The Glands Regulating Personality | Page 4

life for the normal: those most
favorable, stimulative, and assistant to creative activity. For what else
is the content of the idea of freedom?
Without committing the intellectual sin which William James named
Vicious Abstractionism, the goal of the clearest progressive and liberal
thought and forces of the twentieth century might be summed up as this
freedom in a democracy of normals. A good formula which coincides
with the technique of nature in the evolution of species. A fair fight, a
free-for-all who are unhandicapped, is the motto of natural selection.
Where civilization shakes hands with natural instinct, what but the
happiest of results can be expected?
Unfortunately, the formula in human society possesses an Achilles' heel.
Again it is slavery. Where slavery has become bred into the bone, the
standard of the normal becomes reduced so tremendously that the
average of normals, the majority, are hopelessly inferior. In effect, they
are really subnormal. So the ideal of our ideal statesman is bound to be
defeated because of the inadequacy of his material.
No matter how interested in his main business: the promotion of
freedom for creative activities in a democracy of the normals, he is
bound to be beaten by the majority consisting of subnormals. There is
nothing left for him but to cater to the minority of careerists, the
one-eighth of the electorate representing superior intelligence. The
intelligence tests employed in the War showed that and also that
forty-five per cent of the examined, or about one half the total
population, had a mental capacity, or natural ability that would never
develop beyond the stage normal to a twelve-year-old child. They are
doomed to remain forever subnormal.
THE CAREERISTS AS THE ABNORMALS
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,