Guilty Conscience

 

On Pages 93 and 94 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer has some short sections on how hatred is a cementing agent fostering heightened unity among fanatics inside a mass movement. I quote him and then will comment of what he writes there.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                             69

 

The hatred that springs more from self-contempt than from a legitimate grievance is seen in the intimate connection between hatred and a guilty conscience.

 

There is perhaps no surer way of infecting ourselves with virulent hatred toward a person than by doing him a grave injustice. That others have a just grievance against us is a more potent reason for hating them than that we have a just grievance against them. We do not make people humble and meek when we show them their guilt and cause them to be ashamed of themselves. We are more likely to stir their arrogance and rouse in them a reckless aggressiveness. Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.

 

There is a guilty conscience behind every brazen word and act and behind every manifestation of self-righteousness.”

 

My response: This terrifying Hofferian paradox demonstrates how twisted humans are from birth: we feel the most guilt and self-contempt (which we drowned out and suppress self-righteously, arrogantly and then attack again and worse, the just accuser who never did anything to us in the first place) towards those with a just grievance against us. We hate less and treat more fairly those that we have a just grievance against.

 

Those victimized that are blameless are the ones that will be victimized more and worse with passing time by the abuser and hater, who lies monstrously and increasingly to justify to himself his attacking someone who has done nothing to him.

 

H: “                                                            70

 

To wrong those we hate is only to add fuel to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for him.”

 

My response: Here is another paradox: We are most cruel to those we hate after we have hurt them some more; the kinder we are to them, the less we hated them.

 

H: “                                                           71

 

The most effective way to silence our guilty conscience is to convince ourselves and others is to convince ourselves and others that those we have sinned against are indeed depraved creatures, deserving every punishment, even extermination. We cannot pity those we have wrong, nor can we be indifferent toward them. We must hate and persecute them or else leave open to the door to self-contempt.”

 

My response: When we are group-oriented, especially as a zealot, our state of immorality, cruelty, and acted-out hatred onto our favorite scapegoat, wholly innocent and undeserving of abuse and attack, our guilty conscience and self-contempt (if we accepted it consciously—which we deny and rationalize) would make life unbearable. To compensate, we double down and triple down on our persecution of our victim, convincing ourselves that she is monstrous, and is getting what is her due. The more deserving she is of kindness and reprieve, the less will she receive it from us, for she will receive neither pity nor mercy from us.

 

H: “                                                         72

 

A sublime religion inevitably generates a strong feeling of guilt. There is an unavoidable contrast between loftiness of profession and imperfection of practice. And, as one would expect, the feeling of guilt promotes hate and brazenness. Thus it seems that the more sublime the faith the more virulent the hatred it breeds.”

 

My response: Now Mavellonialism is a sublime faith, urging everyone to self-realize as a living angel in service to the Good Spirits. If this provokes a powerful sense of guilt in sinners failing to maverize, then the cruelty they expend towards victims will be singularly vicious and murderous. Now, just as individualism and individuating are coming into moral prominenc, we could anticipate that the cruelty and malice of the collectivists towards other groups, foreigners, minorities, and individualists will be as bad as has ever been committed.

 

Potential victims should stay armed to the teeth and the young must be taught egoist-individualist ethics, so they practice what is preached, so they do not group-live, feel so guilty and then act out cruelly their hatred of victims.