Psudo Puppeteers; L.E. Read

WE THINK of a puppeteer as an unseen person who manipulates and sometimes supplies voices for small figures of people or animals on a miniature stage. Puppetry goes back to at least 500 B.C. The art, often highly de veloped, has occupied and enter tained millions of people all over this earth. A first-rate puppeteer excites our admiration. His is a singular skill made manifest through small, inanimate, man-created charac ters. The uniqueness portrayed by the small figures is transmitted to them by the God-created char acter, the puppeteer. And we mar vel at what is seen and heard pre cisely as we stand in awe of inanimate paint and canvas given form and beauty by a God-created Raphael. 14 Puppeieers LEONARD E. READ Unworthy of admiration are the pseudo puppeteers, among us by the millions. These persons, for the most part, have no demon strated competency to give form and beauty even to inanimate ob jects. Yet, undaunted, they pro ceed to impose their notions of form and beauty on other human beings. They dangle and pull the strings, not of inanimate little fig ures, but of living individuals. And they'll throw in the dialogue at no extra charge!

Pseudo puppeteering is easy to identify but to refer to a person as a pseudo puppeteer may be the truth one day and a falsehood the next. .The explanation for this variation is that pseudo puppeteer ing is the 'luill to power over oth ers, an urge that rises and falls. On occasion an individual's will 1968 PSEUDO PUPPETEERS 15 to power lies dormant; at times it rages. In some persons it rages most of the time; in others it rar ely flares up. But none of us seems to be wholly immune to the urge, convinced as we are of our own goodness: "Why can't you be like m.e?" Unfortunately, there is a bit of the pseudo puppeteer in every one who cares at all about what goes on around him. Ruled by Inferiors My hypothesis is that this ten dency or nagging proclivity-the will to power over others - in whomever it shows forth, is no more than an unconscious, non rational assertion of ignorance or, to be more charitabl~, a blindness as to the nature of a human be ing, regardless of how lowly his position on life's totem pole. In brief, I am suggesting that those who would pull the strings of other human beings are-by virtue of this fact alone, if for no other mentally and morally unfitted to the task. The pseudo puppeteer, when putting on his act, is intel lectually inferior, not superior, to his human puppets.

"Do you mean to suggest, Mr. Read, that the head of state or his appointees, when dictating wages, hours, rents, prices, and other terms and conditions relating to the peaceful and nondestructive aspects of ownership and trade, are inferior intellectually to those who are the objects of this regi mentation ?1 "Just a minute, Sir! Are you claiming that a wealthy plantation owner, when dictating the activi ties of his slaves, was manifesting a greater blindness than theirs? That the same can be said of the great Plato and his slaves? That Stalin, when relegating a Musco vite to dishwashing, regardless of how lowly that fellow may have been, was nonetheless his inferior? "Why, if your hypothesis is valid, the business leader who serves on the Board of the local chamber of commerce and votes for the hometown plaza at the ex pense of taxpayers all over the na tion is displaying an ignorance greater than the millions whose pittances gratify his wishes. This would even be true of the clergy man who preaches or the academi cian who teaches this doctrine.

You can't possibly mean all of this !" Incredible as it seems, this is precisely what I mean! Such charges cannot be leveled against the true puppeteer, the one who controls man-created, in animate objects. His ignorance could not possibly match that of his wholly unintelligent and life1 Livelihood is an extension of life. The control of another's livelihood is thus the control of another's life.

16 THE FREEMAN January less marionettes. But it is possible for the greatest intellect ever born to have a blind spot, an area of ignorance more pronounced than to be found in a slave. Think about this pseudo pup peteer. Regardless of how great his attainments relative to the rest of us, he really knows next to nothing. This is especially. true if he is unaware of how little he knows. No living person has more than a superficial knowledge of himself; he knows even less about his intimate acquaintances; and still less about those he does not know. Each Manis Emergence Depends Upon Himself Consider next the individual, anyone of the several billion hu man beings who, in one way or another, dangles as a marionette to the pleasure ,of the pseudo pup peteers. While all of us, in varying de grees, are victims of puppeteer ing, let us not pose a Socrates or some other brilliant notable in the role of puppet; that would make it too easy to prove the inferiority of the puppeteer. Instead, let us take someone far down the scale in our rating systeITIS, a Negro slave, for instance-no schooling, unable to read or write or even to talk intelligibly. My claim is that any puppeteer, when performing his act, is inferior even to this lowly fellow.

This slave is a human being! He is neither inanimate nor animal. Examined physically, genetically, chemically, atomistically, there is nothing to distinguish him from Booker T. Washington. Or from your own ancestors a short while ago. Doubtless, his brain is as large as yours and has as many nerve cells. I am only trying to establish the point that this slave is as much a human being as you or I; like us, he is endowed with unrealized po tentialities. To say that his poten tialities have not as yet been real ized to the same degree as yours and mine and, therefore, he would be better off were he our puppet, is to assume not only that we have it made but, far worse, that there is no such thing as human prog ress, emergence, evolution. The realization of potentialities is man's purpose; this is human destiny. And the human being, as complex in one stage of develop men t a san 0 the r, c an g 1" ow, emerge, "hatch," only as he is free to do so. The developmental forces and mechanisms-the soul, psyche, call the generative processes what you will-are within him, and his germinal forces are not to be found in any other person. It is stressing the obvious to insist that I cannot manage these forces 1968 PSEUDO PUPPETEERS 17 in you, for you are unique, extra ordinary, and unlike me in every respect. 2 This claim can safely be generalized.

I am not the Creator. Failing to realize that no one of us can mas termind the creative release and growth of another is an utter blindness. And no matter how slight the intellectual attainments of the manipulated human being, the ignorance of the pseudo puppeteer, when puppeteering, is greater than that of the puppet. The puppet, no matter how dim his glimmer, sees more than can a blind puppeteer. Is there any remedy for man imposing his will by force on other men? Can we curb this puppeteer puppet relationship? Pseudo puppeteering might di minish with a realization that it is nothing more than an assertion of ignorance. This is a shunned, not a sought-after, category. 2 See You Are Extraordinary by Roger J. Williams (New York: Random House, Inc., 1967). Resistance to puppeteering might increase with the realization that most of us are being used as pup pets. What self-respecting person wants to be someone else's mari onette?

And the whole nonsensical re lationship would evaporate were enough of us (1) to evaluate prop erly the uniqueness of the individ ual, (2) to understand that the germinal forces for individual growth are exclusively self-pos sessed, and (3) to appreciate that these forces can do their work only when free to function, not when on either end of a string or a chain. Whenever any of us feel the puppeteering urge coming on, we should heed the counsel, "Mind your own business." And when ever we sense that others are us ing us as puppets, we should make it plain that we are not of the slave mentality by simply demon strating that we can think and speak for ourselves. ~ Bettmann Archive John Quincy Adams 1767-1848 ROBERT M. THORNTON IN 1831 John Quincy Adams, age 64, was elected to the House of Representative from his district in Massachusetts. His lifelong politi cal motto-never to seek office and never to refuse one-explains his willingness to serve the public in this relatively minor position for a man who had been a U. S. Sen ator, Minister in The Netherlands, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Lon don, Secretary of State in the Ad ministration of James Monroe, and President of the United States, 1825-1829. But he made it perMr. Thornton is a businessman in Covington, Kentucky.