suicide. Statistics show that those who sink to this lowest degree of
life satisfaction are not the poorest. Not seldom they are the
millionaires who have lost their fortune and kept only enough for a
living which would still be a source of happiness to hosts of others.
If the average wage were five thousand dollars, or, better said, the
comfort which five thousand dollars can buy to-day, this standard
would be taken as a matter of course like fresh air and fresh water.
The same old dissatisfactions and discomforts would spring from the
human heart, when it looked with envy on the luxuries of the
ten-thousand-dollar men, or when by recklessness and foolishness or
illness the habitual home life became suddenly reduced to a pitiable
three-thousand-dollar standard, which would be the goal for the
workingmen of to-day. We are too little aware that the average
existence of the masses in earlier centuries was on a much narrower
scale than the life of practically the poorest to-day, and that the
mere material existence of those who to-day consider themselves as
industrial slaves is in many respects high above that of the
apprentices in the periods before the machine age. Even at present
those who think that they are at the bottom of material life in one
country often live much better than the multitudes in other lands in
which fewer desires have been aroused and developed.
The individual may often alternate between different standards, just
as any one of us when he goes out camping may feel perfectly happy
with the most moderate external conditions, which would appear to him
utter deprivation in the midst of his stylish life the year around.
Many an Irish servant girl feels that she cannot live here without her
own bathroom, and yet is perfectly satisfied when she goes home for
the summer and lives with seven in a room, not counting the pigs. This
dependence upon relative conditions must be the more complete the more
the income is used for external satisfactions. As far as the means
serve education and æsthetic enjoyment and inner culture, there
remains at least a certain parallelism between the amount of supply
and the enjoyment. But the average American of the five-thousand-dollar
class spends four thousand nine hundred dollars on goods of a different
order. Altogether his expenses are the house and the table, the
clothes of the women, and his runabout. In all these lines there is no
limit, and the house of to-day is no longer a pleasure if his
neighbour builds a bigger one to-morrow. The man with the
fifty-thousand-dollar expenditures feels the same dissatisfaction if
he cannot have the steam yacht and the picture gallery which the
multimillionaire enjoys.
The inner attitude, the temperament, the training, the adjustment of
desires to the available means, is the only decisive factor in such
situations. The trust magnate and the factory foreman have equal
chances to feel happiness in the standard of life in which they live.
If they compare themselves with those who are richer, and if their
hearts hang on the external satisfactions, they both may feel
wretched; and yet with another turn of mind they both may be content.
Optimism and pessimism, contentment and envy, self-dependence and
dependence upon the judgment of the world, joyfulness and despondency,
are more decisive contrasts for the budget of happiness than the
difference between fifteen dollars a week and fifteen dollars a
minute. Some of my best friends have to live from hand to mouth, and
some are multimillionaires. I have found them on the whole equally
happy and equally satisfied with their position in life. If there was
a difference at all, I discovered that those who ate from silver
plates were sometimes complaining about the materialism of our time,
in which so much value is put on money. I have never found their fate
especially enviable, nor that of the others especially pitiable, and
evidently they themselves have no such feelings. The general
impression is much more as if actors play on the stage. The one gives
the rôle of the king in purple cloak and ermine, the other plays the
part of a beggar in ragged clothes. But the one rôle is not more
interesting than the other, and everything depends upon the art of
playing the character.
This whole scramble for money's worth is based on a psychological
illusion, not only because pleasure and displeasure are dependent upon
relative conditions, but also because the elimination of one source of
feeling intensifies the feelings from other sources. The vulgar
display of wealth which cheapens our life so much, the desire to seek
social distinction by a scale of expenditure which in itself gives no
joy, have in our time accentuated the longing for wealth out of all
proportion. This is true of every layer of society. The clerk's wife
spends for her frocks just as absurdly large a part of his income as
the banker's wife. Every salesgirl must have a plume on her hat rather
than a nourishing luncheon. Others must have six motor cars instead
of a decent library in their palace. But this longing for useless
display is still outdone by the hysterical craving for amusement. The
factory girl must have her movies every night, and besides the nine
hundred kino shows, a hundred and twenty theatres are needed to
satisfy the amusement seeking crowd of New York, in addition to the
half dozen which offer art. This mad race to outdo one another and
this hunting after pleasures which tickle the senses have benumbed the
social mind and have inhibited in it the feeling for deeper values.
But if by a magic word extreme equality of material means were created
and the mere sensuous enjoyments evenly distributed, in that moment
all the other differences from individual to individual would be felt
with heightened sharpness, and would be causes for much stronger
feelings of happiness and unhappiness.
Men differ in their inborn mental powers, in their intelligence and
talent, in beauty, in health, in honours and career, in family and
friends. The contrasts which are created in every one of these
respects are far greater and for the ill-fated far more cruel than
those of the tax-payers. The beautiful face which is a passport
through life and the discouraging homeliness, the perfect body which
allows vigorous work and the weak organism of the invalid unfit for
the struggle of life, the genius in science or art or statesmanship
and the hopelessly trivial mind, the youth in a harmonious, beautiful
family life and the childhood in an atmosphere of discord, the home
full of love from wife and children and the house childless and
chilly, the honours of the community and the disappointment of social
bankruptcy--they are the great premiums and the great punishments,
which are whirled by fate into the crowd of mankind. Even here most of
it is relative. We rejoice in four-score years, but if we knew that
others were allowed a thousand years of life, we should be despondent
that hardly a short century is dealt out to us. We are happy in the
respect of our social community simply because we do not desire the
honours of the czar or of the mikado. But if we began to measure our
fate by that of others, how could we ever be satisfied? Women might
envy men and men might envy women, the poet might wish to be the
champion of sport and the sportsman might be unhappy because he is not
a poet. No one of us can have the knowledge and the technical powers
which the child of the thirtieth century will enjoy. As soon as we
begin to compare and do not find the centre of our life in ourselves,
we are condemned.
Everybody's life is composed of joys and pains which may come from
any of these sources. Where beauty is lacking, wit may brilliantly
shine; where health is failing, a talent may console; where the family
life is unhappy, the ambitions for a career may be fulfilled. Much
inequality will thus result, but the chances for a certain evenness of
human joy and sorrow will be the greater the more numerous the sources
from which the joys and griefs of our days are springing. Add the
inequalities of wealth, and you increase the chances that the
emotional values in the lives of all of us will become more equal. The
ugly girl may be rich and the poor one may be beautiful, the genius
may hunger and the stupid man may marry the widow with millions, the
healthy man may have to earn his scanty living and the patient may
enjoy the luxuries of life. Their states of feeling will be more alike
than if a socialistic order had put them all on the same economic
level of philistine comfort. The joys of capital are after all much
less deeply felt than any of those others, and the sufferings from
poverty are much less incisive than those from disappointed ambition,
from jealousy, from illness, or from bereavement. It is well known
that many more people die from overfeeding than from underfeeding. We
may feel disgusted that the luxuries so often fall to the unworthy and
that the finest people have to endure the hardship of narrow means.
But all those other gifts and deprivations, those talents and beauties
and powers and family relations, are no less arbitrarily dealt out. We
all may wish to be geniuses or radiant beauties, great singers or
fathers of a dozen children; we have not chosen our more modest lot.
It might be answered that the poverty of the industrial masses to-day
means not only the absence of the special comforts, but that it means
positive suffering. Men are starving from want and are chained down
like slaves to a torturing task. But let us discriminate. It is true
in states of unemployment and illness the physical man may be crushed
by naked poverty, but that has nothing whatever to do with socialism.
We have emphasized before that it is the solemn duty of society to
find ways and means to protect every one who is willing to work as
long as he is healthy, against starvation in times of old age and
sickness, and if possible in periods of market depression. The
non-socialistic community has the power to take care of that, and it
is entirely an illusory belief that socialism has in that respect any
advantage. All the comparisons of the two economic orders ought to
refer only to the variations rather high above the starvation line,
even though the American must call starvation a standard which the
coolie may think tolerable and to which the European poor in the
Middle Ages were often accustomed. On the other hand, neither
capitalism nor socialism can protect the reckless and the wasteful
against economic suicide.
Much more important is the problem of suffering through the character
of the work itself. That is the real fountainhead of the socialistic
flood which threatens to inundate our present-day social structures.
But is there not even here a psychological misunderstanding involved?
It may be granted that many a man and many a woman stand in the
factory day after day and year after year with the one feeling of
distress and wretchedness at the hard work to which they are forced.
But is their work really responsible for it, and is it not rather
their personal attitude? Who is doing harder physical work than the
sportsman? There is no more exhausting muscle strain than the climb
over the glaciers of the Alps, which thousands pursue with passion.
Analyze the profession of the physician. How many of his functions are
in themselves of such a character that they might be denounced as the
most humiliating slavery, if they were demanded from any man who could
not see the aim and higher interest which they are serving! This is
exactly the point where the leaders of labour are sinning
unpardonably. They work with all the means of suggestion, until the
workman, as if hypnotized, looks on the mere movements which he is to
perform in the factory, and forgets entirely the higher interest and
aim of civilization which he is helping to serve. The scholar in his
laboratory has to do a thousand things which in themselves are ugly
and dirty, tiresome and dangerous, uninteresting and exhausting, but
which he is performing with enthusiasm because he knows that he is
serving the great ideal of cultured life, to discover the truth and
thus to help the progress of mankind. There is under no factory roof a
workman so forlorn that the work of his hands is not aiding the
fulfilment of an equally great and equally ideal purpose of civilized
mankind, the development of economic civilization. As soon as his
labour amidst the noise of the machines is felt as such a service to
an ideal cultural purpose, the work is no longer dead, but living,
interesting, significant, wonderful.
The mother who takes care of her little children has to go through a
thousand tiresome actions which would be intolerable if they were
meaningless, but which compose a beautiful life if they are held
together by the aim which the motherly love sees before it. Whatever
work a human being may perform, force on his mind the treacherous
suggestion that it is meaningless, that it is slavery, that others
seize the profit, and he must hate it and feel it an unbearable
hardship. It has often been observed that the most bitter complaints
have always come from those workers who are reached by the suggestions
of theories and not from those who simply face practice, even though
their life may be a much harder one. In Russia the workingmen of the
city found their life so intolerable that revolts broke out, while the
rural classes were satisfied with conditions of much more cruel
deprivation. Our social reformers too easily forget the one great
teaching of the history of mankind, that the most powerful factor in
the world is the ideas. Surely there is some truth even in that
one-sided picture of the history of civilization which makes
everything dependent upon economic conditions, but the element of
truth which is contained therein is due to the fact that economic
conditions may influence the ideas. The ideas are the really decisive
agencies. Only for ideas have men been ready to die, and for ideas
have they killed one another. Give to the world the idea that earthly
goods are useless and heavenly goods alone valuable, and in this
kingdom of the religious idea the beggarly rags of the monk are more
desired than the gold of the mighty. Religion and patriotism, honour
and loyalty, ambition and love, reform ideals and political goals,
æsthetic, intellectual, and moral ideas have turned the great wheel of
history. Give to the workingman the right kind of ideas, the right
attitude toward his work, and all the hardship becomes blessedness and
the suffering glory. His best payment then will be the satisfaction of
carrying his stone to the great temple of human progress, even though
it may not be a cornerstone.
Even the complaint repeated without end that the workingman's task is
unendurable because of its unceasing monotony is ultimately nothing
but a psychological theory, and this theory is superficial and
misleading. It is easy to point out to the suggestible mind that there
is a wonderful enrichment of life in variety, and that uniformity must
therefore be something ugly and discouraging and unworthy. But the
real mental facts allow just as well the opposite argument. The mere
change and variation, going from one thing to another, makes the mind
restless and distracted, without inner unity and harmony. To be loyal
to one task and to continue it faithfully and insistently, brings that
perfect adjustment of the mind in which every new act is welcome
because it has become the habit ingrained in the personality. To be
sure there are individual differences. We have in political life, too,
radicals who get more satisfaction from change, and conservatives who
prefer continuity of traditions; and so the whole mental structure of
some men is better adjusted to a frequent variation in work, and that
of others better prepared for continuity. The one has a temperament
which may lead him from one occupation to another, from one town to
another, from one flat to another, from one set of companions to
another. But there is the opposite type of minds. To them it is far
more welcome to continue throughout life at the same work, in the same
old home, in touch with the same dear friends. Many minds surely are
better fitted for alternation in their activities, but many others,
and they certainly are not the worst, are naturally much better
adapted to a regular repetition. There are opportunities for both
types of mental behaviour in the workshop of the nation, and the
peaceful adjustment is disturbed only by the hasty theory that
repetition is a lower class of work, which makes man a mere machine
and that it is therefore to be despised. Change the theory about
uniformity, and you remove monotony from the industrial world.
Monotony is only the uniformity which is hated.
Do we not see that power of theories and ideas everywhere around us,
even in the most trivial things? The most splendid gown is nothing but
an object of contempt if it is the fashion of the day before
yesterday. In lands where titles and decorations are a traditional
idea, the little piece of tin may be more coveted than any treasures
of wealth. Through ideas only can the great social question be solved.
No distribution of income can change in the least the total sum of
pleasure and displeasure in the world, and the socialistic scheme is
of all the useless efforts to increase pleasure and to decrease
displeasure the least desirable, because it works, as we have seen, at
the same time against those mental functions which secure the most
forceful progress of economic life. A true change can come only from
within. The superficial, unpsychological theories of human happiness,
which have been hammered into the working population of our age, have
made true happiness more and more difficult to attain. There is small
chance that this inner conversion will come in our day through
religion, however much religion may help toward it. There is still
smaller chance that philosophy can do it and that the average man will
take the attitude of Antisthenes who claimed that it is divine not to
need anything and that he who needs least is nearest to the ideal. But
there is every chance that mankind will remember again more vividly
the deeper lasting values of humanity. Society must be sobered after
the frenzy of this present-day rush for external goods. The shallow
disappointment is felt too widely already. The world is beginning to
discover once more that this scramble for pearls and palaces and motor
cars among the rich, and for their showy imitations among the middle
class, and the envy of material profits and the chase for amusements
even among the poorest, leave life meaningless and cold and silly. As
soon as the industrial community turns to a new set of ideas and
becomes inspired by the belief in the ideal value of the work as work
and as a necessary contribution to the progress of mankind, the social
question will be solved, as all the differences which socialism wants
to eliminate then appear trivial and insignificant.
But on the other hand, this belief cannot grow, and cannot spread its
roots deep in the soil of the industrial mind unless, as a necessary
counterpart, the ideas of duties and obligations spread and enlarge
among those who profit from the rights of capital. The capitalistic
society must organize itself so that the sinking below the starvation
line through illness, old age, or unemployment will be reduced to a
minimum, so that the greatest possible participation in all which
gives higher value to life will be secured for the worker and his
family, and above all, so that the industrial control will be exerted
by the best and the wisest. Nowhere is reform of ideals more needed.
The brutality of capital is never felt more strongly than when the
workingman suspects that those at the top are not selected on account
of their stronger capacities. Only when capital is conscious of its
duties can the belief in the ideal meaning of the workingman's
function take hold of the masses and inhibit the suggestion of
socialism. Merely granting the external claims, giving to the factory
girls increasing chance for amusement, means to deceive them. The more
such longings are satisfied, the more they must grow and become a
craze which sharpens the feeling of dissatisfaction. This desire for
superficial joys, for sensual amusements and cheap display is nothing
but a suggested habit, which imitation creates in a period of waste.
If a time of simplicity were to come, not only the longing for these
prizes would become silent, but the prizes themselves would appear
worthless. Liberate the workingman from his distrust of the present
social order; let him feel deeply that his duties are not enforced
slavery but a solemn offering to human progress, which he gives in
glad coöperation in the spirit of ideal belief. At the same time stop
the overestimation of the outer enjoyments, and cultivate the
appreciation of the lasting values, and our time of unrest will come
to inner harmony. But do not believe that this can ever be done, if
those who are called to be the leaders of the social group are not
models and do not by their own lives give the cue for this new
attitude and new valuation. As long as they outdo one another in the
wild chase of frivolity and seek in the industrial work of the nation
only a stronghold for their rights and not a fountain spring of
duties, as long as they want to enjoy instead of to believe, this
inner change can never come in the community. The psychologist can do
nothing but to predict that no other scheme, no outer reform, no new
plan of distribution, can bring a real change, as every calculation
which works with outer means to secure happiness must remain a
psychological illusion. The change from within is the only promise and
the only hope.
III
THE INTELLECTUAL UNDERWORLD
The public conscience of the social world has been stirred in recent
days by the dangers which threaten from an antisocial world that lurks
in darkness. The sociologists recognize that it is not a question of
vicious and criminal individuals, but one of an antisocial atmosphere,
of immoral traditions and surroundings, through which crime flourishes
and vice is fostered. They speak of a social underworld, and mean by
it that whole pitiable setting in which the gangs of thieves and the
hordes of prostitutes live their miserable lives. The public
discussions nowadays are full of stirring outcries against the rapid
spreading of vice in our large cities; it is a war for clean living
and health. But after all we ought not to forget that similar dangers
surround our inner culture and our spiritual life, and that an
intellectual underworld threatens our time, which demands a no less
rigorous fight until its vice is wiped out. The vice of the social
underworld gives a sham satisfaction to the human desire for sensual
life; the vice of the intellectual underworld gives the same sham
fulfilment to the human longing for knowledge and for truth. The
infectious germs which it spreads in the realm of culture may
ultimately be more dangerous to the inner health of the nation than
any physical diseases. The battle against vice and crime in the world
of the body ought to be paralleled by a battle against superstition
and humbug in the world of the mind. The victory over the social
underworld would anyhow never be lasting unless the intellectual
underworld were subjugated first. In the atmosphere of sham-truth all
the antisocial instincts grow rankly.