This, then, will be the clue to our inquiry. We shall assume that what
each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on
pictures made by himself or given to him. If his atlas tells him that
the world is flat he will not sail near what he believes to be the
edge of our planet for fear of falling off. If his maps include a
fountain of eternal youth, a Ponce de Leon will go in quest of it. If
someone digs up yellow dirt that looks like gold, he will for a time
act exactly as if he had found gold. The way in which the world is
imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do. It does
not determine what they will achieve. It determines their effort,
their feelings, their hopes, not their accomplishments and results.
The very men who most loudly proclaim their "materialism" and their
contempt for "ideologues," the Marxian communists, place their entire
hope on what? On the formation by propaganda of a class-conscious
group. But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture
to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?
What is class consciousness but a way of realizing the world? National
consciousness but another way? And Professor Giddings' consciousness
of kind, but a process of believing that we recognize among the
multitude certain ones marked as our kind?
Try to explain social life as the pursuit of pleasure and the
avoidance of pain.
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