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
In national issues of capital and labor, the opinions of employers and
workmen who have worked out a way of meeting the crisis on a smaller
scale, who understand one another on a five or six hundred scale instead
of a two or three million scale, would be treated by the Air Line League
as probably weighty and conclusive. Those classes of employers and
employees who in a marked degree have failed to have the brains to
understand each other even in the flesh and at hand with both persons in
view themselves, must expect to have their national opinions about
national labor and national capital discounted by the Clan. The
Put-Through Clan nationally will grade the listening and ranking of the
demands of industrial groups upon the assumption that people who slur
over what is next door are not apt to be deep about things that are
further away.
Sec. 7. _The Town Fireplace._
The outstanding fact about our modern machine civilization and its
troubles is that crowd-thinking has seized the people--that people see
things and do things gregariously. We have herds of fractions of men,
acting as fractions of men and not as human beings.
Each fraction is trying to get the whole country to be a fraction. Being
a fraction themselves they want a fraction of a country.
Ten differing men can get together and agree.
Ten differing crowds of men--of the same men, will get together and
fight.
Crowds are self-hypnotized. A man who would not be hypnotized off into a
fraction of a man alone, with enough men to help him becomes a thousandth
or ten thousandth of a man in twenty minutes.
If five crowds of a hundred thousand men each could sit down together
around a fireplace and listen to the others--if each crowd of a hundred
thousand could feel listened to absolutely--listened to by the other four
hundred thousand, for one evening, democracy would be safe for the world
in the morning.
As it is, each crowd sits in Madison Square Garden alone--holds a vast
lonely reverie all alone, hypnotizes itself and then goes out and fights.
Of course there are the crowds on paper, too. Ink-mobs roam the streets.
Crowds do not get on as individual persons do, because individual crowds
cannot get physically and humanly together.
It has been generally noted that the best radical labor leaders who come
into definite personal contact with employers grow quite generally
conservative and that the best conservative leaders become what would
have once seemed to them radical when they really learn how to lead.
Why is it that when they begin to learn as leaders how things really are,
they are so often impeached by the crowds they represent--by capital and
labor?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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