To create is an intense satisfaction; to combine elements and produce new results, whether it be a bridge, a basket, or a loaf of bread—to make is in itself a joy. But so is it a joy to give something to somebody, whether at first-hand, or in a combination with many; to spread, to disseminate, to feel the current of human good flow through you; both functions are happy.
The universe is an everlasting production, force taking form, energy embodied, disembodied, re-embodied—this is the game of living. Our little mid-station of consciousness feels the pressure of natural forces on both sides, pushing in through the sensory nerves; pushing out through the motor nerves. Owing to our early mistake about the superior pleasure of impression, and our perverse insistence that expression is only a guarded outlay of limited force, by which to secure desired impressions, we have never understood the nature of human production.
The pleasure of right impression is not to be denied. Every sensory nerve should have its proper stimulus. And man, with his immense collective sensorium, with his highly developed personal sensations, due to social evolution, and his power of feeling with and for other people, has enormous capacity for the reception of pleasure. But what is all this pleasurable stimulus for? The brain is not merely a reservoir for stored sensation. A sensation is a certain amount of energy going into the human battery. Once in, it must be discharged in commensurate activity.
Most interesting experiments in psychology are being made to-day, proving this, even in some immediate result of a strong mental impression in unconscious bodily motion; as shown in studies among school children. As the brain develops it has increasing capacity to receive impressions, to retain and to arrange impressions; but nevertheless sometime that mass of impressions must come out in commensurate action, else disease ensues. The human brain, socially developed, and socially stimulated, has great power of expression; that expression is in work, and work is in Production and Distribution. The productivity of the human race, even with its past and present checks and perversions, is the wonder of the ages. Guaranteed the swift and easy satisfaction of those “wants” our economists build so much on, the steady increase of impressed energy has resulted in as steady an increase of expressed energy, necessarily.
Man receives stimulus from a thousand sources. Since we made mental impressions permanent and exchangeable “in book form,” knowledge and emotion bottled, preserved, and distributed broadcast; there is practically no limit to human stimuli; and, since with this increasing stimulus we have steadily reduced the difficulties of execution, our real problem is, how to provide right outlets for the productive energy of humanity. This normal increase of power and execution we have managed to check, however, quite materially. We have gravely interfered with the natural distribution of stimulus up to the present time; but now our rapid multiplication of free school and free library, with similar tendencies in other educational and recreative lines, is producing its natural result in increased energy.
Even with what stimulus was open to us, our production should have been very great; but we have interfered with that also, in more ways than one. The principal obstacle here is the basic error of the Want theory. Holding that man works only to satisfy desire,—i. e., produces merely to consume,—we prostitute our share of the social energy to a factitious personal advantage; and try to govern the productive processes of society by the dictates of self-interest. Here you have a factory in which a hundred men turn out ten hundred pairs of shoes a day. What for? Why, for the feet of ten hundred people, of course—to shoe the world. “Not so,” they protest. “We are making these shoes for ourselves.” “But you cannot wear ten pairs of shoes a day, my man!” “No, but I only do this work for the pay—and I can easily consume the pay for ten pair of shoes a day.”
This poor man never understands his position as a social functionary with all its honour and pleasure. The Ego concept and the Want theory becloud his mind. Even his personal pride in his personal work has lowered since the machine made his work collective, and his mind failed to keep pace with the machine, and make his joy and pride collective too. His pleasure is only in what he gets back from society in return for his labours, and he gets very little. As part of this same ancient misconception of what work is, we find the incredibly multiplied machinery of production “owned” by individuals; and manipulated by them under the same befogging ideas that lead the workman to “limit his output.”
Never were any of the gross and childish superstitions of remotest savagery more injurious—or more ridiculous—than these rudimentary errors under which our economic development so blindly labours. We have our alleged “overproduction” on the one hand—though a full supply of the good things of life is obtained by scarce one-tenth of the population of the world; and we have the ensuing and even more colossal absurdity of the restricted output—whether of the man who stints his day’s labour, or the group of financiers who “corner” some social product, and say how much the world shall have.
These muddy follies of our common mind—for if we did not all, or nearly all, believe in these principles of action, we would not for a moment allow such economic treason and misrule—together with allied fallacies of a similar nature, most seriously interfere with production. Nevertheless, as the laws of nature are somewhat stronger than our evanescent misconceptions, we do see the tremendous increase in our productivity; and, in favoured instances, its grandeur and delight. As good an expression of this feeling as I know in literature is in George Eliot’s poem of “Stradivarius.”
Here is a man, developing an extremely specialised line of production, and clear of brain enough to see the joy and dignity of it.