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Luke North: Songs of the Great Adventure — 1917
PERSONAL PRIVILEGE THE SILVER THREAD There are in every society a number of people who care. For these life is not bounded by their material satisfactions. They are not content to mind their own business and let the word wag along as it will. For it doesn't wag that way. It has no will. It wags as Rockefeller and the steel trust will. And that spells a shameful and unnecessary poverty — hunger, prostitution, starvation wages, child slavery, insanity, suicide, murder for profit, and millions disemployed. Reason enough why those who care should not be content to sit with hands folded in their own houses. Consciously or unconsciously these sense the invisible silver thread that runs from heart to heart and binds the human mass into a unity from which no unit can escape. This silver thread is not known or sensed by those whose attention is fixed on externalities, and they marvel when "unmerited" blows fall; nevertheless it is the most real thing in the world, and whoever does not reckon with it will find his steering wrong. The silver thread by which the tortures of a Danbury hatter touch the life of a Pasadena millionaire is not mere trope of speech or poetic metaphor. It is more real and lasting and unescapable than rent, interest, and land values. But only those who care sense it. HUMAN NATURE PERCENTAGES Gather a thousand human beings anywhere. Show them the possibility of realizing immediately a sane, decent, kindly system of social life Eighty per cent will enlist to accomplish it. Gather a thousand human beings anywhere. Show them a strange new fiscal device for the alleviation of poverty an inch a year. Ten per cent will eagerly embrace it and try to force it on the rest. Gather a thousand human beings anywhere. Show them an Ideal that calls for heroism — and a Self Interest easily reached. Ninety per cent of them will choose the ideal. STILL WAITING FOR HEAVEN Beware the medieval concept of Heaven! It lingers in the consciousness of those who think themselves most. liberal, most radical, unorthodox, infidel. Many who fancy themselves free bold atheists still believe in Heaven. They have disowned the word, denied the material mansions in the skies, repudiated an after-death state of perfect bliss — still they are thrall to the essentiality of the material concept of Heaven, which denies the reality of Here and Now and relegates everything to the future. Heaven is a habit of thought, a habit of dwelling only or mainly in the future. It is the idea that happiness can only be attained after awhile, that the ideal is only possible for the future; that here and now we must suffer in this vale of tears, but after awhile we will reach socialism, or anarchism, or singletax — then our children or their children will inhabit a decent world and begin truly to develop. It admirably pleases the needs of our masters and exploiters, who are no longer alarmed that we repudiate the word "heaven." They grant us that "freedom," seeing that the Heaven habit of thought abides with us and we go on as ever planning and educating always, always for the future — never for Now! HUMAN NATURE Human nature is full of meanness and pettiness — on its surface. The tongue lies, our interests lead us to deceit, fear keeps us chained to the superficial, the strife against poverty engenders hate and envy — the shadow or the reality of need or hunger saps our frankness and courage, reduces us all to the status of sneak thieves and detectives. This is the surface of life. Underneath it lies the heart, dormant usually, or pumping only in a mechanical way. Rouse it, interest it, excite it to consciousness and dominance, and you will find beneath every hypocrite, liar, and coward (which we all are)— A Man or a Woman true and dependable at the center. Human nature is cramped, distorted, perverted — first and chiefly by the economic and industrial infamies — but its Heart is true. THE SOURCE OF POWER The seat of power is the Heart. The head invokes it, the hands execute it — but power resides in the Heart. Mentality guides, shapes, molds it (more or less) — but the source of power is the heart. This is not gush or sentimentality, but physiologic fact. The heart supplies all motor power — automatically as a rule, unconsciously, aimlessly. The brain analyzes, relates, ponders, plans — but without the Heart it has not power to stir a leaf. In all life the Heart is the reservoir of power, and whoever would accomplish anything must invoke it. We quicken the nerve ganglia of the spleen, the liver, the solar plexus, and other centers — and get emotions of hate, envy, deceit, sensuality, as these centers draw undue blood from the Heart. But quicken the Heart of man, reach directly the Source of Power, and a great expansion of force flows (we call it love or sympathy) that dominates, dares, and performs! PERSONAL SALVATION Personal Salvation is the great delusion. The world is not built that way. Individualism is only intellectual and at no time is it more than half the truth. The other half is, that the deeper part of every human is indissolubly attached to the human mass and responsive to every throb of pain or joy that thrills the mass. No one can fall off the earth or rise above it. While the mass is enslaved no one is free. While the mass is degraded no one can be much else. IDEALS The only man who lives up to his ideals is the man who has none. Ideals are of thought which is fluidic, and wherever thought is active, ideals keep a measurable pace in advance of conduct. When conduct catches up with ideals, thought has ceased to flow, "mental stability" ensues, self-complacency and self-righteousness obtain. MARTYRDOM AND SACRIFICE Self-sacrifice and martyrdom are childish concepts — when not worse. Men seek ever their own good — what is most congenial to themselves, to whatever element of self is then uppermost. Martyrdom and self-sacrifice are — cant. No one sacrifices himself — he "sacrifices" one part of himself to another part. He relinquishes, rejects, that which he conceives to be the lesser in order to obtain what appears to him to be the greater — having learned that he cannot have both. Our acts are for self, for the gain of self, be the gain of gold, pride, love personal or impersonal. Forever we search for the more desirable — to Us — for the thrills, surges, feelings, exaltations (or degradations) peculiar to ourselves. How blindly we grope! — for the excitations of alcohol, the soothings of peace, or the ecstacies of the heretic burned at the stake! I want that, and only that, which it will give me the greatest satisfaction to obtain. What is gain for one man appears as dross to another. Fear, prejudice, habit, keep many from finding their best gain. Ignorance keeps all from their best. But that which each seeks is ever the best that each knows and feels at the time. Some find their best in seizing, robbing, exploiting — or in ease and yielding. Some find theirs in giving and in doing. But each seeks always his own best, and martyrdom and self-sacrifice are — cant. OODLES OF KNOWLEDGE If socialism, anarchism, or singletax means a kinder and decenter world — We are ready for it Now! All our economic education pertains only to life in the christian jungle — and doesn't ease it or help it. If singletax, socialism, or anarchism means to perpetuate this jungle existence, then they are all negligible. If they mean the end of robbery and exploitation, if anyone of them will shear the state of its power to bestow privileges that despoil — Then we are ready for it Now, without another moment's education or preparation. All that lacks is the Power. "Knowledge is power" — not at all. Intellect is only the perceiver of things, the knower, the director. Power is one thing, quite another is knowledge. Already we have knowledge — mountains of it, books, tomes, libraries of ancient and modern knowledge. Life is cluttered with knowledge — the heart is cloyed with it — we have shrivelled to pusillanimity beneath the heavy load of our knowledge — most of which is self-contradictory and all of it negligible while a million human beings are jobless! Knowledge has robbed us of Power. THE LINE OF CLEAVAGE Those who Care and those who don't — this is the line of cleavage in human society. It does not run between exploiter and exploited, the robber and the robbed: those are later accidents of environment and opportunity and circumstances. The still earlier "accident" — so it must appear to our comprehension — that we have to deal with is the "accident" of birth which gave this man a quickened heart and this man a dull one — this man a heart responsive and this man a heart obtuse. Some men Care and some men don't — this is the line of cleavage. It does not parallel any of the artificial lines that superficially separate society into classes. It is not between the masses and the classes, not between labor and capital nor between worker and parasite; it is not between proletariat, bourgeois, and tinsel aristocrat, nor between the educated and the ignorant. The true line of cleavage runs perpendicular thru all the classes — even thru radicalism itself — and divides the world into those who Care and those who don't. NOT THE WORST THING War is not the worst thing in the world. It is not so evil and hideous a thing as the gallows or the electric chair. The war passion is fine — that men will leave all that is dear to them to go off and face death for an ideal, however mistaken. Slavish peace is worse than war, and infinitely worse are the degradation's of disemployment. War at worst is ignorance — that men should make an ideal of their slaveries. The sorrow of the war is, not the spirit of idealism that drives the millions to it, but that the millions should mistake their chains for "something better" and make an ideal of their slaveries. The shame of the war is — the Profit wrung from it. THE HEART LEADS The heart leads, not the head. Reason is to sift truth from its clinging fancies and crass material concepts, mind is to detect error, to correlate and to explain, but the finding of truth and peace of whatever is of real worth is the function of the heart. It leads! And it leads not to despair, not to distrust of Infinity or carping at its seeming cruelties, but to a wider sphere of consciousness with profounder depths of feeling and loftier intellectual reaches, where the antinomies and perplexities of external life are softened gradually till they disappear — where the sharp blacks and whites merge into grayness and the garish midday colors are lost in azure mists thru which rise those "half-glimpsed battlements of eternity" — "Not where the wheeling systems darken, And our benumbed conceiving soars! The drift of pinions, would we hearken, Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors." THE WORLD IS AWAKE The world is awake as never before. Its heart is aflame with daring. Mankind is ready for wonderful changes. It is the time for the fruition of dreams! Huge things are going on — Robberies and exploitations that stagger the imagination, A world holocaust of senseless murder, Half of human energy making death machines, Privilege reaping monstrous streams of wealth That flow from the life blood of countless children, women, and men — Human life crushed into Profit! The world is awake — Only for blood, lust, and death? Wait! You will see. Great things are coming — Quickly! The heart of the world is aflame. It is the hour for the fruition of dreams! |
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