Fostering Hatred

 

Eric Hoffer, on Pages 97 to 99, of his book The True Believer, describes how unit and self-sacrifice encourage people to hate. I quote him and then respond to his content.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                             77

 

Unity and self-sacrifice, of themselves, even when fostered by the most noble means, produce a facility for hating. Even when men league themselves mightily together to promote tolerance and peace on earth, they are likely to be violently intolerant towards those not of a like mind.”

 

My response: This paragraph cinches it for me; Hoffer is a rational egoist that does not think people are born good, that being good is individualistic and that being bad is collectivistic; that noble efforts to aid the public increase group-living; the accompanying decline in self-love experienced by the other-centered participants, increases hatred and injustice in the world: Hoffer is warning that even the well-intentioned, desire by do-gooders to impel the young to spend their lives in self-sacrificing for the common good is fraught with risk. To challenge the young to live their lives as idealistic social justice warriors is actually an invitation for these children to grow altruist evil in the world.

 

This is why idealists and ideologies make the world worse. Their vaunted idealism and their celebrated cause must be kept individually implemented and unholy (not a holy cause worshiped and spread by true believers), or the unleashed mass movement smashes up worse an already hurting world.

 

Note that Hoffer worries that united, self-sacrificing idealists increase their internal private level of hatred and their assembled level of hatred; to mix that with true believer participation in a mass movement, then fanaticism, violence, tyranny, and warring all inevitably follow.

 

H: “The estrangement from the self, without which there can be neither selflessness or a full assimilation of the individual into a compact whole, produces, as already mentioned, a proclivity towards passionate attitudes, including passionate hatred.”

 

My response: Hoffer never invented my peculiar kind of rational egoism or Mavellonialism, but he anticipated it. I have inferred from his writings that he believed that people were not basically good and that if goodness is defined as sensible, sublime self-interest, and evil is defined as selflessness especially a selfish, destructive kind that tarnishes the self and others. He would promote a moral theory that would be egoist-altruist, rather than altruist-egoist which most American Jews and Christians espouse.

 

Above Hoffer notes that the estrangement from the self is the price paid for the individual to become consciously selfless in behavior and lifestyle; the self is annihilated by the self and by the welcoming mass movement handlers, so that the self can be fully assimilated into the compact whole. Hoffer is an ethical moderate too: because the regards the true believer as an evil, defective, morally handicapped, and passionate, that means the fanatic’s will is ruled by the collective will, and that his personal will is dominated by his emotions, especially his extreme, excessive emotions, his passions. Notice that the passionate state of mind of the true believer, in all of its unleashed selfless tendency is a creature throbbing with passionate hatred of the self, of God, of others and Being itself. Hatred is evil and love is good.

 

This tragic, unhappy creature is a wicked hull of a human being now, reduced to dying, if called for, for a cause most certainly not worth dying for.

 

Here, in this sentence, is enumerated by Hoffer, all the essential characteristics of Mavellonialist morality.

 

H: “There are also other factors which favor the growth of hatred in an atmosphere of unity and selflessness. The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.”

 

My response: Note that the true believer, selfless and the living, pure avatar of altruist-collectivist ethics taken to its logical conclusion, is a person that feels justified in being harsh and ruthless towards others, under the justification of enforcing the ideological purity of his chosen holy cause upon unbelievers at the point of the sword, the club the whip. Rarely can a selfish, self-interested individualist so mistreat others, and feel justified with his behavior.

 

H: “The impression somehow prevails that the true believer, particularly the religious individual is a humble person. The truth is that the surrendering and humbling of the self breed pride and arrogance. The true believer is apt to see himself as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit the earth and the kingdom of heaven too. He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen will perish.”

 

My response: I urge that a great soul, thought very self-confident, be modest and measured in speech, writing, communication, and behavior. Since he is with God, and loves the self, good deities, and others, he must treat everyone, including himself with courtesy, truth and diplomacy, dignity and respect. Good manners are obligatory. Boorish, unpleasant public displays—things like strutting, confrontation, arrogance, and bragging are condemned, but the selfless with their holy cause will theatrically demonstrate these rude, in-your-face behaviors in public.

 

H: “There is also this: when we renounce the self and become part of a compact whole, we not only renounce personal advantage but are also rid of personal responsibility. There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and the vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgment. When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom—freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame or remorse.”

 

My response: The concept of the individual as the sovereign idea of the West, which seems right, is a concept promoted by Jordan Peterson. Implicit within this view of the individual is that the individual qua individual is the person with a soul, a free will, and conscience; his groups cannot be sent to heaven or hell for their collective actions, but the individual can go to hell for his sins, or to heaven for his virtues, and through having accepted the gift of grace to be saved from Jesus and other good deities.

 

I believe in and accept this moral characterization of the individual, but take it one step farther, that since the individual and his freely selected choices make him the locus of moral obligation, why should we then assume that altruist-collective morality, rather than adopting egoist-individual-collective morality, is the way for him to be good?

 

If there can only be moral choice and moral improvement achievable on the individual level, and group morality, group-living, group identity and group rights are irrelevant to moral growth why are we pushing altruist-collective ethics? It seems to be that collective moral decisions are either amoral at best or are downright immoral if designated as the primary way of acting decently in the world.

 

How else can we explain what Hoffer reports just above? If joining a mass movement, at least in the mind of the individual true believer—if not, according to God, for we never lose or are released by God from our personal responsibility for every choice we make—that we are absolved of any responsibility for how we behave or what crimes we commit for the cause, then it is immoral to join a mass movement. It is immoral to be primarily or solely motivated by self-sacrifice. It is immoral to live only or primarily in accordance with an altruist-collective morality.

 

H: “Herein undoubtedly lies part of the attractiveness of mass movements. We find there the ‘right to dishonour,’ which according to Dostoevsky has an irresistible fascination. Hitler had a contemptuous opinion of the brutality of the autonomous individual. ‘Any violence which does not spring from a firm, spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook.”

 

My response: Here we have it from two experts (the moral Hoffer and the demonic Hitler) on collective morality: Hoffer condemns pure collective morality unleashed from all private moral restraint, as practiced, and exhibited by true believers pushing their ideology (their holy cause); there are no limits on their cruelty and savagery. There is something demonic about a mass movement raging across a society like what Mao’s young people unleashed upon society during the Cultural Revolution.

 

Hitler, a living devil, knew that individual cruelty could not compete with collective cruelty with its firm, spiritual (ideological base). Hitler approved of collectivist morality which he knew was evil, and he sneered at individual morality because it could not compete at being evil enough to suit the purposes of his Nazi mass movement.

 

Ironically, Hitler recognized that egoism is mostly good, and that altruism is mostly evil, and his evil morality praises rational egoism, in a strictly negative, hostile way, for he promoted altruism-collectivism to build and spread his Third Reich.

 

H: “Thus hatred is not only a means of unification but also its product. Renan says we have never, since the world began, heard of a merciful nation. Nor, one may add, have we heard of a merciful church or a merciful revolutionary party. The hatred and cruelty which have their source in selfishness are ineffectual things compared with the venom and ruthlessness born of selflessness.”

 

My response: So unifying or joining a collective is not only fostered by hatred but hatred is also the product of unification. If evil (self-hatred or other-hatred, both included) is hatred, and love is good, and unifying individuals together grows hatred or evil, is it not recommendable that be true, logical, sensible and ethically desirable is to be very careful about how much we unify people, or how it is structured. We are social creatures and we need to belong and join to some degree to be happy, healthy, sane, good, normal and to stave off loneliness, and to survive as a species, but altruist ethics and group-living have dominated human societies for too long, with much evil being tolerated and produced out of a wicked morality, which is lied about and referred to as moral and desirable.

 

If we did not have altruist ethics and group-living as our moral norms, in “good, quiet times” in functioning social orders around the world, the precondition, for allowing mass movements to arise and inflict terrible harm and damage upon humanity, would be eliminated and not exist. A society of anarchist-individuator supercitizens, living and running a laissez-faire, constitutional republic, would not be an evil people ruled by destructive altruist-collective morality in quiet, stable times, or during times of chaos, lawlessness, revolution, and mass movements coming to the fore.

 

H; “When we see the bloodshed, terror and destruction born of such generous enthusiasms as the love of God, love of Christ, love of a nation, compassion for the oppressed and so on, we usually blame this shameful perversion on a cynical, power-hungry leadership. Actually, it is the unification set in motion by these enthusiasms, rather than the manipulations of a scheming leadership, that transmutes noble impulses into a reality of hatred and violence. The deindividualization which is a prerequisite for thorough integration and selfless dedication is also, to a considerable extent, a process of dehumanization. The torture chamber is a corporate institution.”

 

My response: No one that writes that the torture chamber is a corporate institution could, if pressed, proclaim that unqualified altruist morality is the moral ideal.

 

Hoffer blames mass movements for dehumanizing the individual, and en masse true believers are capable of great deeds and great atrocities.

 

Notice that the holy causes, isms, and ideologies that are spreading hell across the earth can be done in the name of God and Jesus; there are passages in the Bible and all sacred texts that do or seem to promote drastic, extreme behaviors as ethically proper for believes to engage, but there are Biblical passages urging prudence and caution too.