Passionate

 

After writing The True Believer in 1951, Eric Hoffer released The Passionate State of Mind in 1955. Here I quote and comment on two of his entries from Page 7.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “ 1

 

There is in most passion a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.”

 

My response: In the passionate state of mind, the individual is a joiner, not a loner. The joiner is not able to stand himself, so he flees into the social, the collectivity. His state of passion is his felt orientation to and his affective reaction to his inability to know who he is, who he should be, let alone confront the self. He avoids himself and runs from himself at all costs; he has completely walled off his atrophied, silence conscience which is seeking to warn him about his morally lapsed condition.

 

 

Hoffer is likely contrasting felt, healthy, constructive emotion and passion; the latter emotional state that too intensely felt or lived by its bearer.  Passions felt, expressed, and acted out by him are so enthusiastic and violent that it festers, fosters, and becomes a complex system of substituted social encounters, replacing a truthful, wholesome relationship with the self and the world. We can only know ourselves if we are cognitive, logical and truth-apt. Neither passionate nor dispassionate self-expression, or of flat affect, are reasonable, temperate, individualistic or reality oriented. Being passionate more likely accompanies irrational, collectivist, fantasy-orientation, and out-of-regulation emotions.

 

H: “Passions usually have their roots in that which is blemished, crippled, incomplete and insecure within us. The passionate attitude is leas a response to stimuli from without than an emanation of an inner dissatisfaction.”

 

My response: H clearly identifies the passionate person as a flawed, crippled, fragmented unhappy person, whose source of dissatisfaction is inner loathing, and such an angry, depressed person is ripe for frustration, enlistment in a mass movement, and fleeing his spoiled life into the collective refuge.

 

It seems that emotion that is under-expressed and repressed or over-expressed, loud, melodramatic, theatrical, manic, or raging is out-of-balance emoting, or passionate emoting, that is a loud, observable manifestation of an unhappy self, where self-esteem/high self-disregard and self-contempt run rampant.  If this goes on long enough, the discontented self, if the system falls apart, is ripe to convert into frustrated true believer searching for that holy cause to disappear inside of.

 

The person of good will is a person of moral and spiritual wholesomeness, who will love the self, and his self-regard will be rational more than emotional but both.

 

The person of reduced good will—or being so degraded as to becoming a person of bad will, of moral and spiritual darkness, that person is purely passionate, and her reasoning is used by her to achieve her bad objectives, to morally lie and justify what is wrong, calling it right, and inversely to accuse good opponents and their appropriate actions of being sinister and ill-intentioned, when they are clearly nothing of the kind.

 

H: “     2

 

A poignant dissatisfaction, whatever be its cause, is at bottom a dissatisfaction with ourselves. It is surprising how much hardship and humiliation a man will endure without bitterness when he has not the least doubt his worth or when he is so integrated with others that he is not aware of a separate self.”

 

My response: Dennis Prager is no egoist, but his take on attitude is crucial to explaining what constitutes high self-esteem. Prager’s description of wholesome personal attitude, in a sane, cheerful moral agent,  is directly flowing from the instinctive act, the non-self-conscious, self-application by any agent, of Prager’s excellent intuition, to that agent’s sense of self, that no person can be good unless he is grateful, happy and fields a positive attitude—all this from Prager who, like me, complains bitterly that people are born evil, and that the world is filled with lots of cruel, selfish, wicked people.

 

I extrapolate from Prager’s unerring instinct that the individual, unless he is grateful and fields a good, optimistic attitude, he is not a person of good will, and never can know actual happiness. If he is thus not satisfied with his outlook, demeanor, and sense of self that he finds worthy of esteeming, his life will be ruined, and, after a while, that is a self that he must escape from. Such a person is ripe for being taken over by dark forces and Evil Spirits.

 

If one thinks one is lacking an intrinsic sense of self-worth, then one can withstand very little. If a person know he was a person of solid worth, or if he was an ideological true believer, he can withstand almost anything.

 

The person of genuine personal worth can withstand so much because he is so much that is positive and wholesome. The corrupt true believer can withstand most any attack because he exists as sharing complete oneness of self and consciousness with the similarly, interconnected others in his tight-knit group. His individual personality no longer exists, then setbacks and personal failure no longer phase him because there is no self-left to feel either satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the self for any reason.