XI
The Self-and-Others Illusion
It is now evident that self and others are merely different points of view of one and the same experience, two aspects of one thought. Neither of these partial aspects can hold us, we seek always that which includes self and others. To recognize the community principle in everything we do should be our aim, never to work with individuals as individuals. If I go to have a talk with a mother about her daughter, I cannot appeal to the mother, the daughter, or my own wishes, only to that higher creation which we three make when we come together. In that way only will spiritual power be generated. Every decision of the future is to be based not on my needs or yours, nor on a compromise between them or an addition of them, but on the recognition of the community between us. The community may be my household and I, my employees and I, but it is only the dictate of the whole which can be binding on the whole. This principle we can take as a searchlight to turn on all our life.
It is the lack of understanding of this principle which works much havoc among us. When we watch men in the lobbies at Washington working for their state and their town as against the interests of the United States, do we sometimes think, “These men have learnt loyalty and service to a small unit, but not yet to a large one?” If this thought does come to us, we are probably doing those men more than justice. The man who tries to get something in the River and Harbor appropriation for his town, whether or not it needs it as much as other places, is pretty sure back in his own town to be working not for that but for his own pocket. It is not because America is too big for him to think of, that he might perhaps think of Ohio or Millfield, it is just because he cannot think of Ohio or Millfield. There he thinks of how this or the other local development, rise in land values etc., is going to benefit himself; when he is in Washington he thinks of what is going to benefit Millfield. But the man who works hardest and most truly for Millfield and Ohio will probably when he comes to Washington work most truly for the interests, not of Millfield and Ohio, but of the United States, because he has learned the first lesson of life—to think in wholes.
The expressions social and socially-minded, which should refer to a consciousness of the whole, are often confused with altruism. We read of “the socialized character of modern industry.” There is a good deal of altruism in modern industry, but little that is socialized yet. The men who provide rest rooms, baths, lectures, and recreation facilities for their employees, do not by so doing prove themselves to be socially-minded; they are altruistically-minded, and this is involved in the old individualism.28 Moreover, in our attempts at social legislation we have been appealing chiefly to the altruism of people: women and children ought not to be overworked, it is cruel not to have machinery safeguarded, etc. But our growing sense of unity is fast bringing us to a realization that all these things are for the good of ourselves too, for the entire community. And the war is rapidly opening our eyes to this human solidarity: we now see health, for instance, as a national asset.
All of us are being slowly, very slowly, purged of our particularistic desires. The egotistic satisfaction of giving things away is going to be replaced by the joy of owning things together. As our lives become more and more intricately interwoven, more and more I come to suffer not merely when I am undergoing personal suffering, more and more I come to desire not only when I am feeling personal desires. This used to be considered a fantastic idea not to be grasped by the plain man, but every day the plain man is coming more and more to feel this, every day the “claims” of others are becoming My desires. “Justice” is being replaced by understanding. There are many people today who feel as keenly the fact of child labor as if these children were their own. I vote for prohibition, even although it does not in the least touch me, because it does touch very closely the Me of which I am now coming into realization.
The identification of self and others we see in the fact that we cannot keep ourselves “good” in an evil world any more than we can keep ourselves well in a world of disease. The method of moral hygiene as of physical hygiene is social cooperation. We do not walk into the Kingdom of Heaven one by one.
The exposition of the self-and-others fallacy has transformed the idea of self-interest. Our interests are inextricably interwoven. The question is not what is best for me or for you, but for all of us. My interests are not less important to the world than yours; your interests are not less important to the world than mine. If the “altruistic” man is not a humbug, that is, if he really thinks his affairs of less importance to the world than those of others, then there is certainly something the matter with his life. He must raise his life to a point where it is of as much value to the world as anyone’s else.
The self-and-others fallacy has led directly to a conception which has wrought much harm among us, namely, the identification of “others” with “society” which leads the self outside society and brings us to one of the
