The New State · Part I · Chapter 3 (2/2)

Throughout my description of the group process I have taken committee-meetings, conferences etc. for illustration, but really the object of every associating with others, of every conversation with friends, in fact, should be to try to bring out a bigger thought than anyone alone could contribute. How different our dinner parties would be if we could do this. And I mean without too labored an effort, but merely by recognizing certain elementary rules of the game. Creation is always possible when people meet; this is the wonderful interest of life. But it depends upon us so to manage our meetings that there shall be some result, not just a frittering away of energy, unguided because not understood. All our private life is to be public life. This does not mean that we cannot sit with a friend by our fireside; it does mean that, private and gay as that hour may be, at the same time that very intimacy and lightness must in its way be serving the common cause, not in any fanciful sense, but because there is always the consciousness of my most private concerns as tributary to the larger life of men. But words are misleading: I do not mean that we are always to be thinking about it⁠—it must be such an abiding sense that we never think of it.

Thus the new psychology teaches us that the core of the group process is creating. The essential value of the new psychology is that it carries enfolded within it the obligation upon every man to live the New Life. In no other system of thought has the Command been so clear, so insistent, so compelling. Every individual is necessary to the whole. On the other hand, every member participates in that power of a whole which is so much greater than the addition of its separate forces. The increased strength which comes to me when I work with others is not a numerical thing, is not because I feel that ten of us have ten times the strength of one. It is because all together we have struck out a new power in the universe. Ten of us may have ten, or a hundred, or a thousand times the strength of one⁠—or rather you cannot measure it mathematically at all.

The law of the group is not arbitrary but intrinsic. Nothing is more practical for our daily lives than an understanding of this. The group-spirit is the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night⁠—it is our infallible guide⁠—it is the Spirit of democracy. It has all our love and all our devotion, but this comes only when we have to some extent identified ourselves with It, or rather perhaps identified It with all our common, everyday lives. We can never dominate another or be dominated by another; the group-spirit is always our master.