Nowhere To Hide

 

Eric Hoffer, on Page 23 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, has one entry which I quote and then comment on.

 

Hoffer: “            29

 

A fateful process is set in motion when the individual is released ‘to the freedom of his own impotence’ and left to justify his existence by his own efforts. The autonomous individual, striving to realize himself and to prove his worth has created all that is great in literature, art, music, science and technology. The autonomous individual, also, when he can neither realize himself by his own efforts, is a breeding call of frustration, and the seed of convulsions which shake our world to its foundations.

 

The individual on his own is stable only as long as he is possessed of self-esteem. The maintenance of self-esteem is a continuous task which taxes all of the individual’s powers and inner resources. We have to prove our worth and justify our existence anew each day. When, for whatever reason, self-esteem is unattainable, the autonomous individual becomes a highly explosive entity. He turns away from the unpromising self and plunges into the pursuit of pride—the explosive substitute for self-esteem. All social disturbances and upheavals have their roots in the crises of individual self-esteem, and the great endeavor in which the masses most readily unite is basically a search for pride.”

 

My response: These two paragraphs reveal almost directly how Hoffer anticipated Mavellonialism, and predicted what happens if each person, as an autonomous individual, is not taught the rationally egoist morality of individuation. With this moral training, most individuals, most of the time, will know how to and will choose to work towards self-maverization, which will equip them to stand alone, to make good, to self-actualize in service to the good deities as their telos, and this life, brilliantly lived and developed, will equip them with merited self-pride, or self-esteem.

 

So oriented, they will be contented, not frustrated. So oriented, the autonomous individual is not receptive to the appeal of a mass movement to offer him some semblance of collective pride to help him hide from his ruined life, his shattered self that he resents and repudiates, to escape from his personal shame over his choice to believe that he cannot improve his personal situation by his own effort, a lie that he has come to believe, a lie that did not need to be his personal destiny, but is now his only resort.

 

Self-esteem and self-worth are attainable for all, for all are sufficiently if unequally talented, to produce marvelous art. Where each individual accrues merited self-pride or self-esteem, there is no need to seek refuge in a mass movement supporting a holy cause, which provides the battered ego group pride or group esteem, which is a poor but alluring substitute for self-abandonment.

 

When attached to self-realization, self-esteem or self-pride is usually morally positive, and group-esteem or group-pride is the self-esteem of a true believer, and this radical, in his passionate state of mind, is not a moral or truthful person.