Mirror | rorriM

The Little Man does not know that he is little, and he is afraid of knowing it. He covers up his smallness and narrowness with illusions of strength and greatness, of others’ strength and greatness. He is proud of his great generals but not proud of himself. He admires thought which he did not have and not the thought he did have. He believes in things all the more thoroughly the less he comprehends them, and does not believe in the correctness of those ideas which he comprehends most easily….

Your liberators tell you that that your suppressors are Wilhelm, Nikolaus, Pope Gregory the Twenty Eighth, Morgan, Krupp or Ford. And your ‘liberators’ are called Mussolini, Napolean, Hitler and Stalin.

I tell you: Only you yourself can be your liberator!”

This sentence makes me hesitate. I contend to be a fighter for pureness and truth. I hesitate, because I am afraid of you and your attitude towards truth. To say the truth about you is dangerous to life. The truth is also life-saving, but it becomes the loot of every gang. If that were not so, you would not be what you are and where you are.

My intellect tells me: ‘Tell the truth at any cost.’ The Little Man in me says: ‘It is stupid to expose oneself to the little man, to put oneself at his mercy. The Little Man does not want to hear the truth about himself. He does not want the great responsibility which is his. He wants to remain a Little Man. He wants to remain a Little Man, or wants to become a little great man. He wants to become rich, or a party leader, or commander of a legion, or secretary of the society for the abolition of vice. But he does not want to assume responsibility for his work…

I shall tell you who you are:

What is important is not individual treatment but the prevention of mental disorders. You have locked up the crazy people, and the normal people manage this world. Who, then, is to blame for all the misery?

You give impotent people with evil intentions the power to represent you. Only too late do you realize that again and again you are being defrauded. You must come to realize that you make your little men your own oppressors, and that you made martyrs out of your truly great men.

For you are afraid of life, Little Man, deadly afraid. You will murder it in the belief of doing it for the sake of “socialism,” or “the state,” or “national honor,” or “the glory of God.”

I recognized the deadly fear of the living in you, a fear which always makes you set out correctly and end wrongly. You had the happiness of humanity in your hands, and you have gambled it away. You had the world in your hands, and at the end you dropped your atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Through the centuries, you will shed blood where life should be protected, and will believe that you achieve freedom with the help of the hangman; thus you will find yourself again and again in the same morass.

You yourself create all your misery, hour after hour, day after day. You think the goal justifies the means. You are wrong: The goal is in the path on which you arrive at it. Every step of today is your life of tomorrow.

…slowly and gropingly I found what makes you a slave: You are your own slave driver. Nobody else – nobody except yourself carries the responsibility for your slavery. . . I have ceased to be willing to die for your freedom to be anybody’s slave. I tell you: Only you yourself can be your liberator!

The truly great man takes your freedom deadly seriously. In order to establish it in a practical way, he has to surround himself with many little men, helpers and errand boys, because he cannot do the gigantic job by himself. Furthermore, you would not understand him, and would let him fall by the wayside, if he had not surrounded himself with little great persons. Surrounded by many little great persons, he conquers power for you, or a piece of the truth, or a new, better belief.

He writes gospels, freedom laws, etc., and counts on your help and seriousness. He pulls you out of your social morass. In order to keep together the many little great persons, in order not to lose your confidence, the truly great man has to sacrifice piece after piece of his greatness, which he was able to attain only in the deepest intellectual loneliness, far from you and your everyday noise, and yet in close contact with your life. In order to be able to lead you he has to tolerate your transforming him into an inaccessible God. You would have no confidence in him if he had remained the simple man that he was. . .

In this way, you yourself produce your new master. Promoted to the role of new master, the great man loses his greatness because this greatness consisted in his straightforwardness, simplicity, courage, and real contact with life….

There is only one antidote to the germs of the emotional plague in the mass individual: his own feeling of living life. The living does not ask for power but for its proper role in human life. It is based on the three pillars of love, work and knowledge.

You beg for happiness in life, but security is more important to you, even if it costs you your spine or your life. Your life will be good and secure when aliveness will mean more to you than security; love more than money; your freedom more than party line or public opinion; when your thinking will be in harmony with your feelings; when the teachers of your children will be better paid than the politicians; when you will have more respect for the love between men and woman than for a marriage license.

You will no longer believe that you “don’t count.” You will know and advocate your knowledge that you are the bearer of human society. Don’t run away. Don’t be afraid. It is not so terrible to be the responsible bearer of human society. Inflated leaders would have no soldiers and no arms if you clearly knew, and stood up for your knowledge, that a field has to yield wheat and a factory furniture or shoes, and not arms. All you have to do is to continue what you have always done and always want to do: to do your work, to let your children grow up happily, to love your mate.

You are Great, Little Man, when you are not small and petty. You are great when you carry on your trade lovingly, when you enjoy carving and building and painting and decorating and sowing, when you enjoy the blue sky and the deer and the dew and music and dancing, your growing children and the beautiful body of your woman or your man, when you learn to understand and think about life. You are great when you hold your grandchildren on your knees and tell them about times long past, when you look into an uncertain future with their trusting childlike curiosity, when you lull your newborn to sleep, when you sing the good old folk songs.