The Glands Regulating Personality | Page 3

Twain,

but by the common law, the common opinion, the common
assumptions of mankind? Because the development of slavery and
parasitism in human society, the subjection of the weak to the strong,
the dull and base to the clever and headstrong, set up a vicious cycle:
the liberation of more energy for the making of more and more slaves
and the propagation of slaves and slave qualities in a geometrically
increasing proportion.
This might be called the Malthusian law of slavery. For the qualities
that I have named as man's own characterization of himself are the
qualities of the slave and the slave-soul. Nietzche took great pains to
repeat ad nauseam that these qualities were the qualities of the slave.
But by burdening himself with the hypothesis, evolved from his inner
consciousness, that the slaves imposed from below a morality of
weakness upon their masters, he missed the really obvious process by
which slaves beget more slaves, slavery begets more slavery, and the
slave-soul becomes universal. That process is the simple action of
physical and spiritual reproduction of the slaves. The subnormal begets
the subnormal, the inferior begets the inferior.
Slavery appeared as an invention of the would-be-free. It was a brilliant
flash of genius of a seeker after freedom. However, it became a
boomerang. By multiplication and hereditary transmission, the
inferiority and the number of the slaves created a new overwhelming
problem for the superior few, the upper crust of the free. At last the
problem grew into the problem of problems, the problem of
government, that threatened all freedom, as an epidemic disease
threatens even the most healthy. Government, at first organized for
conquest and subjugation, had to change its character until it became
more and more to consist of experiments in a new social machinery that
would free somebody of the incubus. So through the centuries, one
technique of liberty after another was tested in the laboratory of
experience.
But always the attempts are so muddled, because the problem is not
grasped. Muddledom is the essence of the slave-soul. And the essence
infiltrates and poisons the whole atmosphere in which the
would-be-free think and act. Kings' heads are chopped off, a whole
class is guillotined, reform movements come and go, the masters fight
every inch of their retreat, and pile stratagem upon stratagem, device

upon device, to retain their spoils.
The democratic formula of freedom for all comes to the fore. So at last
universal suffrage is introduced as the panacea. Freedom seems within
grasp. Now it looks as if a method and an objective have been hit upon,
that will lead both the free and the enslaved out of their mutual
bondage, and release the handcuffs which have bound them together.
All the trial and error tests to which history had subjected institutions
appeared to culminate in the formula that would automatically yield
Liberty. The French wanted a little more and added Equality and
Fraternity. The Americans put it quite definitely as the formula that
would assist the Pursuit of Life, Liberty, and Happiness. That formula
is: the democracy of the normals.
To be sure, a civilization might be organized for the breeding and the
glorification of the supernormals. Such a civilization may yet have to
be tried. But as the supernormals, as we know them today, are merely
biologic sports, in a sense, simple accidents, no one can tell whether
they will turn out true shots or just flashes in the pan. So it looks the
better course to stick to the plan of nature, which seems to be the
raising of the level of the normals, and the gradual increase of their
faculties and powers.
WHAT THE STATESMAN IS UP AGAINST
Under the terms of the democratic formula the problems of the
statesman seem to become enormously simplified. That is, if one
assumes that he has worked out a perfectly clear idea of what a
democracy means and what the normal means. Assuming these
unassumables, his problem simplifies into the definite object of
producing and developing the greatest possible number of normals--or
if you will, the greatest happiness of the greatest number of normal
lives.
Furthermore you then begin to have the entirely novel possibility in the
world: some sort of collective effort for a collective purpose, beyond
the personal greeds and fears, factions and hatreds. So the state, instead
of fulfilling its old function of serving as the tool of certain powerful
individuals, latterly known as the Big Men, might be transformed into
an instrument toward freedom. With the ideal of a democracy of the
normals ever before him, the statesman could go on to construct and
modify his social machinery. That would entail the satisfaction not

alone of the animal needs, but also the highest aspirations and therefore
the provision of the finest conditions of