The Glands Regulating Personality | Page 6

we can do is accept it and work with it. Human nature is an
incurable disease. Like Jehovah's definition of Himself, it is, it has been,
and ever will be. Everywhere the same, always the same, forever the
same, there is no way out.
POOR HUMAN NATURE

All of these strictures upon poor human nature are exceedingly
delightful to our careerists. Every unpleasant social fact, every outrage
to our best instincts, every exhibition of incapacity, incompetency,
inefficiency, indifference, every example of super-criminal negligence
is pardoned as an effect of that universal sin, human nature. Take the
case of the statesman and the diplomats who failed to prevent the Great
War, though they saw it coming for years, and who should therefore all,
Entente as well as German, American as well as Japanese, be indicted
for their criminal negligence, precisely as a physician would be for
failure to report and stop the spread of an epidemic disease. All these
crimes of omission and commission are excused on the plea that it was
all due to human nature, and that what can be blamed on human nature
in general can be blamed on no one in particular.
Poor human nature! Flagellated on every hand, what are we to do with
it? Why is the careerist so numerous and ubiquitous? Why does the
slave-soul infiltrate like a cancer the soul of society with its black fluid?
Is freedom, the divine idea, nothing but the toy of an orator to the
majority, a distant star in the night to a helpless minority? Yet the
instinct to freedom, the appetite for freedom, flickers through the
centuries as a fitful flame, though snuffed out by every gust of class
passion, every wind of mob resentment, and every storm of national
jealousy. Though the inferior subnormals multiply into great sheep
majorities, and the careerists, like Napoleon, morbid variants, involve
millions in their disease, the idea of freedom persists obstinately. Have
we any reason for regarding it as other than an illusion?
If freedom is an illusion, we must admit the doom of democracy. And
no Wagnerian crashes of orchestration mitigate the tragedy of the scene
as our eyes are opened to the twilight of our new gods. For what other
social methods are there left to us? In the struggle against nature's
barriers upon human aspiration for perfect satisfactions, it looks as
though every other method has failed us.
In the past, refined aristocracies and benevolent despotisms have failed
as miserably as our democracies are now failing and as we are sure
crude anarchism and communism would. Their inferiority has thrown
them on the scrap heap. As for our present ways of government as a
permanent method, the storage of power in the hands of the Clever Few.
War burns in the lesson of how little the careerist regards either the

subnormal or supernormal. He condemns them all sooner or later to
wholesale slavery and carnage.
Is man then never to be the architect of his own destiny? Are we to
surrender our faith in the future of our kind to the spectacle of a
miserable species sentenced by its own nature to self-destruction? We
thought to rise upon the wings of knowledge and beauty, lured by the
mysteries of color and the magic of design and the might of the
intellect and its words, that have transfigured life into the greatest
adventure ever attempted in time and space. But we find ourselves
merely another experiment, intricate and rather long drawn out, to be
sure, with marvelous pyrotechnics, magnificent effects here and there,
but bound to eliminate itself in the end, to make stuff for the museums
of the real conqueror of the stars yet to come. We are condemned to be
classed with the dodo and the mammoth by the coming discoverer of an
escape from the slave and careerist. And so let us resign ourselves to
fate. Let us eat of the humble bread of the stoic's consolation in the face
of the mocking laughter of the gods, let us admit that Mind in Man has
unconsciously but irretrievably willed its own self-annihilation. What
remains for us except to beat our breasts and proclaim: So be it, O Lord,
so be it?
MAN AS A TRANSIENT
Yet, true as it is that the human animal has achieved no advance
beyond the necessities of his ancestors, nor freed himself from his
bondage to their instincts and automatic reflexes, is there no way out
anywhere? Is there perhaps some ground for hope and consolation in
the thought that we, of the twentieth century, no longer see ourselves,
Man, as something final and fixed? Darwin changed Fate from a static
sphinx into a chameleon flux. Just as certainly as man has arisen from
something whose bones alone remain as reminders