The Ghost in the White House Part 34

"I don't think my mother knows WHO I AM!"

What a baby is really doing is disciplining other people.

Not so very different after all from Senator Lodge pivoting as he has for six months a whole world on himself and on his having his own little way with it, disciplining the rest of the Senate, forty nations and a President, and everybody in sight--except himself.

If a patient nation could put him in a crib, everybody would understand.

Many people apparently are deceived by his beard, or by his degree at Harvard, or other clothes. But it is the same thing. What is really happening to him--to Senator Lodge is really a kind of spiritual neuritis. He is cramped, or as the vulgar more perspicuously and therefore more fittingly and elegantly put it, his mind is stuck on himself. He is imbedded in his own mereness and now as anybody can see there is nothing that can be done by anybody with anything, not with a whole world for a crowbar, to pry Lodge off himself.

Most of us know other people like this. Most of us have moments and subjects on which as we have remembered afterwards we have needed to be pried off. The same is true, of course, of a political body like the Republican or Democratic Party, or of a labor union.

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.

-- 4. _Psycho-a.n.a.lysis for a Town._

When a man thinks of himself and wants other people to think of him as an inst.i.tution--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.

In saying that the main thing the Put-Through Clan is for in a town, is to act as town-headquarters for the town's seeing through itself, as a means of making the town the best, the happiest town in the state--as a means of making it a town that deserves anything it wants, I am merely saying that the act of self-invention--the act of recreation once entered into as a habit is so refres.h.i.+ng and so extraordinary in itself, and so practical in its results, that when people once see how it really works--when towns and parties and industrial groups get once started in self-discipline, in self-confession, in psycho-a.n.a.lysis and in taking advantage of opposite ideas--there is going to be an epidemic in this country, a flu of truth.

A whole city or a whole town indulging in psycho-a.n.a.lysis finds it less embarra.s.sing and not more embarra.s.sing than one man does.

When it becomes the thing for a city or for a capital or labor group to see through itself and then collect on the benefit of it, the main thought cities and labor unions and employee managers will have about it will be a wonder they had not thought of it and done it before.

And it will be economical, too, if people take the seeing through them that has to be done by some one, and do it themselves.

Three per cent of the conveniences--the public X-ray machines for keeping people from being fooled about themselves will be enough.

The minute we begin turning the X-ray outfit around and begin trying it modestly on ourselves, a small cheap outfit will do.

It is a mere phonograph-record to say that n.o.body likes self-discipline.

What people do not like, is trying it, or getting started.

There is a sense in which it is possible for a town like Northampton--twenty-five thousand people, to have--if it once gets started, almost an orgy of seeing what is the matter with it. It is easier to be humble in a crowd that is being humble, and a whole town disciplining itself instead of being more difficult to imagine, Would be easier, once start the novelty of one man's doing it.

Why should people think that a man who is capable of disciplining himself is doing it because he thinks he ought to, or why should they be sorry for him?

No one really thinks of being sorry for Marconi or Edison or Wilbur Wright, or Bell, or any big inventor in business or even for a detective like Sherlock Holmes, the whole joy and efficiency of whose life is the way he steals a march on himself.

The very essence and power of being an inventor or a detective or a discoverer, is the way it makes a man jump out around himself, the way he keeps on the qui vive not to believe what he likes, goes out and looks back into the windows he has looked out of all his life.

People must not take the liberty of being sympathetic with a man who does this and of thinking he is being n.o.ble and doing right.

It has never seemed to me that people who look n.o.ble and feel n.o.ble when they are doing right, can ever really do it. I am not putting forward in the present tragic crisis of my nation, the idea of self-criticism, of self-confession, and of self-discipline, with any weak little wistful idea that beautiful and n.o.ble people will blossom up in business all over the country and practice them. I am offering self-discipline as a subst.i.tute for disciplining other people in business, as a source of originality, power and ideas, and as a means of getting and deserving to get everything one wants. I am offering self-discipline because it works.

People who get so low in their minds and who so little see how self-discipline works that they actually have the face to feel n.o.ble and beautiful about it when they are having some, cannot make it work. They must be leaving most of theirs out....

The psychology of self-discipline is the psychology of the inventor.

The inventor is the man who lives in the daily habit of criticising his own mind, and disciplining himself. The source of his creative and original power is that more than other men he keeps facing necessities in himself, keeps casting off old selves, old preconceptions and breaking through to new ones.

The spiritual and intellectual source of the grip of the inventor upon modern life, is that he is a scientist in managing his own human nature and his own mind, that he had a relentless rejoicing habit of disciplining himself.

In every renaissance, revival or self-renewal the world has had, people have had the time of their lives. The great days of history have been the eras of great candid truth-facing, self-discipline. Self-discipline and self-discovery go together.

There is a greater return on the investment in being born again, in getting what one wants, than in anything else in the world.

If one sees through himself, he can see through anybody. It explains and clears up one's enemies and clears one's own life for action.

-- 5. _To-morrow._

I am not writing a beautiful wistful work on how I wish human nature would work or hope it is going to work, in America.

I am recording a grim, matter-of-fact, irresistible, implacable law in the biology of progress.

I am not nagging, teasing or apologizing. I am not saying what I say as religion or as the Lord said unto Moses, or even "as it seems to me."

I am not dealing in what I want to have happen.

I am dealing in truth as a force and not as a property.

I am foretelling what has got to happen. People who do not believe it will have to get out of the way of it.

The conscious control of capital, the conscious control of labor, the conscious control of the public group--the arrival and the victory of the men who get their way by self-control and who are invited by all to have control of others because they have control of themselves, is a law of nature.

I am not preaching or teasing.

I am not asking people's permission in this book for certain events.

This book is not an attempt to answer the question, "What is day after to-morrow's news?"

It is put forth as a prospectus of what has got to happen.

The truth is taking hold of us and is seizing us all.

It is for us to say.

This book is a scenario of a play for a hundred million people to put on the stage, and for five hundred million people to act.

-- 6. _Who._