Mastering others so that they have to do what one says is superficial, merely a momentarily successful-looking way a man has of being a failure.
This master has been tried. He has failed. He is the half-inventor of Bolshevism.
The real master is not the man who masters men, but who makes them master themselves. The masterful man in getting out of people what he wants, is the man who makes the people want him to have what he wants--makes them keep giving it to him fresh out of their hearts every day.
The wholesale national and international criticism the Red Cross workers made in the latter months of the Red Cross activities, of the touch-the-b.u.t.ton and hand-down-the-order methods of many of the business men who controlled the activities at home and abroad--of the millions of workers in the Red Cross, has been itself a kind of national education in what certain types of American business men placed in power fell inadvertently into, in trying to treat millions of free people on the employer and employee plan.
But these men and their whole idea are going by. We are getting down to the quick, to the personal and the human, to the sense all good workers have of listening and being listened to and of not being overridden. Big business after this is going to be big in proportion as it makes people feel--employees and customers both, that they are listened to, that they are being dealt with as individual human beings and not as fractions of individuals, or as part of some big vague bloodless lump of humanity.
Studying one"s customers so as to make them want to trade with one is here to stay.
To speak of studying with the best expert skill in the country one"s employees so as to make them want to work, as humanity, is not quite bright. It is not humanity. It is business.
Making people trade with one instead of making them want to trade with one is recognized as second-rate business. So is making people work for one instead of making them want to work. The business man who depends for his business, on customers, or on workers who want to get away and are going to the first minute they can, naturally goes under first.
VI
THE PUT-THROUGH CLAN PUTS THROUGH
-- 1. _What._
We are a people who think in action. Our way of making other nations think and of thinking ourselves is to do things.
The people who swept into and took over the Red Cross, who dramatized the American people in the war abroad--are the people who are going to make war at home impossible.
The big spiritual or material fact about the Red Cross is that it has been a dramatic organization, that for four years it has been an organization for acting out the feelings, desires, wills and beliefs of a great people toward men who were fighting for liberty.
The Red Cross has been a great emotional epic play, an expression in action, of the heart and brain of a mighty nation.
Emotions by great peoples have been spectacular before, and they have been sentimental and they have been occupied with enjoying themselves.
But in the Red Cross twenty million people have been as inspired as Saint Francis and as practical as a Steel Trust in the same breath.
The vision of the future of the Put-Through Clan that lies ahead is that it shall keep on dramatizing these qualities in the American character at home, selecting things to do which shall dramatize our people to one another, to themselves and to the people of other nations.
The way to make democracy work is for the people to use their brains, their spirit and their imagination to do team-work with the inventors and engineers who help express their democracy for them.
The platform of the Put-Through Clan is the right of all to be waited on.
Skilled labor has a right to be waited on by skilled capital.
Skilled capital has a right to skilled labor in return.
The new and stupendous force in modern life from now on is to be the skilled consumer--the organization of the consumer-group to cooperate with skilled capital and skilled labor, to make it impossible as it is now, for unskilled capital, capital which has not the skill to win the public, or to win its own labor, and for unskilled labor, labor which cannot earn its money and takes it whether it earns it or not, to compel the consumer by force and by holdups to buy goods they do not want at prices they are not worth from men with whom they do not want to deal.
The skilled consumer will organize his skill and deal with the people he wants.
All the people of this country--the consumers (the real employers of all employers) have to do, is to whisper in one national whisper through a hundred thousand grocery stores and other stores what kind of employers and workmen, what kind of goods and factories they like, and the buyers and consumers of America instead of taking what is poked out at them because they have to, and being the fools and the slaves of capital and labor, will get with a whisper what they request, and we will return and will let employers and workmen return, to the status of human beings.
-- 2. _How._
The test of a man"s truth is his technique.
What Mathias Alexander believes about conscious control and making self-discipline work is true because he does not have to say it. He dramatizes it.
Alexander is right in his fundamental idea of giving conscious control to people through new brain tracks toward their bodies because they get up and walk away from him when they have been with him, with their new brain tracks on. New habits--new psycho-physical habits, like Culebra cuts are put right through them.
The man who conceives or invents may be wrong, the man who experiments or tries out, may need to be watched, but the man who puts through is inviolable.
The program, the spirit and the function of the Put-Through Clan in a town, is to embody truth so baldly and with such a shameless plainness that no matter how hard they try, people cannot tug away from it.
There are three courses we might take in the Put-Through Clan in dealing with our town. (1) We can stand for disciplining capital and labor into shape by pa.s.sing laws and heaping up penalties. (2) We can let them see how much better they can make things by sicking them on to each other and having them discipline each other. (3) We can make fun of both of them until they make fun of themselves and each cla.s.s begins disciplining itself. Then general self-discipline will set in. We propose to indulge--each group of us in the Put-Through Clan--the labor group in the town, the employer group and the public group, in self-disciplining ourselves, until the thing is made catching out of sheer shame and decency in others.
-- 3. _Psycho-a.n.a.lysis._
The scientific basis for psycho-a.n.a.lysis for a town, or for a labor union, or for a Republican or Democratic Party, is found in the facts that have been stated by Mathias Alexander in his book and demonstrated by his work.
Professor John Dewey in his introduction to Mr. Alexander"s book speaks of what Mr. Alexander stands for, as Completed Psycho-a.n.a.lysis.
As Alexander"s technique for pulling one particular man, soul and body, together, is precisely the technique I have in mind for pulling a nation together, I want to dwell on it a moment longer before applying it to the Put-Through Clan.
The first thing a man is always fooled about is his own body and in everything else he is fooled about, he just branches out from that.
The Put-Through Clan proceeds upon the idea that this is as true of his political or social or industrial body to which he belongs as it is of his first one.
Reform must be self-reform first.
If it is true that the majority of ideas and decisions most people think they make with their minds are really made for them and handed up to them by their bodies--if it is true that what people quite commonly use their minds for is to keep up appearances, to give rational-looking excuses and reasons for their wanting what their stomachs and livers and nerves make them want, the way to persuade people nowadays is to do what Christ did--get their minds out from under the domination of their bodies.
If it is true that when a man goes to his dentist with a toothache, he finds he does not know which side of his mouth it is on, it is likely to be still more true of all the rest of his ideas about himself--his ideas about his ideas.
If everything about us, about most of us is more or less like this, as Alexander says--wires or nerves all twisted, sensory impressions upside down, half of what is inside our bodies mislaid half the time, the way to change people"s minds is to change them toward the bodies they are with and that they are nearest to, first. Then we can branch out and educate others--even educate ourselves.
Millions of grown people, in religion, business and politics to-day in America can be seen thinking automatically of the world about them in the terms of themselves, in the terms of their own souls sadly mixed up with their own bodies. We all know such people. The world is just an extension, a kind of annex or wing, built out from themselves full of reflections from their own livers, and fitted up throughout with air castles, dungeons, twilights, sunrises, after-glows, from their own precious interior decorations and bowels and mercies.
The basic fact about human nature the Put-Through Clan acts on is the simplest thing in the world. We are always having moments of seeing it.
We all see how true it is in babies we have personally known. We recognize it without a qualm in a baby, that his emotions and reflections about life, about Time and Eternity, and about things in general are just reflections of a milk bottle he has just had, or of a milk bottle he has not just had and wants to know why.
I have often tried to translate a baby"s cry in his crib, into English.
As near as I can come to it, it is