Patriotic

 

On Page 26 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer wrote two entries, which I will quote and then respond to.

 

Hoffer: “            38

 

The patriotic fervor of a population is not always in direct proportion to its well-being and the fair-dealing of the government. Nationalist pride, like other variations of pride, can be a substitute or self-respect. Hence the paradox that when government policies and historic accidents make the attainment and maintenance of self-respect difficult, the nationalist spirit of the people becomes more ardent and extreme. The unattainability of individual self-respect is not the least factor behind the chauvinism of the populace in the Fascist and Communist regime.”

 

My response: If a people are free and individualistic, and they feel good about themselves, some level of patriotic fervor is wholesome and necessary for the survival of a people and a nation—especially in times of national crisis.

 

What Hoffer worries about and cautions the reader to is that any variation of pride (group self-esteem) is or can be a substitute for self-respect. A good people, residing in a free and healthy nation requires that most of its citizens, most of the time, respect themselves.

 

When people do not respect themselves, and have renounced themselves, declaring that self-realizing and the individual, private life provide no outlet or opportunity for the masses, that is a group of frustrated joiners that can only find a substitute, shallow, and corrupt reason to live as true believers with group-pride in their cause, their divinity, the demagogue. Their collective pride in the abstraction that they worship will be supported and built up by them in a most frighteningly ardent and extreme fashion; pretty soon a mass movement is unleashed upon the world, and this hound only knows how to kill, maim and conquer.

 

Hoffer: “            39

 

Both Faith and Terror are instruments for the elimination of individual self-respect. Terror crushes the autonomy of self-respect, while Faith attains it more or less voluntary surrender. In both cases the result of the elimination of individual autonomy is—automatism. Both Faith and Terror reduce the human entity to a formula that can be manipulated at will.”

 

My response: The individual must love himself before he can love others and likely even before loving the good deity that he sincerely strives to worship. If he does love himself, self-care will be his primary but not sole interest. The he will self-realize as a living angel, working tirelessly, continuously, permanently to become as intellectually, morally, spiritually, emotionally, and physically as healthy and developed as he can attain. He will need to live in a society that is free, with limited, small democratic or republican government, and available to him, a bristling arrangement of capitalist prospects. He will treat himself with dignity, courtesy, and respect, and, from this base of ethical and spiritual wellness and love, he will be best situated to treat others well, to serve God favorably, and to work for the good of the community.

 

The individual that knows these advantages will live well, be well, make the world a better place, because he respects himself and is respect by other individuals and individuators, the majority in his community and nation.

 

Were the government, some cause, a mass movement, or his community to employ force and terror to compel his surrender to and conformity with their program—if he yielded to such unjust and outrageous external pressure--he will become an automatism. Being treated with vicious, brutal disrespect by the government or some collectivity will, readily convert most groupists into automatons.

 

Fanatical faith will do the same—where the people are frustrated groupists willing to surrender their independence and bend a knee to the purveyors of this holy cause. Individualism is wiped out, and true believers, pure groupists, will rule society.

 

Only a society of individuating supercitizens would be able to fight back, to be armed and violent in rejecting violently, government thugs, and to assertively push back the faith zealots offering them living death through its enthusiastic and hysterical commands and aggressive invitations that they submit and become one with the passing ism or holy cause.