Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
A man who is doing wrong is essentially bored. He has let himself drop
into doing rows of half-things, or things which he can only half do. He
forgets, for the moment, what it really is that he wants, or possibly
that he wants anything. Then it is that the one little, mean Lonely
Hunger--a glass of liquor, a second piece of pie, another man's wife, or
a million dollars, runs away with him.
When a man sins it is because his appetites fail him. Self-control lies
in maintaining checks and balances of desire, centripetals, and
centrifugals of desire. The worst thing that could happen to the world
would be to have it placed in the hands of men who only have a gift of
hungering for certain sorts of things, or hungering for certain classes
of people, or hungering for themselves.
We do not want the man who is merely hungering for himself to rule the
world--not because we feel superior to him, but because a man who is
merely hungering for himself cannot be taken seriously as an authority
on worlds. People can take him seriously as an authority on his own
hunger. But what he thinks about everything beyond that point cannot be
taken seriously. What he thinks about how the world should be run, about
what other people want, what labour and capital want, cannot be taken
seriously.
I will not yield place to any one in my sympathy with the dockers.
I like to think that I too, given the same grandfathers, the same
sleeping rooms and neighbours, the same milk, the same tincture of
religion, would dare to do what they have done.
But I cannot be content, as I take my stand by the dockers, with
sympathizing in general. I want to sympathize to the point.
And on the practical side of what to do next in behalf of the dockers,
or of what to let them do, I find myself facing two facts:
First, the dockers are desperate. I take their desperation as conclusive
and imperative. It must be obeyed.
Second, I do not care what they think.
What they think must not be obeyed. Men who are in the act of being
scared or hateful, whether it be for five minutes, jive months, or sixty
years, who have given up their courage for others, or for their enemies,
are not practical. What a man who despairs of everybody except himself
thinks, does not work and cannot be made to work. The fact that the
dockers have no courage about their employers may be largely the
employers' fault. It is largely the fault of society, of the churches,
the schools, the daily press. But the fact remains, and whichever side
in the contest has, or is able to have, first, the most courage for the
other side, whichever side wants the most for the other side, will be
the side that will get the most control.
If Labour, in the form of syndicalism, wants to grasp the raw materials,
machinery, and management of modern industry out of the hands of the
capitalists and run the world, the one shrewd, invincible way for Labour
to do it is going to be to want more things for more people than
capitalists can want.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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