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

lowered in dignity, worth and achievement; it is adding cruelty

to this to whitewash windows, prohibit any conversation and count

every movement. Before you may expect loyalty you must deserve

it, and the record of the owners of industry warrants no great

loyalty on the part of their employees. Annoying restrictions are

more than injuries; they are insults to the self-feeling of the

worker and are never forgotten or forgiven.

That a nation is built on the work of its people—their

steadiness, energy, originality and intelligence, is trite. That

anything is really gained by huge imports and exports when people

live in slums and have their creative work impulses thwarted is

not my idea of value. Factories are necessary to a large

production and a large population, but the idea of quantity seems

somehow to have exercised a baleful magic on the minds of men.

England became “great” through its mills, and its working people

were starved and stunted, body and soul. Of what avail are our

Lawrences and Haverhills when we learn that in the draft

examinations the mill towns showed far more physical defects,

tuberculosis and poor nutrition than the non-factory towns?

Work is the joy of life, because through it we fulfill purposes

of achievement and usefulness. Society must have an organization

to fit the man to his task and his task to the man; it must

organize its rewards on an ethical basis and must find the way to

eliminate unnecessary fatigue and monotony. The machine which

increases production decreases the joy of work; we cannot help

that, therefore society must at least add other rewards to the

labor that is robbed of its finest recompense.

A counsel of perfection! The sad part is that books galore are

written about the ways of changing, but meanwhile the law of

competition and “progress” adds machines to the world, still

further enslaving men and women. We cannot do without

machines,—nor can we do without free men and women. The fact is

that competition is a spur to production and to industrial

malpractice, since the generous employer must adopt the tactics

of his competitors whether in a Southern mill town or in Japan.

I must confess to a feeling of disgust when I read preachments on

the joys of work, on consecrating one’s self to one’s task. I can

do that, because I do about what I please and when I please, and

so do you, Mister Preacher, and so do the exceptional and the

able and the fortunate here and there and everywhere. But this is

mathematically and socially impossible for the great majority,

and unless a plan of life fits that majority it is best to call

the plan what it is,—an aristocratic creed, meant for the more

able and the more fortunate.

CHAPTER XIII. THE QUALITIES OF THE LEADER AND THE FOLLOWER

The social group, in its descent from the herd, has become an

intensely competitive, highly cooperative organization. There are

two sets of qualities essential to those phases of society that

concern us as students of character.

Out of the mass there come the leaders, those who direct and

organize the thought and action of the group. The leader, in no

matter what sphere he operates, excels in some quality: strength,

courage, audacity, wisdom, organizing ability, eloquence,—or in

pretension to that quality. The leader is a high variable and

somehow is endowed with more of a desired or desirable character

than others. As fighter, thinker or preacher he has made the

history of man. A dozen million common men did not invent the

wheel; it was one aboriginal genius who played with power and saw

that the rolling log might transport his goods. The shadow may

have interested in a mild way every contemporary and ancestor of

the one who discovered that it moved regularly with the sun. And

when a group is confronted by an unknown danger, it is not the

half-courage of the crowd that adds up to bravery and fearless

fighting spirit; it is the one man who responds to the challenge

with courage and sagacity who inspires the rest with a similar

feeling. The leaders of the world stand on each other’s

shoulders, and not on the shoulders of the common man. Democracy

does not lie in an equal estimate of men’s abilities and worth;

it is in the recognition that the true aristocrat or leader may

arise anywhere; that he must be allowed to develop, no matter who

his ancestors and what his sex or color may be; and that he has

no privileges but those of service and leadership.

The leadership qualities will always be determined by the

character of the group that is to be led and the task to be

performed. Obviously he who is to lead a warrior group of small

numbers in a fray needs be agile, quick of mind, strong and

fearless, whereas a general who sits in a chair at a desk ten

miles from the fighting front and controls a million men fighting

with airships, guns and bayonets must be a technical engineer of

executive ability and experience. The leader whose task is to

exhort a group into some plan of action—the politician, the

popular speaker—needs mainly to appeal to the sympathies and

stir the emotions of his group; his desire to please must be

efficiently yoked with qualities that please his group, and those

qualities will not be the same for a group of East Side

immigrants as for a select Fifth Avenue assemblage. In the one

instance an uncouth, unrestrained passion, fiercely emphasized,

and a bold declaration of ideals of an altruistic type will be

necessary; in the second all that will be ridiculous, but passion

hinted at with suave polished speech and a careful outline of

practical plans are essential. The labor leader, the leader of a

capitalist group, will be different in many qualities, but they

will be alike in their vigor and energy of purpose, in their

aggressive fighting spirit, their proneness to anger at

opposition but controlled when necessary by tact and diplomacy.

They will impress the group they lead as being sincere, honest,

able, knowing how to plan, choose and fight. These last three

qualities are those which the members of the group demand; the

leader must know how to plan, choose and fight for them. Nor, if

he is to succeed easily, must he be too idealistic; he must not

seek too distant purposes; the group must understand him, and

though he must keep them in some awe and fear of him, yet must

they feel that he represents an understandable ideal. The leader

who preaches things out of comprehension arouses the kind of

opposition which finally crucifies him.

The leader must feel superiority to his group, and whether he

proclaims it or not, he usually does. Now and then he is a cold,

careful planner, an actor of emotions he does not feel, a cynic

playing on passions and ideals he does not share. Usually he is

deeply emotional, sometimes deeply intellectual, but not often;

generally he has his ears to the ground and listens for the stir

that tells the way men wish to be led. Then he mounts his horse,

literally or figuratively, brandishes his sword and shouts his

commands.

A leader springs up in every group, under almost all kinds of

circumstances. Let ten men start out for a walk, and in ten

minutes one of them, for some reason or another, is giving the

orders, is choosing and commanding. Often enough the leadership

falls to social rank and standing rather than to leadership

qualities. In fact, that is the chief defect in a society which

builds up rank and social station; leadership falls then to men

by virtue of birth, financial status or some non-relevant

distinction. All one has to do is to read of the misfit leaders

England’s “best” turned out to be in the early part of the late

war to realize how inefficient and untrustworthy such leadership

may be. One meaning of democracy is that no man is a leader by

virtue of anything but his virtues, and that opportunity must be

given to the real leader to come into his own.

Leadership means neither selfishness nor altruism, nor does it

connote wisdom. A leader may be rankly egoistic and careless of

the welfare of his people—Alexander, Napoleon—or he may be

imbued with a mission which is altruistic but unwise. Such, in my

opinion, was Peter the Hermit who started the Crusades. The wise

men of the world lead only indirectly,—by a permeation of their

thoughts, slowly, into the thought of the leaders of the race and

from them downwards. Adam Smith exerted a great influence. But

how many read his books? The leaders of thought did, and they

extended his teachings into the community, but certainly not as

Adam Smith taught. Christ made an upheaval in Jerusalem and its

vicinity; a few leaders taught revisions of His doctrines, and as

the doctrines passed along, they became institutionalized and

dogmatized into a total, made up as much of paganism as of

Christ’s teachings. It is the tragedy of those whose names

exercise authority in the world that their teachings are often

without great influence. For all of Christ’s teachings, the

Christian nations plunge into great wars and repudiate His

doctrines as applicable neither to industry nor international

relations.

If the leader needs certain qualities, the follower needs others.

He must be capable of attachment to the leader or his

institution; he must possess that quality called loyalty. Loyalty

is the transference of the ego-feeling to the group, an

institution or an individual. It has in it perhaps the

self-abasement principle of McDougall, but perhaps it is just as

well to say that admiration, respect and confidence are basic in

it. Loyalty differs from love only in that there is a sort of

inferiority denoted in the first. If you feel yourself superior

to the person or institution claiming your loyalty, you are not

loyal in feeling, though you may be in act; you are bound by

honor or love and not by loyalty.

Loyalty in the inferior may be awakened by many things, but to be

permanent the follower must sooner or later feel himself a part

of the program. He must have not only duties and responsibilities

but benefits, and he must be given a visible symbol of

membership. A child becomes loyal when he is given a badge or

title, and so do men. This is the meaning of uniforms, badges,

titles and privileges; they are symbols of “belonging” and so

become symbols of loyalty. From the higher intellects loyalty can

only be won if they have a share in conference, in the exertion

of power and in identification with the institution in a

privileged way. Though cash and direct benefit do not insure

loyalty, they go a long way toward getting it. Many a man who is

a rebel as a workman is loyal as a foreman, and while here and

there is one who is loyal and leal{sic} whether the wind blows

good or ill, the history and proverbs of men tell very plainly

that loyalty usually disappears with the downfall of the leader,

or when benefits of one kind or another are too long delayed. A

man may be loyal to the leader or institution powerful and

splendid in his youth (usually pride is as much involved as

loyalty), but his children never are.

Disciplinability is a quality of the follower. He must be willing

to sacrifice his freedom of action and choice and turn it over to

another. Rules and regulations are necessary for efficiency. In a

larger sense, they become laws, and the law-abiding are the

disciplined, ready to obey whatever law. Thus the reformers do