Chris Navin?

I believe it is Blogger Chris Navin from Seattle that reposted a youtube video of Eric Hoffer on The Passionate State of Mind.

If I may quote from this blog entry: "Hoffer was a man deeply suspicious of top-down organization and intellectuals running things. He strikes this blog as something of an anti-intellectual's intellectual . . ."

Navin captured two key features about Hoffer's approach to culture and life. He was deeply suspicious of top-down organization. If I may interpret this, Hoffer would advise that the masses run the society, the government, the culture and the business sector.

To extrapolate, my suggestion that the masses into America, need to self-transform themselves into individuating-anarchists and supercitizens, in this bourgeois, capitalist constitutional republic,  calling the shots and running the show, is to amplify Hoffer's approach that America be run, reformed and evolve from the masses running things from the bottom all the way up to the top, in corporate board rooms, in state capitols, and even capturing and holding sway in the federal swamp in Washington.

Intellectuals, according to Hoffer, need not be even very bright, well-educated, or creative thinkers. They just need some formal education, some certification, or a college degree to assume that they are part of the educated elite that should serve as the bureaucrats, technocrats and schoolmasters directing, managing and corralling the masses. They will serve any master, from Nazis, to the Eurocrats in Brussels, the Vatican, Academia or the Communist Party in Red China.

Hoffer warns that intellectuals are never to be allowed to have real power, real governmental power to rule the masses, and that is the one thing that they crave most. It has been denied to them traditionally in America, but now, with the spread of Obamaism and the radicalization and Socialistization of the Democratic Party, intellectuals and college educated people now want to end the American Way of life, a system they disregard as totally rotten, corrupt, unfair and cruel.

Navin is spot on: Hoffer was an anti-intellectual's intellectual. Let me interpret what I think this accurate portrayal of Hoffer's stance towards intellectuals means. Hoffer was not anti-thinking or anti-intellectual. He would never have led an unexamined life.

Rather, he has written that the lust for power, the temptation to rule the masses, felt by intellectuals is so strong, so irresistible for them, that this most addictive urging leads them everywhere that they can gain a foothold, to side with elites, to justify the excesses, injustices and cruelties inflicted by elites on the masses wherever. The result is one of the major reasons why the masses everywhere suffer from human rights abuses, tyranny, inequality and any abuse imaginable.

Intellectuals are articulate, idealistic con men that  back every reform or cause conceivable. They disguise their true aim: to get and hold power and control over the bodies, minds, souls and lives of every commoner. They deceive the gullible, brainwashed masses, promised and reassured that the intellectuals crave power acquisition for the common good, when, in truth, the amassed power is almost never for the common and public good, or the individual and private good, being instead detrimental and injurious to all kinds of good.

Intellectuals in power grow tyranny, suffering, poverty, chaos, misery and death.

Hoffer is not anti-intellectual: he is against intellectuals being in power, having power and wielding power. By extension, every modern institution, its functionaries, are by nature intellectuals, and are the ones that run and rule society.