Mrs. Brines is a secretary and editorial assistant in the offices of the Jasper County Farm Bureau Co-operative Association, Rennselaer, Indiana. Her article first appeared in the August 1956 issue of The Farm News of Jasper County.
It’s a purely personal view but my dander gets up quickly whenever I hear people referred to as the “masses” or the “common people.”
We may be short, tall, good or bad, fat or lean, but we are not a blob of putty to be molded into any one size, shape, or viewpoint. There are about 167,000,000 people in this country and no two sets of fingerprints are alike; and I view with suspicion anyone who takes the view that any or all of the millions of individuals are “masses.” It is an insulting reference, writing off all individual thought and personality.
I hear it frequently, and whether the people who use it do it deliberately or have merely borrowed the phrase in thoughtlessness, it is equally bad. I protest particularly hearing leaders use the term. If the individuals who hired, elected, or appointed them are a faceless “blob,” then not much inspired leadership will result.
I heard one of the very highest labor leaders refer to his union membership again and again in this fashion. He meant no offense,
I am sure, because he is highly respected by people outside the union. Nevertheless, the term defaces people and their personalities. It robs them of being John Jones or Harold Brown, with their individual marks of personality.
I think it’s dangerous to be thought of so impersonally by people in positions where they are responsible for the welfare of large numbers of people. It is not easy to be impersonal about John Jones, the name and the man, but it’s easy to miss his viewpoint when he is “the masses.”
The term is against one of the basic human feelings, the urge to feel important. Ask any performer how important it is to be a “name.” Entertainers work for years to build their name. Politicians know how important a name is. Surveys show that people want not only money for their jobs—they want recognition equally as much.
In all our contacts with others, we meet as individuals. To the filling station attendant you are not a “mass.” You are someone with a a name and personality, perhaps a little cranky sometimes. To you, the attendant is Bill Smith who does the job with a smile, and that’s where you go when you want gas. You like him. You are You. Nobody else can be.
Anyone using such an indifferent and careless term as “the masses” should be promptly and firmly corrected, albeit politely. []
The Nature of Enterprise
It is of the nature of enterprise that the businessman judges for himself what human beings want and how badly they want it, and that he accordingly organizes matters so that human beings can get what they want for themselves. In any society fit for human beings to live in, they must be free to decide what they want, and how much they want one thing more than another thing. If freedom to want things, and to decide among them, is to be of any use to us, we must be free to shop around for what we want. In fact we must be free to shop around if we are to live as free people at all. Freedom of enterprise, as seen from the businessman’s point of view, is the same thing as freedom to shop, as seen from the consumer’s point of view. The central conclusion of economic thought, as I understand it, is that only through freedom to shop can we get the maximum of the things we want most. In other words, free enterprise secures maximum production all around. In this conclusion lies the whole case for freedom to shop and freedom of enterprise.
Hart Buck, Statistician
Toronto-Dominion Bank
