The quest of comfort is a drama. It might be called the tragedy of civilized man. The whole earth is the stage upon which it is being played. The history of civilization records the acts of the play. The accumulated wealth of mankind forms the properties being used by the players.
Three types of actors have played parts in it and still tread the boards:
Herd-minded types;
Quantity-minded types;
Quality-minded types.
An analysis of their characters and their relations one to another is necessary to an understanding of the plot.
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In speaking of “Americans,” or of “business men,” or of “artists,” we have in mind the characteristics which Americans, businessmen, and artists each have in common. Each of these types of men lives a life similar in its essentials to that of his fellows of the same type. Each has like environments, like interests, like problems. Each has like mental characteristics in part because their common mental bent determines their choice of a common life-work and in part because their life-work determines their mentalities. Americans thrill at the sight of the stars and stripes, rise when they hear “The Star Spangled Banner,” revere the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution even though they pay no attention to them, speak English, write the Roman alphabet, use Arabic numerals. These American characteristics are common to Americans just as business men’s characteristics are common to business men and artistic characteristics common to artists.
This is the reason that makes it possible to say that in every age and in every region of the globe men have always consisted of three types of individuals: an immense majority of herd-minded men who have the characteristics common to average men; a small minority of quantity-minded men who have the characteristics which predatory, acquisitive, power-seeking, ruthless men have in common, and a still smaller minority of quality-minded men.
The beauty or ugliness of a civilization—the condition of its culture, the state of its society, and the richness or poverty of the life of the individuals in it—is determined by the parts played in that civilization by these three types of individuals—by the position accorded to quality-minded individuals and the extent to which they are able to impose their ideas upon it. Where the quality-minded play the leading part you have a beautiful civilization. Where the quantity-minded play the leading part you have an ugly civilization. Where the herd-minded play the leading part you have no civilization at all.
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Mr. Everett Dean Martin has very aptly observed that “society is a wave; the wave moves forward, but the water of which it is composed does not.”
Society does change—it moves forward, if you will—from age to age. But the parts played in the drama of civilization by the various types of individual who make up society seem never to change.
The relationship of the three types of players in the drama to one another and their respective contributions to civilization seem to be unchanging.
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It is almost impossible to say of a particular individual that he is in every respect a herd-minded, a quantity-minded, or a quality-minded type. Human beings do not lend themselves to such rigid classification. Most of them are mixtures of two and even three of these types. The most ambitious, the most predatory, the most acquisitive specimen of the quantity-minded type may be average in every respect except the direction in which his appetite seems to have been abnormally developed. John D. Rockefeller, for instance, may be a devout Baptist, a convinced Republican, a sincere patriot. Upon everything other than money-making his reactions may be precisely the same as John Doe’s and every other member of the herd-minded mass. On the other hand, herd-minded individuals may be sensitive to line, to form, to color, to sound; may in some fields be skilled workers of a high order; they may lack only that qualitative attitude toward all the aspects of life which cornes from high sensitivity and profound understanding.
Yet it is possible in spite of these self-evident limitations of classification to throw a flood of light upon the forces that move our civilization by assuming that practically all human beings do belong in one or the other of these categories. The dominant characteristics, the general behavior, the outstanding activities, the values that motivate individuals are sufficiently distinctive to determine the category in which each belongs. And for our purposes it is possible to ignore those who are so definitely on the border-line as to resist all classification.
Fortunately, the theory here set forth rests upon so many inductive analyses of individuals that it cannot be upset by the differences of opinion which may develop as to the class in which historical personages and particular persons of the present period should be assigned. A concordance of circumstances puts John Doe in one class, John D. Rockefeller in the second, and Charles W. Eliot in the third. They remain in the class to which circumstances assign them only as long as they are characteristically unchanged. No man, of course, is “born” to one of these three classes. And no title of nobility, no fiat of government, no amount of wealth, no university degrees can keep him in one of these classes after changes in him or in his circumstances have developed which have actually transferred him to another. The same individual may at one time belong to the herd-minded class; later to the quantity-minded class, and at a still later time, to the quality-minded class.
Take a thousand human beings, and 997 will be herd-minded like John Doe and his fellows; two will be quantity-minded like John D. Rockefeller; and one quality-minded, like Charles W. Eliot. I cannot, unfortunately, vouch for the statistical accuracy of this formula, but it is at least suggestive of the actual state of affairs. Everyday observation makes it very probable that individuals of these three types exist in society in the ratio of 997 to 2 to 1. And in most of mankind’s tragic history, the two quantity-minded individuals have been busily engaged in quarreling to see which one would exploit the remaining 997, and in forcing the one quality-minded soul in the thousand either to entertain them or to assist them in the business of exploitation. Yet, as we shall see, there are good grounds for concluding that whatever we have of civilization has come into being because the quality-minded, exploited though they have been by the quantity-minded possessors of power, and hated by the unthinking masses, have always been able, after an often heart-breaking lapse of time, to impose their ideas upon mankind.
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Programs for the improvement or the reformation of society which do not take these differences in the types of man into account are doomed to inevitable failure. Democratic, humanitarian, equalitarian programs, when strongly charged with political or religious emotionalism, create interesting and dramatic pages in history, but they do not produce a stable and satisfying social life for mankind. Indeed, history is largely the long record of the futile efforts to better society predicated upon false theories of the equality of man and of equally disappointing efforts based upon equally false theories of the inequality of man.
The time has come for the abandonment of programs based upon fictions about man and for the formulation of a program based upon facts.
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Men are neither physically nor mentally equal. They are not equal though every politician in the land proclaim the fiction that law has conferred equality upon them, and every church endlessly proclaim the fiction that religion makes all men equally precious to God. General acceptance of the fact that some men are superior to others and that some are, by the same token, inferior, is important because of the check it would furnish upon the social and political fallacies which abound today.
The plain fact is that individuals are unequal physically and mentally by reason of inexplicable and ineradicable accidents of breed, rearing, and experience. Some are just average because they were born that way, and some are made average by education and circumstances. Some are predatory and acquisitive and others creative, and in all cases what any individual is at any given moment is the end-product of a set of equally incalculable accidents. There are no hard and fast lines of demarcation between the various types of individuals. The range is from complete idiocy to absolute genius, and from an almost perfect purity of type to every combination of types. Every individual is a miracle. Every individual is a law unto himself because each individual is the product of a sequence of events which are not exactly duplicated in the life of any other.
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It is the fact of the inequality of the individual man that is most important. It is the “clinical history” of the individual; his heredity, environment and experience, and not that of his race, nation or family that determines whether he is to be a member of the herd-minded masses, whether he is to be one of its quantity-minded masters, or its quality-minded leaders. For genius, like stupidity, falls “like the gentle dew from heaven” upon those born and brought up Frenchmen and Germans; upon those of the Nordic and the Slav races; upon those coming from families “to the manor born” and those from the “poor white trash.” Genius is not the exclusive prerogative of any of these divisions of mankind perhaps because stupidity seems to be no respecter of even the finest of families, the most progressive of nations, the most superior of races.
Individual men are first of all unequal because they do not come from one race, one nationality, one family. They are unequal by reason of the differences in the blood, history, culture, environment of their races, their nationalities, and their families. The men of one race are not equal to those of another; of one nationality to other nationalities; of one family to other families. No two individuals can ever be equal because the sum total of all the factors of heredity, environment and experience can never be the same in any two individuals.
Even if two individuals were in every controllable respect identical—identical in parentage, identical in education, identical in experience, identical in age—they would still not be equal. No possible combination of all the controllable equalities—equality of income, of education, of feeding; of shelter—is sufficient to produce two really equal individuals.
Two men may have the same father and mother and yet the heritage with which one began was different from the heritage of the other. Even though born twins, the biological material in the cells from which each developed would not have been the same; their development during gestation different, and their history from the moment of delivery, of course, unlike. And from birth onward, every minute difference in rearing and experience would have heightened the early differences in them. They would not have eaten the same food, even though served at the same table; worn the same clothes, received the same treatment from relatives and acquaintances, occupied themselves always alike. They would not have read the same books, met the same persons, taken away from them and from their reading the same set of ideas, nor encountered the same experiences. They could not be exactly alike.
Variation is a basic fact in nature.
Only man is a standardizer.
Variation must therefore be accepted in any really practical plan for producing a beautiful civilization.
With men so different from one another, it is absurd to generalize about man. There is no such thing as “man.” There are only individuals. It is dangerous enough to generalize after we have divided men into types of various kinds. We can say that all men have certain conspicuous physical and mental characteristics in common: they walk on legs, for instance; they talk; they eat. But we cannot say that all men are equally entitled to a voice in the counsels of the state.
It is childish to make anything except the most obvious of generalizations about man. Sound generalizations can only be made after full acceptance of the fact of difference, of variation, of inequality in mankind, and generalizations should be qualified with many reservations even then.
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In trying to outline a really beautiful civilization, not only must this inequality of individuals be accepted, but the inexorability of this inequality must be likewise accepted.
The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
Men may be likened to a race of runners who started to race from some dim and distant mark in the unrecorded past. At any given moment of time, some of the runners are old and some are young; some are rich and some are poor; some are intelligent and some are stupid; some are weak and some are strong. Onward they run, leaving the dead and dying behind them, pressing into the dim and distant future toward some perhaps non-existent goal. As each individual enters the race he finds that there are runners ahead of him, far behind him, and all around him. He enters into the struggle, quite without regard to the fact that he does not start on an equality with, nor even at the same time as the others, helped and hindered in his own running by various advantages and various handicaps which perhaps no other individual in the race exactly duplicates.
The runners in the race of life are not equals.
It is impossible for them to be made equal physically and mentally by fiat no matter how exalted the source from which the decree might emanate.
It is the vainest of vain hope to believe that religion or politics or science can cancel, now that the race is on, any jot or tittle of the existing inequalities among the racers.
Nor can what we call progress change the relative position of the racers. Progress may help the rank and file of plodders to move faster, but it helps the leaders in the race equally as much and sometimes it helps them to move relatively still faster than before. The difference between the Attic helot of ancient Greece and a Plato is not a whit greater than the difference between the average comic-strip reader of a modern New York newspaper and a Charles W. Eliot. All of what is generally called progress—a republican form of government, rapid and cheap transportation, factory production—has contributed in combination all that it could to the development of the average modern New Yorker. Progress may have made the New Yorker a superior being to the Attic helot, although the evidence upon this point is by no means conclusive, but it has not brought him nearer to an equality mentally with a Charles W. Eliot. It has not even brought him to an equality physically with a prize fighter and of course it has not brought him to an equality financially with a John D. Rockefeller. The future may, if we continue to progress, do as much more for the average New Yorker as the past has done for him since his forbears were serfs and slaves. But it cannot bring him to a parity with the predatory men who boss him, nor with the cultured men who civilize him. Progress may increase the speed at which all in the race run: it may substitute wheels for the legs which nature provided for the racers in the beginning of the race, but it cannot bring the racers to an equality.
Men are not equal.
Their inequality is inexorable.
And that they should be equal is undesirable.
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Man is the end product of a long evolutionary process. Everything that he is today, mentally and physically, has been slowly developed by a process which seems like adaptation to his environment, but which has been in reality a process of natural selection of those most fitted to survive from countless millions of variations throughout all time. The varieties best adapted survived. The varieties ill adapted to survival have disappeared because of the handicaps under which they labored in the struggle to maintain themselves and to reproduce their kind.
There is little doubt that man today is superior to his ancestors: that the genus homo sapiens is superior to the primates from which he sprang. That superiority, however, could not have developed had every individual primate been exactly equal to every other primate—had there not been inferior and superior specimens among them—inferior and superior at least in their survival aptitude. Progress, therefore, to the stage of development to which man has now attained has been dependent upon the fact that the primitive stock out of which the present race developed did not consist of identical nor “equal” individuals. It has been dependent upon the inequality of the individuals, and on the consequent ability of the superior among them to be selected as the breeders and nurturers of their successors.
Unless we are, therefore, to argue that no further progress is desirable, it is plain that there must be in the future a continuance of this inequality. If we are to progress from our present state; if we are to produce a race superior to the present and a state of society superior to that which we now enjoy, indeed even if man is to survive at all, the continuance of this selective process is absolutely essential. And since the process involves not only a selection of the superior types from among the whole group of individuals for survival, but also the imposition of their ways of life upon their fellows, it is eminently desirable that men should not be equal.
Social obstacles to the increase in the varieties of human types are most undesirable.
Individuality, and not uniformity, should be encouraged.
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What has probably prevented a general acceptance of the desirability of inequality has been a mistaken assumption that it involves idealization of mere brute strength. But this is an assumption which grows out of a complete misreading of the history of man. Man triumphed over every other animate creature, not because he was the stronger brute, but because he was the more intelligent. Indeed, his physical handicaps may have played a considerable part in forcing upon him a discipline and training which helped him to his present eminence in the animal kingdom.
What is true of man in competition with other animals, is also true of the individual man in competition with his fellows. Not the man who is strongest physically, but the man who is strongest mentally tends to prevail, and tends to reproduce his kind.
It is the race which invented guns and gunpowder which has vanquished the physically superior races of primitives wherever they came into conflict. It is the individual who is intelligent enough to invent some better method of adapting himself to his environment who survives in competition with other individuals. The fact that it is the predatory and not the intellectual types of individuals who generally exercise immediate power does not vitiate the rule. The rulers who survive in the contest with their fellow power-seekers are those intelligent enough to apply to their problems what the intellectuals have to teach them. Ultimately, therefore, it is intelligence which determines survival. In a society of which the cardinal principle was that every encouragement should be given to the individuals best fitted to survive, not brute strength, but intelligence would triumph. Such a society would produce real supermen. Not super-brutes, but super-rational men. They would be healthy in body as in mind, but they would not be muscular giants. They would be notable, not for their ability ruthlessly to sate their appetites, but for their sensitivity to what it is desirable to do with life.
In such a society the things which today are supposed to be in the interests of the masses would be subordinated to things in the interests of the superior individuals. All customs and institutions would be organized so as to encourage the superior individuals in every way, not only to reproduce their kind, but to impose their methods of living, their ideas about life, and their tastes upon the masses of mankind.
They would be the acknowledged teachers of mankind, the accepted architects of its culture patterns.
And in such a society, the general level of the comfort of the great masses of men would be far higher than in one in which no such recognition of the importance of inequality prevailed.
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In spite of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!”, in spite of the ring ing dogma from our own charter of liberty: “All men are created free and equal,” the nineteenth century has not succeeded in producing a really beautiful civilization. Western society has been largely relieved of the incubus of a medieval priesthood. American society has been freed of the exactions of kings and nobles. Society generally has made some revolutionary steps toward economic freedom. But it is the great tragedy of the age of revolution that so many of its experiments in remoulding society were based upon democratic theories of the equality of man. Political, economic, social, educational programs which begin with the proposition that men are equal are predicated upon a foundation of fiction. Societies based upon them contain within themselves the seeds of their own futility and failure.
The democratic theory will always fail to produce a really desirable society because it ignores the patent fact that some men are superior and others inferior; because it assumes that the inferior are capable of selecting those who are best fitted to guide and rule, and because it romantically fancies that power-seeking individuals will accept the dictation of those who lack their own ruthless determination to gratify gargantuan appetites.
Democracy seems to confer power upon the masses. But it can no more prevent the masses from being preyed upon by predatory individuals than a herd of sheep can themselves prevent the wolves from preying upon them. Power cannot be conferred upon those who are incapable of exercising it.
What is probably the greatest evil inherent in democratic forms of society is the fact that they encourage the masses to think themselves equally as good as the superior types of man. Instead of encouraging the superior individuals; instead of giving them every opportunity to act as the fashioners of the average man’s habits of life; of being the artificer of society’s folkways, democracy handicaps the activities of intelligent individuals by the way democracy organizes its social, economic, and political institutions. It tries to force superior individuals to conform to what is normal for the mediocrities and nonentities of whom mankind is so largely composed.
Democracy makes conformity the greatest good in the world.
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But the aristocratic theory, which has been largely destroyed by the rising tide of democracy, furnishes no better basis for a really beautiful civilization. True, it involves a recognition of inequality in mankind. But the inequality it recognizes is a false one. It is one based upon the single accident of birth. The classes into which aristocratic societies are divided have little or no correspondence to the superiority or inferiority of the individuals of which it is composed.
Aristocratic society imposes an artificial inequality upon mankind; it imposes a false test of superiority and an equally false test of inferiority.
The aristocrat is not necessarily a superior individual. For superiority is not merely a matter of birth and breeding. It is these things only in part. There is as yet little real knowledge about the part heredity and the part environment play in the production of superior individuals, and the wise society must therefore make provision for the leadership of those superior individuals who come out of classes and from environments which normally seem to produce only inferior types.
What mankind needs if it is to produce a really desirable state of society is an aristocracy of truly superior persons. The inequality in such a society would be based upon the actual differences among individuals and not upon differences due to the accident of race, nationality, or family.
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In such a society there would be no arbitrary leaderships.
Really superior individuals cannot be selected by examinations any more than they can be selected by elections. The most desirable attributes of the superior individuals neither lend themselves to the pedantry essential in selection by civil service commissions, nor to the demagogery necessary in selection by some form of election.
Whenever there is a general acceptance of the idea that it is in the high self-interest of every individual and of society as a whole to try to recognize intelligence and to give it every opportunity to develop, superior individuals will be recognized merely because they are superior. When it becomes the fashion for the masses to imitate the ways of life of really superior individuals; when it becomes a folkway to make heroes out of quality-minded and not out of quantity-minded individuals, the speed with which quality-minded individuals will impose their ideas, first upon the quantity-minded and then upon society as a whole, will be greatly increased.
The lag in time, between the conception of a better way of life or a better method of doing something or a better idea and the final acceptance of it, which now disgraces civilization would begin to shorten.
In such a society, every activity would be subjected to the scrutiny of its critical intellectual social leaders.
Government would be rationalized and secularized. The divinity which used to hedge about the king and the priest and which modern nationalism has transformed into patriotism, would wither under the ridicule visited upon every effort to impart a sacred character to anything or anybody having to do with government. With this would go much of the emotionalism and mass hysteria with which all political activities are now permeated. Most of the sacred principles, which are supposed to justify the fervor and the fanaticism of present day political leaders, do not bear critical examination. The differences between Republicans, Democrats, and Socialists do not stand factual examination. If it ever becomes the habit to follow those who turn first to fact-finding on controversial questions, politicians will find it difficult to excite themselves, and the multitudes who follow them, with the sort of political questions which now go by the name of paramount issues. With politics thus deflated, the issues between nations which now develop wars could not develop enough hatred to make men kill each other. Armies and navies would go to the scrap heap with the sectionalism and the nationalism which now make them necessary.
Government would be restricted to the barest minimum necessary for the restraint of stupid and vicious individuals, and for the conduct of community enterprises which cannot be more effectively carried on by individual initiative or voluntary cooperation.
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In such a society the necessity for hospitals and jails would be very considerably reduced. In a state of society such as we now enjoy both of these institutions have to be larger than the normal state of mankind requires.
Just as we shall always have super-normal individuals, we shall always have sub-normal individuals. It is necessary to accept this fact and to accept the consequences which flow from it. But it is not necessary to assume that the number of sub-normal and anti social individuals must be as great as that with which society has to struggle today.
Today the erection of insane asylums of one kind or another is one of the principal activities of society. Our insane population seems to multiply itself at a terrific rate. There is no real necessity for all these institutions. They are the inevitable consequence of the resolute refusal of society to apply to all the important questions of life even a modicum of uncommon sense.
It is today the folkway of society, a folkway encouraged by all the churches, not to control the instinct of reproduction. Men and women are not only encouraged to get married and rear large families, regardless of their own fitness for fatherhood and motherhood and their own ability to rear their children properly, but they are forbidden by Federal, State, and Municipal law to acquire information about methods of controlling and restricting birth. It is difficult to picture how much crime, disease, and insanity this one unintelligent custom injects into society. Not only does it encourage a prolific multiplication of undesirables through birth; it fills hospitals and asylums with the victims of abortions; it fills jails with those who violate laws having to do with “illegal” operations and appliances and teachings.
With one hand society manufactures the necessity for these institutions; with the other it devotes itself to building them.
No wonder laws, officials, and public institutions multiply endlessly.
If society would acquire the habit of listening very carefully to the studied conclusions of its intellectual leaders about the innumerable prohibitions which it now inflicts upon itself, it would cease manufacturing so many idiots and criminals, and would find that the true sub-normals would shrink to such a small percentage of the total population that provision for their care would cease to be an increasing social burden and an increasing social problem.
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In such a society the church would become an anachronism. With the masses of men following the pattern of living set for them by the most intelligent of their fellows, the hope of heaven and the fear of hell would not be necessary in order to make society function cooperatively. The waste of precious materials and of more precious human effort in dotting the landscape with churches—most of them ugly as sin—would be ended. The colossal amount of human energy now put into maintaining them—the energy which is organized in committees, boards, and conventions—would be released for more intelligent purposes, and the hundreds of thousands of preachers drooling superstitious rubbish about the virgin birth, the resurrection, the life everlasting, would be forced to engage in more useful and edifying occupations.
Churches, preachers, and religions have merely an ethnological interest for intelligent people. If the masses of mankind were to follow their more intelligent fellows in so regarding them, the gain to social health would be incalculable.
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In such a society the factory, and all that the factory implies —mass-production, mass-distribution, and mass-consumption would be restricted to those products which intelligent men, by the example which they would set in their buying, would determine as desirable for the material well-being and comfort of man.
Man would produce in order that he might live comfortably; he would not live in order that he might produce.
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Finally, in such a society, art would at last come into its own.
Science, which has been subverted into a mere accessory to factory-production, would begin to devote itself to the problem of how man might live more beautifully and how he might produce more beautiful things.
In such an atmosphere, art would not be an interloper. It would not be a mere excrescence upon a civilization devoted to production. It would become the real objective of existence; the necessary protest of every individual against the mundane and ordinary necessities which nature imposes upon man if he is to live.
In such a society all men might, in their due degrees, be artists. Every individual man would be alternately artist and audience: artist to the extent to which he himself produced beautiful things —even though what he produced might be only the product of his vegetable gardens—and audience to the extent to which he was able to show a discriminating enjoyment of what others produced. For the world to be a tolerable place for a really civilized people, this duality must be developed to a high degree. Great art flourishes only where there is a great, discriminating, intelligent patronage of it. And a beautiful life is only possible where the masses of men imitate their superior fellows in their appreciation of the beautiful.
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In such a society!
Why continue to describe what is for the present merely the figment of a dream?
For no such society is as yet within the realm of the probable. Perhaps it is not even in the realm of the possible.
But this is possible—in spite of the fact that the quantity-minded types of men will probably always dominate society, at least in the immediate moment—that individuals who desire to live the superior life shall erect enclaves of their own, enclaves in which they and their families and friends may live without dependence upon the patronage of the quantity-minded and in which they may enjoy such comfort and attain to such understanding as the limitations of life make possible.
Enclaves of this sort—little islands of intelligence and beauty amidst the chaotic seas of human stupidity and ugliness—would not only free the quality-minded from exploitation by the quantity minded, but they would furnish to the rest of mankind the pattern for a more comfortable and more intelligent existence. Mankind being what it is, the tendency of the average man, whether quantity-minded or just herd-minded, to imitate the ways of life of superior persons would be irresistible.
Enclaves of this sort, whenever they became numerous enough, would begin to lessen the ugliness of this civilization.
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Social changes find their genesis in three forces: (1) the forces set in motion by great natural convulsions—changes in climate such as those caused by the movement of the glacial ices—and which are independent of man; (2) the forces set in motion by the efforts of ambitious individuals to sate their appetites for pelf or power—the forces set in motion by an Alexander, a Cæsar, a Napoleon, and to come up to date, by the forces set in motion by the activities of a John D. Rockefeller, an Andrew Carnegie, a
J. Pierpont Morgan; (3) the launching of new ideas, as for instance, the forces set in motion among men by the idea that the world is round; by the idea of immortality; by the idea of equality; by the idea of democracy.
Nature’s convulsions may be dismissed from consideration because they are beyond the control of man. Man cannot produce an ice-age—yet; he can only adapt himself to those produced by nature.
It is the operation of the second of these forces that explains most of our social, economic, and political history. Quantity minded men, in their struggles to sate their ambitions, have been able to impose their wishes upon mankind because of their domination of the herd-minded masses and the dependence upon them of the quality-minded individuals. An Alexander the Great could remake Greece and the regions which he conquered as he wished because he dominated the Macedonian and Greek masses and the Aristotles of his time were so dependent upon him that they could do little on their own initiative. So it is today: the quantity-minded businessmen who direct the General Electric Company remake America as they wish because they dominate the American masses and because quality-minded geniuses like Steinmetz—an idealist, socialist, and humanitarian—are so dependent upon them that the idealists aid them in actually hindering society from adopting the reforms in which the idealists believe.
Let the quality-minded individuals free themselves from this dependence upon the quantity-minded and the civilization of the future will be built upon the basis of intelligent ideas of what changes are desirable in society and how it is most desirable to bring the changes about.
Next Section | John Doe, Average Man: The Herd-Minded Type