Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
All power is rapidly coming to be based on news--news about human
nature, and about what is soon to be done by people. This news travels
by express in boxes, by newspapers, by telephone, by word of mouth, and
by wireless telegraph. Most of the wireless news is not only wireless,
but it is in cipher--hence prophets, or men who have great
sensitiveness; men whose souls and bodies are films for the future,
platinum plates for the lights and shadows of events; men who are
world-poets, sensitive to the air-waves and the light-waves of truth, to
the faintest vibrations from To-morrow, or from the next hundred years
hovering just ahead. As a matter of course, it is already coming to be
true that the most practical man to-day is the prophet. In the older
days, men used to look back for wisdom, and the practical man was the
man who spoke from experience, and they crucified the prophet. But
to-day, the practical man is the man who can make the best guess on
to-morrow. The cross has gone by; at least, the cross is being pushed
farther along. A prophet in business or politics gets a large salary
now; he is a recognized force. Being a prophet is getting to be almost
smug and respectable.
We live so in the future in our modern life, and our rewards are so
great for men who can live in the future, that a man who can be a
ten-year prophet, or a twenty-five-year prophet, like James J. Hill, is
put on a pedestal, or rather is not wasted on a pedestal, and is made
President of a railroad. He swings the country as if it were his hat. We
see great cities tagging Wilbur Wright, and emperors clinging to the
skirts of Count Zeppelin. We only crucify a prophet now if he is a
hundred, or two hundred or five hundred years ahead. Even then, we
would not be apt to crucify; we would merely not use him much, except
the first twenty-five years of him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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