The Grand Denial

 

On Page 39 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer has three entries which I will quote and then comment on.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “   52

 

We almost always prove something when we act heroically. We prove to ourselves and to others that we are not what we and they thought we were. Our real self is petty, greedy, cowardly, dishonest, and stewing in malice. And now in defying death and spitting in its eye we grasp at a chance of a grand refutation.”

 

My response: This is the most explicit quote from Hoffer, which I have come across, where Hoffer accepts that people are basically evil. Still, whether being a member of a holy cause has made the soldier or citizen courageous and heroic, even if it could or did cost her, her life, or the brave hero is a fearless, noble-hearted idealist and individualist, that person is part or most of good will and moral goodness.

 

To be heroic is a grand refutation of our initial and innate sinful nature as fallen people but living as sinners is not our only adult choice, not a deterministic inevitability.

 

H: “        53

 

To act or think extremely one needs a sense of the dramatic. Excesses are essentially gestures. It is easy to be extremely cruel, magnanimous, humble or self-sacrificing when we see ourselves as actors in a performance.”

 

My response: I have assigned to moral goodness such virtues as truthfulness, self-realizing, moderate and modest behavior, calmness, individuating and individual-living, thinking more than feeling, being temperate more than extreme and melodramatic, acting to please the self, not a group audience.

 

To moral badness I have assigned such vices as the inclination to lie to oneself, to each other and to the group, not self-realizing, exhibitionistic and boasting role-playing in public, excitability, nonindividuating and group-living, feeling more than thinking, being intemperate and rash, acting to please group expectations, acting to gain group approval.

 

With these two sets of traits assigned by me to being good or bad, it becomes clear that whether the extremist, the enthusiastic, dramatic groupist, is cruel or magnanimous, his gestures and behaviors could be better if he lived as a good person, not a bad person.

H: “        54

 

It sometimes seems that our most persistent and passionate effort is to convince the world that we are not what we really are.

 

God alone is satisfied with what He is and can proclaim: ‘I am what I am.’ Unlike God, man strives with all his might to be what he is not. He incessantly proclaims: ‘I am what I am not.’

 

My response: Hoffer is right: we use up our lives, as sinful, lying, self-deceiving, group-living nonindividuators, to convince ourselves and the whole community that we are good, decent people just the way we are: normal, good, decent, happy joiners.

 

God the Father and God the Mother, the married Light Couple, both Individualists and Individuators, are satisfied with who they are, and proclaim I am what I am.

 

Humans, who must be dissatisfied with themselves—which they deserve to feel about themselves if they remain undeveloped sinners serving the Evil Spirits—if they faced what they are and do nothing about their fallen state.

 

Humans refuse to maverize and individual-live as living angels, in service to the Good Spirits; the only way they can continue to grow in sin and mediocrity is for them to quell their growing inner sense of guilt and self-loathing by fleeing into the collectivity of their choice, gaining a false sense of worth in group-affiliation, group pride and group values.