The Ghost in the White House Part 12

People who do things soon stop being harsh in judging people who do things.

VI

GETTING FIFTY MEN RIGHT

My experience is that extreme reactionaries and extreme radicals and reformers are the same kind of people turned around. Take any extreme radical and begin operating him other end to, and you have an extreme conservative. In the one thing that determines what a man amounts to and what a man does, viz.: his intuition and judgment with regard to human nature, extreme conservatives and extreme reformers are a marked people and make and have the habit of making singularly stupid, harsh and self-mutilating judgments of human nature. They are always getting wrong the cold actual facts as to what particular people mean--what they are like, and capable of being like and are soon going to show they are like.

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

THE GREAT NEW PROFESSION

En Route, New York, New Haven & Hartford R. R.

January 19, 1920.

Dined at the ----'s last night. Judge ---- was there. Two other lawyers.

We sat after dinner and talked very late.

Three lawyers are too many for a dinner.

I do not know what it is, but I never spend the evening with a lawyer, without talking back to him in my mind all the next day.

Probably, if at this late date I were picking out what I would be in the world, and had to be one thing rather than another, I would pick out being a lawyer backwards.

The usual standard idea of what a lawyer is, is that he is an expert in conducting people's fights for them.

My idea is that the whole thing should be turned around and that in the special state the world is in just now, a new profession should at once be started--a profession in which any man who went into it, would be occupied in being a lawyer backwards.

(I think this would be perhaps the best way to put it because to most people, being a lawyer backwards is inspiring to think of--because everybody would see--a whole nation would see all in one unanimous minute, just what the new profession I have in mind would be like.)

Everybody knows about lawyers. They are always being advertised by the things they do and get the rest of us to do. The most conspicuous ad.--their huge national international display ad. just now of what a lawyer is like--of just how nice being a lawyer backwards would be, is the United States Senate.

It would be the most alluring spectacle we could have in America to most people, if we could have the spectacle in our country of two or three hundred thousand men being lawyers backwards--two or three hundred thousand men stationed strategically in ten thousand cities, as experts everybody went to, to keep them out of fights.

You see a man's sign up over his door and you go in and pay him a fee, or pay him so much a year for making you love your enemies. And of course he will change your enemies some for you in spots so that you can put it over. Then by putting in a little touch here and there on you perhaps, it is not impossible he will make your enemies love you.

My idea is that this idea should be presented to people not for what it is worth--not as a high moral idea or as a spiritual luxury but as a plain practical every day convenience in our world as it is, for getting the things done one wants to do, and for getting what one wants.

If I were hiring a man to help me get what I want out of other people and if I had my choice between hiring a man who is a skilled expert in making people understand me and hiring a man who is a skilled expert in making people afraid of me, it would not take me long to say which would be the more practical thing for me to do.

If I could go down town and engage a man at so much a year who would be an expert in making me understand myself and in making me make fun of myself, so that I could get myself into fairly good shape for other people to understand, it would be still more practical.

I would soon find myself after the first few seances with the man I was hiring to sit down with me and be a lawyer backwards to me--I would soon find myself having things done to me that would be so plain, so pointed, so sensible, so scientific and matter of fact and thorough that I would be able in a minute to cut down to the quick with any man I met,--cut down to the quick and get what I wanted on any subject I took up, because n.o.body could fool me, because I couldn't even be fooled by myself.

I do not know how long it is going to take but I do know that if the world is going to be reformed it is going to be by men who--either by doing it personally, or by hiring somebody else to help them do it, have reformed themselves.

My own personal observation is, so far, that when I set out to see things against myself I seem to need somehow, a great deal of a.s.sistance.

In such a naturally disagreeable mussy job of course, instead of going to my friends, to people one goes out to dine with, I feel there ought to be some regular professional person one could go to, some more n.o.ble refined sort of spiritual hired man--make an appointment by telephone, go down to a room down town on the way to one's office and then just as a plain matter of course be done off for the day, be done over, be put in shape for one's fellow human beings to get on with.

Then one could go out into the midst of the people and keel over a world.

After one had hired some one to be a lawyer backwards to one and got used to it, one would soon be in shape to go to one's employers and let them put in some touches, go to one's employees, go to anybody and everybody right and left. One would soon get so that one could learn something from everybody. One would take points even from relatives.

The main difficulty in a thing like this would be one that would come at the start, the difficulty of getting people to look upon undergoing the truth about themselves, respectfully and seriously and like an operation.

No amateur or friend could get anybody started. The only way to begin is to have some special expert to go to, some special expert with a long string of notable moral patients, men who have succeeded in business by seeing through themselves more, and seeing through themselves quicker and oftener than other people do. You hear of some especially good man who is being a lawyer backwards practicing regularly with great success. You observe his patients from day to day and see how the truth works. Then you go down to his office, plank down your money and get the truth.

The trouble with truth from friends and relatives is that even when they tell it, n.o.body pays for it. Most people neither take the truth nor anything else in this world seriously if it is free. People get more, the more they want it. And the more they want it, the more they show it by wanting to pay for it.