Grandeur

 

On Page 96 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer has two entries which I quote and then comment on.

 

 

Hoffer: “          169

 

There is a grandeur in the uniformity of the mass. When a fashion, a dance, a song, a slogan or a joke sweeps like wildfire from one end of the continent to the other,  and a hundred million people roar with laughter, sway their bodies in unison, hum one song or break forth in anger and denunciation, there is the overpowering feeling that in this country we have come nearer to the brotherhood of man than ever before.”

 

My response: Yes, there is grandeur and a sense of brotherhood in mass uniformity, but that is also where evildoing is concentrated and most damaging.

 

 

Hoffer: “          172

 

The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things out; it needs leisure to mature. People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.”

 

My response: Perhaps the answer to the dilemma that a hustling people are a shallow people is twofold. First, the people must maverize so they can know leisure, growth, and advancement.

 

Second, they must move and do so they stay alive and get something done, putting their life plan into action, making it come real.

 

No Faith

 

On Page 94 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer has two entries which I quote and will comment on.

 

 

Hoffer: “          165

 

When we have no faith in the future we incline to arrange our lives so that we can predict the future. We either make our existence a rigid routine or pile up all manner of defenses to make it secure. The craving for security stems from a need for predictability, and its intensity is in inverse proportion to our faith in the future.

 

 

My response: When we maverize and feel confident that we can directly and forthrightly deal with whatever comes down the pike.

 

When we nonindividuated and run in packs, we are such low self-esteem, that we crave security and control.

 

 

Hoffer: “          166

 

Of all the ways of filling one’s life and of creating the illusion of purpose and worth, none seems so effective as the voluntary subjugation to a set of duties. The satisfaction derived from the daily performance of duties is so unalloyed that the inclination is strong to pile up duty after duty and revel in their performance.”

 

My response: If we would but peace at peace, exert powerful wills, and maverize, then we would have an automatic, solid sense of purpose and worth, and there would be no need to pile up duties in a desperate, vain attempt to justify our lives.

 

Impateint

 

On Page 93 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer has two entries which I quote and then comment on.

 

Hoffer:  “         163

 

Some generations have patience and some are without it. This is one of the crucial differences between eras. There is a time when the word ‘eventually’ has the soothing effect of a promise, and a time when the word evokes in us bitterness and scorn.”

 

My response: People are naturally conservative and do not like embracing change or progressing, but, once a people become frustrated, and a mass movement is beckoning, the times, they are a-changin.

 

 

Hoffer:  “         164

 

We are not truly worried about our footing we are about to jump. It is when we have nowhere to jump that we begin to worry about the soundness of our position. Those who go places give no thought to security.”

 

My response: Hoffer seems to be saying that nonindividuators going nowhere with no dreams and no pursuit of these nonexistent dreams, they are going to worry excessively about their present day security to protect what does not exist, or is so paltry as being unworthy to protect.

 

Maverizers, going somewhere from somewhere, worry not too much about security—they just get going forward, and make adjustments on the fly as things unfold.

 

 

Evolving Theologies

 

On Page 92 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer writes one entry which I will quote and then comment on.

 

Hoffer: “          162

 

It is perhaps true that each era demands a particular kind of God.”

 

My response: I agree and have argued this elsewhere. Secular humanists, being atheists or agnostics or theologically indifferent, suggest that humans, as they evolve in culture, knowledge, and sophistication of consciousness, fabricate a God or gods that reflect their spiritual (the spiritual may not exist, they claim), semantic, evaluative or metaphysical needs for meaning, that posing a sympathetic God that runs parallel to the metanarrative of a historically situated generation.

 

I do not disagree that humans invent a version of God that matches the needs and limited consciousness of each generation, wherever it is at, but this is not the whole story.

 

Rather, God exists and plays an active role in religious formation: God reveals Deself to successive generations as successive deities, names, and personalities that the people of that generation are able to understand, feel attracted to and do business with.

 

These names, various deities and personalities are not fake—at least the good deities are not fake or evil—or transitory and may even be fruitfully worshiped hundreds or thousands of years after humans and moved on, abandoning these manifestations of these benevolent deities.

 

God wants progressing, developing humankind to worship De, and, as they grow in consciousness, love and understanding, God reveals Deself to them in ways they, in consecutive generations, can relate to God. God will not push us beyond what we can handle. It is not kind or merciful to push poor humans of limited intelligence, and a near-fatal weakness of being radically conservative and painfully superstitious about change or being drastically introduced to new ways of doing things.

 

As humans slowly, excruciatingly move forward and upward towards thinking, self-realizing, and loving God virtuously and piously, then God can introduce to them, via a prophet, a new deity, or deities. It is not out with the old, and in with the new: rather it is adding or introducing new members to the pantheon of benevolent deities; people can worship anywhere along this line, but worship they should and must, if they would elicit divine approval.

 

Hoffer: “There are eras when people can believe in God far off in heaven, never to be seen, and eras when they need a tangible God. Our age, it seems, needs a tangible God, be it a Hitler, a Stalin, or a Father Divine.”

 

My response: God exists spiritually and physically; humans exist spiritually and physically. We are innately weakened, sickened, prone to madness and cruel outrage, if our spiritual craving is not met through proper, wholesome religious channels, worshiping a benevolent deity.

 

The Age of Enlightenment made Westerners feel alienated from God, each other, nature, and oneself, when Modernists introduced the idea of God to be Deistically encountered and worshiped. The loss of faith was unbearable.

 

Then people lived through the 20^th century with scientism, humanism, world wars, totalitarianism, postmodernism, mass movements and holy causes. Whatever vestiges of faith in a good deity, a tangible loving deity like Jesus, still existed by 1985, are now in danger of going extinct today.

 

People, frustrated and desperate to find a faith and deity to worship and serve as their cause in which they are able to hide successfully from their spoiled lives, their unwanted selves, will find a tangible deity to worship, either a neo-attraction to a great deity like Jesus, or they will find false, wicked gods like Hitler, Stalin or Satan to serve. They will invent meaning, fraudulent, self-contradictory, and wicked faiths, if necessary, but they will have meaning in their lives, a deity, mass movement, abstraction, or holy cause to worship, or they will invent it.

 

It would be better for all to provide people with benevolent deities to worship. The human requirement for religious comfort, the bottomless need for satiating spiritual hunger, cannot be extinguished or rationally explained away by haughty intellectuals; spiritual hunger, suppressed, denied, and wronged, will come back with a vengeance--as a holy cause and accompanying demonic demigod.

 

If the young can be instructed to self-realize as supercitizens, and to serve the benevolent deity of their choice, their spiritual hunger could be fed and satisfied, without social and political convulsions resulting from humankind torn up over spiritual hunger being thwarted and not met.

 

Hoffer: “Is this primitive need for a tangible God somehow connected to a lack of faith in the future?”

 

My response: Hoffer is an atheist with a profoundly religious worldview, perhaps as a lapsed illegal Jewish immigrant from Bavaria, who retains his cultural values, though he was ever after a secular thinker.

 

As an idiosyncratic theist, I here might quibble with Hoffer a bit. I do not know that the need for God, tangible or intangible (an abstract, remote, never-heard-from Prime Mover that created the world and then remains incommunicado, though existent and present in heaven), is a primitive need. This need is real and wholesome, and it may be negatively primitive in the sense of being childish and a sign of human weakness, a lack of self-esteem, an inability to survive on our own without an immediate, emotional, complex, daily relationship with a deity that we converse with in person 12 times per day, but I deny this.

 

Rather, I think this need is strong, healthy, loving, and consistent with an independent-minded, self-reliant believer—with high self-esteem--in God, who recognizes that God exists, and that this individual is willing to accept God’s existence and right to command human worship, obedience, and willingness to do our share to grow the kingdom on earth of the good deity/good deities.

 

This deep, powerful, unavoidable hunger to meet and know God, this primitive need for God, as tangible or intangible, is positively primitive in that it is an innate, primordial drive that suffuses the being and consciousness of every human being. This need is so strong, that either ultimate meaning (a relationship with a good deity) is recognized, activated, and practiced by every human daily, or the ism worshiped will be a holy cause, a fetishized ism, sickening and dark, whose evil deity will be worshiped by those who denied meeting their need for ultimate meaning by swearing fealty to a good deity. This need may be primitive, but, more so, it is brilliant, fulfilling and rationally—not just sentimentally—a need to be met in even the most subtle, worldly existent.

 

Does the need for a tangible God indicate a lack of human faith in the future? It may well be a fact, and it is a sign that we are weak, vulnerable, and need a tangible God to lean to stay sane and keep going forward. I would not regard this trait as a negative so much as just reality, or even a positive starting point, but I would recommend that an individuating believer, of immense competence, creativity, love, and confidence, would be well-served to acknowledge this need while approaching respectfully and with adoration a divinity that affirms the beauty and obligation for humans to maverize while being faithful, holy and virtuous.

 

It could be too that humans running in packs, not individuating, and living in accordance with evil, primitive, backwards altruist-collectivist morality, were so individually lacking self-esteem, that it is to be expected that they had no faith in the future, deepening excessively their dependency (They could not face the future based on their own efforts, talents and internal resources.)n God, viewed as tangibly or intangibly accessible.

 

If my theory is right, and the Divine Couple, the good deities and the Good Spirits are individuators and individualists, they will not require and do not approve of excessive human dependency and cloying, theatrical, self-debasing communing with said good spirits and good deities.

 

Hoffer: “The ancient Jews, who were the first to have faith in an invisible God, were possessed of a vivid faith in the future. Alone among the nations of antiquity they expected the future to surpass the present and the past. Apparently when we hope ‘for what we see not,’ we can also believe in what see not. It is perhaps a symptom of the hopelessness of our times that we need idols to worship.”

 

My response: It might be that Hoffer the genius, ever tapping into objective truth—and in spite of his atheistic revulsion against the ineradicable, “primitive” human search for ultimate meaning (God)—has captured something terribly, religiously significant and important here.

 

If the ancient Jews were God’s chosen people, and they were, and Yahweh was a bit an Individualist and Individuator, Yahweh would coax and educate these sheepherders and farmers to worship Yahweh as incipient individualists (still groupists and altruists, but more individualistic and egoistic than their pagan neighbors); this would be the birth of worshiping an intangible, invisible Father Sky God.

 

If the Hebrews became more individualistic, then they would discover the need for morality. If they thought that being moral could make one’s life better here in this world, and perhaps in the next (the other world in a future, after-life existence), then being moral and individualistic meant that activism pays off. With their lives guided by a weakened but entrenched egoism-altruism, they soon decided that the future could be better than the present or past, so they begin to have faith in the future. Hoffer is original in identifying that, if people have hope, they can face the future with some bravery and confidence.

 

Where people lack hope, they want a tangible, visible God and they have no hope in the future. To make this worse, it seems patent to me that when people are not egoistic, they lack self-esteem: when one has no faith in oneself, one loses hope, and then one has no sturdy faith in God or the future.  When people are egoistic and confident, then they have faith in themselves, in God and in the future.

 

When we hope in what we see not, we can believe in what we see not. Still, we need to worship God in De’s transcendent, intangible aspect as well as in God as in De’s tangible, visible and immediate mode of existing. God reveals Deself to us both ways at same time without  conflict or contradiction; it can all be balanced and reconciled honorably in the complex believers relationship with her chosen divinity.

 

We are altruists and groupists in our day, but we have no hope for the future so we worship idols (mass movements, gurus and holy causes) as poor substitutes for even a traditional relationship with a good deity.

Self-Righteous

 

On Pages 90 and 91of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer has written six entries which I quote and then comment on.

 

Hoffer: “          156

 

The chief taint of self-righteousness is not its injustice but its insensitivity. The indulgence of self-forgiving is far less vicious than the blindness of self-righteousness which is naught aware of aught in the self which needs forgiving.”

 

My response: The most menacing personality disorder belongs to Progressive and true believers of any ilk in that they are so self-righteous. Not only are true believer the most cruel of thugs when the kill or maim for their holy cause, but they are sententious, actually regarding themselves as noble, superior, kind and idealistic.

 

They conclude, because they are so perfect, they could not possibly ever act in a way that renders at fault and in need of resolution. So it is that passionate fanatics, the most evil human type, are also the most self-righteous, as their most damaging lie is that they are a moral elite helping humanity. It is impossible to reach such people as to the error of their ways; they must just be defeated.  

 

 

Hoffer: "      157

 

Lack of self-awareness renders us transparent. A soul that knows itself is opaque; like Adam after he ate from the tree of knowledge it uses words as figs leaves to cover its nakedness and shame."

 

My response: Ultra-groupists are pure liars, so they possess know self-awareness, so they are thin and transparent. The soul that knows itself is indvidualistic, realistic and self-awareness, but she must fight the natural tendency to equivocate and dodge explaining who she is, warts and all, if she would will to remain virtuous, honest and ethical.        

 

Hoffer: "      158

 

We can see through others only when we can see through ourselves."

 

My response: If one is a sincere, honest, truth-embracing individualist, then one sees through oneself, and by extension, can see through others.

 If one, instead, is mendacious, dishonest, and lying to the self, then one cannot see through oneself, and then will not be able to see through others, thus lying joiners are credulous beyond belief accepting as gospel whatever narrative their groups espouses. 

Hoffer: "      159

No one is truly literate who cannot read his own heart."

My response: One is not an authentic or functioning individualist or individuator unless one embraces and seeks know what is true about the self."

 

 

Hoffer: “          160

 

The most sensitive among us cannot be as observant of themselves as the least sensitive are observant of others.”

 

My response: Hoffer, the implicit promoter of egoist morality, here is very accurate the most sensitive among us (self-actualizers and developing individualists and loners) are not as observant of themselves as are the least sensitive are among us (the least sensitive are wholly group creatures, so the self for each of them does not exist, so they know nothing about themselves), who are very observant of other group members. I would describe these true-believing ultra-groupists as socially sensitive but not individually sensitive in the way that Hoffer is talking about.

 

 

Hoffer: “          161

 

It will perhaps never possible to speak our inner life in precise scientific terms. Can one laugh at oneself or pity oneself in scientific terminology. The choice is between poetry and aphorism. The latter is probably the less vague.”

 

My response: Our consciousness or inner life cannot be captured or neat, linguistically encapsulated with scientific terms and propositions. There are metaphysical and ethical inputs here that cannot just be descriptively defined. 

 

 

 

 

Oblivious

 

On Page 89 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer has two entries which I quote and then comment on.

 

Hoffer: “          154

 

Those who remain in the dark about their own motives are as it were strangers to themselves. Hence perhaps their exceptional power of self-delusion—their ability to talk themselves into anything. Their own impassioned words affect their souls as the words of an outside propagandist.”

 

My response:  Groupist and especially radical, pure joiners, have no self-knowledge at all, Now, Hoffer assumes that the individual, rational and emotionally honest, will know himself and how the world works, so truth is readily at hand for him. Not so for the ultra-joiners.

 

For her, she will believe anything and can be persuaded to believe anything, to justify anything, whether it is her clique that deceives her, or she passionately prevaricates to herself internally.

 

 

Hoffer: “          155

 

There are people who seem continually engaged in an effort of self-proselytizing. To whomever they may talk or write it is to themselves they are talking or writing. They are continually engaged in talking or writing themselves into a conviction, an enthusiasm or an illusion.”

 

My response: It is the self that has free will, not the group or group will. Therefore, if the self would be free and maverize, the self must live authentically and communicate to the self in a mode of truth and openness.

 

On the other hand, where the self is estranged from the self, and lies to the self all the time to sustain the myth that the self is altruistic, exceptional, honest, fulfilled, and compassionate while group-living and nonindividuating. This whole web of interconnected social lies and evasions fed by the self to the self is meant to plaster over any awareness of what is actually going on.

Insensitive

 

Eric Hoffer, on Page 88 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, has two entries which I quote and then comment on.

 

Hoffer: “          152

 

Lack of sensitivity is perhaps basically an unawareness of ourselves.”

 

My response: When one thinks of being sensitive in a negative sense, it is the concept of being touchy, overly sensitized to input of an irritating, unpleasant kind.

 

What Hoffer has in mind, I believe, is suggesting that to be sensitive is to be caring and thoughtful and considerate about the feelings, needs, and touchy sore spots carried by others so as to not ruffle their feathers needlessly, causing them unwelcome pain.

 

He, the implicit promoter of egoist morality, is suggesting that a person that lacks sensitivity about the needs of others, is likely a joiner and nonindividuator, not a loner or maverizer.

 

To self-realize is to love the self, to come to know the self, to be sensitive to what one needs, what one must avoid, what brings one pleasure, and what brings one pain, what are one’s obligations to be met if one strives to be able to continue thinking well of the self.

 

Once the self-aware self-realizer, now awake and sensitive to what he or what any other person needs, is able to feel sympathy, compassion and fellow-feeling, and will seek to act so as to maximize their healthy pleasure or enjoyment, while avoiding adding to their degrading pain and suffering, especially malevolent, senseless, uncalled-for suffering.

 

 

Hoffer: “          153

 

The inability to see into ourselves often manifests itself in a certain coarseness and clumsiness. One can be brazen, rude and even dishonest without being aware of it.”

 

My response: Egoist morality makes people self-aware, so they readily know how they are acting, and if their actions hare bringing enjoyment or pain to others, and that they have no right to bring pain to others.

 

The rudeness, dog-eat-dog competitiveness, and law of the jungle vying is best demonstrated  by how groupist nonindividuators mistreat each other every day on any American freeway.

 

This is why I urge self-realizers to always treat others with courtesy, kindness, dignity, and respect—it is their due.