08-12-2012, 06:41 PM
HOW TO ANALYZE PEOPLE ON SIGHT
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Reaction to Environment
The greatest problem facing any organism is successful reaction to its environment. Environment, speaking scientifically, is the sum total of your experiences. In plain United States, this means fitting vocationally, socially and maritally into the place where you are.[Pg 12]
If you don't fit you must move or change your environment to fit you. If you can't change the environment and you won't move you will become a failure, just as tropical plants fail when transplanted to the Nevada desert.
Learn From the Sagebrush
But there is something that grows and keeps on growing in the Nevada desert—the sagebrush. It couldn't move away and it couldn't change its waterless environment, so it did what you and I must do if we expect to succeed. It adapted itself to its environment, and there it stands, each little stalwart shrub a reminder of what even a plant can do when it tries!
Moving Won't Help Much
Human life faces the same alternatives that confront all other forms of life—of adapting itself to the conditions under which it must live or becoming extinct. You have an advantage over the sagebrush in that you can move from your city or state or country to another, but after all that is not much of an advantage. For though you may improve your situation slightly you will still find that in any civilized country the main elements of your problem are the same.
Understand Yourself and Others
So long as you live in a civilized or thickly populated community you will still need to understand your own nature and the natures of other people. No matter what you desire of life, other people's aims, ambitions and activities[Pg 13] constitute vital obstructions along your pathway. You will never get far without the co-operation, confidence and comradeship of other men and women.
Primitive Problems
It was not always so. And its recentness in human history may account for some of our blindness to this great fact.
In primitive times people saw each other rarely and had much less to do with each other. The human element was then not the chief problem. Their environmental problems had to do with such things as the elements, violent storms, extremes of heat and cold, darkness, the ever-present menace of wild beasts whose flesh was their food, yet who would eat them first unless they were quick in brain and body.
Civilization's Changes
But all that is changed. Man has subjugated all other creatures and now walks the earth its supreme sovereign. He has discovered and invented and builded until now we live in skyscrapers, talk around the world without wires and by pressing a button turn darkness into daylight.
Causes of Failure
Yet with all our knowledge of the outside world ninety-nine lives out of every hundred are comparative failures.
The reason is plain to every scientific investigator. We have failed to study ourselves in relation to the great environmental problem of today. The stage-setting has been[Pg 14] changed but not the play. The game is the same old game—you must adjust and adapt yourself to your environment or it will destroy you.
Mastering His Own Environment
The cities of today look different from the jungles of our ancestors and we imagine that because the brain of man overcame the old menaces no new ones have arisen to take their place. We no longer fear extermination from cold. We turn on the heat. We are not afraid of the vast oceans which held our primitive forebears in thrall, but pass swiftly, safely and luxuriously over their surfaces. And soon we shall be breakfasting in New York and dining the same evening in San Francisco!
Facing New Enemies
But in building up this stupendous superstructure of modern civilization man has brought into being a society so intricate and complex that he now faces the new environmental problem of human relationships.
The Modern Spider's Web
Today we depend for life's necessities almost wholly upon the activities of others. The work of thousands of human hands and thousands of human brains lies back of every meal you eat, every journey you take, every book you read, every bed in which you sleep, every telephone conversation, every telegram you receive, every garment you wear.
And this fellowman of ours has multiplied, since that dim[Pg 15] distant dawn, into almost two billion human beings, with at least one billion of them after the very things you want, and not a tenth enough to go around!