chinery. That would entail the
satisfaction not alone of the animal needs, but also the highest
aspirations and therefore the provision of the finest conditions of
life for the normal: those most favorable, stimulative, and assistant
to creative activity. For what else is the content of the idea of
freedom?

Without committing the intellectual sin which William James named
Vicious Abstractionism, the goal of the clearest progressive and
liberal thought and forces of the twentieth century might be summed
up as this freedom in a democracy of normals. A good formula which
coincides with the technique of nature in the evolution of species.
A fair fight, a free-for-all who are unhandicapped, is the motto
of natural selection. Where civilization shakes hands with natural
instinct, what but the happiest of results can be expected?

Unfortunately, the formula in human society possesses an Achilles'
heel. Again it is slavery. Where slavery has become bred into the
bone, the standard of the normal becomes reduced so tremendously that
the average of normals, the majority, are hopelessly inferior. In
effect, they are really subnormal. So the ideal of our ideal statesman
is bound to be defeated because of the inadequacy of his material.

No matter how interested in his main business: the promotion of
freedom for creative activities in a democracy of the normals, he is
bound to be beaten by the majority consisting of subnormals. There is
nothing left for him but to cater to the minority of careerists, the
one-eighth of the electorate representing superior intelligence. The
intelligence tests employed in the War showed that and also that
forty-five per cent of the examined, or about one half the total
population, had a mental capacity, or natural ability that would never
develop beyond the stage normal to a twelve-year-old child. They are
doomed to remain forever subnormal.

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.