Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
On closer examination the two Inventors in the office were found to be
not Inventors at all. One of them was a fine Hewer who liked to hew and
who hated inventing and the other was merely a rich Hewer who was an
owner in the business who saw suddenly that he would have to stop
inventing and stop very soon if he wanted the business to make any more
money.
There are four things that the Artist has to do with a factory like this
before he can make it efficient.
Each of these things is an art. One art is the art of compelling the
mere owner, the man with the merely hewing mind, to confine himself to
the one thing he knows how to do, namely to shovelling, to shovelling
his money in when and where he was told it was needed, and to shovelling
his money out when it has been made for him.
The art of compelling a mere owner to know his place, of keeping him
shovelling money in and shovelling money out silently and modestly,
consists as a rule in having the Artist or Organizer tell him that
unless the business is placed completely in his hands he will not
undertake to run it.
This is the first art. The second art consists in having an
understanding with the inventors that they will invent ways of helping
the Hewers hew.
The third art consists in having an understanding with the Hewers that
they will accept the help of the Inventors and hew with it. The fourth
art is the art of representing the consumer with the Hewer and with the
Inventor and with the Owner and seeing that he shares in the benefits of
all economies and improvements.
These are all human arts and turn on the power in a man of being a true
artist, of being a man-inventor, a man-developer and a man-mixer, daily
taking part of himself and using these parts in putting other men
together.
These organizers or artists, being the men who see how--are the men who
are not afraid.
CHAPTER XXI
THE LEAGUE OF THE MEN WHO ARE NOT AFRAID
If all the unbrained money in the world to-day and the men that go with
it could be isolated, could be taken by men of imagination and put in a
few ships and sent off to an island in the sea--if New York and London
and all the other important places could be left in the hands of the men
who have imagination, poor and rich, they would soon have the world in
shape to make the men with merely owning minds, the mere owners off on
their island, beg to come back to it, to be allowed to have a share in
it on any terms.
In order to be fair, of course, their island would have to be a
furnished island--mines, woods, and everything they could want. It would
become a kind of brute wilderness or desert in twenty-five years. We
could, now and then, some of us, take happy little trips, go out and
look them over on their little furnished island. It would do us good to
watch them--these men with merely owning or holding-on minds, really
noticing at last how unimportant they are.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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