The Foundations of Personality - Abraham Myerson (best large ereader .txt) 📗
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mentality, these are the chronically unemployed of our social-industrial system.
It must be remembered that to work steadily every day and in the
same place is not an innate circumstance of man’s life. For the
untold centuries before he developed into an agriculturist and a
handicraftsman, he sought his food and his protection in the
simplest way and with little steady labor. Whether as hunter or
fisher or nomad herdsman, he lived in the open air, slept in
caves or in rudely constructed shelters and knew nothing of those
purposes that keep men working from morning till night. It’s a
long way from primitive man and his occupations, with their
variety and their relaxations, to the factory hand, shut up in a
shop all day and doing just one thing year in and year out, to
the housewife with her multitudinous, never-ending tasks within
four walls, to the merchant engrossed with profit and loss,
weighing, measuring, buying, selling and worrying without
cessation. The burden of steadiness in labor is new to the race,
and it is only habit, necessity and social valuation that keeps
most men to their wheel.
We would, I think, be oversentimental in our treatment of this
subject if we omitted two hugely important factors in work
character. Two powerful motives operate,—the necessity of
working and work as an escape from ourselves.
Not much need be said of the pressure of necessity. “To eat one
must work.” This sentence condenses the threat behind most of the
workers of the world. They cannot stop if they would—for few are
those, even in prosperous communities, who have three months of
idleness in their savings. The feeling of insecurity this fact
brings makes a nightmare out of the lives of the many, for to the
poor worker the charity organization is part of the penalty to be
paid for sickness or unemployment. To my mind there are few
things more pathetic than a good man out of a job, and few things
for which our present society can be so heartily damned. Few even
of the middle class can rest; their way of living leaves them
little reserve, and so they plug along, with necessity as the
spur to their industry.
To escape ourselves! Put any person of adult age, or younger, in
a room with nothing to do but think, and you reduce him to abject
misery and restlessness. Most of our reading, entertainment, has
this object, and if necessity did not spur men on to work
steadily, the tedium of their own thoughts would. To reflect is
pleasant only to a few, and the need of a task is the need of the
average human being. Perhaps once upon a time in some idyllic
age, some fabled age of innocence, time passed pleasantly without
work. To-day, work is the prime way of killing time, adding
therefore to its functions of organizing activity, achievement
and social value of recreation.
Yet contradictory as it seems, though many of us love work for
its own sake, most of us do not love our own work. That is
because few of us choose our work; it is thrust upon us. Happy is
he who has chosen and chosen wisely!
Industry, energy, steadiness are parts of the work-equipment;
enthusiasm, eagerness, the love of work, in short, is another
part. Love of work is not a unitary character; it is a resultant
of many forces and motives. Springing from the love of activity,
it receives its direction from ambition and is reinforced by
success and achievement. Few can continue to love a work at which
they fail, for self-love is injured and that paralyzes the
activity. Here and there is some one who can love his work, even
though he is half-starved as a result,—a poet, a novelist, an
inventor, a scientist, but these dream and hope for better
things. But the bulk of the half-starved labor of the world,
half-starved literally as well as symbolically, has no light of
hope ahead of it and cannot love the work that does not offer a
reward. It is easy for those who reap pleasure and reward from
their labors to sing of the joy of work; business man,
professional man, artist, handicraftsman, farmer,—these may find
in the thing they do the satisfaction of the creative desires and
the reward of seeing their product; but the factory is a
Frankenstein delivering huge masses of products but eating up the
producers. The more specialized it becomes the less each man
creates of the unit, machine or ornament; the less he feels of
achievement. Go into a cotton mill and watch the machines and
their less than human attendants at their over-specialized tasks.
Then ask how such workers can take any joy in work? Let us say
they are paid barely enough to live upon. What food does the
desire for achievement receive? What feeds the love of the
concrete finished product of which a man can proudly say, “I did
it!” The restlessness of this thwarted desire is back of much of
that social restlessness that puzzles, annoys and angers the
better-to-do of the world. As the factory system develops, as
“efficiency” removes more and more of the interest in the task,
social unrest will correspondingly increase. One of the great
problems of society is this:
How are we to maintain or increase production and still maintain
the love of work? To solve this problem will take more than the
efficiency expert who works in the interest of production alone;
it will take the type of expert who seeks to increase human
happiness.
Native industry, the love of work are variables of importance. No
matter what social condition we evolve, there will be some who
will be “slackers,” who will regard work as secondary to
pleasure, who will take no joy or pride in the finished product,
who will feel no loyalty to their organization; and vice versa,
there will be those working under the most adverse conditions who
will identify themselves, their wishes and purposes with “the
job” and the product. Nowhere are the qualities of persistent
effort and interest of such importance as in industry, and
nowhere so well rewarded.
In the habits of efficiency we have a group of mechanically
performed actions and stereotyped reactions essential for work.
Except in certain high kinds of work, which depend upon
originality and initiative, method, neatness and exactness are
essential. “Time is money” in most of the business of the world;
in fact time is the great value, since in it life operates. The
unmethodical and untidy waste time as well as offend the esthetic
tastes, as well as directly lose material and information. The
habits in this sense are the tools of industry, though exactness
may be defined as more than a tool, since it is also part of the
final result. He whose work-conscience permits him to be inexact,
permits himself to do less than his best and in that respect
cheats and steals.
The work-conscience is as variably developed as any other type of
conscience. There are those who are rogues in all else but not in
their work. They will not turn out a bad piece of work for they
have identified the best in them with their work. Contrariwise,
there are others who are punctilious in all other phases of
morality who are slackers of an easy standard in their work
efforts. This is as truly a double standard of morals as anything
in the sex sphere,—and as disastrous.
There is on every second wall in America the motto typical of our
country, “Do it now!” To it could be added a much better one, “Do
it well!” The energy of work and its promptness are only valuable
when controlled by an ideal of service and thoroughness. A great
part of the morals of the world is neglected; part of the
responsibility is not felt, in that a code of work is yet to be
enunciated in an authoritative way. I would have it shown
graphically that all inefficiency is a social damage with a
boomerang effect on the inefficient and careless, and in the
earliest school, teaching the need of thoroughness would be
emphasized. Our schools are tending in the other direction; the
curriculum has become so extensive that superficiality is
encouraged, the thorough are penalized, and “to get away with it”
is the motto of most children as a result.
In an ideal community every man and woman will be evaluated as to
intelligence and skill, and a place found accordingly. Since we
live a few centuries too soon to see that community, since jobs
are given out on a sort of catch-as-catch-can plan, it would be
merely a counsel of perfection to urge some such method.
Nevertheless ambitious parents, whose means or whose
self-sacrifice enable them to plan careers for their children,
should take into solemn account, not their own ambitions, but the
ability of the child. A man is apt to see in his son his second
self and to plan for him as for a self that was somehow to
succeed where he failed. But every tub in the ocean of human life
must navigate on its own bottom, and a father’s wishes will not
make a poet into a banker or a fool into a philosopher. Nothing
is so disastrous to character as to be misplaced in work, and
there is as much social inefficiency in the high-grade man in the
low-grade place as when the low-grade man occupies a high-grade
place. We have no means of discovering originality, imagination
or special ability in our present-day psychological tests, and we
cannot measure intensity of purpose, courage and the quality of
interest. Yet watching a child through its childhood and its
adolescence ought to tell us whether it is brilliant or stupid,
whether it is hand-minded or word-minded, whether it is brave,
loyal, honest, a leader or a follower, etc. Moreover, the child’s
inclinations should play a part in the plans made. A man who
develops a strong will where his desires lead the way will hang
back and be a slacker where dissatisfaction is aroused.
To that employer of labor who seeks more than dividends from his
“hands,” who has in mind that he is merely an agent of the
community, and is not obsessed with the idea that he is “boss,” I
make bold to make the following suggestions:
Any plan of efficiency must be based on sympathy and human
feeling. To avoid unnecessary fatigue is imperative, not only
because it increases production, but because it increases
happiness. Fatigue may have its origin in little matters,—in a
bad bench, in a poor work table, or an inferior tool. Chronic
fatigue[1] alters character; the drudge and slave are not really
human, and if your workers become drudges, to that degree have
you lapsed from your stewardship. Men react to fatigue in
different ways: one is merely tired, weak and sleepy —a “dope,”
to use ordinary characterization—but another becomes a dangerous
rebel, ready to take fire at any time.
[1] The Gilbreths have written an excellent little book on this
subject. Doctor Charles E. Myers’ recent publication, “Mind and
Work,” is less explicit, but worth reading.
More important than physical fatigue (or at least as important)
is the fatigue of monotony. If your shop is organized on a highly
mechanical basis, then the worker must be allowed to interrupt
his labors now and then, must have time for a chat, or to change
his position or even to lie down or walk. Monotony disintegrates
mind and body—disintegrates character and personality—brings
about a fierce desire for excitement; and the well-known fact
that factory towns are very immoral is no accident, but the
direct result of monotony and opportunity. It’s bad enough that
men and women
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