ATTITUDES TOWARD HUMAN NATURE 7 



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 subnor- 

 mals. There is nothing left for for him but to cater to the 

 minority of careerists, the one-eighth of the electorate represent- 

 ing superior intelligence. The intelligence tests employed in the 

 War showed that and also that forty-five per cent of the exam- 

 ined, 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 Abnormal^ 



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, varie- 

 ties and subvarieties, with transition links between. One finds 

 him at every level of society. 



Excepting a negligible minority, the feminine career of today 

 (as of the last ten thousand years of the race's history) consists 

 in the acquisition of a husband. After that she is so identified 

 with him that her own life, as something distinct, individual and 

 unique, becomes blurred and then completely erased. The femi- 

 nine careerist, the careeristina, if you will, is a definite type. 

 Consider the unimportance of a collective purpose to the woman 

 whose career is the mate, and then the mate's career. All the 

 kinks and twists of the feminine mind, resulting from the neces- 

 sities of that fundamental primary problem, would form a multi- 

 tudinous and interesting list. The most successful careeristinas 

 are the absolutely unconscious ones because they are not 

 passively besieged nor actively bombarded by any doubts as to 

 what they want. They play their game exceedingly well as do not 

 the quasi-rebels and faint-hearted revoltees that form no small 

 percentage of the Newest Women. For a number of women the 



