Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
What would we try to do if we took the time to think? Would there be any
way of fixing upon an order for saving people on a world? What would be
the most noble, the most universal, the most Godlike and democratic
schedule for souls to be saved on--on a world?
I think the man that would save the most other people should be saved
first. It would not be democratic to save an ordinary man, a man who
could just save himself, just think for himself, when saving the man
next to him instead would be saving a man who would save a thousand
ordinary men, or men who have gifts for thinking only of themselves.
Of course one man who thinks merely of himself is as good as another man
who thinks merely of himself, but from the point of view of a democracy
every common man has an inalienable right--the right to have the man who
saves common men saved first.
And the moment we get in this world, our first democracy, the moment the
common man really believes in democracy, this aristocracy or people who
save others (the common man himself will see to it) will be saved first.
He will make mistakes in applying the principle of democracy, that is in
collecting his aristocracies, his strategic men, his linchpins of
society, but he will believe in the principle all through. It will be
not merely in his brain, but in his instincts, in his unconscious
hero-worship, in his sinews and his bones, and it will stir in his
blood, that some men should be saved before others.
But if the world is not a _Titanic_, and if we have on the average
thirty-five years apiece to decide about men on a world and put them
where they belong, it might not be amiss to try to unite for the time
being on a few fundamental principles. What would seem to us to be a few
fundamental principles for the act of world-assimilation, that vast,
slow, unconscious crowd-process, that peristaltic action of society of
gathering up and stowing away men--all these little numberless cells of
humanity where they belong?
No one cell can have much to say about it. But we can watch.
And as we watch it seems to us that men may be said to be dividing
themselves roughly and flowingly at all times into three great streams
or classes.
They are either Inventors, or they are Artists, or they are Hewers.
Of course in classifying men it is necessary to bear in mind that their
getting out of their classifications is what the classifications are
for.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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