My Life and Work by Henry Ford (surface ebook reader TXT) 📖

WHAT WE MAY EXPECT

We are—unless I do not read the signs aright—in the midst of a change.

It is going on all about us, slowly and scarcely observed, but with a firm surety. We are gradually learning to relate cause and effect. A great deal of that which we call disturbance—a great deal of the upset in what have seemed to be established institutions—is really but the surface indication of something approaching a regeneration. The public point of view is changing, and we really need only a somewhat different point of view to make the very bad system of the past into a very good system of the future. We are displacing that peculiar virtue which used to be admired as hard-headedness, and which was really only wooden-headedness, with intelligence, and also we are getting rid of mushy sentimentalism. The first confused hardness with progress; the second confused softness with progress. We are getting a better view of the realities and are beginning to know that we have already in the world all things needful for the fullest kind of a life and that we shall use them better once we learn what they are and what they mean.

Whatever is wrong—and we all know that much is wrong—can be righted by a clear definition of the wrongness. We have been looking so much at one another, at what one has and another lacks, that we have made a personal affair out of something that is too big for personalities. To be sure, human nature enters largely into our economic problems. Selfishness exists, and doubtless it colours all the competitive activities of life.

If selfishness were the characteristic of any one class it might be easily dealt with, but it is in human fibre everywhere. And greed exists. And envy exists. And jealousy exists.

But as the struggle for mere existence grows less—and it is less than it used to be, although the sense of uncertainty may have increased—we have an opportunity to release some of the finer motives. We think less of the frills of civilization as we grow used to them. Progress, as the world has thus far known it, is accompanied by a great increase in the things of life. There is more gear, more wrought material, in the average American backyard than in the whole domain of an African king.

The average American boy has more paraphernalia around him than a whole Eskimo community. The utensils of kitchen, dining room, bedroom, and coal cellar make a list that would have staggered the most luxurious potentate of five hundred years ago. The increase in the impedimenta of life only marks a stage. We are like the Indian who comes into town with all his money and buys everything he sees. There is no adequate realization of the large proportion of the labour and material of industry that is used in furnishing the world with its trumpery and trinkets, which are made only to be sold, and are bought merely to be owned—that perform no service in the world and are at last mere rubbish as at first they were mere waste. Humanity is advancing out of its trinket-making stage, and industry is coming down to meet the world’s needs, and thus we may expect further advancement toward that life which many now see, but which the present “good enough” stage hinders our attaining.

And we are growing out of this worship of material possessions. It is no longer a distinction to be rich. As a matter of fact, to be rich is no longer a common ambition. People do not care for money as money, as they once did. Certainly they do not stand in awe of it, nor of him who possesses it. What we accumulate by way of useless surplus does us no honour.

It takes only a moment’s thought to see that as far as individual personal advantage is concerned, vast accumulations of money mean nothing. A human being is a human being and is nourished by the same amount and quality of food, is warmed by the same weight of clothing, whether he be rich or poor. And no one can inhabit more than one room at a time.

But if one has visions of service, if one has vast plans which no ordinary resources could possibly realize, if one has a life ambition to make the industrial desert bloom like the rose, and the work-a-day life suddenly blossom into fresh and enthusiastic human motives of higher character and efficiency, then one sees in large sums of money what the farmer sees in his seed corn—the beginning of new and richer harvests whose benefits can no more be selfishly confined than can the sun’s rays.

There are two fools in this world. One is the millionaire who thinks that by hoarding money he can somehow accumulate real power, and the other is the penniless reformer who thinks that if only he can take the money from one class and give it to another, all the world’s ills will be cured. They are both on the wrong track. They might as well try to corner all the checkers or all the dominoes of the world under the delusion that they are thereby cornering great quantities of skill. Some of the most successful money-makers of our times have never added one pennyworth to the wealth of men. Does a card player add to the wealth of the world?

If we all created wealth up to the limits, the easy limits, of our creative capacity, then it would simply be a case of there being enough for everybody, and everybody getting enough. Any real scarcity of the necessaries of life in the world—not a fictitious scarcity caused by the lack of clinking metallic disks in one’s purse—is due only to lack of production. And lack of production is due only too often to lack of knowledge of how and what to produce.

*

This much we must believe as a starting point: That the earth produces, or is capable of producing, enough to give decent sustenance to everyone—not of food alone, but of everything else we need. For everything is produced from the earth.

That it is possible for labour, production, distribution, and reward to be so organized as to make certain that those who contribute shall receive shares determined by an exact justice.

That regardless of the frailties of human nature, our economic system can be so adjusted that selfishness, although perhaps not abolished, can be robbed of power to work serious economic injustice.

*

The business of life is easy or hard according to the skill or the lack of skill displayed in production and distribution. It has been thought that business existed for profit. That is wrong. Business exists for service. It is a profession, and must have recognized professional ethics, to violate which declasses a man. Business needs more of the professional spirit. The professional spirit seeks professional integrity, from pride, not from compulsion. The professional spirit detects its own violations and penalizes them. Business will some day become clean. A machine that stops every little while is an imperfect machine, and its imperfection is within itself. A body that falls sick every little while is a diseased body, and its disease is within itself.

So with business. Its faults, many of them purely the faults of the moral constitution of business, clog its progress and make it sick every little while. Some day the ethics of business will be universally recognized, and in that day business will be seen to be the oldest and most useful of all the professions.

*

All that the Ford industries have done—all that I have done—is to endeavour to evidence by works that service comes before profit and that the sort of business which makes the world better for its presence is a noble profession. Often it has come to me that what is regarded as the somewhat remarkable progression of our enterprises—I will not say “success,” for that word is an epitaph, and we are just starting—is due to some accident; and that the methods which we have used, while well enough in their way, fit only the making of our particular products and would not do at all in any other line of business or indeed for any products or personalities other than our own.

It used to be taken for granted that our theories and our methods were fundamentally unsound. That is because they were not understood. Events have killed that kind of comment, but there remains a wholly sincere belief that what we have done could not be done by any other company—that we have been touched by a wand, that neither we nor any one else could make shoes, or hats, or sewing machines, or watches, or typewriters, or any other necessity after the manner in which we make automobiles and tractors. And that if only we ventured into other fields we should right quickly discover our errors. I do not agree with any of this. Nothing has come out of the air. The foregoing pages should prove that. We have nothing that others might not have. We have had no good fortune except that which always attends any one who puts his best into his work. There was nothing that could be called “favorable” about our beginning. We began with almost nothing. What we have, we earned, and we earned it by unremitting labour and faith in a principle. We took what was a luxury and turned it into a necessity and without trick or subterfuge. When we began to make our present motor car the country had few good roads, gasoline was scarce, and the idea was firmly implanted in the public mind that an automobile was at the best a rich man’s toy.

Our only advantage was lack of precedent.

We began to manufacture according to a creed—a creed which was at that time unknown in business. The new is always thought odd, and some of us are so constituted that we can never get over thinking that anything which is new must be odd and probably queer. The mechanical working out of our creed is constantly changing. We are continually finding new and better ways of putting it into practice, but we have not found it necessary to alter the principles, and I cannot imagine how it might ever be necessary to alter them, because I hold that they are absolutely universal and must lead to a better and wider life for all.

If I did not think so I would not keep working—for