Trend-Setters

 

Eric Hoffer, on Page 58 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, has two entries which I shall quote and then comment on.

 

Hoffer: “          95

 

History is made by men who have the restlessness, impressionability, credulity, capacity for make-believe, ruthlessness and self-righteousness of children. It is made by men who set their hearts on toys. All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.”

 

My response: Hoffer seems to be suggesting that history is made by mass movements on the march, and it is populated by children-fanatics in a passionate state of mind who work tirelessly to capture their object, their holy cause’s success in the world, the toy they are manufacturing.

 

As all leaders strive to turn their followers into true believing children, the children take up, too often their voluntary servitude, by forcing their leader to lead as a tyrant that is but a petulant, criminal, violent teenager himself.

 

Hoffer: “          96

 

Man’s being is neither profound nor sublime. To search for something deep underneath the surface in order to explain the human phenomena is to discard the nutritious outer layer for a nonexistent core. Like a bulb man is all skin and no kernel.”

 

My response: Often it seems as if Hoffer is cynical and degrading in his characterization of human nature, but I trust my intuition that he is a psychologist and truth-detector of the highest order.

 

With this presupposition in mind, I will try to translate what he wrote above. Jordan Peterson, a brilliant psychologist and philosopher, defines mental health as not so much about the various neuroses, psychoses or kinds of mental sickness that people are afflicted with—and those are real—but what he seems to recommend is that the person get right with God, the cosmos and oneself by living as truthful, as authentic and ethical life as one can muster, and that high caliber existing will solve most mental health ailments, especially if they have not been afflicting the patient for decades.

 

If I may interpret Peterson, he does not want a therapist to employ a treatment plan like a Freudian, in depth, almost apriori digging deep into the subconscious to cure mentally sick people. Rather the cure is to treat them on the surface, and, if they play act and role model being loving, moral, spiritual, and healthy on the surface, that will cure them all the way down, and from one end to the other end of their personal psyche or consciousness.

 

Hoffer the longshoreman is writing something akin to this above. Man’s surface being is that he is 60% beast and 35% angel, so where humans live, on the surface, is where they must be healed. To heal the surface is to help each person, who chooses to self-reform or not as an individual implementing his plan of self-care of his own free will.

 

If and when the egoistic individual self-disciplines and self-reforms, his bestial side will be redirected and controlled by him to positive and human purposes, good for himself and for others. In this way, his will will be transformed into a good will and his weak, recessive angelic nature will now become strengthened and will be his outlook and approach to living for the remainder of his life. Once the individual has high self-esteem and loves himself, loves the good deities and loves others, his entire psyche or consciousness will be healed. Its profound and sublime aspects can be operating at the conscious level of existing for the self-reformed agent.

 

Humans live on the outer surface; the surface is their core, so to speak, another Hofferian paradox. If each person, adopts worshiping a good deity as his life mission, and is reared to maverize as an individuating supercitizen, these surface moral lessons taught to children are the most effective way for the child to become good and stay good.

 

The parent is like a basketball coach teaching an awkward child how to practice layups to the basket over and over again, until muscle memory kicks in, and the child easily scores points by dribbling and then shooting to the basket in action with smooth layups to score points.

 

This surface training soon is automatized by the child’s inner computer (bad analogy from a blue-collar worker) until this new habit and self-perfecting surface action becomes second nature to the child and the action converted to part of the child’s consciousness, over time, becomes the child’s trained and permanent nature. Moral training would work similarly, by taming the inner beast and nurturing the weak angel in each child so that she can be normal, sane, and loving.

 

This is what Hoffer is recommending above, and I think he is correct as usual.