Worth Living For

 

We mind our own affairs if our affairs are worth minding, and that is the ethics of egoism. The ethics of altruism turns negative when it is descriptive of and prescriptive for large groups of people intruding upon neighbors and family members, and vice versa, everyone being told what to do, how to live, and what to expect. Hear what Eric Hoffer, on Pages 15 and 16 of his classic book, The True Believer, has to say about meddling in the affairs of others.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                           13

 

When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need of something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives. Hence the embracing of a substitute will necessarily be passionate and extreme. We can have qualified confidence in ourselves, but the faith we have in our nation, religion, race or holy cause must be extravagant and uncompromising.”

 

My response: The Good Spirits are good, loving, and creative, and these originators are individuals and individualists. We are made in their image and likeness, so we are to emulate what they do and how they live. Their enlightened self-interest is the main way that their enterprises and existences are socially beneficent, largely fulfilling their altruistic duty to serve the general good. How this plays out is that their projects, interests and life quest provide them with identity, work, purpose and healthy meaning; not only are they not supposed to find worth and meaning in running their neighbors’ affairs, but they are not inclined to hold down and back another.

 

Humans, born groupist, altruistic, self-loathing and group-living, see no advantage to finding worth and meaning in their own lives, but only in fiddling around in other people’s affairs. Their extreme, passionate, extravagant, and uncompromising devotion to their holy cause informs us not at all about that cause and why it should be approached, but this group fleeing from personally spoiled lives is what is underwriting the exodus from self-care to other-care and group-living.

 

Our self-confidence may be qualified and moderate, but it will be substantive and realistic if limited. The true believer’s group confidence is hubris and chauvinism expressed militantly by its adherents.

 

H: “A substitute embraced in moderation cannot supplant and efface the self we want to forget. We cannot be sure that we have something worth living for unless we are ready to die for it. This readiness to die is evidence to ourselves and others that what we had to take as a substitute for an irrevocably missed or spoiled first choice is indeed the best that ever was.”

 

My response: I have not picked up this book for 35 years, and what I always intuitively suspected is being powerfully confirmed, namely that Eric Hoffer was the first Mavellonialist, and that he is my intellectual and spiritual grandfather. He never quite finished what he started likely because intellectually he had gone as far as he could go, as any of us do come to the outer limits of what we can conceive within the consciousness of the age and generation within which we live.

 

I also have long felt that Hoffer, though recognized as an individualist, a brilliant thinker and pro-American conservative, was someone that other philosophers and intellectuals never quite knew what to do with. I think that his pre-Mavellonialist hunches were upsetting and confusing them and him, but no one knew what it all meant, what were its ramifications, and what they were to do about it, so he and they died, and it passed into American cultural history without much further ado or notice.

 

I am an egoist-individualist and moderate I insist that individuating and individual-living is virtuous and that going by the morality of altruism-collectivism hurts people, that nonindividuating and group-living keeps them discontented, frustrated and, if disaffected, they could well join a mass movement promoting a holy cause that is not holy, important or a genuine cause, but is a poor substitute not worth living for, let alone being willing to die for. The spoiled second choice, the empty substitute, is touted as superior, and the first choice, to maverize into great-souled adulthood as a living angel pushing the cause of all by perfecting one’s personal cause, project or interest is what people can do, and all are capable of doing if they do not give up and quit too early before succeeding.

 

 

H: “  III  The Interchangeability of Mass Movements

 

                                                            14

 

When people are ripe for a mass movement, they are usually ripe for any effective movement, and not solely for one with a particular doctrine or program. In pre-Hitlerian Germany it was often a tossup whether a restless youth would join the Communists or Nazis. In the overcrowded pale of Czarist Russia the simmering Jewish population was ripe both for revolution and Zionism. In the same family, one family would join the revolutionaries and the other the Zionists. Dr. Chaim Weizmann quotes a saying of his mother in those days: ‘Whatever happens, I shall be well off. If Shemuel (the revolutionary son) is right, we shall all be happy in Russia; and if Chaim (the Zionist) is right, then I shall go to live in Palestine.’”

 

My response: Hoffer is pointing out that once one is frustrated and willing to escape from a spoiled life and a loathed self, one could join interchangeably one of several competing holy causes and the mass movement carrying them forward.

 

I think Hoffer thoroughly and originally grasped what mass movements populated by true believers pushing a holy cause to force change in the world; I also think he was warning us as to how dangerous they were. We need to help people everywhere live like Americans going forward should live, as anarchist-individuating supercitizens running, living in, and participating in this free market constitutional republic.

 

With that type of adjustment in the average citizen, change can be realized as desired without such fanatical, violent, disruptive, ruthless movement to upend society, paying a huge price for some if any gain.

 

H: on Paged 16 and 17: “The receptivity of all movements does not always cease even after the potential true believer has become the ardent convert of a specific movement. Where mass movements are in violent competition with each other, there are not infrequent instances of converts—even the most zealous—shifting their allegiance from one to the other. A Saul turning into a Paul is neither a rarity nor a miracle. In our day, each proselytizing mass movement seems to regard the zealous adherents of its antagonists as potential converts. Hitler looked on the German Communists as potential National Socialists. ‘The petit bourgeois Social Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will.’ Captain Rohn boasted that he could turn the reddest Communist into a glowing nationalist in four weeks. On the other hand, Karl Radek looked on the Nazi Brown Shirts (S.A.) as a reserve for future Communist recruits.

 

Since all mass movements draw their adherents from the same types of humanity, and appeal to the same types of mind, it follows: (a) all mass movements are competitive, and the gain of one in adherents is the loss of all the others; (b) all mass movements are interchangeable. One mass movement readily transforms itself into another. A religious movement may develop into a social revolution or national movement; a social revolution into militant nationalism or a religious movement; a nationalist movement into a social revolution or a religious movement.”

 

 

My response: I agree that mass movements are interchangeable. It was revealing that Hitler agreed with Hoffer without knowing of him. Hitler knew he could convert the fanatical Communist, a true believer, but not a petit bourgeois social democrat, a liberal and individualist, by comparison.

 

If individualism and moderation are morally superior to collectivism and radical commitment to one’s holy cause, then we must reward citizens for being the former and not the latter.

 

H on Pages 17 and 18: “It is rare for a mass movement to be only of one character. Usually it displays some facets of other types of movement, and sometimes it is two or three movements in one. The exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt was a slave revolt, a religious movement and a nationalist movement. The militant nationalism of the Japanese is essentially religious. The French Revolution was a new religion. It had ‘its dogmas, the sacred principles of the Revolution—Liberte’ et sainte e’galite’. It had its form of worship, an adaptation of Catholic ceremonial, which was elaborated in connection with civic fetes. It had its saints, the heroes and martyrs of liberty. At the same time, the French Revolution was also a nationalist movement. The legislative assembly decreed in 1792 that altars should be raised everywhere bearing the inscription: ‘the citizen is born, lives and dies for la Patrie.’

 

The religious movements of the Reformation had a revolutionary aspect which expressed itself in peasant uprisings, and were also nationalist movements. Said Luther: ‘In the eyes of the Italians we Germans are merely low Teutonic swine. They exploit us like charlatans and such the country to the marrow. Wake up Germany!

 

The religious character of the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions is generally recognized. The hammer and sickle and the swastika are in a class with the cross. The ceremonial of their parades is as the ceremonial of a religious procession. They have articles of faith, saints, martyrs and holy sepulchers. The Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions are also full-blown nationalist movements. The Nazi revolution had been so from the beginning, while the nationalism of the Bolsheviks was a late development.

 

Zionism is a nationalist movement and a social revolution. To the orthodox Jew it is also a religious movement. Irish nationalism has a deeply religious tinge. The present mass movements in Asia are both nationalist and revolutionary.”

 

My response: Hoffer the genius recognizes that the various mass movements often have several, maybe all the aspects as their properties-being religious, nationalist, social and revolutionary at the same time.

 

What also impresses is that Hoffer is able to study history and many nations and detect what is a mass movement at work in what country in what generation, and what are its salient aspects.

 

H on Page 18 and 19: “                              16

 

The problem of stopping a mass movement is often a matter of substituting one movement for another. A social revolution can be stopped by promoting a religious or nationalist movement. Thus in countries where Catholicism has recaptured its mass movement spirit, it counteracts the spread of communism. In Japan it was nationalism that canalized all movements of social protest. In our South, the movement of racial solidarity acts as a preventive of social upheaval. A similar situation may be observed among the French in Canada and among the Boers in South Africa.

 

This method of stopping one movement by substituting another for it is not always without danger, and it does not usually come cheap. It is well for those who hug to the present and want to preserve it as it is not to play with mass movements. For it always fares ill with the present when a genuine mass movement is on the march. In prewar Italy and Germany practical businessmen acted in an entirely ‘logical’ manner when they encouraged a Fascist and Nazi movement in order to stop communism. But in doing so, these practical and logical people promoted their own liquidation.

 

There are other safer substitutes for a mass movement. In general, any arrangement which either discourages atomistic individualism or facilitates self-forgetting or offers chances for action and new beginnings tends to counteract the rise and spread of mass movements. These subjects are dealt with in later chapters. Here we shall touch upon one curious substitute for mass movements, mainly migration.”

 

My response: Once the masses in a nation are on the march, riled up, fomenting or change or reform as they are wont to define it, they may be impossible to stop, short of brutal slaughter by totalitarian, governmental counterforces.

 

Hoffer suggests that offering a substitute movement might stop it, or redirect the energies of the awakened, roused masses, or it might steer them into an even more radical mass movement.

 

There may be safe substitutes, but the best solution is to provide people with personal self-worth, prosperous and free opportunity for self-fulfillment and positive religious experience, all included with gentle, peaceful constant rates of change, built upon traditional core values, so the need for drastic resort to a mass movement is made rare. We want to absorb the new slogan, the new trends before the people get agitated and are storming for the triumph of a replacement narrative.