Читать книгу The Glands Regulating Personality - Louis Berman - Страница 8

The careerists are those who practice the careerist religion. The careerist religion is the religion par excellence of modernity. Someone once said, with the perfect candor of the North American, that America is the land of opportunity. He meant that America is the land of the Careerist or, as it has also been put, it is the land of the man on the make. The careerist, or the man on the make, is of a thousand genera and species, varieties and subvarieties, with transition links between. One finds him at every level of society.

Excepting a negligible minority, the feminine career of today (as of the last ten thousand years of the race's history) consists in the acquisition of a husband. After that she is so identified with him that her own life, as something distinct, individual and unique, becomes blurred and then completely erased. The feminine careerist, the careeristina, if you will, is a definite type. Consider the unimportance of a collective purpose to the woman whose career is the mate, and then the mate's career. All the kinks and twists of the feminine mind, resulting from the necessities of that fundamental primary problem, would form a multitudinous and interesting list. The most successful careeristinas are the absolutely unconscious ones because they are not passively besieged nor actively bombarded by any doubts as to what they want. They play their game exceedingly well as do not the quasi-rebels and faint-hearted revoltees that form no small percentage of the Newest Women. For a number of women the feminist movement has been an attempt to break away from the traditions of the wife-careerist, and to strike a line of auto-careerism. Can the careeristina instinct, the fruit of the practice of so many generations, be uprooted by the good intentions of a mere statesman?

But the masculine careerist is a marvelous creature. He is a biologic sport, an abnormal variation. New York is the place to watch and study him in his thousands and tens of thousands. You can observe him climbing, climbing, climbing, precisely as an ant climbs a tree. Nothing can really discourage or sway him from his chosen path. If he is not getting on financially, he is getting on socially, or he is using the one method of advance to help him with the other. How the line of least resistance and greatest advantage is determined for and taken by him is a fascinating process.

The careerist instinct, the inherited flair for a career, must not be confounded with the instincts of self-preservation, self-expansion or self-expression, because they are utterly different. Indeed, the careerist instinct is often their direct antagonist, clashing with and dominating them. The making of the career involves the distortion, the mutilation, degradation, degeneration or even the complete suppression of the true personality. But it is all instinctive. To consider the life of the careerist as an expression of instinct will explain too the success of so many who have no inner awareness of what they want. These go straight for the career, looking neither to the right nor to the left, without doubt or hesitation, just as they go for the respiration business as soon as they are born.

Then there is the Super-Careerist. Ordinarily, the careerist is rather obvious, easily recognizable, with diaphanous motives and conduct. But there is another and rarer bird, the careerist of talent, even the careerist of genius, whom it is not so easy to see through. Clever and brainy, he may be a good all around trifler, or his specific gift for some line of achievement may make him more effective. There is nothing he may not call himself: conservative, liberal, progressive, or radical. Often he is an agnostic about social and political affairs and problems, which passes for the indecision of the open mind, and is quite handy to render him all things to all men. But perpetually, the underlying careerist instinct drives him to use all men and women, all ideas and movements and forces he comes in contact with for his own personal advancement, just as the slave making instinct guides the red ant in all its activities to procure its captives. Ideas do not make a hero out of him, but he makes heroes of ideas, because they serve him in his ascent.

Because he is the most subtle, the most complex and the most deceptive type of careerist, he is the most dangerous to the adventure and speculation in intellect which mankind is. To say that he is a wolf in sheepskin is to be unjust to him, since he is most successful when he is most unaware of his own charlatanry. He is most sincere when he is most insincere, and most truthful when he lies best. A little self-consciousness of hypocrisy is a corrupting thing, much of it completely incompatible with the most successful careerism. Tartuffe is always applauded by the world when he plays Hamlet, if he really believes in himself as Hamlet. And, as all he has to do, if he is at all talented, is to look into his glass and see himself in the part, he carries it off very well.