Pooled Self-Esteem

DECEMBER, 1921

BY A. CLUTTON-BROCK

I

I AM, I confess, astonished at the lack of curiosity which even psychologists, and they more than most men, discover about the most familiar, yet most surprising, facts of the human mind. They have their formulæ?, as that the human mind is unconsciously always subject to the sexual instinct; and these formulæ, while they make psychology easier for those who accept them, utterly fail to explain the most familiar, yet most surprising facts.

There is, for instance, self-esteem, — egotism, — we have no precise scientific name for it; if we go by our own experience, it seems to be far more powerful and constant than the sexual instinct, far more difficult to control, and far more troublesome. The sexual instinct gets much of its power from this egotism, or self-esteem, and would be manageable without it; but selfesteem is, for many of us, unmanageable. Often we suppress it, but still it is our chief obstacle to happiness or any kind of excellence; and, however strong or persistent it may be in us, we never value it. In others we dislike it intensely, and no less intensely in ourselves when we become aware of it; and, if a man can lose it in a passion for something else, then we admire that selfsurrender above all things. In spite of the psychologists, we know that the sexual instinct is not the tyrant or the chief source of those delusions to which we are all subject. It is because we are in love with ourselves, not because we are in love with other people, that we make such a mess of our lives.

Now, what we ask of psychology, if it is to be a true science, is that it shall help us to manage ourselves so that, we may achieve our deepest, most permanent desires. Between us and those desires there is always this obstacle of self-esteem, and if psychology will help us to get rid of that, then, indeed, we will take it seriously, more seriously than politics, or machinery, or drains, or any other science. For all of these, however necessary, are subsidiary to the management of the self; and all would be a thousand times better managed by a race of beings who knew how to manage themselves. There is not a science, or an art, that is not hampered by the self-esteem of those who practise it; for it blinds us both to truth and to beauty, and most of us are far more unconscious of its workings than we are of the workings of our sexual instinct. The Greeks were right when they said, ‘Know thyself’; but we have not tried to follow their advice. The self, in spite of all our attempts to analyze it away in physical terms, remains unknown, uncontrolled, and seldom the object of scientific curiosity or observation.

In the past, the great masters of religion were well aware of self-esteem; and our deepest and most practical psychology comes from them, though we do not call it psychology. For them the problem was to turn self-esteem into esteem for something else; and to that all other human problems were subsidiary. By God they meant that in which man can utterly forget himself; and they believed in God because the self can sometimes utterly forget and lose itself in something which cannot be seen or touched but which does cause self-forgetfulness. They were sure that the self could not so forget itself except in something more real than itself. ‘With thy calling and shouting,’says St. Augustine, ‘my deafness is broken; with thy glittering and shining, my blindness is put to flight. At the scent of thee I draw in my breath and I pant for thee; I have tasted and I hunger and thirst; thou hast touched me and I am on fire for thy peace.’ Augustine had, no doubt, an exorbitant self, which tormented him; and he was far more aware of his self-esteem and its workings than most men are, even to-day. He was concerned with a real, psychological fact, and his Confessions are still interesting to us because of that concern. And the Sermon on the Mount itself is also practical and psychological, concerned with the satisfaction of the self in something else, so that we are still interested in it, however little we may obey it. But still, from this supreme object, of self-control, we turn to other tasks and sciences, at best only subsidiary.

We might begin by asking, if once our curiosity were aroused — Why are we born with this exorbitant self? It seems to have no biological purpose; it does not help us in the struggle for life, any more than in the arts and sciences, or in conduct, to be always esteeming, admiring, and relishing the self. The products of our egotism, open or suppressed, are useless and unvalued; the very word vanity expresses our opinion of them. But what a vast part of ourselves is just vanity — far vaster than the part that is instinct or appetite. The demands of appetites cease, for the time, with their satisfaction, but the demands of vanity never. Consider, for instance, how your whole opinion of any man is affected by the fact that he has wounded or flattered your vanity. If he does either unconsciously, the effect on your opinion of him, on your whole feeling toward him, is all the greater; for your vanity knows that unconscious homage or contempt is the most sincere.

The greatest villain in literature, Iago, acts from vanity. He did not know it; we may not know it as we read the play; but Shakespeare knew it by instinct; he saw the possibilities of his own vanity in that of Iago, saw that it was cruel as the grave, and developed it in his tragedy of vanity. Those satanic criminals who seduce and murder woman after woman are not sex-maniacs, but vanitymaniacs, and their conquests feed their vanity more than their lust. They are imprisoned in the self, enslaved to it. And the great masters of religion, intensely aware of this tyrannical self in themselves, fear to be enslaved to it and cry to God for freedom. That is why they are almost morbidly, as it seems to us, concerned with sin. Sin means to them this exorbitant self, this vanity that may draw a man into any monstrous and purposeless villainy. They will not allow the analysis of sin into other and more harmless things, or the analysis of righteousness into other things less lovely. For them there is one problem — to be free of the self and of vanity, to be aware of that which glitters and shines, which shouts and calls to the self to forget itself and be at peace. Sin is the blindness, deafness, captivity of the self when it is turned in upon the self; righteousness is its peace and happiness when it is aware of that superior reality they call God.

You may think them wrong in theory, but in practice they are right; they are concerned with the real human difficulty, and aiming at that, which all human beings do most deeply and constantly desire. The riddle of life is this riddle of the exorbitant self, which somehow or other must be satisfied, but can be satisfied only when it forgets itself in a superior reality. I say satisfied, because suppression or self-sacrifice, as it is commonly understood, is no solution of the problem. You can almost kill the self by lack of interest; but if you do that, you will not satisfy it and, in some indirect way, its egotism will still persist and work mischief in you.

Ascetics are often the worst egotists of all, thinking about nothing but their own souls, which means their own selves, living a life of inner conquest and adventure, which is all artificial because internal. Their interest, because they refuse it to external reality, is the more intensely concentrated on themselves; their very God, to whom they incessantly pray, is but an idol made and set up within the temple of the self and has no likeness to the real God, if there be one. Or it is like a medium, or the leading articles of a newspaper, telling them what they wish to be told, and persuading them that it is true because it seems to come from outside, whereas all the time it is really only the voice of the self echoed back. By those methods we can attain to no freedom because we attain to no selfknowledge or control or satisfaction.

If one is concerned purely with psychology, freed from all biological or other assumptions, one may conjecture that the self comes into life with all kinds of capacities or faculties itching to be exercised, and that the problem of life, for some reason a very hard one, is to find a scope for their exercise. We are born with all these faculties and capacities, but we are not born with a technique that will enable us to exercise them. And, if we never acquire it, then the self remains exorbitant, because they all, as it were, fester and seethe within it. It is as exorbitant as when we have an abscess at the root of a tooth and can think of nothing else. Any thwarting of a faculty, capacity, or appetite produces this exorbitance and tyranny of the self, but, since the satisfaction of faculties and capacities is, for most people, much harder than the satisfaction of appetites, the exorbitance of the self is more often caused by the thwarting of the former than of the latter. The problem of the satisfaction of appetities is comparatively simple, for it does not even need a technique of the mind. We can cat without learning to eat; we can make love, even, without learning to make love; but when it comes to turning the mind outward and away from itself, then it is the mind itself that has to learn, has to realize and discover its external interests by means of a technique painfully acquired.

Civilization means the acquirement of all the techniques needed for the full exercise of faculties and capacities, and, thereby, the release of the self from its own tyranny. Where men are vainest, there they are least civilized; and no amount of mechanical efficiency or complication will deliver them from the suppression of faculties and the tyranny of the self, or will give them civilization. But at present we are not aware how we are kept back in barbarism by the suppression of our faculties and the tyranny of our exorbitant selves. We shall discover that clearly and fully only when psychology becomes really psychology; when it concerns itself with the practical problems which most need solving; when it no longer tries to satisfy us with dogmas and formulæ taken from other sciences.

II

And now I come to the practical part of this article. I, like everyone else, am aware that we are kept back in barbarism and cheated of civilization by war; but behind war there is something in the mind of man that consents to war, in spite of the fact that both conscience and self-interest are against it; and it seems to me that a real, a practical science of psychology would concern itself with this something, just as the science of medicine concerns itself with pestilence. And a real, a practical science of psychology would not be content to talk about the herd-instinct, which is not a psychological, but a biological hypothesis, and only a hypothesis. It would not say, ‘Man is a herd animal; therefore it is natural for herds of men to fight each other.’ In the first place, it would remember that herds of animals do not necessarily fight other herds; in the second, that we do not know that man, in his remote animal past, was a herd animal; and, in the third place, that, as psychology, it is concerned with the mind of man as it is, not with what other sciences may conjecture about the past history of man.

Now, if psychology asks itself what it is in the present mind of man, of the peoples we call civilized, that consents to war, it will at once have its attention drawn to the fact that wars occur between nations, and that men have a curious habit of thinking of nations apart from the individuals who compose them; and of believing all good of their own nation and all evil of any other which may, at the moment, be opposed to it. This is commonplace, of course; but, having stated the commonplace, I wish to discover the reason of it. And I cannot content myself with the formula that man is a herd animal, not only because it is not proved, but also because there is no promise of a remedy in it. There is something in me, in all men, which rebels against this blind belief that all is good in my nation, and evil in some other; and what I desire is something to confirm and strengthen this rebellion. When we can explain the baser, sillier part of ourselves, then it begins to lose its power over us; but the hypothesis of the herd-instinct is not an explanation — it says, merely, that we are fools in the very nature of things, which is not helpful or altogether true. We are fools, no doubt, but we wish not to be fools; it is possible for us to perceive our folly, to discern the causes of it, and by that very discernment to detach ourselves from it, to make it no longer a part of our minds, but something from which they have suffered and begin to recover. Then it is as if we had stimulated our own mental phagocytes against bacilli that have infected the mind from outside; we no longer submit ourselves to the disease as if it were health; but, knowing it to be disease, we begin to recover from it.

The habit of believing all good of our own nation and all evil of another is a kind of national egotism, having all the symptoms and absurdities and dangers of personal egotism, or self-esteem; yet it does not seem to us to be egotism, because the object of our esteem appears to be, not ourselves, but the nation. Most of us have no conviction of sin about it, such as we have about our own egotism; nor does boasting of our country seem to us vulgar, like boasting of ourselves. Yet we do boast about it because it is our country, and we feel a warm conviction of its virtues which we do not feel about the virtues of any other country. But, when we boast and are warmed by this conviction, we separate ourselves from the idea of the country, so that our boasting and warmth may not seem to us egotistical; we persuade ourselves that our feeling for our country is noble and disinterested, although the peculiar delight we take in admiring it could not be if it were not our country. Thus we get the best of both worlds, the pleasures of egotism without any sense of its vulgarity, the mental intoxication without the mental headaches.

But I will give an example of the process which, I hope, will convince better than any description of it. Most Englishmen and, no doubt, most Americans, would sooner die than boast of their own goods. Yet, if someone says — some Englishman in an English newspaper — that the English are a handsome race, unlike the Germans, who are plain, an Englishman, reading it, will say to himself, ‘That is true,’ and will be gratified by his conviction that it is true. He will not rush into the street uttering the syllogism: ' The English are a handsome race; I am an Englishman; therefore I am handsome’; but, unconsciously and unexpressed, the syllogism will complete itself in his mind; and, though he says nothing of his good looks even to himself, he will feel handsomer. Then, if he sees a plain German, he will say to himself, or will feel without saying it, ‘That poor German belongs to a plain race, whereas I belong to a handsome one.’ Americans may be different, but I doubt it.

So, if we read the accounts of our great feats of arms in the past, we ourselves feel braver and more victorious. We teach children in our schools about these feats, and that they are characteristic of Englishmen, or Americans, or Portuguese, as the case may be; and we never warn them, because we never warn ourselves, that there is egotism in their pride and in their belief that such braveries are peculiarly characteristic of their own country. Yet every country feels the same pride and delight in its own peculiar virtues and its own preëminence; and it is not possible that every country should be superior to all others.

Further, we see the absurdity of the claims of any other country clearly enough, and the vulgarity of its boasting. Look at the comic papers of another country and their patriotic cartoons; as Americans, look at Punch, and especially at the cartoons in which it expresses its sense of the peculiar virtues, the sturdy wisdom, the bluff honesty, of John Bull, or the lofty aims and ideal beauty of Britannia; or those other, less frequent, cartoons, in which it criticizes or patronizes the behavior of Jonathan and the ideals of Columbia. Does it not seem to you incredible, as Americans, that any Englishmen should be so stupid as to be tickled by such gross flattery, or so ignorant as to be deceived by such glaring misrepresentations? Have you never itched to write something sarcastic to the editor of Punch, something that would convince even him that he was talking nonsense? Well, Englishmen have just the same feelings about the cartoons in American papers; and just the same blindness about their own. Disraeli said that everyone likes flattery, but with royalty you lay it on with a trowel; and nations are like royalty, only more so: they will swallow anything about themselves while wondering at the credulity of other nations.

What is the cause of this blindness? You and I, as individuals, have learned at least to conceal our self-esteem; we are made uneasy by gross flattery; we are like the Duke of Wellington, who, when grossly flattered by Samuel Warren, said to him: ‘I am glad there is nobody here to hear you say that.’

‘Why, your Grace?’ asked Warren.

‘Because,’ answered the duke, ‘they might think I was damned fool enough to believe you.’

But when our country is flattered, and by one of our countrymen, we do not feel this uneasiness; at least, such flattery is a matter of course in the newspapers and at public meetings in all countries; there is such a large and constant supply of it, that there must be an equally large and constant demand. Yet no one can doubt that it is absurd and dangerous, if not in his own country, in others. Believe, if you will, that all the praises of your own country are deserved, and all the more, because of that belief, you will see that the praises of other countries are not deserved. If America is superior to all other countries in all essential virtues, then, clearly, all the other countries cannot be superior, and there must be some cause for their blind belief in their superiority. Englishmen, for instance, however bad their manners, do not proclaim, or even believe, that they are individually superior to all other men — indeed, you hold that the bad manners of Englishmen come from their belief, not in their individual superiority, but in the superiority of England; if they could be rid of that, they might be almost as well-mannered as yourselves. It is a national vanity, a national blindness, that makes fools of them.

But what is the cause of a folly so empty of either moral, or æsthetic, or even biological value, so dangerous indeed, not only to the rest of the world, but even to themselves? For the danger of this folly, its biological uselessness, has been proved to us in the most signal and fearful manner lately by the Germans. They cultivated national vanity until it became madness; and we are all aware of the results. But, if we suppose that they behaved so because they were Germans and therefore born mad or wicked, we shall learn nothing from their disaster. They were, like ourselves, human beings. There, but for the grace of God, goes England, goes America even; and whence comes this madness from which the Grace of God may not always save us? Because it exists everywhere, and is not only tolerated but encouraged, it must satisfy some need of the mind, however dangerously and perversely. Where there is a great demand for dangerous drugs, it is not enough to talk indignantly of the drug-habit. That habit is but a symptom of some deeper evil, something wrong with the lives of the drug-takers, for which the drug is their mistaken remedy; and the right remedy must be found if the habit is to be extirpated.

National egotism, I believe, is a kind of mental drug, which we take because of some unsatisfied need of our minds; and we shall not cure ourselves of it until we discover what causes our craving for national flattery and also our dislike and contempt of other countries. Somewhere, as in the case of all drugtaking, there is suppression of some kind; and the suppression, I suggest, is of individual egotism. We are trained by the manners and conventions of what we call our civilization to suppress our egotism; good manners consist, for the most part, in the suppression of it. However much we should like to talk of ourselves, our own achievements and deserts, we do not wish to hear others talking about theirs. The open egotist is shunned as a bore by all of us; and only the man who, for some reason, is unable to suppress his egotism, remains an open egotist and a bore, persists in the I — I — I of childhood, and provokes the impatience caused by the persistence of all childish habits in the grown-up.

But this suppression of egotism is not necessarily the destruction of it, any more than the suppression of the sexual instinct is the destruction of that. And, in fact, our modern society is full of people whose egotism is all the more exorbitant and unconsciously troublesome to themselves, because it is suppressed. Their hunger for praise is starved, but not removed; for they dare not even praise themselves. Ask yourself, for instance, whether you have ever been praised as much as you would like to be? Are you not aware of a profound desert in yourself which no one, even in your own family has ever fully recognized? True, you have your faults, but, unlike the faults of so many other people, they are the defects of your qualities. And then there is in you a sensitiveness, a delicacy of perception, a baffled creative faculty even, in fact, an unrealized genius, which might any day realize itself to the surprise of a stupid world. Of all this you never speak; and in that you are like everyone else in the stupid world; for all mankind shares with you, dumbty, this sense of their own profound desert and unexpressed genius; and if, by some ring of Solomon or other talisman, we were suddenly forced to speak out the truth, we should all proclaim our genius without listening to each other.

I, for my part, believe in it, believe that it does exist, not only in myself, but in all men, and the men of acknowledged genius are those who have found a technique for realizing it. I say realizing, because, until it is expressed in some kind of action, it does not fully exist; and the egos of most of us are exorbitant, however much we may suppress their outward manifestations, because they do not succeed in getting themselves born. The word in us is never made flesh; we stammer and bluster with it, we seethe and simmer within; and, though we may submit to a life of routine and suppression, the submission is not of the whole self: it is imposed on us by the struggle for life and for business purposes: and, unknown to ourselves, the exorbitant, because unexpressed, unsatisfied ego finds a vent somehow and somewhere.

III

Self-esteem is the consolation we offer to the self because it cannot, by full expression, win esteem from others. Each one of us is to the self like a fond mother to her least gifted son: we make up to it for the indifference of the world; but not consciously, for in conscious selfesteem there is no consolation. If I said to myself, ‘No one else esteems me; therefore I will practise self-esteem, — the very statement would make the practice impossible. It must be done unconsciously and indirectly, if it is to be done at all and to give us any satisfaction. Most of us have now enough psychology to detect ourselves in the practice of self-esteem, unless it is very cunningly disguised: and, what is more, we are quick to detect each other. It is, indeed, a convention of our society, and a point of good manners, to conceal our self-seteem from others, and even from ourselves, by a number of instinctive devices. One of the chief of these is our humor, much of which consists of selfdepreciation, expressed or implied; and we delight in it in spite of the subtle warning of Doctor Johnson, who said, ‘Never believe a man when he runs himself down; he only does it to show how much he has to spare.’

By all these devices we persuade ourselves that we have got rid of the exorbitant ego, that we live in a happy, free, civilized, de-egotized world. We are not troubled by the contrast between our personal modesty and our national boasting, because we are not aware of the connection between them. But the connection, I believe, exists; the national boasting proves that we have not got rid of our self-esteem, but only pooled it, so that we may still enjoy and express it, if only in an indirect and not fully satisfying manner. The pooling is a pis-aller, like the floating of a limited company when you have not enough capital to finance some enterprise of your own; but it is the best we can do with an egotism that is only suppressed and disguised, not transmuted.

If I have an exorbitant opinion of myself, it is continually criticized and thwarted by external criticism; I learn, therefore, not to express it, and even that I have it; but all the while I am seeking, unconsciously, for some means by which I can give it satisfaction. It becomes impossible for me to believe that I am a wonder in the face of surrounding incredulity; so I seek for something, seeming not to be myself, that I can believe to be a wonder, without arousing criticism or incredulity; in fact, something which others also believe to be a wonder, because it seems to them not to be themselves.

There are many such things, but the largest, the most convincing, and the most generally believed in, is Our Country. A man may, to some extent, pool his self-esteem in his family; but the moment he goes out into the world, he is subject to external criticism and incredulity. Or he may pool it in his town; but, as I have hoard, the Bostonian-born is subject to the criticism and incredulity of the inhabitants of other towns. What, therefore, we need, and what we get, is a something which at the same time distinguishes us from a great part of the human race, and yet is shared by nearly all those with whom we come in contact. That we find in our country; and in our country we do most successfully and unconsciously pool our self-esteem. True, there are other countries also pooling their self-esteem in the same way, and apt to criticize us and to question our preëminence; but they are far away and we can think of them as an absurd, degenerate horde or rabble; we can look at their newspapers and cartoons in our own atmosphere, and laugh at them securely. They have, indeed, a useful function in the heightening of our own pooled self-esteem; for we are able, from a distance, to compare ourselves, en masse, with them, and to feel how fortunate we are, with a kind of hereditary merit, to be born different from them —

then also it was the command of Heaven that we should in due course be born Britons, and share in the glory of the mariners of England who guard our native seas; and there is not one of us who, crossing from Dover to Calais for the first time, does not feel that he is more at home on his native seas than any seasick Frenchman.

All this is amusing enough to Americans in an Englishman, or to Englishmen in an American; but it is also very dangerous. In fact, it is the chief danger that threatens our civilization, that prevents it from being civilized, and so, secure. We are all aware of private vices, even of individual self-esteem and its dangers; but this great common vice, this pooled self-esteem, we still consider a virtue and encourage it by all means in our power. And this we do because we are not aware of its true nature and causes. We think that it is disinterested, when it is only the starved ego, consoling itself with a pis-aller; we suppose that it is necessary to the national existence, when the Germans have just proved to us that it may ruin a most prosperous nation. Still we confuse it with real patriotism, which is love of something not ourselves, of our own people and city and our native fields, and which, being love, does not in the least insist that that which is loved is superior to other things, or people, unloved because unknown. We know that where there is real affection, there is not this rivalry or enmity; no man, because he loves his wife, makes domestically patriotic songs about her, proclaiming that she is superior to all other wives; nor does he hate or despise the wives of other men. In true love there is no selfesteem, pooled or latent, but rather it increases the capacity for love; it makes the loving husband see the good in all women; and he would as soon boast of his own wife as a religious man would boast of his God.

So the true love of country may be clearly distinguished from the patriotism that is pooled self-esteem, by many symptoms. For the patriotism that is pooled self-esteem, though it make a man boast of his country, does not make him love his countrymen. Germans, for instance, before the war, showed no great love of other Germans, however much they might sing “Deutschland über Alles’; and in England, the extreme Jingoes, or nationalists, are always reviling their countrymen for not making themselves enough of a nuisance to the rest of the world. To them the British Empire is an abstraction, something to be boasted about and intrigued for; but real, living Englishmen are, for the most part, unworthy of it. Their patriotism, because it is pooled self-esteem, manifests itself in hatred rather than in love; just because it cannot declare itself for what it is, because it is suppressed and diverted, its symptoms are always negative rather than positive. For, being suppressed and diverted, it can never find full satisfaction like the positive passion of love. So it turns from one object of hate to another, and from one destructive aim to another. Germany was the enemy and Germany is vanquished; another enemy must be found, another danger scented; and there are always enough patriots in every country, suffering from pooled self-esteem, to hail each other as enemies, and to play the game of mutual provocation.

So no league of nations, no polite speeches of kings and presidents, prime ministers and ambassadors, will keep us from hating each other and feeling good when we do so, unless we can attain to enough self-knowledge to understand why it is that we hate each other, and to see that this mutual hate and boasting are but a suppressed and far more dangerous form of that vanity which we have learned, at least, not to betray in our personal relations. In fact, the only thing that can end war is psychology applied to its proper purpose of selfknowledge and self-control. If once it can convince us that, when we boast of our country, we are suffering from pooled self-esteem, then we shall think it as vulgar and dangerous to boast of our country as to boast of ourselves. And, further, we shall be ashamed of such boasting, as a symptom of failure in ourselves. For pooled self-esteem is selfesteem afraid to declare itself, and it exists because the self has not found a scope for the exercise of its own faculties.

Why did the Germans suffer so much from pooled self-esteem before the war? Because they were a suppressed and thwarted people. The ordinary German was wounded in his personal selfesteem by all the social conventions of his country; he was born and bred to a life of submission ;and, though consciously he consented to it, unconsciously his self-esteem sought a vent and found it in the belief that, being a German, he was in all things superior to those who were not Germans. The more submissive he was as a human being, the more arrogant he became as a German; and, with unconscious cunning, his rulers reconciled him t o a life of inferiority by encouraging him in his collective pride. So, even while he behaved as if he were the member of an inferior, almost conquered, race, to his military caste, he told himself that this was the price he gladly paid for national preëminence.

Before and during the war the Germans were always saying that they had found a new way of freedom through discipline and obedience; unlike the vulgar, anarchical, democracies of the West, they stooped to conquer; and, since they did it willingly, it was freedom, not servitude. But their psychology was as primitive as it was dangerous. That willingness of theirs was but making the best of a bad job. If only they had known it, they were not content with their submission; no people so intelligent in some things, so industrious and so self-conscious, could be content. There was in them a dangerous, unsatisfied stock of self-esteem, which, since they dared not express it in their ordinary behavior, found expression at last in a collective national madness. It seems to us now that the German people suffered from persecution mania; but that, mania was the vent by which every German eased his sense of individual wrong and soothed his wounded personal pride. By a kind of substitution, he took revenge for the sins of his own Junkers upon all rival nations; and hence the outbreak which seemed to us incredible even while it was happening.

I speak of this now only because it is a lesson to all of us, Americans and English. We too are thwarted, not so systematically as the Germans, but still constantly, in our self-esteem; and we too are constantly tempted to console ourselves by pooling it. In all industrial societies, the vast majority never find a scope for the full exercise of their faculties, and are aware of their inferiority to the successful few. This inferiority may not be expressed politically or in social conventions; in America, and even in England, the successful may have the wit not to insist in any open or offensive manner upon their success; but, all the same, it gives them a power, freedom, and celebrity which others lack. And this difference is felt far more than in the past, because now the poor live more in cities and know better what the rich are doing. Unconsciously, they are wounded in their self-esteem by all that they read in the papers of the doings of the rich; they have become spectators of an endless feast, which they do not share, with the result that they pool their wounded self-esteem either in revolutionary exasperation or in national pride. But, since national pride seems far less dangerous to the rich and successful than revolutionary exasperation, with the profound, unconscious cunning of instinct, they encourage national pride by all means in their power.

There, I think, they are wrong. I believe that national pride, and the hatred of other nations, is a more dangerous vent for pooled self-esteem even than revolutionary exasperation; for, sooner or later, it wall, as in Russia, produce a revolutionary exasperation all the more desperate because it has been deferred and deceived. If we have another world war, — and we shall have one unless we discover and prevent the causes of war in our own minds, — there will be revolutionary exasperation everywhere; and it will be vain to tell starving mobs that it is all the fault of the enemy. The chauvinism of the disinherited mob is but a drug, which increases the evil it pretends to heal. Behind revolutionary exasperation, and behind chauvinism, there is the same evil at work, namely, the thwarting of faculties, the sense of inferiority, the disappointed ego; and we must clearly understand the disease if we are to find the remedy.

The remedy, of course, is a society in which faculties will no longer be suppressed, in which men will cure themselves of their self-esteem, not by pooling it, but by caring for something not themselves more than for themselves. To dream of such a society is as easy as to accomplish it is difficult; but we shall have taken the first step toward the accomplishment of it when we see clearly that we have no alternative except a relapse into barbarism. Suppression, good manners, discipline, will never rid us of our self-esteem; still it will find a vent in some collective, and so more dangerous, form, unless we can, as the psychologists say, sublimate it into a passion for something not ourselves. If we believe that our country is not ourselves, we deceive ourselves; we may give our lives for it, but it is still the idol in which we pool our self-esteem; and the only way to escape from the worship of idols is to find the true God.

I am not now talking religion; I am talking psychology, though I am forced to use religious terms. The true God is to be found by every man only through the discovery of his deepest, most permanent desires; and these he can discover only through the exercise of his highest faculties. So that is the problem for all of us, and, as we now know, it is a collective problem, one which we can solve only all together. So long as other men are thwarted in the exercise of their highest faculties, you are thwarted also; you are kept always from happiness by the unhappiness of others.

You may be rich, brilliant, and a lover of peace; but, so long as the mass of men can do nothing with their self-esteem but pool it, you will live in a world of wars and rumors of wars. You may be an artist, a philosopher, a man of science; but, so long as the mass of men are set by division of labor to tasks in which they cannot satisfy the higher demands of the self, any demagogue may tempt them to destroy all that you value. Until they also enjoy and so value it, it is not secure for you or for the world.

In the past religion has failed because the problem of release from self-esteem has been for it a private and personal one. That is where psychology can now come to its aid. When once we understand that our self-esteem, if suppressed, is pooled, not destroyed, and that we can escape from it only by the exercise of our higher faculties, we shall see also that the problem of release is collective. We are, indeed, all members one of another, as the masters of religion have always said; but only now is it possible for us to see the full truth of their saying. In the past there often seemed to be some incompatibility between religion and civilization; but now we are learning that they are one, and have the same enemy. Once men sought for God alone, and in the wilderness; now we may be sure that they will not find Him unless they search all together. Salvation itself is not a private making of our peace with God: it is a common making of our peace with each other; and that we shall never do until, by self-knowledge, we remove the causes of war from our own minds.

All that I have said in this article is vague, loose, and amateurish; and I have fallen into religious language now and again because there was no other that I could use. But the science that we all need, if we are all together to be saved, does not yet exist. I have written to point out our bitter need of it, and in the hope that the demand will produce the supply.