Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
3. In the ordinary labourer this domestic unselfishness or house
patriotism is a kind of miniature public spirit. It is the elementary
form of his national or human enthusiasm. It is the form of
disinterestedness that has to be attended to in men first; and the way
for society to get the labouring man to be public-spirited, to have the
habit of considering the rights of others, is for society to have the
habit of considering his rights in his daily work. An intelligent, live
man must be allowed a little margin to practise being unselfish on, if
only in the privacy of his own family. Unselfishness begins in small
circles. The starving man must be allowed a smaller range of
unselfishness than the man who has enough. It is not uncomplimentary or
unworthy in human nature to admit that this is so--to demand that the
human being who is starving must be allowed to be selfish. If he is not
bright enough to be selfish when he is hungry he is dangerous to
society. We ought to insist upon his being selfish, and help him in it.
Virtue is a surplus.
4. This is the first humble, stuttering speech the competent modern
employer who proposes to express himself to his men, and get them to
understand him and work with him, is going to make. He is going to pick
out one by one every man in his works who has a decent, modest, manly
desire to be selfish, and help him in it. He is going to do something or
say something that will make the man see, that will make him believe for
life, that the most powerful, the most trustworthy, the most far-sighted
man he can find in the world to be his partner in being decently,
soundly, and respectfully selfish--is his employer.
No employer can expect to get the best work out of a man except by
working down through to the inner organic desire in the man as a man,
except by waking his selfishness up and by making it a larger, fuller,
nobler, weightier selfishness, and turning the full weight of it every
minute, every hour, on his daily work.
The best language an employer can find to express this desire at first
to his workmen, is some form of faithful, honest copartnership.
5. The ordinary wage labourer has little imagination about other people
because he is not allowed any about himself. The moment he is, and the
moment his employer arranges his work so that he sees every minute all
day that the work which he does for the firm 30 per cent. better counts.
30 per cent. more on his own main purpose in life, his imagination is
touched about himself and he begins to work like a human being. When a
man has been allowed to work awhile as a human being he will begin to be
human with a wider range. Being a partner touches the imagination and
wakes the man's humanness up. He not only works better, but he loves his
family better when he sees he can do something for them. He serves his
town better and his lodge better when he sees he can do something for
them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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