Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
The last thing that many of us who are interested in the modern world
really want is to have war, or fighting, stop. We glory in courage, in
the power of facing danger, in adventuresomeness of spirit, in every
single one of the qualities that always have made, and always will make,
every true man a fighter.
We contend that fighting, as at present conducted, is based on fear and
lazy-mindedness; that it is lacking in the manlier qualities, that the
biggest and newest kind of men are not willing to be in it, and that it
does not work.
We would rather see the world abolished than to see war abolished.
We want to see war brought up to date.
The best way to fight was invented some two thousand years ago, and the
innocent, conventional persons who still believe in a kind of routine,
or humdrum, of shooting, who have not caught up with this
two-thousand-year-old invention, are about to be irrevocably displaced
in our modern life by men who have a livelier, more far-seeing, more
practical, more modern kind of courage. From this time on we have made
up our minds, we, the people of this world, that the only men we are
going to allow to fight for us are the men who can fight the way Christ
did.
Men who have not the courage to fight the way Christ did are about to be
shut up by society; no one will harm them, of course, innocent, afraid
persons, who have to protect themselves with gunpowder, but they will
merely be set one side after this, where they will not be in a position
to spoil the fighting of the men who are not afraid.
And who are the men who are not afraid?
To search your enemy's heart, to amputate, as by a kind of spiritual
surgery, the very desire for fighting in him, to untangle his own life
before his eyes and suddenly make him see what it is he really wants, to
have him standing there quietly, radiantly disarmed, gentle-hearted, and
like a child before you; if you are able, Gentle Reader, or ever have
been able, to do this, you are not afraid! Why should any one ever have
supposed that it takes a backing down, giving up, teary, weak, and
grieved person to do this?
Christ expressed His idea of courage very mildly when He said, in
effect: "Blessed are those who dare to be meek, for they shall inherit
the earth."
It takes a bolder front to step up to a man one knows is one's enemy
and cooeperate with him than it does to do a little, simple, thoughtless,
outside thing like stepping up to him and knocking him down.
Cooeperating with a man in spite of him, moving over to where he is,
winning a victory over him by getting at his most rooted, most
protected, secret, instinctive feelings, literally striking him through
to the heart and making a new kind of man out of him before his own
eyes, by being a new kind of man to him, takes a bigger, stiller
courage, is a more exposed and dangerous thing to do than to fall on him
and fight him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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