The Foundations of Personality by Abraham Myerson (color ebook reader .TXT) 📕

mentality, these are the chronically unemployed of our social-industrial system.

It must be remembered that to work steadily every day and in the

same place is not an innate circumstance of man’s life. For the

untold centuries before he developed into an agriculturist and a

handicraftsman, he sought his food and his protection in the

simplest way and with little steady labor. Whether as hunter or

fisher or nomad herdsman, he lived in the open air, slept in

caves or in rudely constructed shelters and knew nothing of those

purposes that keep men working from morning till night. It’s a

long way from primitive man and his occupations, with their

variety and their relaxations, to the factory hand, shut up in a

shop all day and doing just one thing year in and year out, to

the housewife with her multitudinous, never-ending tasks within

four walls, to the merchant engrossed with profit and loss,

weighing, measuring, buying, selling and worrying without

cessation. The burden of steadiness in labor is new to the race,

and it is only habit, necessity and social valuation that keeps

most men to their wheel.

We would, I think, be oversentimental in our treatment of this

subject if we omitted two hugely important factors in work

character. Two powerful motives operate,—the necessity of

working and work as an escape from ourselves.

Not much need be said of the pressure of necessity. “To eat one

must work.” This sentence condenses the threat behind most of the

workers of the world. They cannot stop if they would—for few are

those, even in prosperous communities, who have three months of

idleness in their savings. The feeling of insecurity this fact

brings makes a nightmare out of the lives of the many, for to the

poor worker the charity organization is part of the penalty to be

paid for sickness or unemployment. To my mind there are few

things more pathetic than a good man out of a job, and few things

for which our present society can be so heartily damned. Few even

of the middle class can rest; their way of living leaves them

little reserve, and so they plug along, with necessity as the

spur to their industry.

To escape ourselves! Put any person of adult age, or younger, in

a room with nothing to do but think, and you reduce him to abject

misery and restlessness. Most of our reading, entertainment, has

this object, and if necessity did not spur men on to work

steadily, the tedium of their own thoughts would. To reflect is

pleasant only to a few, and the need of a task is the need of the

average human being. Perhaps once upon a time in some idyllic

age, some fabled age of innocence, time passed pleasantly without

work. To-day, work is the prime way of killing time, adding

therefore to its functions of organizing activity, achievement

and social value of recreation.

Yet contradictory as it seems, though many of us love work for

its own sake, most of us do not love our own work. That is

because few of us choose our work; it is thrust upon us. Happy is

he who has chosen and chosen wisely!

Industry, energy, steadiness are parts of the work-equipment;

enthusiasm, eagerness, the love of work, in short, is another

part. Love of work is not a unitary character; it is a resultant

of many forces and motives. Springing from the love of activity,

it receives its direction from ambition and is reinforced by

success and achievement. Few can continue to love a work at which

they fail, for self-love is injured and that paralyzes the

activity. Here and there is some one who can love his work, even

though he is half-starved as a result,—a poet, a novelist, an

inventor, a scientist, but these dream and hope for better

things. But the bulk of the half-starved labor of the world,

half-starved literally as well as symbolically, has no light of

hope ahead of it and cannot love the work that does not offer a

reward. It is easy for those who reap pleasure and reward from

their labors to sing of the joy of work; business man,

professional man, artist, handicraftsman, farmer,—these may find

in the thing they do the satisfaction of the creative desires and

the reward of seeing their product; but the factory is a

Frankenstein delivering huge masses of products but eating up the

producers. The more specialized it becomes the less each man

creates of the unit, machine or ornament; the less he feels of

achievement. Go into a cotton mill and watch the machines and

their less than human attendants at their over-specialized tasks.

Then ask how such workers can take any joy in work? Let us say

they are paid barely enough to live upon. What food does the

desire for achievement receive? What feeds the love of the

concrete finished product of which a man can proudly say, “I did

it!” The restlessness of this thwarted desire is back of much of

that social restlessness that puzzles, annoys and angers the

better-to-do of the world. As the factory system develops, as

“efficiency” removes more and more of the interest in the task,

social unrest will correspondingly increase. One of the great

problems of society is this:

How are we to maintain or increase production and still maintain

the love of work? To solve this problem will take more than the

efficiency expert who works in the interest of production alone;

it will take the type of expert who seeks to increase human

happiness.

Native industry, the love of work are variables of importance. No

matter what social condition we evolve, there will be some who

will be “slackers,” who will regard work as secondary to

pleasure, who will take no joy or pride in the finished product,

who will feel no loyalty to their organization; and vice versa,

there will be those working under the most adverse conditions who

will identify themselves, their wishes and purposes with “the

job” and the product. Nowhere are the qualities of persistent

effort and interest of such importance as in industry, and

nowhere so well rewarded.

In the habits of efficiency we have a group of mechanically

performed actions and stereotyped reactions essential for work.

Except in certain high kinds of work, which depend upon

originality and initiative, method, neatness and exactness are

essential. “Time is money” in most of the business of the world;

in fact time is the great value, since in it life operates. The

unmethodical and untidy waste time as well as offend the esthetic

tastes, as well as directly lose material and information. The

habits in this sense are the tools of industry, though exactness

may be defined as more than a tool, since it is also part of the

final result. He whose work-conscience permits him to be inexact,

permits himself to do less than his best and in that respect

cheats and steals.

The work-conscience is as variably developed as any other type of

conscience. There are those who are rogues in all else but not in

their work. They will not turn out a bad piece of work for they

have identified the best in them with their work. Contrariwise,

there are others who are punctilious in all other phases of

morality who are slackers of an easy standard in their work

efforts. This is as truly a double standard of morals as anything

in the sex sphere,—and as disastrous.

There is on every second wall in America the motto typical of our

country, “Do it now!” To it could be added a much better one, “Do

it well!” The energy of work and its promptness are only valuable

when controlled by an ideal of service and thoroughness. A great

part of the morals of the world is neglected; part of the

responsibility is not felt, in that a code of work is yet to be

enunciated in an authoritative way. I would have it shown

graphically that all inefficiency is a social damage with a

boomerang effect on the inefficient and careless, and in the

earliest school, teaching the need of thoroughness would be

emphasized. Our schools are tending in the other direction; the

curriculum has become so extensive that superficiality is

encouraged, the thorough are penalized, and “to get away with it”

is the motto of most children as a result.

In an ideal community every man and woman will be evaluated as to

intelligence and skill, and a place found accordingly. Since we

live a few centuries too soon to see that community, since jobs

are given out on a sort of catch-as-catch-can plan, it would be

merely a counsel of perfection to urge some such method.

Nevertheless ambitious parents, whose means or whose

self-sacrifice enable them to plan careers for their children,

should take into solemn account, not their own ambitions, but the

ability of the child. A man is apt to see in his son his second

self and to plan for him as for a self that was somehow to

succeed where he failed. But every tub in the ocean of human life

must navigate on its own bottom, and a father’s wishes will not

make a poet into a banker or a fool into a philosopher. Nothing

is so disastrous to character as to be misplaced in work, and

there is as much social inefficiency in the high-grade man in the

low-grade place as when the low-grade man occupies a high-grade

place. We have no means of discovering originality, imagination

or special ability in our present-day psychological tests, and we

cannot measure intensity of purpose, courage and the quality of

interest. Yet watching a child through its childhood and its

adolescence ought to tell us whether it is brilliant or stupid,

whether it is hand-minded or word-minded, whether it is brave,

loyal, honest, a leader or a follower, etc. Moreover, the child’s

inclinations should play a part in the plans made. A man who

develops a strong will where his desires lead the way will hang

back and be a slacker where dissatisfaction is aroused.

To that employer of labor who seeks more than dividends from his

“hands,” who has in mind that he is merely an agent of the

community, and is not obsessed with the idea that he is “boss,” I

make bold to make the following suggestions:

Any plan of efficiency must be based on sympathy and human

feeling. To avoid unnecessary fatigue is imperative, not only

because it increases production, but because it increases

happiness. Fatigue may have its origin in little matters,—in a

bad bench, in a poor work table, or an inferior tool. Chronic

fatigue[1] alters character; the drudge and slave are not really

human, and if your workers become drudges, to that degree have

you lapsed from your stewardship. Men react to fatigue in

different ways: one is merely tired, weak and sleepy —a “dope,”

to use ordinary characterization—but another becomes a dangerous

rebel, ready to take fire at any time.

[1] The Gilbreths have written an excellent little book on this

subject. Doctor Charles E. Myers’ recent publication, “Mind and

Work,” is less explicit, but worth reading.

More important than physical fatigue (or at least as important)

is the fatigue of monotony. If your shop is organized on a highly

mechanical basis, then the worker must be allowed to interrupt

his labors now and then, must have time for a chat, or to change

his position or even to lie down or walk. Monotony disintegrates

mind and body—disintegrates character and personality—brings

about a fierce desire for excitement; and the well-known fact

that factory towns are very immoral is no accident, but the

direct result of monotony and opportunity. It’s bad enough that

men and women