Thinking Would End Depressions

Henry J. Foley

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, July-August 1939]

EVERY man on earth is engaged in the one great purpose of hunting prosperity wealth: things to eat, things to wear, a house to live in, and things to make life enjoyable, the luxuries. Even when he aspires to the nobler things, music, and painting, and learning, and love, these things are impossible without a foundation of material wealth, prosperity.

The animals also need prosperity, wealth, material things, and they do enough thinking (or whatever their substitute may be for thinking), to assure themselves of the wealth necessary to live. The herd of buffalo finding themselves in a depleted pasture, move to more promising fields. The wolf pack, in a blizzard, will forsake their usual haunts and follow the game. Animals which failed to study the problem of prosperity would quickly die, and they think very seriously on the matter -- all but man.

Some plants in my window were recently brought from the garden, where they grew upward toward the sun. They are now streaming in horizontal lines towards the window. It would seem that they had thought out the problem of their prosperity, and of where wealth was to be had. But men in distress do not even think of where they should look.

The problem of prosperity in man should be an easy one. Man has at his disposal the earth and the fullness thereof. He has all the abilities of the animal for the making of prosperity, plus a million abilities which no other animals possess hands to fashion most effective tools for the production of wealth; a brain to organize; science, machinery, and division of labor. But prosperity for men is more elusive than the black cat to the blind man at midnight. The "thinking animal" has ceased to apply to the problem of prosperity the thinking which furnishes to the buffalo and the oyster a supply of the good things of life.

In the matter of prosperity, men have adopted the plan of following leaders and slogans, and have abolished thinking. Two hundred million Russians followed Lenin into Bolshevism. Fifty million Italians followed Mussolini into Fascism. A hundred million Americans followed Hoover into "rugged individualism" and then followed Roosevelt into regimentation. Possibly one of these methods could be right, but certainly all these opposites can not be right, and none of them has yet succeeded in bringing to mankind the prosperity of the oyster.

"Fifty million Frenchmen can't be wrong" if they think. But fifty million Frenchmen can be woefully wrong if they follow a leader who is headed for perdition. There is no magic which automatically selects for men the leader who will take them where they wish to go. Unless men think where they should go, and pick out a leader who is going there, leadership means nothing except a grand march to destruction.

Jean Henry Fabre describes a caterpillar, the "oak leaf processionary," which has the instinct of following a leader, and he made an interesting experiment with them, by starting a leader around the rim of a pail. When the rim was full the leader was immediately behind the last arrival and proceeded to follow him. The troop was then engaged in an everlasting march to nowhere, just like the human race in the eternal march to prosperity, and they continued until each one fell from starvation and exhaustion.

If men applied to the problem of prosperity the amount of thinking employed by the oyster and the gorilla, it is inconceivable that they could not secure the prosperity of the lower animals, multiplied a thousand fold. The glaring fact is that men have ceased to think, not on all subjects, but only on the subject of making a living. Men think of their particular trades. The shoemaker studies the making of shoes, but not why the shoe trade is flat. The farmer studies how he can grow more crops, but not why the crop must be plowed under. Ten million men in the United States spend their days searching for jobs, but not a moment in searching for the reason why the insects can make a living and the lords of creation can not; why the wolf released at the city limits and the fish thrown into the stream would make a living, but a man on the earth is as helpless as a fish in the desert.

I am not a believer in human stupidity. The child thinks of his problems and works them out more or less successfully. Some one has said that the problems of the man would have been answered if men had not silenced the questions of the child; but the child who seeks to know learns that one subject is taboo the question of why men are poor and hungry and helpless in a world of plenty. No child, without the promptings of an adult, would think out the proposition that a man or a nation gets rich by going deeper into debt; that a nation could borrow itself out of debt; that a man who has no place to work can be prosperous; or that people can get more for their money by the raising of prices on what they buy. This lack of thought can not be because men are incapable of thought, and certainly it is not because they do not wish a solution. There must be an outside reason.

If a starving horse will not go to the manger it may be that he is tied out of reach; or it may be that he has seen the head of a serpent in the hay. What can be the reason for the refusal of men to look intelligently at the problem of prosperity? There are two good and sufficient reasons: The making of a living has become so heart-breaking, such an impossible a task, that there is no time nor energy left to think. The rabbit pursued by the fox is not thinking of the lettuce patch, and the man worn out with labor and anxiety is not forming plans to improve world conditions.

Men are in a depression because they can not think, and they can not think because they are in a depression. What a diabolically vicious circle! The depression could be ended by the kind of elementary thinking done by the grisly bear, and this amount of thinking might be induced even among men in a depression; but it would be futile to expect anything beyond elementary thinking.

The second reason is that men have been sold the idea that, in the matter of prosperity they have no ideas, they never can have ideas, and no one else will ever have ideas. Prosperity is an elusive thing to be prayed for or experimented with, and a man may only choose whether he shall shout for Hoover, for Lenin, for Mussolini, or for Roosevelt. These men know that thousands of books have been written on the subject of prosperity, whose writers had no method of securing prosperity. They know that dozens of plans, bolshevism, fascism, communism, socialism, have been tried without bringing prosperity, and how can the ordinary man ever hope to think correctly about prosperity, and why should he engage in a hopeless effort to think!

This article is not written to point out the path to prosperity, but only to introduce prosperity as a subject for study. If the human mind is unable to solve the dark mystery of prosperity, perhaps man could find a solution by watching the angleworm or the blind mole, who have solved the problem successfully. This is merely an effort to point out that men could find prosperity if they would only look for it, and use the intelligence which the Creator gave to them and denied to the lower animals; but unless the "thinking animal" can be induced to apply his thinking to this most important of all problems, prosperity will be forever beyond his reach.

There is a third reason why men have ceased to think. Every man with a genuine reform becomes saturated with an enthusiasm to examine it in all its ramifications, and to tell the world about it in books of many volumes, and large words. He becomes an unintended ally of the men who have sold to the world the idea that prosperity is a mysterious subject on which thinking is fatal, that prosperity is a subject beyond human intelligence; and these apostles sometimes branch out into endless and unrelated subjects.

Then we have the case of aimless thinking. For instance, there were two men who had thought out the proposition that men who were not allowed a place to work would be poor; they proceeded to tell the neighbors of the discovery, and they built up a following which promised to bring the end of unemployment. Now one of the two discovered that interest was a bad thing; the other reasoned that interest was not only good, but necessary. They argued before their listeners, who also went deeply into the subject, haunting the libraries, and writing books. They are still writing books, the two leaders have died in a duel, the movement has faded out, and the problem of unemployment is still unsolved.

There was never a genuine reform in the history of the world, religious, political, or economic, which was beyond the intelligence of a child. Any reform which needed the services of a university was not a reform, but an effort to justify some exploitation which would have been evident to a child unless the child had been trained to follow leaders instead of to think.

The Great Reformer said "Suffer little children to come unto Me." And He also said that the Creator had hidden His wisdom from the wise, and had revealed it to little ones. His reform, the most stupendous project in history, was spread over the earth by twelve illiterate fishermen. The child and the savage know justice and fairness beyond the ability of all the presidents and emperors to clarify, and justice would solve every problem which has ever tormented the world.