Well, you say, what are you going to do about it?  That is human nature.  The Evils of Human Nature!  There is the perpetual answer to be repeated by our clever editors unto Eternity.  You cannot get away from human nature.  It is human nature to be a careerist.  It is human nature to put the immediate triumphs of the self and its pleasures above the more indirect, the more remote and distant benefits of a great, wonderful, free community.  We are all careerists.  In so far as democracy has succeeded as a form, it has persisted because there was in it for the common man the promise of his getting more out of life that way than any other way.  For himself.  And the devil take the others.  The myopia of such crude selfishness continues to determine his politics to this very day.  And so he proceeds to vote for favors bestowed and patronage past or potential.  That is, when he does not throw his ballot away altogether into the fire of family habit, sectional inertia, or race prejudice.

Again you say, that is human nature.  It is human nature for us to be narrow, to be confined within the circle of personal thought and desire, without imagination for the beyond.  So the calf is limited in its wanderings to the radius of the rope by which it is tethered.  The servile soul will always be submissive and docile, greedy and stupid.  What else could you expect from the descendant of the solitary beast who once lived for thousands of years in caves?  Without servility of the soul, without chains for the spirit of the wild animal against the world, men could never have been driven to live together for twenty-four hours in communities.

The conception of human quality out of which all social machinery has been devised and built is a conception of slave quality and careerist quality.  As we are all caught in the net, as the unconscious memories of our slave and careerist ancestors flow in our blood and echo in our cells, all we can do is accept it and work with it.  Human nature is an incurable disease.  Like Jehovah’s definition of Himself, it is, it has been, and ever will be.  Everywhere the same, always the same, forever the same, there is no way out.

POOR HUMAN NATURE

All of these strictures upon poor human nature are exceedingly delightful to our careerists.  Every unpleasant social fact, every outrage to our best instincts, every exhibition of incapacity, incompetency, inefficiency, indifference, every example of super-criminal negligence is pardoned as an effect of that universal sin, human nature.  Take the case of the statesman and the diplomats who failed to prevent the Great War, though they saw it coming for years, and who should therefore all, Entente as well as German, American as well as Japanese, be indicted for their criminal negligence, precisely as a physician would be for failure to report and stop the spread of an epidemic disease.  All these crimes of omission and commission are excused on the plea that it was all due to human nature, and that what can be blamed on human nature in general can be blamed on no one in particular.