THE CAREERISTS AS THE ABNORMALS

The careerists are those who practice the careerist religion.  The careerist religion is the religion par excellence of modernity.  Someone once said, with the perfect candor of the North American, that America is the land of opportunity.  He meant that America is the land of the Careerist or, as it has also been put, it is the land of the man on the make.  The careerist, or the man on the make, is of a thousand genera and species, varieties and subvarieties, with transition links between.  One finds him at every level of society.

Excepting a negligible minority, the feminine career of today (as of the last ten thousand years of the race’s history) consists in the acquisition of a husband.  After that she is so identified with him that her own life, as something distinct, individual and unique, becomes blurred and then completely erased.  The feminine careerist, the careeristina, if you will, is a definite type.  Consider the unimportance of a collective purpose to the woman whose career is the mate, and then the mate’s career.  All the kinks and twists of the feminine mind, resulting from the necessities of that fundamental primary problem, would form a multitudinous and interesting list.  The most successful careeristinas are the absolutely unconscious ones because they are not passively besieged nor actively bombarded by any doubts as to what they want.  They play their game exceedingly well as do not the quasi-rebels and faint-hearted revoltees that form no small percentage of the Newest Women.  For a number of women the feminist movement has been an attempt to break away from the traditions of the wife-careerist, and to strike a line of auto-careerism.  Can the careeristina instinct, the fruit of the practice of so many generations, be uprooted by the good intentions of a mere statesman?

But the masculine careerist is a marvelous creature.  He is a biologic sport, an abnormal variation.  New York is the place to watch and study him in his thousands and tens of thousands.  You can observe him climbing, climbing, climbing, precisely as an ant climbs a tree.  Nothing can really discourage or sway him from his chosen path.  If he is not getting on financially, he is getting on socially, or he is using the one method of advance to help him with the other.  How the line of least resistance and greatest advantage is determined for and taken by him is a fascinating process.

The careerist instinct, the inherited flair for a career, must not be confounded with the instincts of self-preservation, self-expansion or self-expression, because they are utterly different.  Indeed, the careerist instinct is often their direct antagonist, clashing with and dominating them.  The making of the career involves the distortion, the mutilation, degradation, degeneration or even the complete suppression of the true personality.  But it is all instinctive.  To consider the life of the careerist as an expression of instinct will explain too the success of so many who have no inner awareness of what they want.  These go straight for the career, looking neither to the right nor to the left, without doubt or hesitation, just as they go for the respiration business as soon as they are born.