Representative government has failed. It has failed because it was not a method by which men could govern themselves. Direct government is now being proposed. But direct government will never succeed if (1) it is operated from within the party organization as at present, or (2) if it consists merely in counting all the votes in all the ballot-boxes. Ballot-box democracy is what this book is written to oppose.
No government will be successful, no government will endure, which does not rest on the individual, and no government has yet found the individual. Up to the present moment we have never seen the individual. Yet the search for him has been the whole long striving of our Anglo-Saxon history. We sought him through the method of representation and failed to find him. We sought to reach him by extending the suffrage to every man and then to every woman and yet he eludes us. Direct government now seeks the individual; but as we have not found him by sending more men to the ballot-box, so we shall not find him by sending men more often to the ballot-box. Are our constitutional conventions to sit and congratulate themselves on their progressive ideas while they are condemning us to a new form of our old particularism? The ballot-box! How completely that has failed men, how completely it will fail women. Direct government as at present generally understood is a mere phantom of democracy. Democracy is not a sum in addition. Democracy is not brute numbers; it is a genuine union of true individuals. The question before the American people today is—How is that genuine union to be attained, how is the true individual to be discovered? The party has always ignored him; it wants merely a crowd, a preponderance of votes. The early reform associations had the same aim. Both wanted voters not men. It makes little difference whether we follow the boss or follow the good government associations, this is all herd life—“following the lead”—democracy means a wholly different kind of existence. To follow means to murder the individual, means to kill the only force in the world which can make the Perfect Society—democracy depends upon the creative power of every man.
We find the true man only through group organization. The potentialities of the individual remain potentialities until they are released by group life. Man discovers his true nature, gains his true freedom only through the group. Group organization must be the new method of politics because the modes by which the individual can be brought forth and made effective are the modes of practical politics.
But who is the individual we have been seeking, who is the individual we are to find within the group? Certainly not the particularist individual. Every man to count as one? That was once our slogan. Now we have relegated it to a mechanical age. Today we see that every man must count for infinitely more than one because he is not part of a whole, a cog in a machine, not even an organ in an organism, but from one point of view the whole itself. A man said to me the other day, “That is not democracy, that is mysticism.” But why mysticism? It is our daily life as lived from hour to hour. We join with one group of men at work, with another at play, another in our civic committee, another in our art club. Man’s life is one of manifold relatings. His vote at the polls must express not his particularist self, but the whole complex of his related life, must express as much of the whole as these multiple relations have brought into existence for him, through him. I find my expression of the whole-idea, the whole-will, through my group life. The group must always dictate the modes of activity for the individual. We must put clearly before us the true individual with his infinite relations, expressing his infinite relations, as the centre of politics, as the meaning of democracy. The first purpose of genuine politics is to make the vote of every man express the All at his special coign of outlook. In every man is the potentiality of such expression. To call it forth is the aim of all training, the end sought by all modes of real living.
Thus group organization releases us from the domination of mere numbers. Thus democracy transcends time and space, it can never be understood except as a spiritual force. Majority rule rests on numbers; democracy rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations. Democracy is not worked out at the polling-booths; it is the bringing forth of a genuine collective will, one to which every single being must contribute the whole of his complex life, as one which every single being must express the whole of at one point. Thus the essence of democracy is creating. The technique of democracy is group organization. Many men despise politics because they see that politics manipulate, but make nothing. If politics are to be the highest activity of man, as they should be, they must be clearly understood as creative.
What is there inherent in the group which gives it creative power? The activity which produces the true individual is at the same time interweaving him and others into a real whole. A genuine whole has creative force. Does this seem “mystical?” The power of our corporations depends upon this capability of men to interknit themselves into such genuine relations that a new personality is thereby evolved. This is
