Crowds / A Moving-Picture of Democracy

by Gerald Stanley Lee

CHAPTER X

THE STUPENDOUS, THE UNUSUAL, THE MONOTONOUS, AND THE SUCCESSFUL

The imagination of crowds may be said to be touched most successfully when it is appealed to in one of four ways:

THE STUPENDOUS. THE UNUSUAL. THE MONOTONOUS. THE SUCCESSFUL.

Of these four ways, the stupendous, or the unusual, or the successful are the most in evidence, and have something showy about them, so that we can look at them afterward, and point out at a glance what they have done. But probably the underhold on the crowd, the real grip on its imagination, the one which does the plain, hard, everyday work on a crowd's ideals, which determines what crowds expect and what crowds are like inside—is the Monotonous.

The man who tells the most people what they shall be like in this world is not the great man or the unusual man. He is the monotonous man.

He is the man, to each of us, who determines the unconscious beat and rhythm with which we live our daily lives.

If we wanted to touch the imaginations of crowds, or of any particular crowd, with goodness, the best way to do it would probably be, not to go to the crowd itself, but to the man who is so placed that he determines the crowd's monotony, the daily rhythm with which it lives—the man, if we can find him, who arranges the crowd's heart-beat.

It need not take one very long to decide who the man is who determines the crowd's heart-beat. The man who has the most dominion over the imaginations of most of us, who stands up high before us out in front of our lives, the man who, as with a great baton, day after day, night after night, conducts, as some great symphony, the fate of the world above our heads, who determines the deep, unconscious thoughts and motives, the inner music or sing-song, in which we live our lives, is the man to whom we look for our daily bread.

It is the men with whom we earn our money who are telling us all relentlessly, silently, what we will have to be like. The men with whom we spend it, who sell things to us, like the department stores, those huge machines of attention, may succeed in getting great sweeps of attention out of crowds at special times, by appealing to men through the unusual and through the stupendous or the successful. But what really counts, and what finally decides what men and what women shall be, what really gets their attention unfathomably, unconsciously, is the way they earn their money. The feeling men come to have about a fact, of its being what it is, helplessly or whether or no—the feeling that they come to have about something, of its being immemorially and innumerably the same everywhere and forever, comes from what they are thinking and the way they think while they are earning their money. It is out of the subconscious and the monotonous that all our little heavens and hells are made. It is our daily work that becomes to us the real floor and roof of living, hugs up under us like the ground, fits itself down over us, and is our earth and sky. The man with whom we earn our money, the man who employs us, his thinking or not thinking, his "I will" and "I won't," are the iron boundaries of the world to us. He is the skylight and the manhole of life.