Bored

 

Here is a frightening comparison: Dennis Prager never mentions Eric Hoffer; I do not even know if he has heard of Hoffer though he should have, being a California intellectual like Hoffer was. I have long listened to the wise Prager in his campaign and alarm-raising against the Left that they destroy all they touch, that telling the truth is not a Left-wing value, and that they are on the march. All of Pragers criticisms of the Left are accurate, and on my own I came up with the idea that Prager’s remarks after 50 years of studying Progressives, applies to them not just because they are the Left, but because cultural Marxism in America and elsewhere is an active mass movement; therefore, what Prager says about the Left would apply to any other mass movement: climate activists, globalists, Islamic fundamentalists, Russian nationalists or fascists, etc.

What chilled me among Prager’s repeated remark is his observation that a dangerous group of Americans that are ripe for becoming agitators, ideologues and true believers are the educated that are affluence, secular (They have no god to worship, so they find a fraudulent ideology, Progressivism to worship.) and BORED: bored, affluent people, leading lives void of meaning, purpose and religion, invent something to worship or latch onto some passing fad, movement or holy cause to fill the gap in their empty, frustrated hearts. Prager is describing the bored Leftists written about by Erich Hoffer below. Hoffer warns that lots of unrelieved boredom leads to mass movement time, and our cultural Marxist mass movement is breathing down our neck at this moment.

 

Here is Eric Hoffer (H after this), on Pages 50-52, from his book, The True Believer: “

 

                                                              X

 

The Bored

 

                                                             41

 

There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the presence of unrelieved boredom. In almost all of the descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of mass movements there is reference to vast ennui, and in their earliest stages mass movements are likely to find sympathizers and support among the bored than among the exploited and oppressed. To a deliberate fomenter of mass upheavals, the report that the people are bored stiff should be at least as encouraging as they are suffering from intolerable economic or political abuses.”

 

My response: Another paradox: a bored, affluent population has no meaning, no purpose, no metanarrative to live for, no God to worship, no cause to sacrifice for: as their ripeness maximizes, they will find a mass movement to hide inside of, one that provides them with utterly certain platitudes and doctrines to comfort them. The mass movement will be successful, not because the oppressed and exploited are frustrated enough to do something about their lot, but because the bored, privileged, and well-off have nothing to live for, nothing to die for.

 

H: “When a people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored. The consciousness of a barren, meaningless existence is the main fountainhead of boredom. People who are not conscious of their individual separateness, as is the case with those who are members of a compact tribe, church, party, etcetera, are not accessible to boredom. The differentiated individual is free of boredom only when he is engaged either in creative work or some absorbing occupation or when he is fully engrossed in a struggle for existence. Pleasure-seeking and dissipation are ineffective palliatives. Where people live autonomous lives and are not badly off, yet are without abilities or opportunities for creative work or useful action, there is no telling to what desperate and fantastic shifts they might resort in order to give meaning and purpose to their lives.”

 

My response: This is a rich paragraph, and Hoffer is warning that people work to belong to a corporate body, and they need purpose, meaning and a value system to live by; otherwise, they seek it in a revolutionary, disruptive, inferior substitute, a mass movement pedaling its holy cause. Jordan Peterson has gone over much of this same territory.

 

People ensconced in their compact, existent groups dream no dreams and are not frustrated, so not susceptible to wooing by agitators and malcontents. Where differentiated individuals, wealthy and bored, not subsumed and snugly embedded in some tribal group, or some religious sect with its assertive, affirmative value claims, they become frustrated and susceptible to joining those proselytizing for mass movement upheaval.

 

It is incumbent upon us, we Mavellonialist of the future to reach out to these differentiated individuals and provide them with training so they can maverize, make money and engage in constructive action, so they need not feel frustrated, so remain uninterested in and resistant to the alluring holy cause peddlers.

 

H: “Boredom accounts for the almost invariable presence of spinsters and middle-aged women at the birth of mass movements. Even in the case of Islam and the Nazi movement, which frowned upon feminine activity outside the home, we find women of a certain type playing an important role in the early stage of their development.

 

Marriage has for women many equivalents of joining a mass movement. It offers them a new purpose in life, a new future and a new name. The boredom of spinsters and of women who can no longer find joy and fulfillment in marriage stems from an awareness of a barren, spoiled life. By embracing a holy cause and dedicating their energies and substance to its advancement, they find a new life full of purpose and meaning. Hitler made full use of ‘the society ladies thirsting for adventure, sick of their empty lives, no longer getting a ‘kick’ out of love affairs. He was financed by the wives of some of the great industrialists long before their husbands had heard of him.  Miriam Beard tells of a similar role played by the bored wives of businessmen before the French Revolution: they were devastated with boredom and given to fits of the vapors. Restlessly, they applauded innovators.’”