THE NEW STATE
By Mary Parker Follett

Chapter 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 of 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 doing so
prove themselves to be socially-minded; they are altruistically-
minded, and this is involved in the old individualism [1].

     1.  It must be remembered, however, that these welfare
     arrangements are often accompanied by truly social motives,
     and experiments looking towards a more democratic organization
     of industries.

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 to-day 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 any one'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 most harmful of dualisms.  The reason we
are slow to understand the matter of the subordination of the
individual to society is because we usually think of it as meaning
the subordination of the individual to "others," whereas it does
not at all, it means the subordination of the individual to the
whole of which he himself is a part.  Such subordination is an act
of assertion; it is fraught with active power and force; it affirms
and accomplishes.  We are often told to "surrender our
individuality."  To _claim_ our individuality is the one essential
claim we have on the universe.

  We give up self when we are too sluggish for the heroic life. 
For our self is after all the greatest bother we ever know, and the
idea of giving it up is a comfortable thought for sluggish people,
a narcotic for the difficulties of life.  But it is a cowardly way
out.  The strong attitude is to face that torment, our self, to
take it with all its implications, all its obligations, all its
responsibilities, and be ourselves to the fullest degree possible.

  I do not mean to imply, however, that unselfishness has become
obsolete.  With our new social ideal there is going to be a far
greater demand on our capacity for sacrifice than ever before, but
self-sacrifice now means for us self-fulfilment.  We have now a
vision of society where service is indeed our daily portion, but
our conception of service has been entirely changed.  The other day
it was stated that the old idea of democracy was a society in which
every man had the right to pursue his own ends, while the new idea
was based on the assumption that every man should serve his fellow-
men.  But I do not believe that man should "serve his fellow-men";
if we started on that task what awful prigs we should become. 
Moreover, as we see that the only efficient people are the servers,
much of the connotation of humility has gone out of the word
service!  Moreover, if service is such a very desirable thing, then
every one must have an equal opportunity for service.

  We have had a wrong idea of individualism, which has made those
who had more strength, education, time, money, power, feel that
they must do for those who had less.  In the individualism we see
coming, all our efforts will be bent to making it possible for
every man to depend upon himself instead of depending upon others. 
So _noblesse oblige_ is really egoistic.  It is what I owe to
myself to do to others.  _Noblesse oblige_ has had a splendid use
in the world, but it is somewhat worn out now simply because we are
rapidly getting away from the selfish point of view.  I don't do
things now because my position or my standing or my religion or
_my_ anything else demands it, nor because others need it, but
because it is a whole-imperative, that is, a social imperative.  We
cannot transcend self by means of others, but only through the
synthesis of self and others.  Wholeness is an irresistible force
compelling every member.  The consciousness of this is the
wellspring of our power.

  An English writer says that we get leadership from the fact that
men are capable of being moved to such service by the feeling of
altruism; he attributes public spirit to love, pity, compassion and
sensitiveness to suffering.  This is no doubt largely true at the
present moment, but public spirit will sometime mean, as it does
to-day in many instances, the recognition that it is not merely
that my city, my nation needs me, but that I need it as the larger
sphere of a larger self-expression.

  I remember some years ago a Boston girl just entering social
work, fresh from college, with all the ardor and enthusiasm of
youth and having been taught the ideals of service to others.  She
was talking to me about her future and said that she was sorry
family circumstances obliged her to work in Boston instead of New
York, there was so much more to reform in New York!  She seemed
really afraid that justice and morality had reached such a point
with us that she might not be afforded sufficient scope for her
zeal.  It was amusing, but think of the irony of it: that girl had
been taught such a view of life that her happiness, her outlet, her
self-expression, depended actually on there being plenty of misery
and wretchedness for her to change; there would be no scope for her
in a harmonious, well-ordered world.

  The self-and-others theory of society is then wrong.  We have
seen that the Perfect Society is the complete interrelating of an
infinite number of selves knowing themselves as one Self.  We see
that we are dependent on the whole, while seeing that we are one
with it in creating it.  We are separate that we may belong, that
we may greatly produce.  Our separateness, our individual
initiative, are the very factors which accomplish our true unity
with men.  We shall see in the chapter on "Political Pluralism"
that "irreducible pluralism" and the self-unifying principle are
not contradictory.
