The Future

 

On Page 48 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer has two entries which I quote and comment on.

 

Hoffer: “            74

 

We cannot dream passionately of the future without making a counterfeit of the present. The craving for things that are not induces us to see the world as it is not.”

 

My response: Here Hoffer is suggesting that revolutionary men of words are at war with the current dispensation, seeking to replace it with their “perfect”, idealized utopia of the future. If they can gaslight and deprecate the present and the existent dispensation, to the point that the masses lose faith in it, and awakened and without a collectivity to hide from themselves inside of, the desperate, panicked, frustrated masses are now ready to serve in the mass movement in its active phase to overturn to current dispensation, with a new, totalitarian, revolutionary dispensation whose doctrine and rationale grow out of the holy cause being promoted.

 

Hoffer:  “         75

 

The remarkable thing is a preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past. To enter the realm of the future is like entering a foreign country: one must have a passport, and one must be able to provide a detailed record of one’s past. Thus a nation’s preoccupation with history is not unfrequently an effort to obtain a passport to the future. Often it is a forged passport.”

 

My response: Yes, that forged passport is revisionist history written by men of words shilling for the revolution already victorious, or for the mass movement still in its active phase.