Believed

 

 

From Pages 65 to 67 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer writes about Make-Believe; I quote from him and then comment on what he wrote.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                  Make-Believe

 

                                                           47

 

Dying and killing seem easy when they are part of a ritual, ceremonial, dramatic performance or game. There is a need for some kind of make-believe in order to face death unflinchingly. To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for. It is only when we see ourselves as actors in a staged (and therefore unreal) performance that death loses its frightfulness and finality and becomes an act of make-believe and a theatrical gesture. It is one of the main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a grandiose spectacle, a solemn or lighthearted dramatic performance.

 

Hitler dressed eighty million Germans in costumes and made them perform in a grandiose, heroic and bloody opera. In Russia, where even the building of a latrine involves some self-sacrifice, life has been an uninterrupted, soul-stirring drama going on for thirty years, and its end is not yet.      The people of London acted heroically because Churchill cast them in roles as heroes. They played their heroic role before a vast audience—ancestors, contemporaries, and posterity—and on a stage lighted by a burning world city and to the music of barking gun and screaming bombs. It is doubtful whether in our contemporary world, with its widespread individual differentiation, any measure of general self-sacrifice can be realized without theatrical hocus-pocus and fireworks. It is difficult to see, how the present Labor government in England can realize its program of socialization, which demands some level of self-sacrifice from every Briton, in the colorless and undramatic setting of socialist Britain. The untheatricality of most British socialist leaders is a mark of uprightness and intellectual integrity, but it handicaps the experimentation of nationalization which is undoubtedly the central purpose of their lives.”

 

My response: The core theme that Hoffer, an atheist, seems to be his accepting, as his basic premise, through all the books he wrote, is that existence (Especially human existence for we are self-aware of the need to find meaning for living but may not know how to put that into clear concepts arranged in an objective argument that captures reality and our place within its grasp.) for the individual and a people is our facility to live our lives while living in history, and time is passing every second of our existing, and we must change, adopt, resist, but change nonetheless and become be we willing or not, to go with the historical march of change through time.

We each have at least identities, one as individuals and one or several as group existers in the groups we belong to. We have consciousness and we exist in the world as smart biological animals, and we are passing through time. How we react to that existing, changing, becoming, adapting or not, will powerfully influence how we live, and the quality of that living, be we coping with ever-changing reality as an isolated individual, or as a member ofone or more groups.

 

Since people are initially, innately fatalistic and arch-conservative in some non-reflective way (all people, all the time, everywhere, past, present and future) in response to incoming, changing, fluctuating reality, big changes in society and in the natural world occur and disrupt their lives, and even tear a fabric in the cloth of social order, they are jerked awake, out of their complacency and the warmth of their collective bubbles; now awake and frustrated, seeking a cocoon to run back into to shed the unwanted self and the burden of individual existence.

 

Hoffer seems to theorize that joining a passing mass movement allows a people, and each individual in that society, to adjust to historical, unavoidable change, and that is how, historically and perhaps prehistorically, people were disrupted, made their adjustments. And, when their mass movement cooled off and settled down, to whatever degree these group-living peoples were tolerant of differentiated individualism and individual-living, and then the mass movement, like cooling, hardening lava, became the fertile soil to cultivate a new social order out of, a new compact unity in which the people could delve into and live for a few hundred or event thousands of years until change or history attacked them again with some cataclysmic climate change, internally generated holy cause, or invading tribe, to dislodge them from their corporate slumber once more.

 

He did not know about Mavellonialism when he writes, but I am suggesting that a historically literate society of supercitizens, understanding the need to change while keeping their individuating and individual-living intact as their decentralized social order a way of permanent living to change and adjust to inevitable, eternal change. In this way they can peacefully and constructively, with minimal social upheaval, absorb the blows from evolving, swirling reality all about them. These supercitizens can moderately, constantly, and judiciously adjust to change with minimal disruption to their personal lives, or for the corporate structure of society to withstand.

 

As individuals and as a whole nation, non-frustrated living angels would require no mass movement to serve as their only resort, cataclysmically, violently jerking from one sleepy  corporate compactness in one generation to eventually settling into, the next generation,  some replacement corporate structure where the people go right back to sleep and shed their unwanted, selves in the collective. This historical, societal, and personal adjustment to unstoppable change has been accomplished, but at a painful, wasteful, often violent cost. And the people go back to sleep in their new compact social order, but still are altruistic, nonindividuating and group-living, vulnerable to falling into the trap of future gurus, holy causes and mass movements springing up to offer them refuges and ways to go forward.

 

If individuating supercitizens could enjoy their individualism as living angels, in generation after generation, in society after society, then they could change calmly and rationally, while avoiding  evil, fanaticism, and collectivist stampeding in a helter-skelter panic, by starts and stops, into the forbidding, unwelcome future.

 

Yesterday, I heard a country song on the radio in which the male single talked about his life being damaged beyond repair, that all his hopes and dreams and been shattered, so he could not offer his new potential girlfriend much.

 

This is the outlook of a frustrated victim of change and suffering. Damaged one might be by suffering, let-downs, social change and betrayals, but there are no future prospects for one as an individual and indivudator only if one believes that for one, failure and loss is how it has to be. It does not have to be that way: we can stay awake, and we can keep the best of our traditional values, and current value system, without fleeing like optionless, lemmings into some replacement mass movement and holy cause, some revolutionary, totalitarian nightmare.

 

Hoffer does have a point that leaders must dress up the business of war and killing with make-believe and theater to make the grim business of killing palatable to people about to kill and be killed.

 

H: “The indispensability of play-acting in the grim business of dying and killing is particularly evident in the case of armies. Their uniforms, flags, emblems, parades, music and elaborate etiquette and ritual are designed to separate the soldier from his flesh-and-blood self and mask the overwhelming reality of life and death. We speak of the theater of war and of battle scenes. In their battle orders army leaders invariably remind their soldiers that the eyes of the world are on them, that their ancestors are watching them and that posterity shall hear of them. The great general knows how to conjure an audience out of the sands of the desert and the waves of the ocean.

 

Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience—the knowledge that our mighty deeds will come to the ears of our contemporaries or ‘of those who are to be.’ We are ready to sacrifice our true, transitory self for the imaginary eternal self we are building up, by our heroic deeds, in the opinion and imagination of others.”

 

My response: This make-believe and romanticizing war, killing and being killed, are necessary to make the bloodiness, horror and brutality of warring palatable for an army, but it likely would be necessary even if an army was comprised of modern civilian-soldiers of individuating supercitizens.

 

 

An army of supercitizens would still field their romanticized, idealized selves as heroes, but their romantic fantasy, at the same time, would in each be brought back to earth. These citizen warriors would fight and die, but not hysterically and theatrically, but in a mood of tranquil resolve. They would be in calm, competent directly conscious of their individual selves, but their ferocity in battle would not falter.

 

 It is not so much that self-actualizers, motivated by egoist morality, are against self-sacrifice for the common interest should be the exception not the moral norm, and only in time of national emergencies or times of great need for all to sacrifice so the community will not perish. It is the duty of self-actualizers, like all citizens to self-sacrifice for a cause and the nation, if a just cause is being defended, or the nation in an conducting a just war. In these cases, doing what is duty and necessary, fine. Once the crisis has passed, then the norm of self-sacrificing should revert to pursuing self-interest as the social norm.

 

Peoples should be self-interested, where the self of yesterday disciplines the self ever not to  indulge the self in too much shallow pleasure, or mindless, unearned, excessive leisure to work hard and discipline the self to grow as a farmer, writer, scientist, housewife and mother, painter, engineer. In sober truth, the rational-egoist soldier can still be very brave and very violent. Make-believe is not so central to his motivation to fight and die for his country or his cause.

 

H: “In the practice of mass movements, make-believe plays perhaps a more enduring role than any other factor. When faith and power to persuade or coerce are gone, make-believe lingers on. There is no doubt in staging its processions, parades, rituals and ceremonials, a mass movement touches a responsive chord in every heart. Even the most sober-minded are carried away by the sight of an impressive spectacle. There is an exhilaration and getting out of one’s skin in both participants and spectators. It is possible that the frustrated are more responsive to the might and the splendor of the mass than are people that are self-sufficient. The desire to escape or camouflage their unsatisfactory selves develops in the frustrated a facility for pretending—for making a show—and also a readiness to identify themselves with an imposing spectacle.”