Allied

 

 

On Pages 92 and 93 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer writes of the dark, sinister motives that best and most easily incite people to unite. Here is what he wrote there, and I then respond to it.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “We do not usually look for allies when we love. Indeed, we often look on those who love with us as rivals and trespassers. But we always look for allies when we hate.”

 

My response: If we are individuals when we love and we then do not seek allies, and when we hate, we seek allies, this seem an implicit agreement, by Hoffer, of what Ayn Rand and I believe: that love is self-interest and individualistic, and hatred is other-interest and collectivistic, thereby then we seek and find willing allies.

 

H: “It is understandable that we should look for others to side with us when we have a just grievance and crave to retaliate against those who wronged us. The puzzling thing is when our hatred does not spring from a visible grievance and does not seem justified, the desire for allies becomes more pressing. It is chiefly the unreasonable hatreds that drive us to merge  with those that hate as we do, and it is this kind of hatred that serves as one of the most effective cementing agents.”

 

My response: Here is another Hofferian paradox: we hate the most and seek allies the most when the target of our hatred has not wronged us, so our hatred of them is without cause or justification. The less justified we are in hating our innocent victim—who we identify as our devil—the deeper, crueler, and more vicious will be our hatred, and the more than we seek allies because we need numbers to lie with us to ourselves and each other, because, deep down and inside, we know it is all a cruel fabrication. And, the most unreasonable and vicious hatred is, the more it unites the group, and that is truly scary, sinister, and tough to combat.

 

H: “Whence come these unreasonable hatreds, and why their unifying effect? They are the expression of a desperate effort to suppress an awareness of our inadequacy, worthlessness, guilt and other shortcomings of the self. Self-contempt is here transmuted into hatred of others—and there is a most determined and persistent effort to mask this switch.”

 

My response: Note that self-loathing and a collapse of self-esteem is transmuted into attacking and hating others, and this is what human nature and the altruist-collectivist morality contribute to and cause.

 

H: “Obviously, the most effective way of doing this is to find others, as many as possible, to hate as we do. Here more than anywhere else we need general consent, and much of our proselytizing consists perhaps in infecting others not with our brand of faith but with our particular brand of unreasonable hatred.

 

Even in the case of a just grievance, our hatred comes less from a wrong done to us than from the consciousness of our helplessness, inadequacy and cowardice—in other words from self-contempt. When we feel superior to our tormentors, we are likely to despise them, even pity them, but not hate them. That the relation between grievance and hatred is not simple and direct is also seen from the fact that the released hatred is not always directed against those who wronged us. Often, when we are wronged by one person, we turn our hatred on a wholly unrelated person or group. Russians, bullied by Stalin’s secret police, are easily inflamed against ‘capitalist warmongers’; Germans, aggrieved by the Versailles Treaty, avenged themselves by exterminating Jews; Zulus, oppressed by Boers, butcher Hindus; white trash, exploited by Dixiecrats, lynch Negroes.

 

Self-contempt produces in man ‘the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable, for he conceives a mortal hatred against that truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults.”

 

My response: It is often the historical occurrence, that wrong persons do not latch out against the powerful wrongdoers, but scapegoat, venting their anger and hatred on those less powerful than themselves, and even more socially vulnerable and unpopular.