Nor is there any great danger that such a group leader will be tempted or, if tempted, be able to exploit his position to the detriment of his fellows. The problem of what may be called small-scale leadership is not a difficult one, except in societies of hierarchical pattern. In such societies (and where industrial organization is concerned, even the democratic states are hierarchical and dictatorial), the little leader is constantly tempted to revenge himself on those below him for all the indignities he has received from his superiors. Chickens in a poultry yard have a well-defined ‘pecking order.’ Hen A pecks hen B, who pecks C, who pecks D and so on. It is the same in human societies under the present dispensation. The tyrannical jack-in-office is to a great extent the product of tyranny in higher places. Big dictators breed little dictators, just as surely as big scorpions breed little scorpions, as big dung-beetles breed little dung-beetles. A society organized, not hierarchically, but on co-operative lines, and in which the principle of self-government is applied wherever possible, should be tolerably immune from the plague of small-scale tyranny.
Bad leadership is undesirable at any social level. At the top, it may produce, not merely local discomfort, but general disaster. The body politic is subject to two grave diseases in the head, madness and imbecility. When people like Sulla or Napoleon assume the functions of the social brain, the community which they direct succumbs to some form of insanity. Most commonly the disease is paranoia; all the contemporary dictatorships, for example, suffer acutely from delusions of grandeur and of persecution. The alternative to mad King Stork is, only too frequently, a hopelessly inactive and deficient King Log who infects the body politic with his own imbecility. Imbeciles rise to power either by hereditary right or, if the system of choice is elective, because they possess certain demagogic talents, or very often, because it suits certain powerful interests within the community to have an imbecile in office. Most modern societies have abolished the hereditary principle in politics; idiots can no longer rule a country by right of blood.
In the world of finance and industry, however, the hereditary principle is still admitted; morons and drunkards may be company directors by divine right. In the world of politics, the chances of getting imbecile leaders under an elective system could be considerably reduced by applying to politicians a few of those tests for intellectual, physical and moral fitness which we apply to the candidates for almost every other kind of job. Imagine the outcry if hotel-keepers were to engage servants without demanding a ‘character’ from their previous employers; or if sea captains were chosen from homes for inebriates; or if railway companies entrusted their trains to locomotive engineers with arterio-sclerosis and prostate trouble; or if civil servants were appointed and doctors allowed to practise without passing an examination! And yet, where the destinies of whole nations are at stake, we do not hesitate to entrust the direction of affairs to men of notoriously bad character; to men sodden with alcohol; to men so old and infirm that they can’t do their work or even understand what it is about; to men without ability or even education.
In practically every other sphere of activity we have accepted the principle that nobody may be admitted to hold responsible positions unless he can pass an examination, show a clean bill of health and produce satisfactory testimonials as to his moral character; and even then the office is given, in most cases, only on the condition that its holder shall relinquish it as soon as he reaches the threshold of old age. By applying these rudimentary precautions to politicians, we should be able to filter out of our public life a great deal of that self-satisfied stupidity, that authoritative senile incompetence, that downright dishonesty, which at present contaminates it.
To guard against the man of active, paranoid ambition, the potential King Stork of a political or industrial society, is more difficult than to guard against the half-wit, the dodderer and the petty crook. Political and legal checks to ambition, such as those contained in the American Constitution, are effective up to a certain point, but only up to a certain point. Legal checks and balances are merely institutionalized mistrust; and mistrust, however elaborately and ingeniously translated into terms of law, can never be an adequate foundation for social life. If people do not wish to play the political or industrial game according to the prescribed rules, no amount of surveillance will keep them from taking unfair advantages whenever they offer. ‘Over the mountains,’ runs the old song, ‘and under the graves’: avarice and the lust for power will ‘find out the way’ even more surely than love. They will find out the way for just so long as people are brought up to regard ambition as a virtue and the accumulation of money as men’s most important business. At present, we choose to organize our political and economic life and to educate our children in such a way that we must inevitably suffer, as time goes on, more and more severely and chronically from the organized paranoia of dictatorship. But even if reforms were carried out to-day their full effects would not be felt until those brought up under the present dispensation had either died or sunk into impotent old age. Meanwhile, it may be asked, are there any changes in social organization which would make it more difficult for the ambitious men to impose their wills upon society?
An examination system would rid our business and our politics of imbeciles and the more simple-minded types of crook. It would do little to keep out the individual of consuming ambition, and nothing at all, when he had passed his tests, to educate him into a more desirable, less greedily Napoleonic frame of mind. Something more is needed than examinations. Mere social machinery cannot give us the whole of that something more: but as much of it as social machinery can give could probably be provided by some institution akin to that of the Chartered Accountants. A self-governing union of professional men, who have accepted certain rules, assumed certain responsibilities for one another, and can focus the whole force of their organized public opinion, in withering disapproval, upon any delinquent member of the society—such an organization is one of the most powerfully educative social devices ever invented. Leadership will never be made expert and responsible until there is an institute of chartered business managers, another of chartered politicians and yet another of chartered administrators. (In England the higher civil service is almost a caste, having its own rules and standards, which it enforces by distributing that most gratifying form of praise, that most unbearable form of blame, the praise and blame of fellow professionals. To the fact that it approximates so nearly to an institute of chartered administrators it owes its efficiency and its remarkable freedom from corruption.)
Examinations and membership of a professional order would unquestionably do a great deal to raise the standard of political and economic leadership and to check the tendency of ambitious individuals to exceed due bounds. To extend the application of an old is always easier than to introduce a new and unfamiliar principle; and as the examination system is almost universally in use and the chartered professional organization widely known and respected, there should be no great difficulty in merely widening their field of applicability. Only in some such way as this can we minimize the social dangers inherent in the fact of individual inequality.
Chapter XII EDUCATION
Professional educationists and, along with them, certain psychologists, have been inclined to exaggerate the efficacy of childhood training and the accidents of early life. The Jesuits used to boast that, if they were given the child at a sufficiently early age, they could answer for the man. Similarly, the Freudians attribute all men’s spiritual ills to their experience during early childhood. But the Jesuits trained up free-thinkers and revolutionaries as well as docile believers. And many psychologists are turning away from the view that all neuroses are due to some crucial experience in infancy. ‘Treatment in accordance with the trauma theory is often,’ writes Jung, ‘extremely harmful to the patient, for he is forced to search in his memory—perhaps over a course of years—for a hypothetical event in his childhood, while things of immediate importance are grossly neglected.’
The truth is that a man is affected, not only by his past, but also by his present and what he foresees of the future. The conditioning process which takes place during childhood does not completely predetermine the behaviour of the man. To some extent, at any rate, he can be re-conditioned by the circumstances of his adolescent and adult life; to some extent his will is free, and, if he so chooses and knows the right way to set about it, he can re-condition himself. This re-conditioning may be in a desirable direction; it may equally well be
