Tom Schactman, likely is a Leftist, though I have not studied him. I was earlier angry about some things that Shactman has penned about Hoffer, especially claiming that he was racist against blacks. Still, upon further reflection, I admit that he knows Eric Hoffer rather well. I do not think he understands Hoffer as well as I do, but that is to be expected, being as I am the inventor of Mavellonialism, and Hoffer was the first Mavellonialist (Perhaps even he was not fully conscious of his point of view. In the 1960s the words and concepts that will make Mavellonialism popular and influential going forward, had not been coined and explained by me yet.).
I want to quote a full paragraph from Shactman's book, American Iconoclast, Page 187, and then I will comment on it, indicating what I thought Hoffer meant versus what Shactman thought he meant.
Here is the quote: "Hoffer's most important insight, in this section, was that true artists and thinkers were ‘preoccupied with the birth of the ordinary and the discovery of the known.' To the true creator, 'a common occurrence' could be 'as revealing as an outstanding event,' and he or she could also utilize the work of the middle-rank or mediocre artist as a trigger for the creator's better idea. In contrast, the non-creatives, a group that included not-very-good-teachers and uninspired managers who insisted on making themselves the center of the teaching and managing experiences, clung to the idea of an elite as the fount of all creativity. Insistent that 'genius and talent' were 'rare exceptions,' this group refused to recognize, as Hoffer did, that the masses could collectively exhibit genius and talent--as when the 'trash' of Europe, dumped in America, built its wealth."
My interpretation: First, true creators can find creative potential in the most mundane events and objects.
Second, Hoffer is Mavellonialist in that he and I are arguing the law of moderation permeates all reality, including the creative process, so there is a paradox here that Shactman and others do not recognize: The Paradox of Borrowing Other's Ideas: What We Borrow from Others is Often More Original than the Incipient Vision of it Produced by its Less Imaginative Originator( One can be more imaginative without being the smarter or more talented.)-whether the borrower plagiarizes or attributes his sources openly and honestly—he is improving them. Hoffer has written that the most creative person, or the most original thinker or artist, may not be the best explicator or developer of his pure innovation. A greater more original talent does his most brilliant and original creating based upon what he borrows or steals from others, rather than what he originates himself. How this Paradox is moderate is that the purest creator often is not the most brilliant exponent of the new movement. We are maverizing and individualistic, but we borrow from others all the time. The individual is most creative when triggered or inspired by the neighbors in the community, and somehow that act of borrowing ironically is conductive to greater creativity than the seminal tinkering and dabbling engaged in by a pure pioneer of new insight, perhaps somehow exhausted by imagining the new line of thought. Perhaps pure originality is self-limiting because so much of its power or force is dissipated permanently in the primal act of creation.
Third, Hoffer likely believed that the masses could exhibit genius and talent, not just on some lower level like creating wealth as Shactman indicates--though that wealth is the origin most hospitable to maverizing--collectively, but with education in the science of Mavellonialism, every common person individually, if they so will and so dedicate their lives to using 95% of their inborn talent, could exhibit genius and talent as impressively as Shactman, Jordan Peterson and Hoffer, with their very high IQs.
I believe Hoffer sided with me on this, and less thinking like Shactman and Peterson that there is a small elite that are geniuses, and everyone else can, at best, be a competent plumber, bookkeeper or dental hygienist.
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