Most of us know other people like this. Most of us have moments and subjects on which as we have remembered afterwards we have needed to be pried off. The same is true, of course, of a political body like the Republican or Democratic Party, or of a labor union.
The best that most of us—whole towns of us—can do is to get up as we propose for a whole town to do in the Put-Through Clan on the same platform, stand there cheerfully all together on the great general platform and admit in chorus sweetly, that we are all probably this blessed moment and every day being especially fooled more or less by ourselves about ourselves, about the things nearest to us—especially our own personal bodies and political and industrial souls and bodies. The only difference between people who are put into insane asylums and those of us who are still allowed from day to day a little longer to stay out, is that we can manage, if we try, some of us, to be more limber about calling ourselves fools in time. For all practical purposes in this world, it may be said that the people who are wise and deep about keeping themselves reminded that they may be crazy any minute, are sane.
What happens to people—to most people when they are grown up is that they stop being simple and honest like a baby. But they all have practically the same essential thought when they are being disagreeable. They are trying to make the world around them toe the line to their own interior decorations. What they think, what they feel, what they do in the little back parlors of their own minds must be daubed on the ceiling of the world.
The joy of toleration, of new ideas, of rows and tiers of their non-selves, and of their yet-selves reaching away around them that they can still know and share and can still take over and have the use of in addition to the mere self they already have, they hold off from.
This is where the baby has the advantage of them.
§ 4. Psycho-Analysis for a Town.
When a man thinks of himself and wants other people to think of him as an institution—as a kind of church—of course it makes him very unhappy to believe he is wrong, but the minute he thinks of himself as a means to an end, thinks of his personality as a tool placed in his hand for getting what he wants or what a world wants—the minute a man thinks of himself as a kind of spirit-auger, or chisel of the soul, or as a can-opener to truth, which if it is a little changed one way or the other, or held differently, will suddenly work—changing himself toward himself, and believing what he would rather not, becomes like any other invention or discovery, a creative pleasure.
In saying that the main thing the Put-Through Clan is for in a town, is to act as town-headquarters for the town's seeing through itself, as a means of making the town the best, the happiest town in the state—as a means of making it a town that deserves anything it wants, I am merely saying that the act of self-invention—the act of recreation once entered into as a habit is so refreshing and so extraordinary in itself, and so practical in its results, that when people once see how it really works—when towns and parties and industrial groups get once started in self-discipline, in self-confession, in psycho-analysis and in taking advantage of opposite ideas—there is going to be an epidemic in this country, a flu of truth.
A whole city or a whole town indulging in psycho-analysis finds it less embarrassing and not more embarrassing than one man does.