Religion

 

On Page 35 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer has two entries, which I quote below and the comment on.

 

Hoffer: “            46

 

That self-hatred should generate in us an eagerness to unite with others seems to suggest that is primarily against ourselves that we league ourselves with others.”

 

My response: I feel that this quote is a powerful hint that Hoffer is a psychological altruist, and thinks people are born groupist, sinful, fallen, destructive, self-hating and altruistic by nature. Only if their weak, recessive good tendencies are built up into a good personal will of the self that works, creates, loves and is moral, then the self can esteem itself and not desire to flee from the self and a guilty conscience.

 

One must be an egoist to define people as self-hating, and that generates a powerful urge in them to unite with other to drown out their personal consciousness and the self-loathing that they must feel because they deserve to feel rotten about themselves because they refuse to do anything to sin no more by becoming holy and virtuous.

 

Everyone escaping into the group, the collective, an active or quiet mass movement is in league without everyone else in the group to use each other to hide each from herself.

 

Hoffer: “            47

 

By renouncing the self we are getting out from underneath the only burden that is real. For however much we identify ourselves with a holy cause, our fears on its behalf can never be as real and poignant as our fear and trembling on behalf of a perishable self. The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of irrevocable extinction, is the only real thing that can ever really matter. Thus a renunciation of the self is felt as a liberation and salvation.”

 

My response: “Deep down people seem to sense, that, only as individuals that maverize, can we live with a self that we are fully conscious of, and can live with because we are moral producers, so thus we justifiably, at least for today, can approve of ourselves, and be reconciled to ourselves as we are at this moment.

 

We know, deep down, that only the maverized self matters, and only it can bring us happiness and a sense of meaning.  So, if we have not the will to adjust to that reality, our substitute option is renouncing the self by killing our consciousness as a separate soul, by fleeing into the collectivity. To wipe out our soul be minimally existing as in-group zombies, we are forever saved, and absolved of needing to feel miserable and upset any longer over our rotten inner selves.