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
John Stuart Mill · en
The best that most of us--whole towns of us--can do is to get up as we
propose for a whole town to do in the Put-Through Clan on the same
platform, stand there cheerfully all together on the great general
platform and admit in chorus sweetly, that we are all probably this
blessed moment and every day being especially fooled more or less by
ourselves about ourselves, about the things nearest to us--especially our
own personal bodies and political and industrial souls and bodies. The
only difference between people who are put into insane asylums and those
of us who are still allowed from day to day a little longer to stay out,
is that we can manage, if we try, some of us, to be more limber about
calling ourselves fools in time. For all practical purposes in this
world, it may be said that the people who are wise and deep about keeping
themselves reminded that they may be crazy any minute, are sane.
What happens to people--to most people when they are grown up is that
they stop being simple and honest like a baby. But they all have
practically the same essential thought when they are being disagreeable.
They are trying to make the world around them toe the line to their own
interior decorations. What they think, what they feel, what they do in
the little back parlors of their own minds must be daubed on the ceiling
of the world.
The joy of toleration, of new ideas, of rows and tiers of their
non-selves, and of their yet-selves reaching away around them that they
can still know and share and can still take over and have the use of in
addition to the mere self they already have, they hold off from.
This is where the baby has the advantage of them.
Sec. 4. _Psycho-Analysis for a Town._
When a man thinks of himself and wants other people to think of him as an
institution--as a kind of church--of course it makes him very unhappy to
believe he is wrong, but the minute he thinks of himself as a means to an
end, thinks of his personality as a tool placed in his hand for getting
what he wants or what a world wants--the minute a man thinks of himself
as a kind of spirit-auger, or chisel of the soul, or as a can-opener to
truth, which if it is a little changed one way or the other, or held
differently, will suddenly work--changing himself toward himself, and
believing what he would rather not, becomes like any other invention or
discovery, a creative pleasure.