Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
The only people, to-day, who are going to be competent to run a world,
or who can get hold of even one end of it to try to run it, are going to
be the people who want a world, who have a habit, who may be said to be
almost in a rut, of wanting things all day, every day, for a world--men
who cannot keep narrowed down very long at a time to wanting things for
themselves.
There will be little need of our all falling into a panic, or all being
obliged to rely on policemen, or to call out troops to stave off an
uprising of the labour classes as long as the labour classes are merely
wanting things for themselves. It is the men who have the bigger hungers
who are getting the bigger sorts of things--things like worlds into
their hands. The me-man and the class-man, under our modern conditions,
are being more and more kept back and held under in the smaller places,
the me-places and class-places, by the men who want more things than
they can want, who lap over into wanting things for others.
The me-man often may see what he wants clearly and may say what he
wants.
But he does not get it. It is the class-man who gets it for him.
The class-man may see what he wants for his class clearly and may say
what he wants.
But he does not get it. It is the crowd-man who gets it for him.
It is a little startling, the grim, brilliant, beautiful way that God
has worked it out!
It is one of His usual paradoxes.
The thing in a man that makes it possible for him to get things more
than other people can get them is his margin of unselfishness.
He gets things by seeing with the thing that he wants all that lies
around it. With equal clearness he is seeing all the time the people and
the things that are in the way of what he wants; how the people look or
try to look, how they feel or try to make him think they feel, what they
believe and do not believe or can be made to believe; he sees what he
wants in a vast setting of what he cannot get with people, and of what
he can--in a huge moving picture of the interests of others.
The man who, in fulfilling and making the most of himself, can get
outside of himself into his class, who, in being a good class-man, can
overflow into being a man of the world, is the man who gets what he
wants.
I am hopeful about Labour and Capital to-day because in the industrial
world, as at present constituted in our cooeperative age, the men who can
get what they want, who get results out of other people, are the men who
have the largest, most sensitive outfits for wanting things for other
people.
If there is one thing rather than another that fills one with courage
for the outlook of labouring men to-day it is the colossal failure Ben
Tillett makes in leading them in prayer.
Even the dockers, perhaps the most casually employed, the most spent and
desperate class of Labour of all, only prayed Ben Tillet's prayer a
minute and they were sorry the day after.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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