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 — John Shaqi
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 quick way to deal with the industrial situation is to expose the
extreme reactionaries and the extreme radicals who have created it. The
quick way to do this and to get the reactionaries and radicals to come to
terms and get together, scatter their fear and their panic about one
another, bone down to team work, join with the rest on a big constructive
job on the fate of the world, is to pick out certain strategic human
beings in business, see to it that the extremists on both sides are held
up and held up close to the cold scientific facts about what these human
beings are, and what they mean, and what they are driving toward, by
engineering experts in human nature and in interpreting human nature.
These personalities to unlock a nation with--to make a hundred million
men believe together and act together should be picked out, men like
Charles Schwab everybody is looking at and men not looked at yet
everybody ought to look at, and will like to look at when they know them.
Intensive publicity extensively applied.
Then with a printing press and a postage stamp multiply it by a hundred
million. Make true beliefs about picked out men--typical men we have
thousands of duplicates of, the daily habit of people's lives.
If the American people can come to know and interpret fifty men--if they
can get fifty sample men right--they will then be able to use these fifty
men every day of their lives as keys to unlock understanding with, unlock
team work with, with all the others. People will have something to work
from and something to work toward, in judging what they can do with
employers and with workmen around them.
Then we will have team work and civilization--we will have a democracy
the Germans would like to be asked to belong to.
VII
ENGINEERS IN FOLKS
The most gravely important, unbusinesslike and unscientific blunders
people make in economics, are their judgments of facts about people. The
other facts than the facts about people--about how people feel and are
going to feel inside, are comparatively accurate and obtainable.
Comparatively ordinary experts, or experts with rather routine training
and education can deal with the other facts than the facts about people.
The facts about labor, capital and superproduction, that we fail to get
most, are the psychological facts about the way people are judging one
another.
We have strikes because on one side or the other, or both, people are off
on their facts about one another. One of the first things business men
are going to generally arrange for is to have these facts about human
nature, like all other engineering facts in business, dealt with by
experts--by the general recognition and employment of experts in human
nature--of human engineers, of natural and trained interpreters of men to
one another.
If everybody will begin dealing to-morrow morning with people as they
really are, our economics in America will be as simple as a primer,
before night.
VIII