What will we do, what ideas will we carry out?
Get one hundred thousand picked men together and what can they not do, what ideas can they not carry out?
What is hard, what is priceless, is getting the men and getting the men together. Everybody who has ever done anything knows this.
What we are doing is not to get values together, but the men who keep creating the values.
The men who have created already the values of five thousand cities, shall now create values for a nation.
I am not writing to people--to the hundred thousand men who are going to be nominated to the Look-Up Club--to ask them whether they think this idea of mine--of having the first hundred thousand men of vision of this country in a Club, is going through or not.
I am writing them and asking them if--if it is going through--they want to belong to it.
Very few men can speak with authority--even if they would, as to what the other ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine men will possibly do or not do with my idea in this book. But any man can speak with authority and speak immediately when he gets to the end of it, as to how he feels himself, whether he wants or likes the idea, and wants to count one to bring the idea to pa.s.s.
I speak up for myself in this book. Anybody can see it. If every man will confine himself in the same way, and will stake off himself and attend to himself at the end of this book and say what he wants--we will all get what we want.
The proposition looks rather big, mathematically, but looked at humanly, it is a simple straight human-nature question. All I really ask of each man who is nominated is,
"If the first hundred thousand men who have imagination in business are being selected and brought together out of all the other business men in America, do you want to be one of them? Who are the ten, twenty or fifty men of practical vision in business--especially young men, you think ought not to be left out?"
It is all an illusion about numbers and sizes of things.
The way to be national is to be personal, for each man to take sides with the best in himself.
Suddenly across a nation we look in a hundred thousand faces.
-- 2. _Why the Look-Up Club Looks Up._
The Const.i.tution does not provide for an Imagination Department for the United States Government.
It has judicial, executive and legislative departments, but a department made up of men of vision to create, conceive and reconceive, go deeper and see further than law and restraints can go, does not exist in our Government.
We have a Judicial Department to decide on whether what is born has a right to live--a Legislative Department to pa.s.s rules under on how it shall be obliged to live--and an Executive Department to make it mind--but the department to create and to conceive for the people is lacking.
Government at best is practically a dear uncle or dear maiden-aunt inst.i.tution.
Government as a physical expression is without functions of reproduction.
Government--contrary to the theory of the Germans--from the point of view of sheer power in projecting and determining the nature and well-being of men--the fate of men and the world--is superficial, is a staid, standardized, unoriginal affair--devoted to ready-made ideas like the Red Cross during the war.
This is what is the matter with a Government"s posing in this or any other nation as a live body for the people.
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 cooperating with the Try-Out Club to act as an informal Imagination Department for the United States.
V
THE TRY-OUT CLUB TRIES OUT
-- 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 n.o.ble 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.
This chapter has been written so far on a pad in my pocket while inhabiting or rather being packed in as one of the bacilli with twenty other men, in the long narrow throat or gullet of a dining-car. When I was swallowed finally and was duly seated, the man who was coupled off with me--a perfect stranger who did not know he was helping me write this chapter in my book, reached out and started to hand himself the salt and then suddenly saw I might want it too and pa.s.sed it to me.
He summed up in three seconds the whole situation of what democracy is, the whole question between the Germans and the other peoples of the earth.
With one gesture across a little white table he settled the fate of a world.
His selfishness, his own personal acc.u.mulated experience with an egg, made him see that he wanted salt in it.
His unselfishness made him see that I must be sitting there wanting salt in an egg as much as he did.
So he took what his selfishness made him see on the one hand and what his unselfishness made him see on the other, put them together and we had the salt together.
Incidentally he finished this chapter and dramatized (just as I was wishing somebody would before I handed it in) the idea I am trying to express in it. This in a small way is a perfect working model of what I call civilization. Unselfishness in business is not a civilization at all. It is a premature, tired, sickly, fuddle-headed heaven.
Imagination about other people based upon imagination about what one wants oneself, is the manly, unfooled, clean-cut energy that rules the world.
The appet.i.tes in people which make them selfish supply them with such a rich big equipment for knowing what other people want, that if they really use this equipment in a big business way for getting it for them, no one can compete with them.
A righteous man if he has any juice in him at all and is not a mere giver, a squush of altruism, a mere negative self-eliminating, self-give-up, self-go-without person--is a selfish person and an unselfish person mixed. What he calls his character is the proportion in which he chooses to mix himself.