In national issues of capital and labor, the opinions of employers and workmen who have worked out a way of meeting the crisis on a smaller scale, who understand one another on a five or six hundred scale instead of a two or three million scale, would be treated by the Air Line League as probably weighty and conclusive. Those classes of employers and employees who in a marked degree have failed to have the brains to understand each other even in the flesh and at hand with both persons in view themselves, must expect to have their national opinions about national labor and national capital discounted by the Clan. The Put-Through Clan nationally will grade the listening and ranking of the demands of industrial groups upon the assumption that people who slur over what is next door are not apt to be deep about things that are further away.
§ 7. The Town Fireplace.
The outstanding fact about our modern machine civilization and its troubles is that crowd-thinking has seized the people—that people see things and do things gregariously. We have herds of fractions of men, acting as fractions of men and not as human beings.
Each fraction is trying to get the whole country to be a fraction. Being a fraction themselves they want a fraction of a country.
Ten differing men can get together and agree.
Ten differing crowds of men—of the same men, will get together and fight.
Crowds are self-hypnotized. A man who would not be hypnotized off into a fraction of a man alone, with enough men to help him becomes a thousandth or ten thousandth of a man in twenty minutes.
If five crowds of a hundred thousand men each could sit down together around a fireplace and listen to the others—if each crowd of a hundred thousand could feel listened to absolutely—listened to by the other four hundred thousand, for one evening, democracy would be safe for the world in the morning.
As it is, each crowd sits in Madison Square Garden alone—holds a vast lonely reverie all alone, hypnotizes itself and then goes out and fights.