Third World

 

One of the many paradoxes revealed in Eric Hoffer’s work is what is actually generating the rise and spread of mass movements, versus what intellectuals declare is fomenting agitation and collective action against the status quo as For example, revolutionaries and Leftists mistakenly attribute the willingness by the poor to rise up against the haves is because these suffering, noble but feisty masses will not stomach being treated unjustly, so they revolt to achieve justice. Hoffer demonstrates in The True Believer that the poor are most fatalistic and inert. What frustrates them is when their compact, warm, communal world is smashed by change or disruption. The sleeping discontented, then can become frustrated, and then joint a movement to overthrow what is, and the movement is accepted, not because it is reformist, but because it is warm, corporate and offers them the chance once again to escape from their newly discovered, but unbearable individual lives that they are most anxious to shed, scurrying pack into a movement or nearby herd.

 

On Pages 37 and 38 of his book, The True Believer, Hoffer again offers a paradoxical motivator for people of the Third World in the early or mid-20^th century, as to why they sought decolonization and national independence. They were not idealistic lovers of freedom and native rights: they were upset because their traditional corporate patterns of existence had crumbled in a changing, violent world, and they were collective peoples lacking a collective structure to live within, with its ready-made narrative, myths, and values to find comfort and meaning in. These disrupted peoples, like the new poor of Europe that had become frustrated, now frustrated and very upset and off balance, turn decisively and desperately if imprudently to passing mass movement, nationalistic, religious, or social in nature, to seek a corporate structure to escape into, leaving their upsetting atomistic, exposed selves, behind.

 

Hoffer writes this (H after this): “The discontent generated in backward countries by their contact with Western civilization is not primarily resentment against exploitation by domineering foreigners. It is rather the result of a crumbling or weakening of tribal solidarity and communal life.

 

The idea of self-advancement which the civilizing West offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of a communal existence. Even when the Westernized native attains personal success—becomes rich, or masters a respected profession—he is not happy. He feels naked and orphaned. The nationalist movements in the colonial countries are partly a striving after group existence and an escape from Western individualism.”

 

My response: Western individualism and the ethos of self-advancement pulls even Westerners away from their former group existence, and that divorce from collective, warm corporate comfort is much exacerbated among the more profoundly groupist peoples of the Third World.

 

It will be controversial to some that Hoffer refers to these nations as backwards, and the West is bringing civilization to them, but both statements roughly were or are true, and multiculturalism be damned, not all cultures are created equal. To defend myself and Hoffer against accusations anticipated from Progressive readers that we are racist and white supremacists—we, like all people are naturally jingoistic, so we are a bit white supremacist and racist, but not much, because our adopted egoist (Hoffer’s egoist values are implicit and mine are overt.)  values—believed and practiced by us—render us fair and impartial. My qualification is that though Western culture is superior, it is not my dog whistle that Westerners and whites are superior—they are not—to people in Third World countries. With our superior values, peoples from any country or race will be able to maverize and individual-live without frustration or desperation, and Mavellonialism can be blended by them, with their native cultures and their degree of need for communal living to comfort them.

 

H: “The Western colonizing powers offer the native the gift of individual freedom and independence. They try to teach him self-reliance. What it all actually amounts to is individual isolation. It means the cutting off of an immature and poorly furnished individual from the corporate whole and releasing him, in the words of Khomiakov, ‘to the freedom of his own impotence,’ The feverish desire to band together and coalesce into marching masses so manifest both in our homelands and in the countries we colonize is the expression of a desperate effort to escape this ineffectual, purposeless individual existence. It is very possible, therefore, that the present nationalist movements in Asia may lead—even without Russian influence—to a more or less collectivist rather than a democratic form of society.”

 

My response: The Western gift of individual freedom, education and independence is often a curse rather than a blessing for the recipient who now is not really Western, and can no longer fit back into his traditional communal structure. Such a person is frustrated and will find joining a mass movement a way to escape his unhappy individualistic state of being.

 

For both Western peoples and those in developing nations, we need slowly to move peoples out of corporate, collectivist existence structures and into individual-living and self-realization patterns, but this must be done carefully and gently and slowly to minimize the rise of frustration which could lead people to construct and join destructive mass movements like postmodernist Marxism to hide inside of.

 

Hoffer’s statements often reveal his deep, unannounced presuppositions: For example, he writes of how frustrated peoples of Asia in his time pay prefer a collectivist over a democratic form of society. I accept that preference would be likely for a group-oriented people awakened from their dogmatic, cultural slumbers. What is significant is that Hoffer aligns collectivist societies with authoritarian or tyrannical political systems, and democratic systems are much more oriented and identifying its citizens as individuals rather than as a group.

 

H: “The policy of an exploiting colonial power should be to encourage communal cohesion among the natives. It should foster equality and a feeling of brotherhood among them. For how much the ruled blend and lose themselves in a compact whole, by so much is softened the poignancy of their individual futility; and the process which transmutes misery into frustration and revolt is checked at the source. The device of ‘divide and rule’ is ineffective when it aims at a weakening of all forms of cohesion among the ruled. The breaking up of a village community, a tribe or a nation into autonomous individuals does not eliminate or stifle the spirit of rebellion against the ruling power. An effective division is one that fosters a multiplicity of compact bodies—racial, religious or economic—vying with and suspicious of each other.”

 

My response: Hoffer seems like the cynical, Machiavellian colonizer figuring out that natives in established groups are less rebellious than if they are set loose to become frustrated, though that is the case. He is describing rather than prescribing colonial effective oppression techniques—keep the natives corporate but rival corporations.

 

This leads me to think that people like me that are egoists and Mavellonialists, pushing anarchist-individuator supercitizenship, still need to plan how to provide atomistic maverizers with communal bonding in cohesive group settings part of the time, over time. Even great-souled loners need human companionship and friendship.

 

H on Pages 38 and 39: “Even when a colonial power is wholly philanthropic and its sole aim is to bring prosperity and progress to a backward people, it must do all it can to preserve and reinforce the corporate pattern.  It must not concentrate on the individual but inject the innovations and reforms into tribal and communal channels and let the tribe or community progress as a whole. It is perhaps true that the successful modernization of a backward people can be brought about only within a strong framework of united action. The spectacular modernization of Japan was accomplished with the fervor of united action and group consciousness.

 

Soviet Russia’s advantage as a colonizing power—aside from her lack of racial bias—is that it comes with a ready-made and effective pattern of united action. It can disregard, and indeed deliberately sweep away, all existing group ties without the risk of breeding individual discontent and eventual revolt. For the sovietized native is not left struggling alone in a hostile world. He begins his new life as a member of a closely knit group more compact and communal than his former clan or tribe. The device of encouraging communal cohesion as a preventive of colonial unrest can also be used to prevent labor unrest in the industrialized colonizing countries.

 

The employer whose only purpose is to keep his workers at their task and get all he can out of  them is not likely to attain his goal by dividing them—playing off one worker against the other. It is rather in his interest that the workers should feel themselves as part of a whole, and preferably a whole which comprises the employer too. A vivid feeling of solidarity, whether racial, national or religious, is undoubtedly an effective means of preventing labor unrest. Even when the type of solidarity is such that it cannot comprise the employer, it nevertheless tends to promote labor contentment and efficiency. Experience shows production is at its best when the workers feel and act as members of a team. Any policy that disturbs and tears apart the team is bound to cause severe trouble. ‘Incentive wage plans that offer bonuses to individual workers, do more harm than good . . . . Group incentive plans in which the bonus is based on the work of the whole team, including the foreman . . .  are much more likely to promote greater productivity and greater satisfaction on the part of the workers.”

 

My response: Revolution and agitation are more likely to spring up where group cohesion is undercut; thus, the oppressed or employees are more docile where their group cohesion is not divided and conquered, for the colonialist or employer does not want to promote individual frustration.

 

To offer reform, it is not enough to reward individual merit, but it is important to remind the people affected that their collective benefit will be moved forward too.