We Do Not Behave As If We

To Consider Powerful Souls As If They Were A Useful Public Resource Is Quite Foreign To Our Customs. In A Small Sense It Is Undemocratic, For It Assumes That Some People Really Know Better In A Way That Must Seem Arbitrary To Most. In A Large Sense It Is Certainly Democratic, In That It Makes The Great Man Serve As A Man.

When We Choose A Man To Beautify Our Towns, We Do Not Automatically Call On The Major Artists Of The World. ... We Now Lavishly Praise Frank Lloyd Wright, But We Never Made Any Community Use Of Him, Though He Longed For The Chance.

It Is By Losing Himself In The Objective, In Inquiry, Creation, And Craft, That A Man Becomes Something.

Thwarted, Or Starved, In The Important Objects Proper To Young Capacities, The Boys And Young Men Naturally Find Or Invent Deviant Objects For Themselves. ... Their Choices And Inventions Are Rarely Charming, Usually Stupid, And Often Disastrous; We Cannot Expect Average Kids To Deviate With Genius. But On The Other Hand, The Young Men Who Conform To The Dominant Society Become For The Most Part Apathetic, Disappointed, Cynical And Wasted.

The Aim Is Not To Give Human Beings Real Goals That Warrant Belief, And Tasks To Share In, But To Re-establish "belonging," Although This Kind Of Speech And Thought Is Precisely Calculated To Avoid Contact And So Makes Belonging Impossible.