Eric Hoffer, The Preface

 

I am writing out the 3-page Preface (Pages ix, x. xi) of Eric Hoffer’s 4^th book, The Temper of Our Times, published in 1967. Here it is:

 

Hoffer (H after this): “To know the central problem of an age is to have our fingers on a thread of continuity through the welter of willful events and unforeseen crises. It is my assumption that the main difficulty and challenge of our age is drastic change—from backwardness to modernity, from subjection to equality, from poverty to affluence, from work to leisure.”

 

My response: It seems that drastic change, or the relentless march of beings, humans, the world itself through time as existence keeps going on an on, as natural history, supernatural history and artificial human history ceaselessly unfold, turns out to be Hoffer’s major presupposition, that it drives humans to react, and how they react bodes well or ill for human survival.

 

Hoffer never clarifies if drastic change is a supernatural force, but he definitely would define it as a natural and social force. It seems that this presupposition is his metaphysical take on the world, and it is not a bad one to assume.

 

H: “These are all highly desirable changes, changes that mankind has hoped and prayed for through the millennia.”

 

My response: Hoffer adds a normative element hear, that some trends in history are progressive and desirable, going from backwardness to modernity, from subjection to equality (and liberty I add), from poverty to affluence, from work to leisure (We need leisure but we need to work more.). There is rough progress ethically as history unfolds, though there are backward sliding trends all the time, and ultimate reversal of all human gains can still happen, no guarantees.

 

H: “Yet it is becoming evident that, no matter how desirable, drastic change is the most radical and dangerous experience mankind has undergone.”

 

My response: Boy, this that a mouthful. Hoffer knows human essence, or its nature, naturally is quite conservative, really being averse to and detesting ay change, let alone drastic change.

 

My goal would be to raise up a generation of citizens as individuating supercitizens, so in love with change, so habituated to constant change, and rationally and quickly grasping what is underway, so they can be adaptable, versatile without losing their self-esteem, hope or sense of equilibrium.

For such a population, so self-esteeming and in love with themselves, they would understand that whether historical change in their generation is drastic, moderate but steady, or very little changes, they would agree to work together to modulate the change so that they had time to absorb it, and still sharing as a community and people a meaningful, reassuring grand narrative which would provide them with a value system to hold onto, so they can weather all that is being tossed at them by existence and history itself.

 

It would be better to have a traditional grand narrative, and old way of living which satisfied their need for holding onto the past and their heritage, all while gently, steadily, incrementally changing all the time, and this allows drastic change, most of the time, to be absorbed by a people without causing social turmoil and unrest.

 

As Hoffer warns, drastic change can be most difficult and dangerous for a people not equipped to deal with it.

 

H: “We are discovering that broken habits can be more painful and crippling than broken bones, and that disintegrating values may have as deadly a fallout as disintegrating atoms.

 

The essays in this volume try to make sense of some of the happenings of our time, and they are all concerned with aspects of change. Most of the writing  also deals with the role of the intellectual, and in one place I suggest that our age is the age of the intellectual.”

 

My response: By 2015 in the West, so many young people had college degrees, that they took over the institutions, pushing their woke DEI and socialist agenda upon everyone. These intellectuals are ruler-wannabees, or desperate graspers after elite ruling status over the masses. It seems that millions of young people being college educated does offer credence and evidence to Hoffer’s claim that this is the age of the intellectual.

 

H: “Actually, it can now be seen that the intellectual who during recent decades aspired to ride and command the process of change in various parts of the world is one in a line of aspirants waiting to take their turn in the arena.

 

Just now in Africa and elsewhere the intellectual is being elbowed out and supplanted by soldiers who will use armies rather than mass movements as instruments of change. It is significant that the American Negro’s passage from inferiority to equality is proceeding more equably and effectively in the U.S. Army than anywhere else. The Army is at present the only place where the Negro is a human being first and only secondly a Negro. So, too, in Israel the army has been an unequaled agency for the conversion of polyglot immigrants into self-respecting Israelis.”

 

My response: It seems to me that we live in time of remarkable change,  when American blacks have gone from being the descendants of slaves, held back legally, economically and socially, to have full equality and equal opportunity.

 

With some optimism and imagination, I confess to the reader than if we can teach our citizens, especially to young, to maverize and conduct themselves as supercitizens, then change will be so progressive and transformative, it would almost seem as if human nature was not fixed and mostly unalterable, which it is, but our powers of reason and good moral habits, can allow us to learn to act other than we naturally would, if we try hard and stay at it.

 

H: “It is conceivable that eventually other agencies powered by other human types are going to have their turn. The actors will come and go, but the arena and the menacing problem will remain the same. E.H. San Francisco, California July, 1966.”

 

Victor Hanson On Charlie Kirk

 

Intellectual Victor Hanson wrote and posted, on 9/18/25, an editorial for townhall.com called The Murder of Charlie Kirk Was Not a George Floyd Moment. I copied and pasted the editorial belong and will comment on it. Here it is:

 

Victor (V after this): “

The Murder of Charlie Kirk Was Not a George Floyd Moment

September 18, 2025

Victor Davis Hanson

Just days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the left is working overtime to hide the truth and create fantasies about his death.

Specifically, leftists alleged that conservatives were going to “pounce” on the death to wage protests and boost radical agendas in the manner of what followed George Floyd’s death.”

 

My response: The gentle, civil, civilized, and law-abiding Christian supporters of Charlie Kirk will not riotously hit the streets, damage property, kill people, and burn down buildings. Rather Erika Kirk and the millions of Charlie Kirk fans intend to respond by carrying on his work now that he has been martyred.

V: “Here are some of the lies that such a ridiculous narrative entails.

One, Charlie Kirk is not conservatives’ George Floyd. There were no mass riots after his death of the sort that followed Floyd’s demise.

Floyd’s death was used by the left to justify five months of rioting, arson, murder, looting, and attacking police officers.

The postmortem respect for Kirk’s singular life was not characterized by $2 billion in property damage, the torching of a police precinct, a federal courthouse, and an iconic church, 35 deaths, and 1,500 injured law-enforcement officers.

Instead, thousands of people peacefully joined his Turning Point USA organization and promised to redirect their lives toward peaceful political engagement.”

My response: It is well known that Democrats riot and hit the streets, that it is organized and not spontaneous, and they do this to intimidate the public and seize power, but the public are onto them.

Republicans and conservatives seek redress nonviolently within the system, and yet we are defamed as fascists, warmongerers, Christian nationalists and domestic terrorists—all lies.

K: “Two, after Kirk’s death, no prominent Republican or conservative is encouraging ongoing mass (and often violent) protests in the manner of high-profile leftists like Kamala Harris.

She blurted out on national television in June 2020, “But they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop, and this is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop, and everyone beware, because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day. Everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up—and they should not. And we should not.”

No conservatives—like the spouse of Governor Tim Walz—declared of the 2020 arsons, “I could smell the burning tires, and that was a very real thing. I kept the windows open as long as I could because I felt like that was such a touchstone of what was happening.”

Instead, Kirk’s supporters are calling on everyone to express their anger peacefully at the ballot box by registering to vote and showing up for the 2026 midterms.”

My response: Conservatives can express their anger at the ballot box.

V: “Three, Charles Kirk was not George Floyd. He was a law-abiding, religiously devout, political organizer, happily married with two children. Kirk was a media figure and head of a huge 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose brand was calmly debating students who disagreed with him.

Floyd should not have died while in police custody. But Floyd’s comorbidities were many. When arrested, he was under the influence of fentanyl and methamphetamine, with a heart condition and recent Covid infection.

He was a career felon, with eight previous criminal convictions, who had in the past staged a violent home-invasion robbery and pointed a knife at the abdomen of one of the female occupants.

In contrast, when Kirk was killed, he was not on drugs. He was not resisting police officers. And he was not trying to pass counterfeit currency. Instead, he eschewed violence and tried to engage in polite dialogue with students of different views.”

My response: That Charlie Kirk is considered a conservative version of George Floyd is a false equivalency.

V: “Four, Kirk was not, as alleged by the left, murdered by a right-wing shooter. His death was not an example of right-on-right violence. Just the opposite was true. The shooter, Tyler Robinson, was on record with his family expressing hatred for the conservative Kirk.

Robinson engraved his bullets with both Antifa-like “anti-fascist” messaging and transgender references. He lived with his transgender partner, who was a leftist. Robinson’s aim was to end Kirk’s peaceful conservative career because he hated his politics and popularity and feared his influence.”

My response: I hope Turning Point USA grows to 25 million followers and strengthens the return to traditional political practices in America.

V: “Five, the left used the death of Floyd to promote its hard-left and otherwise unpopular agenda—defunding the police, cashless bail, decriminalization of theft, and DEI mandates. It manipulated outrage, chaos, and months-long violence to ram through radical cultural and top-down legal changes that otherwise had little popular support.

Conservatives upset over Kirk’s murder will bolster Turning Point USA. They are determined through peaceful means to persuade more youth about the poverty and dangers of progressive thought.”

My response: Victor could not have captured the differences between these two men in a more eloquent fashion.

V: “Why is the left fabricating the circumstances surrounding and following Kirk’s murder?

In its signature projective style, the left is terrified that the right might follow its own example—by manipulating facts, ginning up street violence, and issuing non-negotiable demands to achieve its agenda.

But the chief difference between the Kirk assassination and the death of Floyd is that the post-Floyd agenda had no majority support and so had to be rammed through in hysterical times by implied threats of unending violence beyond five months of continued mayhem.

The post-Kirk agenda eschewed violence because it was both morally wrong and politically counterproductive—since most Americans naturally favored most of what Kirk championed.”

 

My response: Victor has written a fair, accurate, commonsense editorial above.

 

 

Peterson Remembrance Of Charlie Kirk

 

On 9/17/25 Jordan Peterson on YouTube carried, in remembrance of the murder of Charlie Kirk, a video excerpt of an interview between them from several years ago.

 

Here is Jordan’s 8.33 minute video, and he writes: “We should always remember his journey, Never Forget the Path He Walked.”

 

My response: I did not copy out this video fully, but just curtailed it and edited it for speech and economy, while retaining the essence of the interview. I have paraphrased their conservation at times.

 

Charlie the 19-year-old visionary sensed that he needed not to go to college, but to go out around colleges and his pathway was to build Turning Point college chapters, to promote conservative ideas among campus youth.

 

Charlie: “I loved to debate via dialogue to pursue truth. Dialogue is a gift from God.”

 

My response: This is a profound statement: Dialogue is a gift from God. It allows human individuals as thinkers and speakers, to converse and debate, and the intellectual stimulation resulting can lead to intellectual prowess, the gift of rational consciousness, consistent with the theological claim that Jesus was the word, the Logos who became flesh, died on the cross and saved humanity from its own sins.

 

Humans cannot individuate, grow in goodness, philosophical consciousness, rational power, and original thinking, without dialoguing with each other—and inside oneself with oneself while maverizing-- and this is a godly, God-centered, and God-approved undertaking.

 

Charlie: “Conservatives rarely go on campus to reach out to college kids.”

 

My response: Part of Charlie’s uniqueness was his far-sighted original impulse that this was an unserved cultural niche required filling, and that he was the spokesman to carry it out, and the consequence was that he spearheaded the conservative revival of thought for American youth.

 

Jordan: “When I was a professor at the University of Toronto, only Communists in those days set up a card table to sway students to their cause.

 

Charlie: “I was deemed as unseemly by the conservative establishment because the conservative way of doing things was not to go set up a card table. It was, so to speak, only proper for a young conservative to go to college, to go to Stanford to get the highest possible education.”

 

My response: Charlie was unique: a young conservative from a Chicago suburb, where all young, affluent children, were expected to go to college, but he took another path. He was an autodidact reading the Great Books, or at least the classic capitalist and libertarian texts, and he was entrepreneurial and a political organizer, self-styled.

 

He also did the political heavy-lifting of going out and personally making contact with the young—it also cost him his life—but the lesson to take away from this is that people need personal connection as individuals to be politically energized, and the old time, out-of-touch Republicans lost interest in mixing with the masses, and thus they lost at the polls. Charlie’s political instincts were brilliant: he pressed the flesh and eventually got out the youth vote for Trump, a most impressive feat. He saved old guard Republicans party, without their appreciation or blessing.

 

I suspect that he enjoyed out-arguing and knowing more about culture, economics, history and politics than most of the college students whom he verbally sparred with, thereby overtly and subtly pointing out that he could out-think, out-argue, and was better educated than college-educated students, which he was.

 

There may have been an element of showing off in his debating, and he humiliated his assassin in a bitter encounter during which he referred to that narcissist as being a narcissist to his face in front of thousands of witnesses. The humiliated and vengeful assassin did not forgive Kirk and likely saw killing him as having the last word.

 

Charlie had no college degree. Not having that degree was what he wore like a badge of honor. Charlie took risks, and that courageous willingness to face the opposition openly likely contributed to his losing his life.

 

My take on the phenomenal Charlie Kirk rise to prominence as a leader of millions of young college and young blue-collar conservatives was that that something new, remarkable and unprecedented was born when Charlie started building Turning Point USA: something in the historical air of this time in history in America instilled in Charlie the ambition and vision be the change agent, fostering the turning point transition of young people away from Leftist or liberal populism, and back towards Christian, Western, capitalist, American, traditional political, religious and cultural values. He had influence noticeable as the increasing numbers of young people uniting and so expressing themselves, would be inspired by Kirk’s growing movement, a conservative, populist movement.

 

It is wholesome, democratic conservative populism, not like ideological, collectivist, conservative but actually fascist, mass movement populism in Germany in the 20s and 30s which fed into the Hitlerian rise to power at the head of the Nazi movement taking over Germany.

 

American liberals and Leftists who identify Turning Point as Hitlerian are slanderers, liars or just clueless.

 

By stark contrast, what Kirk espoused was a political return to influence by millions of young people who would politically organize within the system, and win at the ballot box, as they helped Trump become President. Charlie had a remarkable knack for organizing and getting out the vote, especially the youth vote.

 

Charlie: “And what I was doing unknowingly was doing something on cutting edge, was something you mentioned earlier, that conservatives have become of low trust of institutions and liberals have become of high trust of institutions and defend the FDA. They will defend the CDC, and they will defend Pfizer, and the intelligence agencies.”

 

My response: Charlie is noting that in the 60s the liberals were anti-establishment and distrusted institutions and those that ran them, and by 2015 liberals and Leftists dominated all institutions and were the establishment and expressed high loyalty to, confidence in and trust of institutions.

 

Leftists and collectivists are pro-institution when they run them, and they are anti-institution when out of power. Their dirty little secret is Leftists are never really anti-institution, though they talk that way when out of power, seeking to regain power. They always seek power, and this is the basis for whether they trust institutions or not, not because those in charge are wicked and foolish, or because institutions are intrinsically problematic—regardless of the ideology proclaimed by those in power. The larger and more widespread the institutions, the more do the rulers of these hierarchies, trend to authoritarian aims on the part of that elite in charge of the institutions.

 

This transition was realistically occurring, and accurately described by Charlie, and slowly young people started rebelling against and feeling alienated from the postmodernist, Leftist elite running all the institutions by 2010, even big, woke corporations.

 

Jordan: “Yeah, great, defend Pfizer, Big Pharma.”

 

Charlie: But they will. They are high trust of institutions. They find themselves defending institutions. In 1960s they were low trust of institutions. Don’t send us to war. But today, they are pro-institution. But today, and I was on the cutting edge of this.

 

In 2012, 2013, 2014, conservatives were still on the high trust of institutions.”

 

J: “Okay, so let me rephrase that slightly.”

 

Charlie, “Yes, so you understand.”

 

J: “Well, there is a conundrum because conservatives will trust institutions. That’s like an oxymoron.”

 

My response: This statement by Jordan is what drew my interest to this video because I had a flash of intuition that Charlie was instinctively right about something here, that Jordan with his intimidating intellectual heft, seemed to be dismissing something original that Charlie by instinct and experience had concluded. What is that?

 

Charlie noted that the followers of Turning Point, young college and non-college and blue-collar conservatives, have lost their trust of American institutions, which progressive elites currently running the institutions are destroying, and that is their overt intent: to wipe out the entire American way of life, all of it.

 

Jordan seems to accept the British, classical conservative view that institutions inherently are good and to be preserved, all conservatives need to do is throw liberals and socialists out of office to restore the British tradition.

 

This conservative outlook has some merit, but it is pre-Margaret Thatcher. Now British conservatism is post-Tory in part at least, as Thatcher represented the middle class, some individualism, capitalist aspirations for her people.

 

The residual House of Lords, the Royal Family Wing and the gentry all are more collectivist than the Thatcherite conservatives of the 70s and 80s. The George Bush Republican Party of 2002 is more collectivist and anti-populist than the more individualistic, pro-populist Turning Point youth who distrust institutions.

 

I am theorizing that Charlie Kirk and his unseemly young, populist conservatives intuitively understood that institutions are not to be trusted in and of themselves, because large institutions thrive best when their victim subjects are morally altruistic, nonindividuating, groupist citizens with a high tolerance for being enslaved, oppressed, tyrannized, abused and exploited, all while moaning and yet submitting to be ruled by elites running the institutions.

 

Jordan defines still conservatives as not just pro-tradition and capitalism but pro-established institutions. Jordan and the Tory conservatives of England regard institutions as redeemable, as inherently good, which they are not.

 

Kirk’s current conservatives are more conservative populist (my phrase) not old-fashioned Brahmins like the George Bush family or the British Tories of old. The Charlie Kirk grass root young conservatives are not just against the postmodernist wokesters and cultural Marxists running and wrecking our institutions and America. They also mistrust institutions as a matter of faith.

 

They need me to articulate their unspoken but significant disagreement with Jordan that the way  to right the ship means that conservatives just need to win at the ballot box to take back the government for conservative patriotic America and the traditionalists, that once Trump was in office, then inherently good and useful institutions could be respected and trusted again, and all will be okay like before, which it never was.

 

 I suspect that Kirk did not have the words for it (I believe uniquely I do) but his instinct about the young conservatives today having lost respect for institutions is an admission and principle on their part that institutions themselves are inherently corrupt and irredeemable—which they are. Collectivists want to preserve the institutions, as Charlie’s people want that, but in part the Turning Point youth, as individualists and neophyte egoists and nonviolent anarchists, want staunch, universal liberty, individualism, freedom and capitalism for the masses here, but not a society without institutions but a society of hierarchies greatly reduced in wealth, power, size  extensive reach and control into private lives as the federal leviathan wields today.

 

Jordan calls him on this and says conservatives want to preserve the institutions and Jordan suggests that if the right elite can be reinstalled, then conservatives will once again trust institutions. Conservatives might indeed again trust institutions as they have in the past, but that would be a mistake. Institutions breed groupism, collectivism, altruism, and tyranny, and they breed the spread of the hierarchies and the enrichment of clout-wielding authority of power-greedy elites living off the huddled masses.

 

My thing is that hierarchies, institutions, elites, and centralized social structures of any kind retard and suppress the lives and prospects of individual citizens as individuating supercitzens and individuators.

 

Thus, we need conservative-liberal politics and free market economics, but very limited institutions, still existent to keep tyranny and evil at bay from growing in a society.

 

 Collectivism is evil and where people are groupist, selfless and collectivist, they run in packs and there, institutions and hierarchies abound, and the people suffer.

 

I suspect that Charlie and his followers sensed that institutions and collectivism are inherently corrupt, and they politically want to head or inch towards My Mavellonialist take on institutions, but they would possess not the words, the theoretical framework, or concepts to articulate their disagreement against an articulate, impressive but erroneous critic like Jordan.

 

Jordan overwhelmed Charlie on this, but Charlie meant something very different from Jordan about conservatives not respecting institutions and this is why I am doing this video review to point out this critical development—two opposing conservative views on trusting institutions ever, even when run by benevolent elite dictators.

 

I wish to differentiate Jordan’s understanding of the societal role of institutions versus the populist, distrusting view which Charlie promulgated, and how the two politely disagreed about this. Jordan may have overwhelmed the younger man’s instinct that institutions are suspect and corrupt and always will be. One forgets that easily as one grows in power, rank, and social influence, like one will forsake a wary view of institutions at one’s peril.

 

In Jordan’s defense he seems to distrust institutions as he, Jordan, does seems to want to get rid of college institutions to build an online university so he knows that an institutions can be so corrupt that they cannot be saved.

 

C: “We are trying to preserve something institutions have destroyed.”

 

J; “Okay, so that’s the thing. So, imagine there’s a hierarchy of institutions. The fringe of the institution is more exploratory. You can move into the center which is more conservative. And you can move right to the bottom. What is it? I would say it is fundamentally religious.”

 

My response: Jordan is talking obscurely here without defining his terms when he suggests the bottom of the hierarchy, or any institution is religious. I am going to speculate wildly Jordan is suggesting that the common masses are always at the bottom of a hierarchy, that society and its institutions exist for their sake, and Jordan is avowing that they need God, social structure, and institutions to lead fulfilling, meaningful, productive lives, and that all of this finds its fountainhead in God’s inner message to each person, to call God into her life, to find happiness in this world and the next.

 

J: “As you move towards the core, you move towards what is religious.”

 

 

C: “That’s right.”

 

My response: It could be that moving towards the core of a hierarchy reveals the common people and that is where God resides, so if among the masses is where God and goodness are, then perhaps society should not waste its time serving elites and the ruling class at the pinnacles of hierarchies, for that is where the Devil is.

 

J: “So the conservative stance is not anti-institutional.”

 

My response: Traditional conservatives’ political stance was not anti-institutional because they were collectivists, who love hierarchies with the masses willingly and masochistically volunteering to bend the knee to conservative elite, their ruling class, their exploiters, abusers and tyrants at the top of the institutional heap.

 

J: “It’s a stance that is not knowing what has happened. You know in the story of Moses when he goes off to get the commandments, he is the pipeline to God. He leaves his brother in charge.”

 

C: “They have a rave party.”

 

J: “That’s exactly right They make this calf which is a materialistic object. They dance naked in the street and have an orgy. And that’s what happens to the political when it is detached from the sacred.

 

So, it is not that conservatives have become skeptical of institutions. It’s because, it’s that the conservatives note the institutions no longer serve the purpose for which they were established.”

 

My response: Jordan doubts that young conservatives today are skeptical of institutions per se, not just that elites here in charge are destroying them, and they are being misused here against the citizens and the polity. I have long suspect Jordan as a professor, a member of the educated, intellectual elite, seeks to rule the little people as a philosopher king.

 

 Eric Hoffer famously warned that intellectuals always side with the ruling class and are its servants and co-conspirators. Intellectuals as rulers of the masses are the collectivists in charge, and they like institutions because they are the important rulers of the institutions, and through them ruling all of society. From their point of view, what is not to like about that?

 

Jordan claims to be for Western sovereign individuality, but he defends institutions as valuable and redeemable, and that smacks of being an altruist, a collectivist and perhaps an elitist running those institutions.

 

Charlie: “Chartered.”

 

J: “Chartered, yes, exactly. Conservatives are objecting, and that is happening everywhere, this radical secular.

 

It isn’t just secularization because there should be a separation between church and state. It’s not that the institutions have become secular. It’s that they have turned 180 degrees from their original orientation and now are rampaging as madly as possible in the other direction.

 

So, the universities no longer are the fortress wall against the barbarians. They are actually the voice of the barbarians, hence the pro-Hamas demonstrations.”

 

C: “The Black Lives Matter stuff, or the transgender stuff.”

 

J: “But we got to get that terminology exactly right because it is very dangerous for conservatives to conceptualize themselves as anti-institutional because then they become indistinguishable from the radicals.’

 

My response: Boy, is Jordan mistaken here. It is much more dangerous for conservatives not to conceptualize themselves as anti-institutional, rather than remaining pro-institutional, which makes them identical to and indistinguishable from the radicals. Radicals revolt and terrorize orderly society, not because they are anti-institutional. Their violent anarchy is their vehicle for their taking over the machinery of government, so these ideological nihilists can expand institutions into every nook and cranny of private life.

 

 

I believe Jordan and other classical conservatives have conflated being pro-tradition with being pro-institutional, and they are not the same at all.

 

Many of our Western, Christian, and American traditions are wonderful and advantageous, but it is because of the degree that they have allowed for personal liberty, personal responsibility, personal power-wielding, chasing after one’s own self-interest, working or running a business for profit—the list goes on.

 

We have institutions always, of course, and we should have them, but they need to be restrained, kept limited, small, powerful, efficient and hands off the lives and doings of whatever the citizens can do on their own.

 

Charlie and his followers likely had a sense that institutions themselves are the problem, as much as the destructive, corrupt policies and practices implemented by radicals now running most American institutions.

 

J: So it isn’t that (anti-institutional—Ed adds). It is returning to the things we talked about in the beginning, like the spiritual force.

 

And your people are going to campus saying you have lost the plot. How do you save brick and mortar institutions? I think they are dominated by people; they are aiming in the wrong direction.”

 

C: “They are irredeemable.”

My response: My hunch, again, is that Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA movement, is Charlie's brilliant and sound, rather unarticulated, instinctively derived concept that institutions are not to be trusted, and that a youth conservative movement, partially individualistic and egoist-thinking among is members, is the kind of conservative populism which would  serve nicely to match the kind of conservative populism which I hope will arise. It is peaceful, law-abiding and change within the system, aiming to restore not overthrow our constitutional republic and free market system.

If millions of young Americans were to unite and combine their Christian faith with my Mavellonialist philosophy for growing young adults who are individuating, anarchist supercitizens, what would arise would be a powerful, durable, peaceful reform movement to rejuvenate America and make it extra great again.

The Canonization Of Charlie Kirk

 

The Left is outraged at worst, or vexed and disgusted at best, about all the conservative and Republican outpouring of grief, praise and celebration of the life and advocacy of stellar, assassinated Charlie Kirk. It could well lead to Charlie being regarded, in religious, cultural, and political circles, henceforth, as St. Charlie, and I applaud that.

 

He was a decent young man who engaged the opposition in debate and dialogue. Anyone could come up to the campus microphone—all opinions were expressed. He wanted change through the ballot box, to increase conservative alliance of the young by peaceful means of conversation and dialogue.

 

He was not misogynist, fascist, racist or transphobic. Applied to Charlie, even now posthumously, was the classical Left’s tactic that immediately and wholly, either you renounce all conservative opinions, or, if you hold onto them, you are evil personified, misogynist, racist, fascist, or transphobic. You are a hating, hateful moral monster to be shunned socially, jailed for hate speech, and relegated to second class status under even a soft Leftist dictatorship, which the Left craves to inflict upon America.

 

Charlie rejected this Leftist false dichotomy of roles imposed upon conservatives, he refuted eloquently and in a courteous, principled manner, this black and white fallacy.

 

I am old enough (I was on the school ground, probably a 3^rd grader, when someone came out and said JFK was killed.) to remember how JFK, Martin Luther King and RFK were canonized, and even King, now has a federal holiday. The liberal political culture of the 60s and 70s made that possible, and as these slain liberal leaders were celebrated and canonized, that is laudable, and almost no one back them objected.

 

To demonize the political canonization of Charlie Kirk, today, by liberals and Leftists, seems to me to be highly hypocritical, but likely they are not aware of  their inconsistent thinking and reaction to the political murder recently of Charlie, a conservative icon, and remarkable recruiter of young people away from postmodernist and nihilistic values.

 

Let us celebrate the death and loss of this wise, fine young man, and let the political canonization develop. He likely will not be accorded a national holiday, but perhaps the state of Arizona can commemorate Charlie’s life with a state holiday.

 

What we must learn from Charlie, regardless of our chosen side of the raging political and cultural war underway, is to allow free speech and opposing views, without violent clashing, assassinations and terrorist responses to view from an opponent that we dislike.

 

We must remain peaceful and civil, and fight it out verbally, and seek to gain ground each for our own sides at the ballot box. That is what Charlie lived, practiced, and would have wanted us to adopt as our political path forward, not ushering in American Civil War II.

Accommodating Social Freaks

 

The young man in Utah, the likely killer of Charlie Kirk, was also likely a social freak, like I am, as I always have been, and I always will be, for pure loners are not allowed to have peacefully, cooperative, mutually beneficial social relationships with groups.

 

Groups hunt us, and they will cease discriminating against us. Groups hate us and want us dead, or at least canceled and marginalized. We have no protected class status as we should enjoy constitutionally, legally, and socially.

 

Once Mavellonialist egoism and individuating is commonplace, then groups will have to evolve, a learned behavior tolerance to allow mavericks in their midst to fit in, to be victimized no longer.

 

Mavericks must man up, quit feeling sorry for themselves as victims—actually victimized—and they must heed Jordan Peterson, and they therefore must shoulder the largest moral burden as they can handle, killing no one but devising an original philosophical insight, and that is how they make their rage and frustration serve social needs and ends. That is how they save themselves, and that is how they find meaning, purpose, perhaps happiness, and let God guide their personal journey.

 

Groups are fanatical: here is their explicit (more often implied) message to loners, great souls, pathetic misfits, and social freaks in their midst: If you want to be an individualist, you will be deprived of any social standing, popular social rank, the prize all humans seek and will give up anything to gain. If you persist in rebelling against living altruistically and part of the collective units in your circle, we will command that you must totally renounce group affiliations, as we reciprocally utterly renounce you. You are other, outside, outcast, enemy. You can go off and die alone. You can be a target of mob violence.

 

If you repent, relent and surrender, your modest reward will be this:  You can gain some slave-like group status on the bottom rung of the social hierarchy, to be rebuked, reviled, and disrespected for a lifetime with no hope of gaining social rank. These are your either/or choices, a pure, cruel false alternative.

 

This negative side of group altruism, mistreatment of individuals who cross the pack, keeps the masses in line with their heads down, huddled inside the group, conforming lest they be singled out and so horribly treated also.

 

Paradoxically, it would not and does not help to feel sorry for some that is a social freak a real, pure social freak like me; this pity turns into contempt and turns into scapegoating on the victim again.

 

Rather, we use tough love on social freaks—as we should on all humans—and exhort them to man up, get over their suffering and victimization, and get on with self-realizing to make something of themselves.

 

 We need to respect and make room for social freaks as part of the human community. Once all begin to individuate, all can be part exceptional individuating social freak, and part mediocrity with warm social relations rank and nonindividuating going on.

 

We live in an era so unique now, that life only a few generations ago seems like the remote, disembodied past. When I was 35 in 1989, social media and my smart phone were not existent, let alone central to one’s life—boy, has that changed!

 

This new era with its hyper-revolutionary technology requires an ethical revolution of individuating and egoism, and God-centered individuating faith to work to administrate and expand God’s kingdom.

 

This would allow the latest social freaks like the Utah assassin an avenue of constructive rate/hate/despair sublimation. We can no longer afford to give affluence, freedom, technology and education to coming hordes of young social freaks—Remember Eric Hoffer warns us that  all become social misfits in times of drastic change--young people without special moral and religious training offered to them so they can grow into productive, contributing, civilized adults of 2065.

 

This need to convert the Utah assassin into future up-and-coming Jordan Petersons will allow millions of teenagers in the future begin to be introduced to and flirt with self-realizing and individual-living as egoistic maverizers.

 

As supercomputers become a rival race of intelligent beings created by humans, it is unavoidable that the number of maladaptive social freaks will multiply and explode, because they are anomic, isolated teenagers not individualized. They will be complete vulnerable to becoming monstrous social freaks, without the social structures of rational egoism, and self-realizing path per person as each is called by God as the Individuator-In-Chief, calling each young person, cisgender or transgender, to self-realize as a living angel in service to God.

 

The Mother and the Father, their son Jesus, the Holy Spirits, the other benevolent deities, and the Good Spirits, run heaven and heavenized parts of earth along the lines of an advanced egoist morality.

 

It is a sin for us to unmoor born groupists from altruist morality and collective living arrangements when we fail to provide them with advanced, superior egoist ethics and individualized living arrangements.

 

 To avoid mass shootings and the nightmare scenario that one day some smart, genius, evil social freak monster will find a way to kill all humans, we must resolve to no longer create social freaks converted to monsters to attack society. Rather, the young need to invent, love, create and make new medical discoveries instead.

 

With the new technology comes a new culture and a new morality that will violently and revolutionarily clash with the old tribal, communal and herd instincts holding people down and back.

 

The grouped, nonindividuating masses are stretched almost to their limits of tolerance. Not much longer will altruist, collectivist group-living arrangements satisfy young people as most or all will be disaffected, alienated, frustrated seekers after true believer status. Imagine 100 million Utah killers coming of age in America: If that nightmare prospect does not scare the hell out of you nothing will. We cannot put the genie back in the bottle. We cannot return to medieval and feudal times, to rid ourselves of individualism, going back to times of collectivist tyranny over the masses. We cannot and should not go back.

 

The human future is individuating, individual-identifying, individual living, individual rights, individual ethics, and egoism. It is inevitable that we change, but if we do it carefully, we can slim down the risk of social upset like communist revolution or inaugurating World War III—we hope.

 

In the future all will become radical loners, radical social freaks. Social status will no longer be the standard for being normal, ordinary, a good person of good social standing. We will still have social life and group relations, and should, but if every potential Utah killer can become an Elon musk or Jordan Peterson, that is a huge social victory.

 

As individuating become routine and common, people’s consciousness as private persons, will personally be the consciousness of a great soul, who, by definition, are social freaks, but can become potential or actual living angels, serving a benevolent deity instead and at the same time.

 

We need to abandon groupism and group-orientedness, opting instead to spend our lifetimes maverizing, no longer wasting years and resource to nab some social status of questionable worth.

 

Groups that will exist in the future, and there will be lots of them, will be more loosely associated, but strong and durable. Groups will be populated by 70 to 89%  great souls, so the group will have to exert self-pressure and accommodate to each individual more than each individual individuators will need to accommodate herself to the group, though she should so accommodate them if it does not violate her sense of liberty, empowerment, opportunity to maverize, her privacy and space.

 

Gun control will not eliminate the future arrival of the Utah assassin or others, the mass shooters.

 

Only when psychotic, utterly alone and rage-filled, hate-filled, drastic loners, are able to maverize, then their sublimated creativity and productivity will allow them an outlet for their lust for violent revenge upon society.

 

As individuating becomes popular, most or all will become social freaks, outside of group-living, group-identifying, group-morality, and the upward trajectory of human advancement and progressing requires Mavellonialist rational egoism and rational religion serve as the ethical, cultural and grand narrative replacement ethos for people to grab onto, to make the personal journey from natural groupist to individuator, a most unnatural human mode of existence. This is the path to the future, for human liberation.

Radically Free Speech

 

I am intrigued with promoting radical free speech, refuting the Leftist requirement that we have social and legal speech codes banning hate speech or offensive speech.

 

Humans are born with the ability to think, and Ayn Rand is spot on, insisting that we must think, reason, and form concepts, or our mind atrophy.

 

For the future of humanity, with the masses existing a individuating supercitizens, each a philosopher king, humans must be socially and legally free up to think and say just about anything they want to.

 

We have consciousness. We conceptualize our perceptions into thoughts, and then we ascribe a specific concept and its precise definition to the selected term under consideration.

 

We cannot grow and think originally, brilliantly, or logically unless we are able to speak and dialogue with one another, as amateur philosophers, with almost any forbidden or taboo thought verbally and publicly expressed being allowed.

 

To speak freely and openly is our natural right, under our divine right to live free, liberated lives, and neither the clique, the church nor the government can be allowed to censor we think, write and speak.

Charlie Kirk

 

Victim of political assassination and modern Christian martyr Charlie Kirk had many fine ideas, but perhaps his best was his advice for us to keep talking to those on the other side of the culture war.

 

This cultural war could degenerate into a new Civil War, and none of us that have any sense would desire that.

 

We must reach out to our enemies, we must reach out to those that hate us, and who gnash their teeth every time we speak. We may not be able to reach the hard-core minority among the opposition, but towards their more reasonable or at least respectful followers and onlooking neutrals, we can be—and can be observed to be--conciliatory, peaceful, respectful, nonviolent—except unless physically attacked—and committed to ongoing, frank, open dialogue and radical free speech enjoyed by all in the discussions, often heated.

 

If we are civil, we may win allies and converts, and, more importantly, we may keep society from exploding into unrest due to white-hot divisive, political, factional quarreling.

 

There must be no final word, no situation where both sides arm themselves and oppose each other from opposing sets of barricades.

 

Charlie would advise that we keep talking to the opposition, that civil discourse civilly and peacefully conducted, with sincere mutual regard, can help the masses stay calm, not stampede or revolt us into chaos, anarchy or a police state, while seeking meaning and resolution in these trying times.