Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
"These men you see here, forty silent nations looking on, hundreds and
thousands of self-respecting, self-supporting, public-serving, creative,
successful business men, whom all the world envies looking on, do hereby
beg to declare to all business men who know them and to the people, that
they did not ever really want these things for themselves that their
business says or seems to say they wanted.
"They wish to ask the public to put themselves in their places and to
refuse to believe that they deliberately sat down, seriously thought it
all out, that they had planned to express to everybody what their
natures really were in a blind, brutal, foolish business like this which
we have just been showing you. They beg to have it believed that their
business misrepresents them, that it misrepresents what they want, and
they ask to be again admitted to the good-will, the hope and
forgiveness, the companionship of a great people.
"They declare" (the government will go on) "that they are not the men
they seem. They are merely men in a hurry. They want it understood that
they have merely hurried so fast and hurried so long that they now wake
up at last only to see, see with this terrific plainness what it really
is that has been happening to them all their lives, _viz._: for forty,
fifty, or sixty years they have merely forgot who they were and
overlooked what they were like.
"In hurrying, too, it is only fair to say they have had to use machines
to hurry with and unconsciously, year by year, associating almost
exclusively with machines, their machines (pump handles, trip-hammers,
hydraulic drills, steam shovels and cranes and cash registers) have
grown into them.
"This is the way it has happened. 'Let the nation be merciful to them,'
the government will then say, and dismiss the subject."
* * * * *
What our President seems to be for in America, is to do up a nation in
one specific, particular man who expresses everybody.
This man deals with each other specific man, his aggressions and
services, as a nation would if a nation could be one specific man.
The President of the United States is the Comptroller of the people's
vision, by seeing a part and dealing with a part as a part of a whole,
he governs the people.
He is the Chancellor of the People's Attention.
The business of being a President is the business of focusing the
vision, of flooding the whole desire or will of a people around a man
and letting him have the light of it, to see what he is doing by, and to
be seen by, while he is doing it.
The corporations have expressed or focused the employers of labour. The
Labour Unions have focused or expressed the will of the labourers, and
the government focuses and expresses the will of the consumers, of the
people as a whole, rich and poor, so that Labour and Capital, both
listen to It, understand It and act on It.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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