Further Deprecation

 

 

On Pages 69 and 70 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer that those running a mass movement cannot deprecate the present unless they promise a better future. Here is what Hoffer wrote, and here is my response to it.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “There can be no genuine deprecation of the present without the assured hope of a better future. For however much we lament the baseness of our times, if the prospect offered by the future is that of advanced deterioration or even an unchanged continuation of the present, we are inevitably moved to reconcile ourselves with our existence—difficult and mean though it be.”

 

My response: The trouble with the preachers of a holy cause is that by intention or accident, they usually lie about future prospects: if their revolution is thorough and violent enough or totalitarian enough, the future is usually much worse than the present—change need not be an improvement.

 

H: “All mass movements deprecate the present by depicting it as a mean preliminary to a glorious future; a mere doormat on the threshold of the millennium. To a religious movement the present is a place of exile, a vale of tears leading to a heavenly kingdom; to a social revolution it is a mean way station on the road to Utopia; to a nationalist movement it is an ignoble episode preceding the final triumph.

 

It is true of course that the hope released by a vivid visualization of a glorious future is a most potent source of daring and self-forgetting—more potent than the implied deprecation of the present. A mass movement has to center the hearts and minds of its followers on the future even when it is not engaged in a life-and-death struggle with established institutions and privileges. The self-sacrifice involved in mutual sharing and co-operative action is impossible without hope. When today is all there is, we grab all we can and hold on. We are afloat in an ocean of nothingness and we hang on to any miserable piece of wreckage as if it were the tree of life. On the other hand, when everything is ahead and yet to come, we find it easy to share all we have and forego advantages we have within our grasp. The behavior of the members of the Donner party when they were buoyed by hope and later, when hope was gone illustrates the dependence of co-operativeness and communal spirit on hope. Those without hope are divided and driven to desperate self-seeking. Common suffering by itself, when not joined with hope, does not unite nor does it evoke mutual generosity. The enslaved Hebrews in Egypt, ‘their lives made bitter by hard bondage,’ were a bickering, backbiting lot. Moses had to give them hope of a promised land before he could join them together. The thirty thousand hopeless people in Buchenwald did not develop any form of united action, nor did they manifest any readiness for self-sacrifice. There was more greed and ruthless selfishness than in the greediest and most corrupt of free societies. ‘Instead of studying the way in which they could best help each other they used all their ingenuity to dominate and oppress each other.’”

 

My response: This very sobering set of paragraphs illustrates the need for wise, good leaders and wise good followers, individuators supercitizens and nonindividuator citizens alike, to preach a message of hope for the future, first, because it can always get better, if people are determined to make improvements, and, second, if the people are lucky, and third, if people believe things can improve, and believe it is their job to work incessantly to make things better, then things will improve, a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.

 

That there must be hope in the future if even people in mass movements are to strive forward, or at least they have to believe it will be better tomorrow.

 

Hoffer’s sobering, dark account that the Holocaust victims at being more selfish and greedy that the most selfish and ruthless people in a free society tells me several things. First, Hoffer did not believe people were basically good: when Holocaust victims, at the very bottom of the pecking order of power  and popularity in a vicious collectivist hierarchy were robbed of hope, if they were born good, they would have banned together, to treat each other as kindly and respectfully as possible, uniting to fight the Nazi tormentors. But, they did not: they had no chance to climb up that hierarchy, so they decided to set up a mirror-image imitative hierarchy based on power and conflict, dog-eat-dog, with the more powerful or vicious sucking up to those above and beating down the pathetic and helpless or weaker below them.

 

Second it reminds us, that, we are not good, because too often the abuser abuses those younger, weaker or less powerful than himself, as soon as he accumulates some power or muscle so he can dominate those below him. He did not learn from his abuse, but wants to imitate his abusers, and get it revenge on his victims. Humans are born evil, so spreading rather than ending abuse is the common response to being mistreated.

 

Third, where people are shattered by abuse, their ruthlessness, viciousness and selfishness is highlighted because where pure self-hatred is all one is, then there selfishness is maximized and there being and doing evil are all that one can be and do. It is almost not even their fault, they are so degraded by the harshest treatment imaginable. A creature born evil, suffering from malevolent oppressors in a collectivist hellhole, has to be a nasty, unsavory moral agent.

 

Fourth, if the victims at Buchenwald were to unite and rebel against the Nazis, they would have been shot and executed, but they would have died with dignity and pride in maintaining their own humanity is the harshest circumstances conceivable.

 

To so rebel most effectively the Buchenwald victims would need to rebel as a united opposition, made up of self-actualizing supercitizens, for they cannot be conquered, enslaved, or abused because they will fight to the death if liberty, equality, life, liberty, happiness, and property are not their natural rights messed with by none. Nazis or some other oppressor could kill them but not rule or enslave them.