We are quite clever at simple examples in units, but very weak on fractions. We could see how one man affected another in the short radius of a limited early group, but the long-range effects of our widening interhuman activities have been beyond us, and we are slowly working out in heavy centuries those problems of liberty and justice, of honesty and love, the mastery of which is as essential to our further progress as was the early mastery of metallurgy and mechanics.
A mistake in short and simple addition is easily seen, but as the examples grow more complex the errors are more difficult to trace.
They spread wider and last longer, and by the time a society begins to meet the punishment due to the behaviour of its misguided constituents, those worthies have long since died in the odour of sanctity and a new generation is piously producing the incipient errors which will destroy its grandchildren. The vigour of our basic life processes sustains us through wide reaches of experiments and mistakes.
A flourishing society can maintain more fools than any savage period could afford.
We have to do in this book with several of the basic errors in our common concepts as to economics. We shall see how different are the facts of our economic life to-day from that inner world of concepts we carry in the brain and always take for facts while they remain there. The world is, to us, the sum of our concepts concerning it; and while the real facts relentlessly affect us, our supposed facts are of deadly importance because they modify our conduct.
In the field of economics we maintain to this day some of the most primitive ideas, some of the most radically false ideas, some of the most absurd ideas a brain can hold. They do not fit the facts; they are not provable as true, but very promptly provable as false; they do not agree with such true ideas as we have, nor even with each other; but all this gives no uneasiness to the average brain. That long-suffering organ has been trained for more thousands of years than history can uncover to hold in unquestioning patience great blocks of irrelevant idiocy and large active lies.
In the face of every century’s accumulating facts of organic social relation we have peacefully maintained our original animal theory of individualism—the Ego concept. If bees had brains like ours, and the exquisitely organised modern bee could consciously maintain the state of mind of her remote prototype, the solitary bee, we might have some parallel to comfort our lonely height of foolishness. Well did the Greeks call an “idiot” the man who behaved as a separate individual and considered his personal advantage first. Consider the ruin and disorder of the hive if bees were “idiots.” That type of industry, of harmony, of peaceful wealth, could never have arisen under such misconception.
We have many more root concepts, some basic, some collateral and derivative; all working, discordantly enough, against social progress. Several will be touched upon here; those most patently connected with the subject of the book, our Human Work. In pursuance of which subject it is necessary to lay down some of the facts as to the nature of society, its structure and functions; and to show how perverse, how inadequate, how deadly mischievous are the ancient theories which still stand in our minds in place of those facts.
IV: SOME FALSE CONCEPTS
Summary
The ego concept, based on pre-human status. Our separate consciousness not human. Human consciousness collective. “We” human, “I” animal. Absurdity of individualism in organism. Pleasure-in-impression theory. Animal basis. Pleasure through motory nerves as well as sensory, and in us far greater. Pay Concept, animal basis, logical extremes in Heaven and Hell. Other forces also operative. Woman labour. Slave labour. Shame and agony resultant in concepts of eternal torture. Wage labour. Want theory. Self-interest theory. Self-preservation not nature’s first law. Race-preservation. Pain concept: “Sweet uses of adversity.” Action and reaction equal. “Good to be born poor.” Pain only a message, always indicative of wrong. Defensive torture. Hazing. Evils of poverty. Abraham Lincoln. Illegitimate wealth. Dumbbells not dinner. Contempt for work, how derived. Veblen. Paradox of “independence.” Law of demand and supply.