
Of course there are the crowds on paper, too. Ink-mobs roam the streets.
Crowds do not get on as individual persons do, because individual crowds cannot get physically and humanly together.
It has been generally noted that the best radical labor leaders who come into definite personal contact with employers grow quite generally conservative and that the best conservative leaders become what would have once seemed to them radical when they really learn how to lead.
Why is it that when they begin to learn as leaders how things really are, they are so often impeached by the crowds they represent—by capital and labor?
The moment there are conveniences for crowds—for the rank and file of crowds to catch up to their leaders, to see things whole, too—the moment we have the machinery for crowds being able to have the spiritual and personal experiences their leaders have with the other side, crowds will stop dismissing their leaders—the moment they see both sides, and get practical, too.
The purpose of the local chapter of the Put-Through Clan, is to find a means in each town of getting all crowds and groups together regularly as one group revealing themselves, listening and being listened to, and confiding themselves to team-thinking and to doing team-work together.
The Put-Through Clan headquarters in a town will be the Town Fireplace for Crowds. It will be the warmest, liveliest, manliest, most genial resort in town—where all the live men and real men who seek real contacts and care about men who do, will get together. The refreshing and emancipating experience many men had in army camps will be carried on and become a daily force in the daily life of every town in America.