Anti-Family

 

 

This section of his book, The True Believer, on Pages 34, 35 and 36, Eric Hoffer is going to discuss the connection between mass movements and the family in a society riven by an active mass movement. I have not read this book for 40 years, but I anticipate that ideologues and those of the totalitarian bent, hate, and seek to destroy the family as one of the bulwarks of Western civilization that allow the wholesome, functioning individual to function independently to the selfless myrmidons that have renounced their selfhood in service of their holy cause.

 

Here is Hoffer (H after this): “The attitude of rising mass movements toward the family is of considerable interest. Almost all of our contemporary movements showed in their early stages a hostile attitude toward the family, and did all they could to discredit and disrupt it. They did it by undermining the authority of the parents; by facilitating divorce; by taking over the responsibility for feeding, educating and entertaining the children; and by encouraging illegitimacy. Crowded housing, exile, concentration camps and terror also helped to weaken and break up the family. Still, not one of our contemporary movements was so outspoken in its antagonism towards the family as was early Christianity. Jesus minced no words: ‘For I have come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, is not worthy of me.”

 

My response: This is not fun to respond too because I am Christian and have the greatest affection, love, and admiration for Jesus. Hoffer, below, will explain what he is driving at, but he seems to suggest that only the guru or leader (Jesus?) of a wicked mass movement, would order his novitiates to choose him entirely over his own resistant family, or be cast out of the movement forever. Jesus is a divinity with the keys to the gate to heaven and hell, so if he tosses out a potential follower that must make an instantaneous, either/or choice to follow his family or choose the Christ, this makes early Christianity seem like an evil, fanatical, extreme mass movement, and to make Jesus, its divine leader, demonic for forcing potential converts to make drastic choices, either choose the loving, healthy family, or joint the cult, and refusing to join the cult immediately, wholly, without looking back even once will lead to one burning in hell along with one’s misguided, family unwilling to receive the good news. I do not believe that Jesus was a leader of a mass movement, not willing to use fanaticism and zeal to punish his human children for not jumping on the wagon without hesitation or regrets. Below is my alternative explanation.

 

 

Context is everything here. Jesus is an Individualist, an Individuator, and always has been. He was also in part really and was always, popularly perceived of and conceived of as the Great Self-Sacrificer, the altruistic, saintly Shepherd of the forlorn human flock of sheep; He was and is the Leader of the Pack.

 

I think Jesus knew that moderation and healthy family are the bedrock of loving homes where healthy, moral Christian children will grow up in, but in the first century CE, humans were groupist, emotional and fanatical, so Jesus had to talk to them in ways that they could understand and emotionally endure. He must relate to them in words and concepts that they could appreciate and relate to.

 

It is also hard to sort out because families are the biological group that love and sustain children, but also crush in them the weak but real, healthy desire to maverize, to self-actualize, to individual live to seek to develop personal identity. Families benefit children but harm them at the same time in other ways. Mass movement, on the other hand, always shred human consciousness and dignity.

 

What may make Christ seem strident in denouncing the Jewish and pagan families of His day was the need to denounce the Jews being more backward looking, less noble, less loving, retarding the ethical and spiritual growth of their children who otherwise might lean towards becoming Christians? The hidebound families from which he sought to extract converts may have been reactionary fanatics, so he needed to talk extreme to jolt his potential converts to be motivated to leave the old to take up the new.

 

H: “When he was told that His mother and brothers were outside desiring to speak with Him He said: ‘Who is my mother? Who are my brethren? And he stretched forth his hand towards his disciples, and, said, Behold my mother, and my brethren!’ When one of his disciples asked to leave and go bury his father, Jesus said to him: ‘Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead.’”

 

My response: Jesus was referring to his followers as physically alive but also spiritually alive and saved from damnation. Those Hebrew or pagan families that did not follow Jesus were physically alive but spiritually dead and would burn in hell.

 

It is my conclusion that Jesus was for moderation, reason, individualism, and goodness, not fanaticism, enthusiastic emotion, groupism and wickedness. How He came across and how He must be understood contextually.

 

Conservative families at the time that he got going with his mass movement would have been against the young becoming Christian and better spiritually, just as backwards families today will bitterly oppose my appeal to the young to become Mavellonialists. Some people call me crazy, a white nationalist, a bigoted fascist, a dangerous white supremacist, but these accusations are baseless. I am a decent person out to harm no one.

 

Jesus was not anti-family, but he wanted families to support their children when they encountered, in their generation, a newer, more advanced religion and morality. Jesus and I know that the nuclear family, intact, loving and functioning, will rear, in the West, young people that are pretty healthy, largely individualistic, if still nonindividuating and mildly groupist in comparison to fully groupist families in the Third World.

 

Neither Jesus or I am anti-family; indeed, we are pro-family, but we are for families that  support, not undercut the latest advancement in religion and morality, and these backwards, sullen kind of families that kept their children “dead” were the ones that Jesus opposed so vehemently.

 

If Jesus’s and my attitude towards families seems paradoxical, well, they like are, as true contradictions.

 

H: “He seemed to sense the ugly family conflicts His movement was bound to provoke both by its proselytizing and by the fanatical hatred of its antagonists. ‘And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death.’”

 

My response: If Jesus seemed fanatical here against the lukewarm that wanted to join him while sticking with their families, building a bridge of peace, understanding and reconciliation between the bitter foes, where no compromise was possible or sought, it was likely that he had to talk in black and white terms to make people understand what was at stake.

 

Note how he predicted 2000s before the rise of the Nazis and Bolsheviks how family members would betray each other to the totalitarian state, and, before that, to the rabid, ultraist mass movement in its active phase, the movement that, when victorious, led to the arrival on the scene of the totalitarian state. Ism supplanted family loyalty among ardent true believers.

 

H: “It is true that he who preaches brotherly love also preaches against love of mother, father, brother, sister, wife and children.”

 

My response: He, the ideologue and firebrand that preaches brotherly love, is preaching group love, the love of people as centralized, united, group entity, the collectivized unit. We accept that group-living, group-identifying, group morality (altruism) and nonindividuating are more evil than good, and that individual-living, individual-identifying, individual morality (egoism) and individuating are good more than evil. The purveyor, preacher and practitioner of brother love is evil more than good, and the advocate, of self-love and love of one’s family as the primary if not sole love interest that one is to explore and live, is good more than evil.

 

The preacher of brotherly love also seeks to replace family with membership in the new, replacement, the pseudo-family unit, the mass movement itself. Jesus, Confucius, and I favor family dynamics that encourage parents to raise wholesome children that love, function, work, worship a benevolent deity, marry, and propagate the species; their children will be more individualistic and thus morally and spiritually healthier.

 

H: “The Chinese sage Mo-Tzu who advocated brotherly love was rightly condemned by the Confucianists who cherished the family above all. They argued that the principle of universal love would dissolve the family and destroy society. The proselytizer who comes and says ‘Follow me’ is a family-wrecker, even though he is not conscious of any hostility towards the family and has not the least intention of weakening its solidarity.”

 

My response: If a mass movement is limited in duration and excess, it can still cool down and be a positive improving reform for people. Not every proselytizer is fanatical or fronting a mass movement to build and spread his unholy, holy cause. Jesus was no ideologue.

 

Jesus, Confucius, and I would want families to raise not just mature, kind individualists, but mostly individuators, that could encounter several proselytizers and gurus during their lifespan, and never be nonplussed or carried away by such ultraists. If we can rear up an society of individuating supercitizens, then new reforms, new causes can be absorbed and progress can be made without mass movements, gurus and holy causes any longer poisoning the well of civil society.

 

H: “When St. Bernard preached, his influence was such that ‘mothers are said to have hid their sons from him, and wives from their husbands, lest he should lure them away. He actually broke up so many homes the abandoned wives formed a nunnery.”

 

My response: Wow!

 

H: “As one would expect, a disruption of the family, whatever its causes, fosters automatically a collective spirit and creates a responsiveness to the appeal of mass movements.

 

The Japanese invasion undoubtedly weakened the compact family pattern of the Chinese and contributed to their recent, increased responsiveness to both nationalism and communism. In the industrialized Western world the family is weakened and disrupted mainly by economic factors. Economic independence for women facilitates divorce. Economic independence for the young weakens parental authority and also hastens an early splitting up of the family group.”

 

My response: It just occurred to me that the rather existent, healthy society in which the family units are intact would be where, in eastern countries like China, where the children are very groupist, selfless and group-living, the family would allow the average child, in that traditional society, to be decent, wholesome, and socialized.

 

In the West, the family, though more individualistic than Asian families, on average, would bring up children to be socialized, normal, morally healthy adults that were mildly individualistic.

 

A mass movement, in East or West, no matter what century, was a vehicle of gigantic, massive change under which the young and adults were deracinated from their self-comfort, and becoming disaffected and frustrated, they would flee into mass movements as an ontological refuge allowing them to lose their personal identity, to assume a collective identity, and embrace an ism that would drastically transform a society, perhaps the world.

 

H: “The drawing power of large industrial centers on people living on farms and in small towns strains and breaks family ties. By weakening the family these factors contributed somewhat to the growth of the collective spirit in modern times.”

 

My response: The drastic and marvelous upheavals and advancements of the late 19^th century and through the first half of the 20^th century  up to when Hoffer wrote this book in 1951 helped Hoffer realize that the shattering of traditional societies, the splintering of clans and extended families and isolated communities into fragmented, formerly collectivist or corporatist social units, would lead isolated, alienated, exposed people to feel frustrated, and require even desire a return to some collective womb (the mass movement) that promised them a better future, release from remembering how ruined and despairing they feel, and offers them a holy cause and ideology to provide them with all the meaning and answers they could ever seek.

 

If traditional collective, corporatist, tribal, provincial, communal or familial forms of group-living can no longer be so powerful and all-embracing to comfort its members with meaning, a sense of identity, comfort, emotional warmth and meaning, it could be that Mavellonialism, blended with other modern cosmologies, could provide people anywhere and everywhere with individualistic meaning and spirited creativity, so they can leave behind traditional social collectivist modes, without resorting to mass movement alternatives.

 

H: “Hitler’s lunatic shifting of entire populations during the Second World War and his fantastic feats of extermination must have minced and scrambled millions of families in a large part of Europe. At the same time, the Anglo-American air raids, the expulsion of nine million Germans from the east and south of Europe and the delayed repatriation of German prisoners of war did to Germany what Hitler had done to Europe. It is difficult to see how, even under optimal economic and political conditions, a continent strewn with the odds and ends of families could settle into a normal conservative social pattern.”