Men Of Character

In writing the above, I have had intelligence chiefly in mind. But to my way of thinking the attribute “higher” is to be assigned to men less on the ground of superior intelligence— important as that is—than on the ground of superior character. What then are the essential features of the superior man’s character?

The qualities that I should place absolutely first are those by which alone a man can climb up out of the seemingly changeless, ever-sucking abyss of unthinking, unaspiring, undifferentiated mass-man and attain unto a life of his own, inwardly rooted and inwardly directed. I do not entirely identify the inert mass with “working people,” though doubtless they constitute a very large proportion of it. But to my mind a man of any class is, and must be, mass-man until he has learned to break his dependence on others. 

He must cease to be content to float like a cork on the current of life. His primary dissatisfaction must be not with others, not with his environment, not with an economic or political system, but—above all—with himself. He must have come to a vision of life ahead of where he stands, and must want ever to outgrow what he is that he may give his bones and his flesh to his vision. He must, therefore, be one whose very nature it is to risk himself and to spend himself, even unto exhaustion, for the sake of what he most loves and believes in. He must have recognized and accepted the necessity of a stern discipline imposed on himself under the will of his leading bent. 

The required qualities, therefore, are an unflagging aspiration, a dominant coordinating will, profound self-reliance, a capacity for boundless loyalty and devotion, utter integrity, and with it the strength and the courage to bear the burden that his integrity imposes. The experience of living long under these directives gives a man taste, one of the most incommunicable things in the world and one most decisively marking off higher man from mass-man.

–Which Way Western Man by William Gayley Simpson