TECHNIQUE FOR A NATION'S GETTING ITS WAY
I
BIG IN LITTLE
A nation, in order to be a safe nation for itself, or safe for other
nations in this world, must have a technique for getting and for getting
a world to want it to get--its own way.
I am interested in a technique for a nation's getting its way and
deserving to get its way because I want to get mine, and because being
human and having quite a good deal of human nature taken out of the same
stuff--out of the same mixed hot and cold ingredients as other people's,
I have quite naturally come to think that what works for me, if I cut
down to the quick and am honest with myself, in getting what I want, will
probably, with proper shadings, of course, work for anybody.
I have thought I would see if I could not work out in this book, a
technique which could be used modestly by one man, tried out in miniature
as it were--a technique for getting and deserving to get one's own way.
I pick out one man, to try out the principle on, because it is safer and
fairer to try out a principle other people are supposed to be asked to
risk, on one man first.
Because I happen to know him better than I know anybody else, and because
my experience is, he will stand more from me than anybody else, I have
picked out myself.
When the technique has been tried out on one man the people who know him
will believe it and try it. Then we will try it on one hundred men one
after the other. Then as I have been working it out in this book, try it
on the body-politic, the soul and body of a nation, try it on a hundred
million people.
Then with a technique for having a body and for not being fooled by
ourselves and having some substance in what we say and what we do, we
would have the spectacle of a hundred million people making themselves
felt in political conventions, making themselves felt in The White House
and even being noticed perhaps in time at the other end of Pennsylvania
Avenue by the great I AM, or I CAN'T, or I WON'T tucked under the come of
all of us--called The United States Senate.
II
CONSCIOUS CONTROL OF BRAIN TRACKS
My experience is that the first thing for me to attend to and know, in
getting people to let me have my way, is to know when and how to discover
and open up in people new brain tracks and when and how to make my main
dependence on their old ones.
Getting what one wants from people turns on seeing the situation--the
brain track situation in one's own mind at a particular time, and in
other people's, as it really is.
In other words, the way to get one's way with people is to know and
extend one's consciousness down deeper into one's subconsciousness in
one's own mind, so that one draws on the conscious and the subconscious
in one's own mind at will, so that gradually having the habit of drawing
on the conscious and the subconscious in one's own mind at will, one soon
makes oneself master of the conscious and the subconscious in the minds
of others.
I do not precisely know this, of course, because I have never practiced
having my own way with other people as much as I would like, but my
theory and my observation of others who have practiced on me leads me, in
speaking for all of us to believe this: The way for a man to do who wants
to get his own way with people is to heighten his consciousness, deepen
his consciousness down into his subconsciousness, live more abundantly in
soul and body, deeper down and higher up and further over into himself
than others. Then he gets his way with others because everybody wants him
to, almost without knowing it or anybody's else knowing it.
A man who does this becomes like any other great force of nature. The
indication seems to be that what the artist in a man or the engineer in
him does with the genius in him namely: the driving down of an artesian
well of consciousness into his subconsciousness, the using of his new
brain tracks and old ones together--is the secret of getting one's way
for all of us, whether with Nature or with one another.
Of course, the hard part of this program to arrange for is the new brain
tracks to put with the old ones both in getting our own way with other
people and with ourselves.
This part of my book deals with what is a very personal problem for most
of us--what new brain tracks are really like, how they work, and what
people can do to get them.
III
WHAT IS CALLED THINKING
The one special trait that stands out in all new brain tracks in common,
is that nobody wants them. The way people really act--even the best of
us, when some one steps up to them with new tracks for their brains, is
as if they had no place to put them.
The plain psychological facts about them when one fronts up with them are
rather appalling. They first appear when one begins to observe closely
what one actually does with one's own personal listening and what other
people, when one checks them up, do with their listening to us.
In making as I have tried to make during the last six months, a few
special studies in not being fooled by myself, studies in changing what I
call my mind, I have come to feel that any man who will try several hours
each day a few harmless experiments on his friends and on himself and his
other enemies, will come to two or three thoughts about Man as a rational
being which would have seemed dreams to him six months ago.
The first fact is this:
Nearly everything that is the matter with the world can be traced back to
the fact that people have, when one studies them closely, two sets of
ears--one set that they look as if they used, put up more or less showily
before everybody on the outside, and another entirely secret or real set
inside, that they seriously connect up with their souls and themselves
and really do their living with.
I first came on them--on these two sets of ears, in my experiences as a
young man in speaking to audiences. In the vague helpless way a young
lecturer has, I studied as well as I could what seemed to me to be
happening to my audiences--what they seemed to be doing to themselves,
but it was a good many years before I really woke up to what they were
doing to me, to the way their two sets of ears made them treat me.
I would watch people sometimes all suddenly in the middle of a sentence
shutting up their real ears or inside ears at me and then holding their
outside ones up at me kindly as if I cared, or as if I doted on them--on
outside ears, on ears of any kind if I could get them and I would feel
hurt but I did not wake up to what it meant.
As I remember it the first thing that made me really wake up to the truth
about ears was the fact that I never seemed to want to speak if I could
help it, to an audience all made up of women, like a Woman's Club, or all
made up of men, or to an audience all made up of very young people or of
very old people, or of people who presented a solid front of middle age.
The trouble with a one-sexed audience or a one-classed audience seems to
be that they all stop right in the middle of the same sentence sometimes
and change to their outside ears all at once and before one's eyes. In
any audience representing everybody when any one person feels like it,
and goes off on some strange psychological trail of his all alone, one
can keep adjusted and one soon begins to find that an audience of men and
women both is easier to stand before than one which gives itself up to
easy one-sex listening, because the ducks and dodges people make in one's
meaning, the subterranean passages, tunnels and flights people go off on,
from what one says, all check each other up and are different. When the
women go under the men emerge. The same seems to be true in speaking to
mixed ages. Fewer passages are wasted. Middle-aged people who remember,
and look forward in listening always help in an audience because they
seem to like to collect stray sentences cheerfully thrown away by people
who have not started remembering much yet, or by people who do not do
anything else.
I do not want, in making my point, to seem to exaggerate, but so far as
what people do to me is concerned if people would get up and go out of a
hall each sentence they stop listening or stop understanding, it would
not be any worse--the psychological clang of it--than what they do do. It
would merely look worse. The facts about the way people listen, about the
way they use their two sets of ears on one, snap one out of their souls,
switch one over from their real or inside ears to their outside ones, in
three adjectives, are beyond belief. And they all keep thinking they are
listening, too. One almost never speaks in public without seeing or
expecting to see little heaps of missed sentences lying everywhere all
around one as one goes out of the hall.
What is true of one's words to people one can keep one's eye on, is still
more true of words in books.
If I could fit up each reader in this book with a little alarm clock or
music box in his mind, that would go off in each sentence he is skipping
without knowing it, nobody would disagree with me a minute for founding
what I have to say in this book about changing people's minds upon the
way people do not listen except in skips, hops and flashes to what they
hear, the way they do not see what they look at, or the way they think,
when they think, when they think they think.
(For every time I say "they" in the last paragraph will the reader kindly
read "we.")
If there were some kind of moody and changeable type all sizes, kinds and
colors, and if this book could be printed with irregular, up and down and
sidling lines--printed for people the way they are going to read it, if
the sentences in this chapter could duck under into subterranean passages
or could take nice little airy swoops or flights--if every line on a page
could dart and waver around in different kinds and colors of type, make a
perfect picture of what is going to happen to it when it is going through
people's minds, there is not anybody who would not agree with me that all
these people we see about us who seem to us to be living their lives in
stops, skips and flashes probably live so, because they listen so.
If the type in the pages in this book dealing with Mr. Burleson could be
more responsive, could act the way Mr. Burleson's mind does when he reads
it--that is if I could have the printer dramatize in the way he sets the
type what Mr. Burleson is going to do with his mind or not do with his
mind with each pellucid sentence as it purls--even Mr. Burleson himself
would be a good deal shocked to see how very little about himself in my
book, he was really carrying away from it.
If in Mr. Burleson's own personal copy of this book, I were to have this
next chapter about him that is going to follow soon--especially the
sentences in it he is going to slur over the meaning of or practically
not read at all--printed in invisible ink and there were just those long
pale gaps about him, so that he would have to pour chemical on them to
get them--so that he would have to dip the pages in some kind of nice
literary goo to see what other people were reading about him, he would
probably carry away more meaning than I or any one could hope for in
ordinary type like this, which gives people a kind, pleasant, superficial
feeling they are reading whether they are reading or not.
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 recooerdinating 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 reeducating and
recooerdinating 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 the _Atlantic_,
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.
XIII
LISTENING TO JIM
(A Note on Collective Bargaining)
I would like to say to begin with that I believe in national collective
bargaining as it is going to be in the near future--collective bargaining
executed on such subjects and with such power and limitations and in such
spirit as shall be determined by the facts--the practical engineering
facts in human nature and the way human nature works.
I do not feel that collective bargaining has been very practical about
human nature so far. The moment that it is, the public and all manner of
powerful and important persons, who are suspicious or offish or
unreasonable about collective bargaining now, are going to believe in it.
A book entitled "A Few Constructive Reflections on Marriage" by a man who
had had a fixed habit for many years of getting divorces,--a man whose
ex-wives were all happily married would not be very deep probably. A
symposium by his ex-wives who had all succeeded on their second husbands
would really count more. Most candid people would admit this as a
principle.
The same principle seems to hold good about what people think in National
Associations of Employers and national associations of workingmen in
labor unions.
Thinking a thing out nationally on a hundred million scale which is being
done by people who cannot even think a thing out individually or on a
two-person, or five-person scale, is in danger of coming to very
superficial decisions.
Capital has been in danger for forty years and labor is in danger now, of
being fooled by its own bigness. Because it is big it does not need to be
right, and because it does not need to be right it might as well be wrong
about half the time.
The trouble with the illusion of bigness is that it is not content with
the people who are in the inside of the bigness who are having it. Other
people have it.
When a man looks me in the eye and tells me with an air, that two times
two equals four and a half, he does not impress me and I feel I have some
way of dealing with him as a human being and reasoning with him. But when
I am told in a deep bass national tone that 2973432 multiplied by 2373937
is 9428531904456765328654126178 I am a little likely to be impressed and
to feel that because the figures are so large they must be right. At all
events, on the same principle that very few of my readers are going to
take a pad out of their pockets this minute and see if I have multiplied
2373937 by 2173937 right, or if I have even taken half a day off to
multiply them at all, I am rather inclined to take what people who talk
to me in a deep bass seven figure national tone, at their word.
Labor unions and trusts in dealing with the American public have been
fooled by their own bigness and have naturally tried to have us fooled by
it a good many years.
It is a rather natural un-self-conscious innocent thing to do I suppose,
at first, but as the illusion is one which of course does not work or
only works a little while, and does not and cannot get either for capital
or labor what they want it does not seem to me we have time,--especially
in the difficulties we are all facing together in America now, to let
ourselves be fooled by bigness, our own or other people's, much longer.
The difficulties we have to face between capital and labor are all
essentially difficulties in human nature and they can only be dealt with
by tracing them to their causes, to their germs, looking them up and
getting them right in the small relations first where the bacilli begin,
dealing at particular times and in particular places with particular
human beings. In the factory that listened to Jim, no order from a
national Collective Bargaining Works could have begun to meet the
situation as well as Jim did and the factory did.
If Jim had stuck his head in the door by orders from Indianapolis, or if
the President of the Company had had a telegram giving him national
instructions to lie awake that night, what would it have come to?
I believe in national or collective bargaining as a matter of course, in
certain aspects of all difficulties between capital and labor. But the
causes of most difficulties in industry are personal and have to be dealt
with where the persons are. The more personal things to be done are, the
more personally they have to be attended to.
If the women of America were to organize a Childbirth Labor Union, say
next Christmas--and if from next Christmas on, all the personal relations
of men and women and husbands and wives--the stipulations and conditions
on which women would and would not bear children were regulated by
national rules, by courtship rules and connubial orders from
Indianapolis, Indiana, it would be about as superficial a way to
determine the well-being of the sexes, as foolish and visionary a way for
the female class to attempt to reform and regulate the class that has
been fenced off by The Creator as the male class, as the present attempt
of the labor class to sweep grandly over the spiritual and personal
relation of individual employers and individual workmen and substitute
for it collective bargaining from Indianapolis.
There is one thing about women. It would never have occurred to the women
of this country as it has to the men to get up a contraption for doing a
thing nationally that they could not even do at home.
For every woman to allow herself to be governed from the outside in the
most intimate concerns and the deepest and most natural choices of her
life is not so very much more absurd than for a man in his business, the
main and most important and fundamental activity in which he lives, the
one that he spends eight hours a day on, to be controlled from a distance
and from outside.
The whole idea, whether applied to biology or industry is a half dead,
mechanical idea and only people who are tired or half alive, are long
going to be willing to put up with it.
As the mutual education of marriage is an individual affair,--as the more
individualness, the more personalness there is in the relation is what
the relation itself is for, the mutual education of employers and
employees is going to be found to have more meaning, value and power, the
more individual and personal--that is to say, the more alive it is.
All live men with any gusto or headway in them, or passion for work, all
employers and employees with any headway or passion for getting together
in them are as impatient of having the way they get together their
personal relations in business governed from outside, as they would be in
the sexual relation and for the same reasons.
If it was proposed to have an audience of all the women in America get
together in a vast hall and an audience of all the men in America get
together in another, and pass resolutions of affection at each other,
rules and bylaws for love-strikes and boycotts, and love-lockouts, how
many men and women that one would care to speak to or care to have for a
father or mother, would go?
Only anaemic men and women in this vast vague whoofy way would either make
or accept national arrangements made in this labor-union way for the
conditions of their lives together.
And in twenty years only anaemic employers and anaemic employees and
workmen are going to let themselves be cooped up in what they do
together, by conventions, by national committees, are going to have eight
hours a day of their lives grabbed out of their hands by collective
bargaining and by having what everybody does and just how much he does of
it determined for him as if everybody was like everybody, as if locality,
personality and spirit in men did not count, as if the actual daily
contacts of the men themselves were not the only rational basis of
determining and of making effective what was right.
XIV
THE NEW COMPANY
I met a wagon coming down the street yesterday, saying across the front
of it--half a street away, American Experience Co.
I wanted to get in.
Of course it turned out to be as it got nearer, The American Express Co.,
but I couldn't help thinking what it would mean if we had an equally
well-organized arrangement for rapid transit of boxes--boxes people have
got out of or got into, as we have for conveying other boxes people are
mixed up with. (Fixes were called boxes when I was a boy. We used to
speak of a man having a difficult experience, as being in a box.)
The Air Line League proposes to be The American Experience Company--a big
national concern for shipping other people's experiences to people, so
that unless they insist on it, they will have the good of them without
having to take their time and everybody else's time around them to go
through them all over again alone and just for themselves.
Of course there are people who tumtytum along without thinking, who will
miss the principle and insist on having a nice private misery of doing it
all over again in their own home factory for themselves. But there are
many million people with sense in this country--people as good at making
sense out of other people as they are in making money out of them, and
the Air Line League proposes that to these people who have the sense,
when they want them, when they order them, experiences shall be shipped.
And when they get orders--they can ship theirs.
If some of the experience the Labor unions in England have had and got
over having, could be shipped in the next few weeks, unloaded and taken
over by the Americans, anybody can see with a look, ways in which the Air
Line League or American Experience Company, if it were existing this
minute, could bring home to people what they want to know about what
works and what does not, what they long to have advertised to them--at
once. Experiences--or date of experiences shipped from England would not
only make a short-cut for America in increasing production in this
country, lowering the cost of living, but would give America a chance in
the same breath by the same act, to win a victory over herself and to
turn the fate of a world.
What the Air Line League proposes to do is to act--particularly through
the Look-Up Club--as the American Shipping Experience Company.
XV
THE FIFTY-CENT DOLLAR
This book is itself--so far as it goes, a dramatization of the idea of
the Look-Up Club.
The thing the book--between its two bits of pasteboard does on paper--a
kind of listening together of capital and labor, the Look-Up Club of The
Air Line League is planned to do in the nation at large and locally in
ten thousand cities--capital, labor and the consumer listening to each
other--reading the same book as it were over each other's shoulders,
studying their personal interests together, working and acting out
together the great daily common interest of all of us. The Look-Up Club,
acting as it does for the three social groups that make up The Air Line
League and having an umpire and not an empire function, operates
primarily as a Publicity or Listening organization.
I might illustrate the need the Look-Up Club is planned to meet and how
it would operate by suggesting what the Club might do with a particular
idea--an idea on which people must really be got together in America
before long, if we are to keep on being a nation at all.
Millions of American laborers go to bed every night and get up every
morning saying:--
"The American employer is getting more money than he earns. We are going
to have our turn now. Nobody can stop us."
Result: Under-production and the Fifty-Cent Dollar.
The cure for the American laboring man's under-production and working
merely for money is to get the American laboring man to believe that the
American employer is working for something besides money--that he is
earning all he gets, that he is working to do a good job--the way he is
saying the laboring man ought to do. If the American laboring man can be
got to believe this about his employer, we will soon see the strike and
the lock-out and the Fifty-Cent Dollar and the economic panic of the
world all going out together.
I know personally and through my books and articles hundreds of employers
who look upon themselves and are looked on by their employees as
gentlemen and sports--men who are in business as masters of a craft,
artists or professional men, who are only making money as a means of
expressing themselves, making their business a self-expression and
putting themselves and their temperaments and their desires toward others
into their business as they like.
If all employers and all employees knew these men and knew what their
laborers thought of them and how their laborers get on with them the face
of Labor toward Capital--the face of this country toward the world and
toward itself and toward every man in it would be changed in a week.
Suppose I propose to take one of these men and write about him until
everybody knows about him, and to devote the rest of my life to seeing
that everybody knows these men, and start to do it to-morrow; what would
be the first thing I would come upon?
The first thing I would come upon would be a convention. It is one of the
automatic ideas or conventions of business men--not to believe in
themselves.
XVI
THE BUSINESS MAN, THE PROFESSIONAL MAN, AND THE ARTIST
Why is it that if a professional man or an artist does or says a certain
thing--people believe him and that if a business man does or says
precisely the same thing--most business men are suspicious?
When I say in the first sentence of an article on the front page of the
_Saturday Evening Post_--as I did awhile ago--"I would pay people to read
what I am saying on this page,"--everybody believes me. As people read on
in one of my articles in the _Post_, they cannot be kept from seeing how
egregiously I am enjoying my work. Anybody can see it--that I would pay
up to the limit all the money I can get hold of--my own, or anybody's--to
get other people to enjoy reading my stuff as much as I do. Nobody seems
inclined to deny that if I could afford to--or, if I had to--I would pay
ten cents a word to practically any man, to get him to read what I write.
Precisely the way I feel about an article in the _Saturday Evening Post_
so fortunate as to be by me--or, about a book written by g.s.l., a man I
know very well--W. J. ---- feels about a house or about a bank created by
W. J. ----. But if W. J., a designer--contractor--a builder--pretends he
enjoys his creative work in building as much as I enjoy writing--if W.
J., a business man, were to go around telling people or revealing to
people that he would like to hire them to be his customers by handing
back to them twenty, thirty or forty per cent of his agreed upon profits
when he gets through (which is what he practically does over and over
again) there are very few business men who would not say at first sight
that W. J. is a man who ought to be watched.
And he is too, but for precisely turned around reasons most people have
to be watched for. W. J. in designing and constructing a house, or a bank
for a client, sets as his cost estimate a ten per cent maximum profit for
himself, as a margin to work on; aiming at six or five per cent profit
for himself, on small contracts and at a four, three or two and one-half
per cent profit for himself on million dollar ones. Changes and
afterthoughts from his clients in carrying out a contract are inevitable.
W. J. wants a margin on which to allow for contingencies and for his
customers' afterthought.
The three things that interest W. J. in business are: his work on a
perfect house, his work on a perfect customer and his work on making
enough money to keep people from bothering his work.
A perfect house is a house built just as he said it would be which comes
out costing less than he said it would cost--possibly a check on his
client's dinner plate the first night he dines in it.
A perfect customer is a customer who is so satisfied that he cannot
express himself in words but who cannot be kept from trying to--who
cannot be kept from coming back and who cannot be kept from sending
everybody to W. J. he can think of.
The tendency of mean typical business men--even men who do this
themselves, when I tell them about a man like this, is to wonder what is
the matter with the man and then wonder what is the matter with me.
This is what is the matter with the country--the conventional automatic
assumption that millions of men--even men who are not in business merely
to make money themselves--make in general, that we must arrange to run a
civilization and put up with doing our daily working all day, every day,
in a civilization in which most people are so underwitted, so little
interested in life, so little interested in what they do, that they are
merely working for money.
If we all stopped believing that this is so, or at least believe it does
not need to be so, that the country is full of innumerable exceptions and
that these exceptions are and can be and can be proved to be the rulers
and the coming captains of the world, holding in their hands the fate of
all of us--we would be a new nation in a week.
In a year we would increase production fifty per cent.
This has happened over and over again in factories where this new spirit
of putting work first and money second, caught from the employers, has
come in.
Naturally, inasmuch as W. J. as all people who know him know, has made a
very great business success of running his business on this principle, of
making it a rich, happy and efficient thing, and of doing more things at
once than merely making money--running a business like any other big
profession, one of the first things I think of doing is to write
something that will make everybody know it. Well, as I have said, the
first fact I come on is that many business men do not approve of
believing in themselves or in business or in what I say about its being a
profession, any more than they can help.
XVII
THE NEWS-MAN
I have recently come in my endeavors as a publicist, as a self-appointed,
self-paid employee of the American people, upon what seems to me a very
astonishing and revolutionary fact.
I have come to put my faith for the world in its present crisis into two
principles.
1. The industrial and financial fate of America and the world turns in
the next few years--or even months, on news--on getting certain people to
know in the nick of time that if they do not do certain things, certain
things will happen.
2. News, in order to be lively and contagious must not be started as a
generalization or as a principle. To make news compelling and conclusive
one has to say something in particular about somebody in particular.
Here is the fact I have come on in acting on these principles.
When I find news done up in a man to save a nation with, if I make
everybody know him, the fact I face about my country is this.
A generalized--that is--a sterilized idea is free. A fertilized or
dramatized idea--an idea done up and dramatized in a man so that
everybody will understand it and be interested in it, is hushed up.
I am not blaming anybody. I am laying before people and before myself a
fact.
Suppose that I think it is stupendously to the point just now to
advertise as a citizen or public man, without profit or suspicion of
profit to myself and without their knowing it, certain men it would make
a new nation for a hundred people to know?
Suppose that with considerable advantages in the way of being generally
invited to write about what interests me, instead of indulging in a kind
of spray or spatter work of beneficial publicity--instead of getting off
ideas at a nation with a nice elegant literary atomizer, I insist on
making ideas do things and I plan on having my ideas done up solidly in
ten solid men who will make the ideas look solid and feel catching?
Suppose inasmuch as in the present desperate crisis of underproduction, a
man who dramatizes--makes alluring, dramatic and exciting the idea of
increased production or superproducing, seems to the point--suppose I
begin with W. J.?
What does anyone suppose would happen?
XVIII
W. J.
If W. J. were dead, or were to die to-morrow, it would be convenient. In
bearing upon our present national crisis it would be thoughtful and
practical of W. J. to die.
If W. J.'s worst enemy were to push him off the top of the fortieth story
of the Equitable Building to-morrow morning all I would have to do would
be to write an article about him in some national weekly, _Saturday
Evening Post_ or _Collier's_, which would be read by four million people.
But the _Saturday Evening Post_ or _Collier's_ has no use for W. J. until
he is dead. It would like to have, of course, but it would not be fair to
the business men who are paying ten thousand dollars a page to be
advertised in it, for the _Saturday Evening Post_ to let any other
man--any man who is not dead yet, be advertised in it.
This is the reason for the Look-Up Club, a national body--the gathering
together of one hundred thousand men of vision to advertise W. J. to--who
will then turn--the hundred thousand men of vision--and advertise him to
everybody.
Then other men, strategic men like W. J.--men who are dramatizing other
strategic ideas will be selected to follow W. J. for the one hundred
thousand men of vision to advertise to a hundred million people.
By writing a book and having my publisher distribute through the
bookstores a book, I would reach, at best, only one hundred thousand
people, and I am proposing to reach a hundred million people--to organize
a hundred thousand salesmen scattered in five thousand cities and reach
with my book, the hearts and minds, the daily eight-hour-a-day working
lives of a hundred million people.
This is what the Look-Up Club is for. It is an organized flying wedge of
one hundred thousand salesmen who have picked each other out for driving
into the attention of a nation, national ideas.
The fate of America and the fate of the world at the present moment turns
upon free advertising written by men who could not be hired to do it--in
books distributed by a hundred thousand men who could not be hired to
distribute them. We are setting to work a national committee of a hundred
thousand men, to unearth in America, advertise, make the common property
of everybody the men who dramatize, who make neighborly and
matter-of-fact the beliefs a great people will perish if they do not
believe.
XIX
THE LOOK-UP CLUB LOOKS UP
We are drawing in the next few months in America the plans and
specifications for a great nation and a new world.
We want a Committee of a Hundred Thousand.
We are proposing to gather a Look-Up Committee of a hundred thousand men
of constructive imagination in business and other callings, in ten
thousand cities, who will work out together and place before the people,
plans and specifications of what this nation proposes to be like--a
picture of what a hundred million people want.
The situation we are trying to meet is one of providing new brain tracks
for a hundred million people. It will not seem to many people, too much
to say that the quick way to do this, is to form a Club--a Committee in
this country, of a hundred thousand men to ask to be told about these new
brain tracks, who will then tell them to the hundred million.
The Look-Up Club is a Publicity and Educational Organization for the
purpose of focusing and mobilizing the vision of the people acting as a
clearing house of the vision of the people--gathering, cooerdinating,
pooling and determining and distributing the main points in their order
of what the American people believe.
The first subject we act in our Publicity Organization as our Listening
Conspiracy--our Cooeperative news-service to our members--is the subject
of how cooeperation between capital and labor works. Our first news-service
will be planned to increase production, decrease the cost of living, stop
strikes and lockouts, drive out civil war and substitute cooeperation as a
means of getting things in American life.
Every man who is nominated to membership in the Look-Up Club naturally
asks four questions.
1. How can I belong?
2. What does it cost?
3. What do I undertake to do for the Club?
4. What do I get--what does the Club do for me?
The idea is for each man who is deeply interested, to pick out, to
nominate any fifty men--I put down for instance on my list Franklin P.
Lane--among forty-nine others, ask Mr. Lane who the men are he knows in
this nation, men he has come on in his business in the course of twenty
years, who are characterized either by having creative imagination
themselves or by marked power to cooeperate with men who have it.
After Mr. Lane had given me his fifty, I would ask each of Mr. Lane's
fifty for their fifty and each in turn for their fifty until we had
covered the country and had picked out and introduced to each other from
Maine to California the men of creative imagination in America.
Other members will of course be nominated by members of the Air Line
League in their respective communities and everybody who is invited to
nominate for the Look-Up section of the Air Line League will be asked to
nominate in three lists--(1) those he thinks of as representing invention
in the nation at large, (2) those he knows or deals with in his own
business or line of activity--all over the country, who have creative
imagination or power of discovery and planning ideas, and (3) those he
knows in his own home-community that he and his neighbors would like to
see in the Look-Up Club, on the nation's honor roll of men of vision in
the nation representing his own community.
The cost is to be determined by the Club, but is planned as a small
nominal sum--nominal dues for expense of correspondence and conducting
the activities of the Club.
What a man gets by joining the Club is the association with two or three
thousand members from all over the land at any given time who will be in
the Club headquarters in a skyscraper hotel of its own, when he comes to
New York and the advantage of common action and common looking at the
same things at the same time with the other members of the Club, through
the activities of the Club by mail.
The Look-Up Club Bulletins, pamphlets and little books containing news of
critical importance and timeliness to all members--news not generally
known or not available in the same concentrated form in the daily press,
will be sent to all members for their own use and for distribution to
others at critical times and places and with strategic persons--labor
unions and employers and public men.
What the Look-Up Club does for a man is to give him the benefit of a
friendly candid national conspiracy between a hundred thousand men, to
get the news and to pass on the news that counts and to do it all at the
same time instead of in scattered and meaningless dabs.
If the thing each man of a hundred thousand sees once a year in a little
lonely dab of vision all by himself could be seen by all of us by
agreement the same week in the year, we will do the thing we see.
Anything we see will have to happen. The only reason the thing we see
does not happen now, is that we make no arrangements to see it together.
Seen together, news that looks like a rainbow acts like a pile driver.
A man becomes a hundred thousand times himself. In the Look-Up Club what
a man gets for his own use, is hundred thousand man-power news.
What does a man when he joins the Look-Up Club, undertake to do?
Send in news when he knows some, and use news when he gets it.
I do not undertake to say just what each member of the Look-Up Club will
undertake to do with news when he receives it.
When a man receives live news which immediately concerns him and his
nation in the same breath, the way he feels about it and acts about
it--about real news he applies to himself and to his work and the people
around him, will seem to him to come, not under the head of duties to the
Club, but under the head of the things the Club will tempt him to do and
that he cannot be kept from doing.
If a hundred thousand picked men in this country in all walks of life all
get the same news the same week, and then use the news the week they get
it, and put it where other people will use it, we will all know and
everybody else will know what the Look-Up Club is for.
We will be carrying out in the Look-Up Club what might be called a
selective draft of vision.
We will mobilize and bring to action the vision and the will of the
people.
XX
PROPAGANDY PEOPLE
I am weary and sad about the word propaganda. I am weary of being
propaganded, or rather of being propaganded at and as regards
propagandafying others myself, or propagandaizing them, whatever it is
publicists and men who are interested in public ideas suppose they do, I
am sad at heart. There is a prayer some one prayed once one tired New
Year's Eve, which appeals to me.
"Forgive me my Christmases as I forgive them that have Christmased
against me."
I could pray the same model outline for a prayer. But for Christmasing,
substitute propagandy-izing.
The word somehow itself in its own unconscious beauty dramatizes the way
I feel about it. I have written many hundred pages of what I believe
about reformers--about people who are trying to get other people's
attention, and about advertising, but the brunt of what I believe now is
that most people if they would stop trying to get other people's
attention and try to get their own, would do more good.
The advertising in which I believe is the advertising that is asked for.
I believe in getting a few million people to ask to be advertised to and
to give particulars.
More good would be done this way than by turning the whole advertising
idea around and working it wrong end to as we do now.
For instance at this present moment I want to know everything about
myself and against myself, my enemies know. I do not see why I should put
up with my enemies being the ones of all others to know things against me
that if I knew would be the making of me. What I want to do is to find a
way--make arrangements if I can, to get them to tell me--tell me
politely--if they can, but tell me.
If every person, or party, or group in America to-day would do this,
Capital, Labor, bankers, socialists, Republicans and Democrats, America
would quit being merely a large nation at once, and begin being a great
one. People who have organized to be advertised to will read advertising
more poignantly, even sometimes perhaps (as I would) more desperately.
They will get ninety-three per cent value out of advertising they read
where now they get three and a half. Everybody who has read advertising
he has asked for and advertising that has butted in on him whether or no
the same day, and who has compared for one minute how he has felt about
them and how he has acted about them, knows that this is true.
It is a platitude.
A platitude that nobody has expressed and that nobody has acted on is a
great truth.
What the Air Line League is for, one of the things it is for, is to act
on this truth.
Through the three branches, the Look-Up Club, the Try-Out Club and the
Put-Through Clan, the Air Line League is an organization not for
asserting or for pushing advertising, but for nationally sucking
advertising. With its thirty million people joining it, asking to be
advertised to, and giving particulars, it is to be the National Vacuum
Cleaner for Truth.
XXI
THE SKILLED CONSUMERS OF PUBLICITY
The trouble with the consumers of publicity is that they are not skilled.
They are not organized to get what they want.
We should organize the Consumers of Publicity, make it possible for the
people of America as readers, to be skilled readers in getting what they
want.
We should make arrangements which would be the equivalent of organizing
Skilled Readers' Labor Saving Unions.
The difficulties of attaining a power of national listening
together--through the press and through pamphlets and books, are so great
that they can only be overcome practically and immediately, by our having
an organization the members of which join it as they will join the Air
Line League for the express purpose not of advertising--but of being
advertised to.
The most fundamental activity of the Air Line League in the present
crisis of the nation is to be the superimposing upon the advertising of
the ordinary kind we already have, of free advertising by men who have
certain ideas and certain types of men they want to advertise to a
specific twenty or thirty million people who contract with them (as I
would have often wished my readers would contract with me) to have these
same men or types of men and ideas, advertised to them.
It would be hard to overemphasize or overestimate the power of an
organization that exists not to advertise but to be advertised to.
I say again--if I may be forgiven for the still small voice of
platitude--a platitude because nobody acts as if he believes it--the most
effective advertising is advertising that is asked for.