From Pages 21 to 24, Eric Hoffer, in his book The True Believer, writes about how a nation’s undesirable citizens are always potential converts for a mass movement.
Hoffer (H after this): “ PART TWO ----------THE Potential Converts
IV ----The Role of the Undesirables in Human Affairs
There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation or any distinct group by its least worthy members. Though manifestly unfair, this tendency has some justification. For the character and destiny of a group are often determined by its inferior elements.”
My response: This seems intuitively true to me, and he is not stereotyping the misfits and malcontents in any ethnic, racial, or socioeconomic category. This Hofferian generalization applies to all for we are all equally human, roughly equal in talent and ability, and all equally flawed from birth.
How I interpret this paragraph is that people live in tyranny, group-live and do not individuate, so the least worthy members will live lives of crime, laziness, poverty, powerlessness, mental illness, and fatalism. These asocial behaviors are going to doom a certain percentage of people that are by class or race at the bottom of society, or by lacking individual merit in a country of fabulous opportunity open to all, but each has to work hard and stay it to achieve.
If the young of any class, gender or race were taught to maverize, then there would be a hard time finding any group of a race or nation that were any longer poor performers, so their lifting themselves up by their own boot straps would empower all of society so an observer characterizing a people or nation, would not need so much to be characterize it by its least worthy members.
H: “The inert mass of a nation, for instance, is in its middle section. The decent, average people who do the nation’s work in cities and on the land are worked upon and shaped by minorities at both ends—the best and the worst.”
My response: My vision of an American upper middle class citizen majority of anarchist-inividuator supercitizens, would not allow the best or the worst to shape them so much as they would shape the best and the worst by turning the tables on them.
H on Pages 23 and 24: “The superior individual, whether in politics, literature, science, commerce or industry, plays a larger role in shaping the nation, but so do individuals at the other extreme—the failures, misfits, outcasts, criminals and all those who have lost their footing, or never had one, in the ranks of respectable humanity. The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.
The reason that the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that they are wholly without reverence for the present. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both: hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy. They also crave to dissolve their spoiled, meaningless selves in some soul-stirring spectacular communal undertaking. Thus they are among the early recruits of revolutions, mass migrations and of religious, racial and chauvinist movements, and they imprint their mark upon these upheavals and movements which shape a nation’s character and history.”
My response: Again, we are born discontented, unhappy and self-loathing, so we need Mavellonialist positive values so that we need not recklessly abandon and work to destroy our traditional society and the present; we need to preserve our capitalist democracy, but ever change so people adjust and grow, but feel rather satisfied and okay with their lives and themselves in the present, here and now.
H: “The discarded and rejected are often raw material of a nation’s future. The stone the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone of a new world. A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, decent, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come. It was not the irony of history that the undesired in the countries of Europe should have crossed an ocean to build a new world on this continent. Only they could do it.
Though the disaffected are found in all walks of life, they are most frequent in the following categories: (a) the poor, (b) misfits, (c) outcasts, (d) minorities, (e) adolescent youth, (f) the ambitious (whether facing insurmountable obstacles or unlimited opportunities, (g) those in the grip of some vice or obsession, (h) the impotent (in body or mind), (i) the inordinately selfish, (j) the bored, (k) the sinners.
Sections 20-42 deal with some of these types.”
My response: I like what he writes about these categories of the disaffected types.
It seems to me that the ambitious would become disaffected and frustrated if they were ambitious but never able to win and succeed, or if there were opportunities so rich, they just were overwhelmed. If we teach the young to maverize as their telos for existing, we must remind them as Jordan Peterson does that small improvements in manageable increments leads to real success over time. This means that most anyone can improve their lives and know real success.
As an egoist, I like that he identifies the inordinately selfish as so filled with self-loathing, and an overwhelming sense of self-disgust with their damaged selves and their heightened, unbearable existence in the present, that they are most willing to chuck it all and disappear into a mass movement in a mode of delirious self-renunciation.
I regard the egoist as self-disciplining and self-realizing, sacrificing short-term gratification of hedonic pleasure for the sake of a developing self-realizing its potential over the years of life. This positive selfishness or enlightened self-interest would find the appeal of being inordinately selfish as repugnant.
It is joiners and group-livers that are inordinately selfish and inordinately selfless (willing to immerse the self in a collectivist mass movement), so I think Hoffer and I are leaning towards egoist ethics, though he never writes of such, as far as I can remember.
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