Looking Forward

 

Eric Hoffer, from Pages 67 to 69 of his book, The True Believer, write of what occurs as true believers deprecate the present.

 

I quote what he writes and then comment on his writing.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “             Deprecation Of The Present

 

                                                           48

 

At its inception a mass movement seems to champion the present against the past. It sees in established institutions and privileges an encroachment of a senile, vile past on a virginal present. But, to pry loose the stronghold of the past, there is a need for utmost unity and self-sacrifice. This means that the people called upon to attack the past in order to liberate the present must be willing to give up enthusiastically any chance of ever tasting or inheriting the present. The absurdity of the proposition is obvious. Hence the inevitable shift once the movement starts rolling. The present—the original objective—is shoved off the stage and its place is taken by posterity—the future. More still: the present is driven back as if it were an unclean thing and lumped with the detested past. The battle line is now drawn between things that are and have been, and the things are not yet.

 

To  lose one’s life is but to lose the present; and, clearly, to lose a defiled worthless present is not much to lose.”

 

My response: that the guru offering the frustrated the mass movement, does deprecate the present and the past, is to deny the individual historical context and perspective upon which to build a fulfilling, productive, rewarding, happy life for his family and himself in the present.

 

The promoters of the offered holy cause argue seductively that the present and the past are sordid and only the unprincipled, selfish individual clings to them; one is to flee into service of the mass movement to bring about a better future for posterity, that one’s personal life and aims are irrelevant and valueless.

 

H: “Not only does the mass movement depict the present as mean as miserable—it deliberately makes it so. It fashions a pattern of individual existence that is dour, hard, repressive and dull. It decries pleasures and comforts and extols the rigorous life. It views ordinary enjoyment as trivial or even discreditable, and represents the pursuit of personal happiness as immoral. To enjoy oneself is to have truck with the enemy—the present. The prime objective of the ascetic ideal preached by most movements is to breed contempt for the present. The campaign against the appetites is an effort to pry loose tenacious tentacles holding on to the present. That this cheerless individual life runs its course against a colorful and dramatic background of collective pageantry serves to accentuate its worthlessness.”

 

My response: The healthy, well-adjusted individual, especially an individuators, would be aware of the past, and well responsible to working to fulfill future high goals as a teleological, noble effort, but, that same person, must live in, work in, play in and enjoy the present in rather high comfort, prosperity, and enjoyment of life’s pleasures, while being moral, responsible, creating and working. This balanced life of the maverizer, half-way between epicureanism and asceticism is how the maverizer should live, and the present should never be deprecated.

 

The depcrecators are not noble idealists: these murderous monsters want to shake loose the sleeping masses from their individual differentiated lives, their comforts, their enjoyments and pleasure relations in the present, all given up to push forward a  mass movement run by idealists and ideologues who are not compassionate, but are radicalizing society to replace it with a mass movement and totalitarian superstructure with the ruling party, gathering all power, money and say to themselves.

 

H: “The very impracticality of many of the goals which a mass movement sets for itself is part of a campaign against the present. All that is practicable, feasible and possible is part of the present. To offer something practicable would be to increase the promise of the present and reconcile us to it. Faith in miracles, too, implies a rejection and defiance of the present. When Tertullian proclaimed, ‘And He was buried and rose again; it is certain because it is impossible,’  he was snapping fingers at the present. It sees the present as the faded and distorted reflection of a vast unknown throbbing underneath and beyond us. The present is a shadow and an illusion.”

 

My response: As a marginal Christian, I believe in the miracle of Christ having died on the cross, being buried, and then rising from the grave, and that it is certain though it is impossible. I accept all of that, and think of Jesus as an Individualist, an Individuator, and Moderate, that would want us to look to the future, to salvation in the afterlife, while still enjoying our private, pleasurable lives here and now while alive. We can have our cake and eat it too Jesus loves His people and wishes them to enjoy and have pleasure, though hard work and self-sacrifice for the future and for doing well in the afterlife, should remain the prime moral objective.

 

Reason is good when it is reasonable, moderate, temperate, offering people possible, practicable and feasible solutions to problems here and now in the present, as people enjoy their lives.

 

Reason that is the logical arguments of ideologues, uncompromising idealists and fanatical ascetics, pushing impossible schemes and demanding that the masses live in a degrowthed economy without pleasure, comforts or technology—that it is selfish and irresponsible to enjoy being happy and prosperous in the present—the thinking of these intellectuals masks a cruel ambition to smash all that is beneficial and enjoyable in life, to deprive all individuals the liberty and means to live well as they choose to live.