The Glands Regulating Personality | Page 5

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.
WHY THE STATESMAN FAILS
Slaves and careerists, subnormals and abnormals, are the important
elements of the constituency of every modern statesman. The financial
and social careerists as business men, professionals, artists, publicists,
presidents of countries, politicians, philosophers dominate his outlook,
his plans, his horizon. The slaves, the inferiors, the subnormals exist
merely to be exploited by them. No one questions the causes of the

multiplicity of them. No one asks why there are so many little lives.
For a fundamentally minded statesman the control of the production of
the careerist, why he is produced, and how he may be prevented,
becomes the primary problem of his art.
Well, you say, what are you going to do about it? That is human nature.
The Evils of Human Nature! There is the perpetual answer to be
repeated by our clever editors unto Eternity. You cannot get away from
human nature. It is human nature to be a careerist. It is human nature to
put the immediate triumphs of the self and its pleasures above the more
indirect, the more remote and distant benefits of a great, wonderful,
free community. We are all careerists. In so far as democracy has
succeeded as a form, it has persisted because there was in it for the
common man the promise of his getting more out of life that way than
any other way. For himself. And the devil take the others. The myopia
of such crude selfishness continues to determine his politics to this very
day. And so he proceeds to vote for favors bestowed and patronage past
or potential. That is, when he does not throw his ballot away altogether
into the fire of family habit, sectional inertia, or race prejudice.
Again you say, that is human nature. It is human nature for us to be
narrow, to be confined within the circle of personal thought and desire,
without imagination for the beyond. So the calf is limited in its
wanderings to the radius of the rope by which it is tethered. The servile
soul will always be submissive and docile, greedy and stupid. What
else could you expect from the descendant of the solitary beast who
once lived for thousands of years in caves? Without servility of the soul,
without chains for the spirit of the wild animal against the world, men
could never have been driven to live together for twenty-four hours in
communities.
The conception of human quality out of which all social machinery has
been devised and built is a conception of slave quality and careerist
quality. As we are all caught in the net, as the unconscious memories of
our slave and careerist ancestors flow in our blood and echo in our cells,
all