The Ghost in the White House Part 13

This is why I suspect that being a lawyer backwards will have to be a regular profession. There is going to be a tremendous demand for going down town and getting a disagreeable truth, the moment people see how going down and getting one and digesting one makes one get on with people in one's work.

The lawyers who are hired to fight out for him, a man's lies about himself, will soon be crowded out of business by the lawyers who free a man from himself, who knock a man out from a kind of cramp or neuritis of himself and present him a world with the truth.

This idea should be presented to people just as plain common sense.

People should not be asked to take it up not as an ideal but as an operation. If a man goes down town to hire a doctor to tell him how he has got to eat in order to live, why should he not go down town to a man's office and hire him to tell him what he has got to be like in order to have any one willing to let him live?

We have operations on all our other inner organs. The things that are done to us at these times are usually to say the least intensely personal and intimate things. And if people will let themselves be cut open and operated on so that they can eat, why should there not be men--hundreds of thousands of men everywhere in offices, people can go to to be operated on so that they can earn something to eat? Nine out of ten of the things that keep people from earning a living as they should or as they might, are truths against themselves that have never been operated on.

IX

GETTING PEOPLE TO NOTICE FACTS

The first thing the man in the White House for the next four years is going to have to face is the problem of dealing with people as they really are.

If I were writing a book for the next president to run for president on, one of the first things I would put into it would be a definite statement of what the president and the government proposed to do and what policy they proposed to adopt to keep Labor and Capital from being off on their facts about each other.

There are two policies to choose from.

First Policy: Have Capital tell Labor what is the matter with Labor, and have Labor tell Capital what is the matter with Capital. (Results: Strikes heaped on lockouts and lockouts heaped on strikes.)

Second Policy: Turn the whole truth-telling policy around.

The way to make a truth count is to get the utmost possible attention to it.

The way to get the utmost possible attention to a truth is to have people one does not expect it from telling it. The way to advertise the sins of Capital is to have Capital tell them. Employers and capitalists can attract twenty times as much attention in telling things that are the matter with them, and will be believed forty times as much. And they not only can tell the facts against themselves more fairly, but while they are telling the facts against themselves they are in a position to change them. They can tell facts against themselves with one hand and change them with the other. Or they can begin changing them--begin getting labor to help them change them.

If I had to save the world in a week or rather get a.s.surance in a week that it could be saved, I would get all the people in it to agree for a year to read each other's papers. Have every man read two papers. We would start up for America the national Parallel Column Habit. Each man by himself daily putting his own little world and other people's world alongside until they got used to it, and then together.

There is no limit to what reading the wrong papers would not do for this nation. It is not a matter to argue about. It is a mere plain matter of fact in ordinary every day psychology. The veriest tyro in human engineering can see it,--that the way to get a truth noticed about Capital or Labor, the way to make a truth of some use and get it believed and acted on, is to have the wrong people tell it.

Judge Gary could say some of the things Mr. Gompers is saying a great deal better than Mr. Gompers could.

There is one thing I am going to do when I put this up to the people. I am not going to let them think I am putting it up to them as a Christian.

The way to introduce the idea is to speak as a plain practical engineer in folks and in the way human nature works. I don't know as I would mind people having fine religious feelings about it, when they did it, if they liked, but I would prefer to call it and prefer to introduce it as simple, plain, hard-headed publicity.

The most natural quick universal short-cut to peace, to different groups of people in America getting their facts right and getting them quick and dealing with each other as they really are, is to have people go around in America from now on, telling truths everywhere, who have just got them--people the truths look prominent on.

X

THE FOOL KILLERS

The gist of the labor problem simmers down to our making some adequate universally understood provision, generally resorted to by everybody as a matter of course, for people's not being fooled about themselves.

If people do not fool themselves n.o.body else can fool them.

And they do not go around fooling others.

The next thing employers and employees who are being fooled by themselves and who are trying to fool one another, are going to observe, is that their compet.i.tors in their own industry--the employers and employees in their own industry who are not fooled by themselves and who are not taking time to fool one another, are producing more, cheaper and better goods than they can.

Things that take years to straighten out, straighten out in weeks when people on both sides who have stopped fooling themselves, get together and look at the facts over each other's shoulders. All that is necessary is to get the thing started--looking at the facts over each other's shoulders. People who do not want to start to look at facts in this way should call in a specialist until they do.

Labor human nature is not one kind of human nature and capital human nature another. They both believe on both sides what they want to, unless they go to a specialist and get a practical, matter-of-fact, profitable habit started of making a deliberate, desperate effort not to.

The world is not being run from day to day by the truth. It is run by what people believe is the truth. It is what the I. W. W. extremists believe is the truth, which const.i.tutes the important fact--the fact which has to be looked up, considered and seriously dealt with. The truth about Judge Gary's att.i.tude or Charles Schwab's, toward labor unions, makes no difference if n.o.body believes it, or if the labor unions don't believe it. As long as the labor unions are fooling themselves and believing what they want to believe, the only serious matter of fact way to deal with them is to consider how they manage to do it. The fundamental thing that is the matter with people is that they are off on their facts about themselves and believe what they want to about themselves. Naturally having begun with this they branch out and believe what they want to about anybody.

To this end in our present industrial deadlock, the first thing we have obviously got to make provision for in modern American life, is practically a new profession--regular professional persons everywhere in all cities, and in all the different industries and in the highly specialized groups each with their special and different techniques, who are experts in saving people from the consequences to themselves and others of believing what they want to about themselves.

XI

THE WHISPERERS

A very considerable proportion of the things that labor unions are in the habit of saying against their employers, the employers lock their office doors and sit down and whisper to one another against themselves.

A very considerable proportion of the thing that employers are in the habit of saying against their workmen, the workmen of the more efficient type are whispering around to one another against themselves.

One cannot help thinking what it would mean, in our present industrial deadlock, if the people who are whispering would shout, and the people who are shouting would shut up.

But perhaps it does not matter so much what the shouters shout.

The first moment the shouters suspect what the whisperers are whispering,--the whisperers on the other side--they will stop shouting to listen.

The whole industrial situation narrows down to this,--might be put into two words by a hundred million people to-day, to Capital and Labor, "Swap Whispers!"

The tumult and the shouting die.

It is with the whisperers, we will save the world.

XII

MR. DOOLEY, JUDGE GARY AND MR. GOMPERS

The proposal that we have a new profession--a group of specialists to go to, to straighten out our souls so that we can get on with other people and be competent in business, comes to one's mind at first perhaps as a kind of good humored, whimsical way of treating a serious and almost tragical subject. But something has made me want to begin my idea in this way.