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As we shall frequently have to refer to certain major errors in popular thought, it will be as well to clearly enumerate and describe those selected. The field is wide,—each of those mentioned connects with many others,—and there may be serious question as to which antedates which; but difference on that point will not invalidate the actuality of their influence on conduct. The group mentioned in this chapter will be further described and elaborated later; this is merely to introduce them in some order for reference.

The first, and here assumed to be the basic error in the human mind, the parent of almost all the others, is the Ego concept. This is the universal assumption, based on a pre-human status when it was true, that human beings are separate entities, like the lower animals.

As animals we are separate, and, when we first began to think, the animal life was so enormously preponderant, and the human life so weak, so vague, so intermittently realised, that it was quite natural we should carry over the sense of personal entity into the social entity. That we have a separate personal consciousness is not denied, but it is not humanity. The human consciousness is collective, as we shall see later.

Our mistake has been, not in retaining the Ego concept, which is as necessary in its place as the concept of a leg or a liver, but in failing to grasp the larger inclusive Social concept. All the complex organic phenomena of social life we have continually tried to construe in terms of the individual. The distinctive features of human life are invariably social. No one trait or power of our great race but what must be accounted for in its development and understood in its use as a social factor.

“We” are human, “I” am an animal, save as “I,” being part of Society, embody and represent it. The discord and mischief which would be wrought in a physical organism by any absurd pretence of individual life and interest on the part of its organs, is precisely the discord and misery wrought in our social organism by the persistence of this archaic idea.

Another error, most deeply basic in its logical relation, though perhaps not so early recognised by the conscious mind, is our general belief that pleasure lies wholly—or even mainly—in impression. Like the first, it dates from a pre-social status, is the governing theory of personal animal life, and has not been removed and replaced by truer views as social life is developed.

The individual animal having no functions but those of maintenance, reproduction, and improvement, and accomplishing his improvement only along lines of personal heredity, acted only toward those ends, and remained at rest when those ends were served. Pleasure led and pain drove him to the attainment of the means to these ends of this fulfilment, so he early learned to associate pleasure with getting what he wanted,—pain with the lack of it,—a perfectly true concept as far as it went. But as the individual animal’s activities are promptly reactionary, and not matters of conscious judgment and volition, he never took into account the pleasure inherent in action, in the discharge of energy, and the pain equally inherent in the prevention of such discharge.

The nerves bring to us sense of pain and pleasure: certain currents feel good to them, certain others bad. An inflow of warmth is a pleasure; increase the vibration, make it heat, it becomes pain, agony, torture. The sensory nerves bring to us their burden of impression, the consciousness we call enjoyment or dislike; but have the motory nerves no burden? Are the currents of energy going out not as perceptible as those coming in? To the individual animal they are not; he does not “feel himself work” particularly. His consciousness is in his income, not in his output.

But the social creature comes under different conditions. His range of activity increases, both in complexity and power; he has an enlarging fund of energy to discharge and a thousand complicated avenues to discharge it through. Moreover, this discharge is no longer a personal affair of his own arms and legs, but involves concurrent action of many others.

To adjust rightly this intricate mutual activity requires consciousness, and consciousness involves pleasure and pain. The whole field of distinctively human activities is under this law. We have a vast fund of energy, a vast field of exercise, and a constantly increasing consciousness of this exercise. Meanwhile the income of man, as a separate animal, remains the same. He has, as before, the pleasure of the intake, the attainment of the means to his separate welfare. He has, beyond that, his share of pleasure in the larger collective intake also, the gratification of his social desires; but he has, pre-eminently, the pleasure of action; of the conscious expression of energy.

This is the largest field of human delight, but has not been so recognised. We still commonly associate pleasure with impression, with things we are to get, to have. Whereas, in fact, our pleasure depends far more largely upon what we do.

Closely derived from this basic assumption is our general theory of return as an incentive; what we may call the Pay concept. This was one of man’s earliest generalisations. He observed the excito-motory action of the individual beast; under the influence of hunger or fear he acts; not influenced, he does not act, sleeps in the sun, and accumulates energy for the next jump.

The beast, seeing his dinner running before him, ran after it; having caught his dinner, he ceased to run. Seeing his enemy running behind him, he ran away from it; having escaped from his enemy, he ceased to run.

“Aha!” cries that astute observer, Early Man, “Exertion depends on pleasure before you or pain behind you!” and he forthwith produced his grand primeval generalisation of Reward and Punishment.

This is still exclusively held by almost all of us. We have used it to account for all human actions, with the bitter conclusion that “every man has his price.” We have spread and lengthened and deepened it to cover our waxing field of action, till out of its logical extremes we have built both Heaven and Hell.

It was a tremendous concept for the early brain to achieve, and it was true—as far as it went. These two forces do modify action. They were very strong upon individual animals, and they act upon us yet—to a degree. That is, there are still some of us so near the plane of individualism as to be readily and strongly influenced by these agents.

The error of early man lay in not observing other forces even then operative; and the error of modern man lies in not observing that these others have grown continually, and the primal ones have dwindled in proportion.

Right beside our rashly generalising ancestor laboured the primeval squaw, working patiently, working eagerly, working most efficiently, out of the overflowing energy of the mother instinct, with the power of recreative love. Not because of anything to gain or anything to fear, but because energy must have expression; and the expression is in proportion to the energy, not in proportion to the return. Later, in the fall of the matriarchate and the inception of our dramatic androcentric period, the woman was made a slave and her labour became slave labour, not to its improvement. Later again men were made slaves; their activity was coerced by these two primitive stimuli, the fear of punishment, the hope of reward; mainly the former.

In that first period of co-ordinate activity among men, the irreconcilable male energy was forced into service by the immediate pressure of pain and fear. Slavery was one step short of slaughter, as such accepted, as such hated. All that deep-rooted aversion to labour—sense of scorn for it, shame in it, honour in being free of it—was superimposed upon humanity at this period, and has never been fully outgrown. This terrible period, its wrong, its shame, its agony, its hopelessness, deeply impressed the growing brain of man, and, as this period was of great duration, it made possible to our minds the prodigious concepts of eternal torture.

Later, in the second stage of coerced action, that of wage labour, we have the reward used instead of the penalty. We will not whip the man if he does not work, but we will not feed him unless he does.

Our governing concept being that action is produced only by these means, we must needs use one or the other. Since we believe that if the slave were not in fear of punishment he would not work, or that if the employee were not in hope of pay he would not work, we act upon our belief consistently enough. We have outgrown the period where we believed we had a right to enforce labour by inflicting punishment; but we have not outgrown the only less primitive belief that we have a right to enforce it by withholding the reward. We do not yet, to any extent, recognise the other forces under which human beings act.

Closely allied to the Pay concept and following it, a more concrete expression of the same general thought as applied to industrial activity, comes our universal economic fallacy, the Want Theory.

This is repeatedly defined and opposed in later chapters, and here need only be stated as that basic proposition in Political Economy in which it is assumed that man works to gratify wants, and that if his wants are otherwise gratified he will not work. This fundamental theory of economics rests, as will be readily seen, on the foregoing, on the Ego concept and the Pay concept. Part of it, more generally applied, is our general Self-interest theory, usually expressed in solemn tones: “Self-preservation is the first law of Nature.” Men say this as if it were so, and other people believe it simply because it is said to them so solemnly. Our brains, trained for all time to bow to authority, have a treacherous trick of believing whatever is advanced by those in authority or even by the scribes. The present scribe asks no such gulp, but that the reader use his own active thinking power on the propositions here advanced. Now, this self-preservation theory is contradicted on its own doorstep by the fact of the race-preservation instinct, the individual counting for nothing, absolutely nothing, in the unbroken stream of racial life of which he forms so small a part.

If we were solemnly taught “Race-preservation is the first law of Nature,” we should be nearer the truth. Even in the purely individual animals the good of the race is paramount to that of the member, and in the collective animals the social instinct is so highly developed that self-preservation is not even thought of. Break an ant-heap, and watch “the first law of Nature”! Immediate, instinctive, unquestioning, they rush to save the eggs and young, to guard the queen, to preserve the group—not the individual.

“Nature” develops whatever faculties are required in a given form of life, and if the life-form is collective the collective instincts appear in force. Now “Self-interest” as a motive does act upon the human being, but it does not compare in weight and value with the larger later motives of social interest. We assume that the visibly social processes we see going on about us are best governed by self-interest in the parties concerned; that efficient service is best commanded under this pressure. We are wrong.

Social processes were initiated primarily along lines of self-interest, in orderly development, from existing instincts to higher ones, but the further developed are these processes the less useful is the early motive, the more needed is the later motive of social interest. Self-interest, preserved too long in social growth, becomes a deterrent force. The more wide and complex the process, the greater the distance between producer and consumer, the more injurious is the action of that essentially limited force. This is why in small, early societies there is more honest and efficient service under this motive; and in large, modern societies, unless the social instincts of duty, honour, and the like are operative, we find such infinitely ramified dishonesty and inefficiency.

Another stumbling-block of progress is an extremely ancient belief of ours, not derived from the preceding five, but in flat contradiction to some of them, which the popular and poetic saying calls “the sweet uses of adversity.” We very generally believe that pain and difficulty are good for us, and the logical consequence of this belief—so far as practical life allows such an absurdity to have any consequence—is of course that we do nothing to remove pain and difficulty. The further logical consequence, that we should deliberately add pain and difficulty to our lives in order to improve them, is seldom allowed; it is too ridiculous even for our brains.

Now what is the fraction of truth in this peculiar piece of idiocy? At its very base lies the law of physics: “action and reaction are equal.” As hard as you push against a wall does the wall push against you. Following this comes the early observation of the effect of environment. Where the channel is narrowest the stream is deepest; where it is widest the stream is shallowest; and if you dam the stream the water rises to the height of the dam.

So in the action of the human forces we observe that, if you hinder and obstruct a man, he resists your pressure and rises against it—sometimes! Sometimes he does no such thing, but is crushed instead. However, we perceived numbers of cases where opposition called forth resisting energy where action and reaction were equal, and we made our easy generalisation as to the beneficent effects of difficulties.

Applied to human life, in the concrete environment which we call good and bad according to our lights, we observed further that this law seemed to work backward; that where a person had no difficulties, where all was made easy for him, he did not manifest energy. Then we felt sure we were right. We produced a lot of popular expressions of this general thought, a religious phase of it being “whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth”; its application in education leading us to believe that it is good to make the child labour and struggle in learning—bad to “make it too easy for him”; and in economics we apply it in our sad comments on the disadvantages of wealth, our cheerful assertion that “it is good for a man to be born poor.”

Of course no one ever thinks of staying poor because of its benefits; no one foregoes being rich, or trying to be rich because convinced of its evils; above all, we do not seek to work out this theory on our children. Its main mischief is in preventing us from trying to remove the obstacles to human progress in general. So long as we even partially believe that obstacles promote to progress, that the hurdles add to the speed of the racer—why, if we do not really give extra hurdles to aid the man we want to win, we at least do nothing to clear the track.

Now where does the essential error lie in this loosely hung together bunch of foolishness? In the first place separate “pain” from difficulty. Pain is merely a message; it is a telegram to headquarters to say that something is wrong. It always means that. Normal action does not hurt. It may be “good,” as the sentinel is good who gives the alarm so that you may save yourself; but his alarm is a warning of evil. It may accompany a “good” process, like that of resuscitating the drowning; but that is not a normal process, the pain is conditioned upon water in the lungs.

If a person is so situated that he must bear pain, then it is good to get used to it, if possible. On this basis the early savage used self-torture to help him bear the incidental miseries of life, and from that practice dated our views on the subject.

The most unblushing survival of this gross savagery is seen in our practice of hazing, calmly defended by its perpetrators as “it makes boys manly,” “it develops character.” The savage had at least the grace to do it to himself, and it was not practised upon children. Our imperfectly educated children maintain in this the customs of the lowest savages, in a rudimentary form. There are times in life when pain has to be borne for a greater good, but that does not make the pain good.

As to the other and a little more legitimate branch—difficulty. Here we feel more assurance. We do see the poor boy making tremendous struggles, and rising above his difficulties hardened, bruised, belated, but triumphant. We do see the rich boy making no struggle at all, and rising above nothing. Hence—but wait a bit. Do all poor boys thus struggle and rise?

Do the slums produce the best citizens? Is a well-bred, well-fed, well-educated boy so hopelessly handicapped in life by those advantages? Is our ceaseless attempt to provide for our children the best advantages all folly? We may not be logical, but have horse sense enough to know better than that.

We know that poverty coarsens, weakens, stunts, degrades; that under its evil influence “the dregs of society” are steadily and inevitably produced. We know that where one person of phenomenal capacity can rise in spite of it, thousands of ordinary capacity are ruined because of it.

Abraham Lincoln was a rail-splitter. Yes. Were there no others? There were and are many poor boys splitting rails, and yet the crop of Abraham Lincolns remains limited to one.

Our error is a very simple one. We confuse a coincidence with a cause. Most people are poor. Therefore most great people have risen from poverty. How many more great people we might have had under better conditions we shall never know.

As for the effect of wealth, great wealth in private hands is not an advantage; it, too, is a morbid condition, and under its evil influence the scum of society is steadily and increasingly produced. It is perhaps as hard for a great nature to overcome the difficulties of our illegitimate wealth as those of our illegitimate poverty. Still some do it. We have but to study the biographical dictionary to find that the proportion of great men to rich and poor is about the same as the proportion of those two classes, that is all.

Meanwhile the healthy truth under this is the physiological law that exercise develops function. Whatever power you have is increased by exercise to a certain extent. But you must first have your power. A punching bag helps develop your muscles if rightly used, but it does not make them. Your daily food is the prime factor.

To get the best results from people they must first be born in good condition—starved mothers and exhausted fathers are not advantageous; then kept in good condition;—good air, good food, good clothing. Does anyone wish to claim that poor air or poor food or poor clothing is advantageous? When you have good stock, and give it all the advantages of true education, bringing out and correlating all its powers, then the strong and active creature can maintain and develop those powers by exercise. But dumbbells in place of dinner do not strengthen.

One more very common attitude of mind with regard to work, not as fundamental as the foregoing, and not founded on any law whatever, but on arbitrary and evil conditions, is our general contempt for it.

Regarding it, as we must under the Want theory, as done only to gratify a want; regarding it, as we must under the Ego concept, as done by the individual for the individual, it does seem a poor thing enough. Why should we honour and approve the never-so-ingenious efforts of a person to keep himself alive, so scornfully described in a poem of Robert Buchanan:

“Struggle, speculate, dig, and bleed,

Reap the whirlwind of Venus’ seed,

O senseless, impotent human breed!”

But beyond the legitimate scorn of a social creature for what he estimates as an individual activity, comes our illegitimate scorn based on lamentable, evil conditions.

The work of the free mother in the matriarchal period was never despised; when men enslaved women their work became contemptible. So when the despised captive was made to labour, his work also was held contemptible. And then, as Veblen shows so irrefutably, this primitive attitude was retained through all the centuries in the stagnant pool of leisure-class life, that singular medium wherein the active modern world may find preserved a sedimentary deposit of most ancient times. This class and its customs and habits of mind, being revered by us, we have made permanent and constantly reinforced the scorn of work which else would have been contradicted long since by every fact of progressing civilisation.

With this mixed foundation the feeling remains in full force. It serves to check the normal activities of those who “do not have to work,” and to belittle the importance of those who do. It shows, for one result, this pretty paradox: a human creature absolutely helpless, doing nothing whatever to maintain himself or anyone else, depending for the meanest service as for the greatest, on the assistance of others; and then calling himself “independent,” and believing that he “supports” those who keep him alive, by “furnishing them employment”! And—still more paradoxical—the active and valuable persons who so laboriously maintain this ornament believe it, too.

A minor fallacy in our popular economics, but one doing much mischief, is that familiar phrase “the law of demand and supply.” It is in part a logical derivative of the want theory; in part based on a true natural law, and for the rest weakened and confounded by the conditions of our own artificial “market.”

Spencer refers to this with great solemnity in “The Man vs. The State”; showing how smoothly and beautifully great London is provided for by the working of this “law.” He points out the immense numbers of people to be supplied daily, and the immense amount of materials brought in daily, by ship, by rail, by horse and cart, under the wise guidance of individual self-interest and this governing “law of demand and supply.” It sounds very attractive! and when stated by so great a thinker it seems as if it were so. But is it? Are the millions of inhabitants in London thus accurately provided for? Do none starve and freeze? Do none dwindle and sicken, and become hopeless cripples and invalids for lack of proper supplies? Or again, do none waste and spoil, receiving far more than they need? Are the demands of the human body, of the human mind, of the human heart, really supplied in London, or anywhere else, by this alleged law?

What do the words really mean, if they mean anything? For “demand” read “purchasing power”; “the law of supply and purchasing power.” What does “supply” mean? It means the product of human industry. The product of human industry is equal to the purchasing power. This does not sound so smooth, but is more accurate. And what does it mean now? That those who have purchasing power can get what they want. Can they—always?

Why, yes—if there is any. But if all the purchasing power in the world should happen to demand a few more of the works of Phidias—they would not be forthcoming. There is frequent complaint even among the very rich of their inability to get some things they want; such as ideal servants. This is a very common demand, and the air is filled with protest because, at any price, the supply does not equal the demand. This law is a common vagrant—“having no visible means of support.” All it amounts to is that if you demand a thing—and can pay for it—and there is any such thing—the previous owner will sell it to you—if he wants to.

On the other hand, nothing is more frequent than our upsetting this supposed equilibrium by what we call “overproduction.” If the supply were equal to the demand the demand is certainly not alleged to be equal to the supply. “It’s a poor rule that doesn’t work both ways.”

What does govern the supply, if demand does not?

“Supply” is human production—the output of our social energies. If it can be called “equal” to anything, it is equal to the combined action of heredity and environment, modified by our volition. The product of a race depends on its stock, its inherited characteristics; on its education, physical and mental, on its nutrition and stimulus, on its governing concepts.

To make such and such a product forthcoming you must have such and such a producer; he must have the capacity and the wish to produce such a “supply.” If he has not the capacity, no power on earth—be it a reward of the princess and half the kingdom, or a penalty of thumbscrews and boiling oil—can get it out of him.

Turn your “supply” round and apply it to the producer. Supply him with all the necessary conditions for rich production. Then we might say in a general way “the supply is equal to the supply.” But “demand” is not a producing agent. It does not make people create, invent, or discover. It does not make them sell unless they want to—see Ahab demanding Naboth’s vineyard—or Frederic and his Miller of Sans Souci. It does not make them work even, unless they are able and willing. Demand what you please of the tramp and pauper—he cannot produce it.

A natural law is a series of observed phenomena. Such things always happen, so we say it is a law. The observed phenomena in this case are those of a past stage of economic development; and at no time “natural” but purely arbitrary. A parallel may be drawn from similar observed phenomena in the system of slave labour. The “supply” then was the work of the slave. The “demand” was a command, and was enforced by the whip; no whip no work, more whip more work, and behold “a law”! The work equals the whip! So it did, in most cases—granting the man was a slave. But it was no law of social economics; it was a law of slavery. Neither is this theory of ours that “The work equals the pay” a law of social economics—it is only a law of wagery.

Among free men, the whip would not produce work but merely a fight. Among independent gentlemen an offer of pay does not produce service of any sort—it is regarded as an insult. The crucial condition of the work-and-whip law is that you shall hold the whip and have power to use it; in the work-and-pay law, that you shall hold the pay and have a right to withhold it.

These are the root errors most especially discussed in this book:

1. The Ego Concept.

2. The Pleasure-in-Impression Theory.

3. The Pay Concept.

4. The Want Theory.

5. The Self-Interest Theory.

6. The Pain Concept.

7. The Law of Supply and Demand;

with the derivative scorn for work; here only enumerated and briefly set forth for convenience in reference.