The Ghost in the White House: Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they wantLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
The Ghost in the White House: Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Democracy; United States -- Politics and government
The spontaneous uprising of business men during the war--the spectacle of
the dollar a year men overwhelming and taking over the government, the
breaking in of the National Council of Defense--the spontaneous
combustion of millions of free individuals into one colossal unit like
the Red Cross--all the other outbreaks of the creative vital power of the
superior people of the nation, all point to the fact that when new brain
tracks are called for, the natural irresistible way is to find individual
persons who have them, who make them catching to other individual
persons, and who then give body to them across the nation.
Its whole nature and action of a Government tend to make Government and
most of the people in it mechanical.
In the nature of things and especially in the nature of human nature,
this nation--if its new ideas and its new brain tracks are to come to
anything at all, they must have a spontaneous willful and comparatively
free origin and organization of their own.
Hence the Look-Up Club cooeperating with the Try-Out Club to act as an
informal Imagination Department for the United States.
V
THE TRY-OUT CLUB TRIES OUT
Sec. 1. _I_ + _You_ = _We._
If Darius the Great had put the eunuchs of his court in charge as Special
Commissioners for controlling the social evil in Babylon, they would have
made very sad work of what they had to do because they would not have
understood what it was all about. They would not have had the insight
necessary to measure their job, to lay out a great engineering project in
human nature, determine the difficulties and the working principles and
go ahead.
What makes a man a man is the way he takes all the knowledge, the
penetrating lively enriching knowledge his selfishness gives--his vision
of what he wants for himself, and all the broadening enriching knowledge
his unselfishness gives--his imagination about what he wants for others,
and pours the two visions together.
The law of business is the law of biology--action--reaction--interaction.
I + You = We.
It is getting to be reckless for the people in other nations to sit
around and gossip about how bad it is for the Germans to be so selfish.
It is reckless for capital to gossip about how selfish labor is--and for
labor to putter away trying to make capital pure and noble like a labor
union.
There are far worse things than selfishness in people.
Being fooled about oneself is worse because it is more difficult to get
at, meaner, more cowardly and far more dangerous for others.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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