Thus the common factors in the
story become more abstract. This story, lacking precise character of
its own, is heard by people of highly varied character. They give it
their own character.
2
The character they give it varies not only with sex and age, race and
religion and social position, but within these cruder classifications,
according to the inherited and acquired constitution of the
individual, his faculties, his career, the progress of his career, an
emphasized aspect of his career, his moods and tenses, or his place on
the board in any of the games of life that he is playing. What reaches
him of public affairs, a few lines of print, some photographs,
anecdotes, and some casual experience of his own, he conceives through
his set patterns and recreates with his own emotions. He does not take
his personal problems as partial samples of the greater environment.
He takes his stories of the greater environment as a mimic enlargement
of his private life.
But not necessarily of that private life as he would describe it to
himself. For in his private life the choices are narrow, and much of
himself is squeezed down and out of sight where it cannot directly
govern his outward behavior. And thus, beside the more average people
who project the happiness of their own lives into a general good will,
or their unhappiness into suspicion and hate, there are the outwardly
happy people who are brutal everywhere but in their own circle, as
well as the people who, the more they detest their families, their
friends, their jobs, the more they overflow with love for mankind.
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