by them. No
one questions the causes of the multiplicity of them. No one asks why
there are so many little lives. For a fundamentally minded statesman
the control of the production of the careerist, why he is produced,
and how he may be prevented, becomes the primary problem of his art.

Well, you say, what are you going to do about it? That is human
nature. The Evils of Human Nature! There is the perpetual answer to be
repeated by our clever editors unto Eternity. You cannot get away from
human nature. It is human nature to be a careerist. It is human nature
to put the immediate triumphs of the self and its pleasures above
the more indirect, the more remote and distant benefits of a great,
wonderful, free community. We are all careerists. In so far as
democracy has succeeded as a form, it has persisted because there was
in it for the common man the promise of his getting more out of life
that way than any other way. For himself. And the devil take the
others. The myopia of such crude selfishness continues to determine
his politics to this very day. And so he proceeds to vote for favors
bestowed and patronage past or potential. That is, when he does not
throw his ballot away altogether into the fire of family habit,
sectional inertia, or race prejudice.

Again you say, that is human nature. It is human nature for us to
be narrow, to be confined within the circle of personal thought and
desire, without imagination for the beyond. So the calf is limited in
its wanderings to the radius of the rope by which it is tethered. The
servile soul will always be submissive and docile, greedy and stupid.
What else could you expect from the descendant of the solitary beast
who once lived for thousands of years in caves? Without servility of
the soul, without chains for the spirit of the wild animal against
the world, men could never have been driven to live together for
twenty-four hours in communities.

The conception of human quality out of which all social machinery has
been devised and built is a conception of slave quality and careerist
quality. As we are all caught in the net, as the unconscious memories
of our slave and careerist ancestors flow in our blood and echo in our
cells, all we can do is accept it and work with it. Human nature is an
incurable disease. Like Jehovah's definition of Himself, it is, it has
been, and ever will be. Everywhere the same, always the same, forever
the same, there is no way out.

POOR HUMA