130 Ancient Ideals
regimen is to the body: both are demanding, both produce salu-
tary results.
The young person starting out as a thinker soon develops a sense
of proportion: it’s clear to him that, as Emerson says, a popgun is
just a popgun, even if the ancient and venerable say it is the crack of
doom. He has studied the past, and so he knows that what shakes
the crowd this way or that on a given day is usually nothing more
than a light breeze; the real perturbations go unfelt. In time he learns
to smile at the pretensions of the wealthy, the successful, those who
claim they have made themselves happy. For he knows that, even
now in this fi rst stage of thought, he is putting his mind to use nobly.
He’s engaging in the ancient and honorable pro ject of clearing away
error. He is attacking, in himself and outside (but mostly in him-
self ), the reigning forms of deception.
The Self and the culture of the Self have other uses for the powers
of the mind. Self takes the beautiful and perhaps near- infi nite force
of reason and puts it to work on the mundane. It curses the mind
with twelve cumbersomely “profi table” labors, and when those are
done concocts twelve more. The mind of the Self is pragmatic. It
holds a thought to be true if it helps the Self get closer to fulfi lling
its desires. The Self uses the mind as a slave and sends it on errands:
it puts the mind to work sweating over an account book; it uses it to
get one up on the competitor, or the friend. Of what value is reason
to the Self? It helps the Self gain more of what it desires. The prac-
tical mind schemes and strategizes and thinks only for and about
the individual. It also feeds the Self the necessary justifi cation for
all its acts, however base. The practical mind helps the Self create
arguments that will let it go on living in the manner it has been.
Truth, the pragmatist says, is that which gets you what you
want. You: the individual. The pragmatic mindset has little to
do with anything more than you— there is no necessary concern
with us, with we, with humanity. The pragmatist, enemy of ide-