Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
I have no prejudice against the Very Good Little Boy. It is not his
goodness that is what is the matter with him. But I am very much afraid
that if there were any way of getting all the facts, it would not be
hard to prove categorically that what has been holding the world back
the last twenty-five years in its religious ideals, its business ethics,
its liberty, candour, its courage, and its skill in social engineering,
is the Very Good Little Boy. He may be comparatively harmless at first
and before his moustache is grown, but the moment he becomes a grown-up
or the moment he sits on committees with his quiet, careful, snug,
proper fear of experiment, of bold initiative, his disease of never
running a risk, his moral anaemia, he blocks all progress in churches, in
legislatures, in directors' meetings, in trades unions, in slums and
May-fairs. One sees The Good Little Boys weighing down everything the
moment they are grown up.
They have all been brought up each with his one faint, polite little
hunger, his one ambition, his one pale downy desire in life, looking
forward day by day, year by year, to the fine frenzy, to the fierce joy
of Never Making a Mistake.
If I had been given the appointment and were about to set to work
to-morrow morning to make a new world, I would begin by getting together
all the people in this one that I knew, or had noticed anywhere, who
seemed to have in them the spirit of experiment. Any boy or girl or man
or woman that I had seen having the curiosity to try the different kinds
and different sizes of right and wrong, or that I had seen boldly and
faithfully experimenting with the beautiful and the ugly so that they
really knew about them for themselves--would be let in. I would put
these people for a time in a place by themselves where the people who
want to keep them from trying or learning, could not get at them.
Then I would let them try.
I would put the humdrum people in another place by themselves and let
them humdrum, the respectable people by themselves and let them
respectabilize.
Then after my try-world had tried, and got well started and the people
in it had finished off some things and knew what they wanted, I would
allow the humdrums and the respectabilities to be let in--to do what
they were told.
Doing what they are told is what they like. So they would be happy.
Of course doing what they are told is what is the matter with them. But
what is the matter with them would be useful.
And everybody would be happy.
* * * * *
When the Titanic went down a little while ago and those few quiet men on
deck began their duty in that soft, gracious moonlit night, of sorting
out the people who should die from the people who should live--if one
was a woman one could live. If one was a man one could die.
No one will quarrel with the division as the only possible or endurable
one that could have been made.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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