Frustrated

 

Part of me is frustrated because I do not think Eric Hoffer (Ayn Rand for that matter, either) is given the attention, respect, or appreciation that he deserves. His campaign against academics and intellectuals, and his opposition to the Leftist radicalism that he lived through in the 60s, these irritations did little to endear him to the Progressives that now dominate American academia and our national cultural perspective. They dislike, perhaps hate him because he criticized them, and opposed them.

 

They refer unfairly to him as a racist, and thus dismiss him and his wisdom summarily. This profound conservative. And American intellectual giant is a treasure that they do not know what to do with, so they pretend that he never existed.

 

Many liberals were impressed with his original writing and thinking. Here is what one famous, liberal historian wrote about Hoffer (I pulled this quote from Wikipedia on 2/24/24: “Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. said of The True Believer: "This brilliant and original inquiry into the nature of mass movements is a genuine contribution to our social thought."

 

 

^What I have been reading indicates that his contribution to social thought, an explanation of mass movements and of the true believers or fanatics that populate such movements, as viewed by thinkers currently, is that Hoffer explained about fanatics, and that is interesting but so yesterday, and that he little to offer beyond that. They state that his perceptive study of mass movements and fanatics has narrow application and importance, applying to infrequent, aberrational, historical phenomena like the mass movement like Communists, Nazis, and Islamists, but, other than that, Hoffer’s work provides us with nothing more of much relevance.

 

That view is unfortunate and deprives a new generation of an understanding of why Hoffer is extremely relevant today, perhaps pivotal if humans are to survive, let alone find happiness and fulfillment as a race.

 

 I offer to the indifferent public my Mavellonialist interpretation of his book, The True Believer, as a needed corrective for this deficiency. Mavellonialist ethics offers a way to make Hoffer relevant for America in 2024;

 

What youngsters and adults need to know is that Hoffer, by my reading of him, was a proto-Mavellonialist. He thought people were born basically not good, He implicitly was a rational egoist, advising all Americans to live as individuals, perhaps as self-actualizers, temperate and reasonable, working, playing, voting, living, and dying as average, happy Americans in this democratic, free market land of plenty, freedom and opportunity.

 

He was very metaphysical though he was an atheist. He thought that people were born not liking themselves, which make them discontented, average people group-living and getting by in the dispensation in which they are born, and this political and cultural matrix protects them from being alone, purely alone, to encounter unwillingly the actual self, away from the crowd hustle, bustle, noise, and traffic of daily life.

 

When the social order collapses or is blown up by radicals, war, rapid change or natural catastrophe, the discontented, selfless joiners that do not like themselves and have hidden successfully for decades in the group, away from confronting personal lies, self-denial and personal failure to take responsibility for their lives  and choices, these naturally and socially construct joiners, fanatics and collectivists, goaded forth by altruist morality, are now intensely passionate and very unhappy inside, so they become frustrated, ready to flee their worthless spoiled private selves and lives behind, fleeing into the passing mass movement.

 

The lesson that all Americans should have learned from Hoffer is that regular citizens are sleeping true believers all the time, unhappy but functioning as long as their social unit and order remain intact.

 

If these average people can learn to self-realize as supercitizens in quiet, regular times, then they go from being discontented to rather routinely, psychologically contented with their active but civilized lives of working, getting married, raising children, and personally self-realizing.

 

When their whole society and world explodes and falls apart, they will be so stoically calm, confident, self-reliant, and adaptable, that they will calmly, rationally work together to reform society, blend the new trends and innovations with their traditional dispensation and social order. They will go right through mass calamity and upheavals, and then go forth into the future, still happy and contented, and private true-believership and mass movements are no longer attractive to them, and change can be brought about without all the fuss and damage.

 

This is what we need to learn from Eric Hoffer, and I am the only one preaching this message of hope, this Mavellonialist orientation to survive the post-space age as individuating supercitizens.