Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
The invention of the Megaphone, of the Cinema, and the _London Times_,
and of the Bible, are all a part of the great, happy, hopeful effort of
one part of this world to get the attention of the other part of it, and
steer heads inside.
This art of steering heads inside, which has come to be the secret art
of all the other arts, the secret religion of all the religions, is
also the secret of building and maintaining a civilization and a
successful and permanent business. It is hard to believe how largely,
for the last twenty years, it has been overlooked by employers as the
real key of the labour problem--this art of steering people's heads
inside.
We have seen part of the truth. We have put in a good deal of time in
finding fault with labouring men for thinking too much about themselves
and about their class, and for emphasizing their wages more than their
work, and for not having more noble and disinterested characters.
Parliaments, clergymen, and employers have all been troubled for years
about Labour, and they have been trying very hard on Sundays and through
reports of speeches by members of Parliament in the daily press, and
through laws, and through employers' associations, and through factory
rules and fines, to get the attention of labouring men and lift their
thoughts to higher things.
A great many wise things have been said to Labour--masterpieces, miles
of them as it were, whole Louvres of words have been hung upon their
walls.
But in vain!
And all because we have merely taken the outside of the boy's head in
our hands. We have not thought what was really going on in it. We have
not tried to steer it inside. We have been superficial.
It is superficial for a comfortable man with a bun in his pocket to talk
to a starving man about having some higher motive than getting something
to eat. Everybody sees that this is superficial, if we mean by it that
his body is starving. But if we mean something more real and more
terrible than that--that he is starving inside, that his soul is
starving, that he has nothing to live for, no real object in getting
something to eat--if we mean by it, in other words, that the man's
imagination is not touched even by his own life, people take it very
lightly.
And it is the most important thing in the world. The one thing now
necessary to society, to industry, is to get hold of the men who are in
it, one by one, and touch their imaginations about themselves. We have
millions of men working without their thoughts and expectations being
ventilated or passed along, year after year.
One sees these men everywhere one goes, in thousands of factories, doing
their work without any draught. We already have tall chimneys for our
coal furnaces; we have next to see the value of tall chimneys, great
flues to the sky, on the lives and thought and the inner energies of
men. The most obvious way to get a draught on a man, to get him to glow
up and work is to cut through an opening in the top of his life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account