The Ghost in the White House Part 18

My own experience is that my own faults really impress me most when I see them in other people.

I cannot help feeling hopefully that out of the five or six million people who are supposed to read a national magazine, there may be a few scattered hundred thousands who will catch themselves suspecting they may have moments of being like me in this.

Self-discipline sets in, as far as I can make out, in most of us in a rather weak and watery way--that is: we usually begin with seeing how unbecoming other people make our faults look. Then we begin disciplining our faults in other people, get our first faint moral glow, and then before we know it, having once got started chasing up our faults in other people we get so interested in them we cannot even leave them alone in ourselves.

Disciplining other people in itself as an object almost never does any good. Mr. Burleson is not going to get anything much out of this article, but I am the better man for it, and there are others, a million or so perhaps, who are helping me chase up our faults in him, who will chase them back to their own homes from the Post Office.

There are few of us who do not have, certain people, certain times, and certain subjects, with which we can be trusted to be unerringly fooled about ourselves.

And when we consider how Albert Sidney Burleson has missed his chance, when we consider what he could have got out of fifty-three thousand wistful silenced Post Offices in the way of pointers in not being fooled about himself, we cannot but take Mr. Burleson very gravely and a little personally. We cannot but be grateful to Mr. Burleson in our better business moments as America's best, most satisfactory, most complete exhibit of what is the matter with American business.

I leave with the reader the Thought, that probably the majority of men who have been watching Mr. Burleson for seven years wasting fifty-three thousand Post Offices, and all the fifty-three thousand Post Offices could do for him to make a successful man out of him, will go down to their offices next Monday morning, and instead of worming criticism out of everybody in sight, instead of using their business and everybody who approaches them in the business to produce goods, will use the business to produce the impression that they are perfect and that n.o.body can tell them anything--will just sit there all glazed over with complacency cemented down into their self-defending minds, imperious, impervious, as hard to give good advice to, as hard to make a dent in as beautiful shining porcelain-lined bathtubs.

It would be only fair and would save a good deal of time in business for some of us who like to try new ideas, if there were some way of telling these men--if some warning could be given to us not to bother with them--if these men with brilliantly non-porous minds, could be fitted up so that one could tell them at sight--by their heads looking the way they are--by their being bald--by their having brilliantly non-porous heads--just nice perfectly plain shiny k.n.o.bs of not-thinking.

One could tell them across a room.

But the man with the most refreshingly eager mind toward new ideas, I know, the mind the most brilliantly open--which fairly glistens inside with eagerness, glistens outside, too.

The only thing there is to go by, in telling a man with a non-porous mind, is to try gently--changing it, and see what happens.

XXIV

MACHINE-MINDEDNESS

The various forms I have mentioned of the malady of being fooled by oneself, all practically boil down to one in the end--one cause which we have to recognize and avoid--automatism, the lack of conscious control of the mind--letting oneself be rolled under the little wheels in one's head.

The main central cause operating with people when they are being fooled about themselves, is machine-mindedness.

A man's body being a great storehouse of psycho-mechanical processes and habits makes his mind react automatically, and when some one calls him a fool or acts with him as if possibly he might have moments of being fooled about himself, the man's whole nature like a spring snaps his mind back into self-defense, and instead of being grateful and thoughtful as a rational or second-thought person always is, he lets his subconscious self take hold of him, tumtum him along into showing everybody how perfect he is.

Everybody knows how it is.

XXV

NEW BRAIN TRACKS IN BUSINESS

Speaking roughly, there are two kinds of men who are markedly successful in business--the men who give people what they want, and the men who make people want things they have thought they did not want before. Moving pictures, watermelons, pianolas, telephones, forks, flying machines and locomotives, appendicitis, Christianity and chewing gum, umbrellas and even babies--have all been brought to pa.s.s by convincing other human beings that they do not know what they want, by a process which is essentially courting, that is: by a combination of fighting and affection which arrests, holds and enthralls people into adding new selves to themselves.

I confess to a certain partiality for men who get rich by making people different because I am an evolutionist and the chances are that anything you do to most people that makes them different, improves them.

But comparisons are irrelevant and I am not willing to back down from my good opinion of American human nature in business and admit that men who prosper by making people want telephones, or things they have not wanted, are the business superiors of men who prosper by just piling up on people more and more and better--things they want already.

The superior business man is the man who has a superior knowledge of himself, who searches out and uses the gift he is born with in himself and who gets other people to use theirs. Because it happens that I am an inventor, or what is called an artist, and because though I cannot remember, without the slightest doubt, I began, to advertise that I was here, or about to be here, before I was born, and because I would be bored to death handing out to people things I know they want, or presenting to people truths they merely believe already, it would be shallow for me to say that the men in American business who do not make people want things, and who just heap up on them what they want, are not successful men, are not equally important, equally essential to the state and are not doing for themselves and others just what the country, if it was a wise country and was around asking people to do things, would ask them to do.

On the other hand, I believe that in the present new tragic economic crisis with which all kinds of business men, whatever they are like, are being brought sharply face to face at a time when new brain tracks in business are especially called for--a time when practically millions of people have got to have them and use them whether they want to or not, I have thought it would be to the point to consider in the chapters that follow, what new brain tracks are like, how they work, and what people who have been accustomed not to have new brain tracks or to find them awkward, can do to get them and to make them work.

BOOK III

TECHNIQUE FOR A NATION'S GETTING ITS WAY

I

BIG IN LITTLE

A nation, in order to be a safe nation for itself, or safe for other nations in this world, must have a technique for getting and for getting a world to want it to get--its own way.

I am interested in a technique for a nation's getting its way and deserving to get its way because I want to get mine, and because being human and having quite a good deal of human nature taken out of the same stuff--out of the same mixed hot and cold ingredients as other people's, I have quite naturally come to think that what works for me, if I cut down to the quick and am honest with myself, in getting what I want, will probably, with proper shadings, of course, work for anybody.

I have thought I would see if I could not work out in this book, a technique which could be used modestly by one man, tried out in miniature as it were--a technique for getting and deserving to get one's own way.

I pick out one man, to try out the principle on, because it is safer and fairer to try out a principle other people are supposed to be asked to risk, on one man first.

Because I happen to know him better than I know anybody else, and because my experience is, he will stand more from me than anybody else, I have picked out myself.

When the technique has been tried out on one man the people who know him will believe it and try it. Then we will try it on one hundred men one after the other. Then as I have been working it out in this book, try it on the body-politic, the soul and body of a nation, try it on a hundred million people.

Then with a technique for having a body and for not being fooled by ourselves and having some substance in what we say and what we do, we would have the spectacle of a hundred million people making themselves felt in political conventions, making themselves felt in The White House and even being noticed perhaps in time at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue by the great I AM, or I CAN'T, or I WON'T tucked under the come of all of us--called The United States Senate.

II

CONSCIOUS CONTROL OF BRAIN TRACKS

My experience is that the first thing for me to attend to and know, in getting people to let me have my way, is to know when and how to discover and open up in people new brain tracks and when and how to make my main dependence on their old ones.

Getting what one wants from people turns on seeing the situation--the brain track situation in one's own mind at a particular time, and in other people's, as it really is.