Chapter XIV: Book V: The Technique of a Nation's Being Born Again (2)

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.

Sec. 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.

Sec. 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.

Sec. 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.

Sec. 8. _The Sign on the World._

I looked up yesterday and saw a sign on a church in New York. I like it better every time I go by.

THIS CHURCH IS OPEN ALL DAY EVERY DAY FOR PRAYER, MEDITATION AND BUSINESS.

I have been wondering just who the man is who had the horse-sense and piety to take up the secret of business and the grip of religion both, telegraph them into ten words like this, and make a stone church say them at people a thousand a minute, on the busiest part of the busiest street in New York.

Whoever the man is, he stands for the business men we want for the Put-Through Clan first.

One of the first things the Put-Through Clan is going to dramatize is this sign on the Marble Collegiate Church.

The men in America in the next twenty years who are going to carry everything before them in business, drive everybody and everything out of their way, take possession of the great streets and the great factories in the name of God and the people, are the men who practice daily the spirit of this sign, the men in business who refuse to go tumtytumming along in a kind of thoughtless inertia of motion, doing what everybody's doing in business--the men who turn one side (by whatever name they call it) to pray, to snuggle up to God and think.

Men who have success before them in business are the men who have the most imagination in business.

Imagination with most of us consists in taking time to see things before other people do, in connecting up what we do with its larger, deeper, more permanent relations, relating what we do to ourselves, to others, to our time and generation, to the things we have done before and to the things that must be done next.

"Prayer, Meditation and Business."

It is wonderful how these words, when one comes on a man who does not say anything about it and puts them together, tone each other up.

The first thing the Put-Through Clan is going to do in a town in this present tipply and tragic world, is to stand by and help make known to everybody across a continent the men in business who stand by these words--who mix them so people cannot tell them apart.