Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
It is the men with whom we earn our money who are telling us all
relentlessly, silently, what we will have to be like. The men with whom
we spend it, who sell things to us, like the department stores, those
huge machines of attention, may succeed in getting great sweeps of
attention out of crowds at special times, by appealing to men through
the unusual and through the stupendous or the successful. But what
really counts, and what finally decides what men and what women shall
be, what really gets their attention unfathomably, unconsciously, is the
way they earn their money. The feeling men come to have about a fact, of
its being what it is, helplessly or whether or no--the feeling that they
come to have about something, of its being immemorially and innumerably
the same everywhere and forever, comes from what they are thinking and
the way they think while they are earning their money. It is out of the
subconscious and the monotonous that all our little heavens and hells
are made. It is our daily work that becomes to us the real floor and
roof of living, hugs up under us like the ground, fits itself down over
us, and is our earth and sky. The man with whom we earn our money, the
man who employs us, his thinking or not thinking, his "I will" and "I
won't," are the iron boundaries of the world to us. He is the skylight
and the manhole of life.
The monotonous, the innumerable and over and over again, one's desk,
one's typewriter, one's machine, one's own particular factory window,
the tall chimney, the little forever motion with one's hand--it is
these, godlike, inscrutable, speechless, out of the depths of our
unconsciousness and down through our dreams, that become the very breath
and rumble of living to us, domineer over our imaginations and rule our
lives. It is decreed that what our Employers think and let us know
enough to think shall be a part of the inner substance of our being. It
shall be a part of growing of the grass to us, and shall be as water and
food and sleep. It shall be to us as the shouts of boys at play in the
field and as the crying of our children in the night. To most men
Employers are the great doors that creak at the end of the world.
It is not the houses that people live in, or the theatres that they go
to, or the churches to which they belong, or the street and number--the
East End look or the West End look the great city carves on the faces of
these men I see in the street--that determines what the men are like.
Their daily work lies deeper in them than their faces. One finds one's
self as one flashes by being told things in their walk, in the way they
hold their hands and swing their feet.
And what is it their hands and feet, umbrellas, bundles, and the
wrinkles in their clothes tell us about them?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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