Trigger

 

On Page 33 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer has two entries, which I shall quote and then comment on.

 

Hoffer: “            43

 

The mere possession of power does not inevitably lead to aggression. It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable. Some inner unbalance is apparently needed to keep people on the go, and it needs the unbalancing of fear to activate power.”

 

My response: This reminds me of the imperial, traditional, imperial Russian propensity to invade its neighbors, to conquer and colonize them, creating a buffer of colonies around Russia to serve as a human shield against invaders.

 

Russians seem to say, in foreign policy, that I will do it to your before you do it to me (conquering others so it itself is rich and powerful, able to withstand invaders from the steppes of Asia or from Europe). Despite its great size, military prowess, and large population, Russians use their power against their neighbors, as their conqueror perhaps as much or more out of fear, than out of greed to own and bleed dry their neighbors.

 

Ukraine certainly was not going to attack Russia a few years ago, but Putin thought they were fascist competitors, so he invaded them, doing it to them before Ukraine and NATO did to him, but this is an absurd, empty justification for his misadventures in empire-building.

 

Hoffer: “Another way of putting it would be that only when power utilizes the propensities and talents of the weak does it become ruthless and vicious.”

 

My response: Somewhere else, Hoffer writes something similar: when the powerful (the no-longer active mass movement that is now the post-revolutionary totalitarian state) honestly regard themselves as weak and vulnerable, they ratchet up their true believer citizens and subjects to a fever-pitch frenzy and hysteria: now they find a target, a devil amongst their people: the religious, the dissidents, the minorities and the individualists, which the howling, rampaging, rioting mob will now attack and consume.

 

The games and coping devices of the powerless groupists and the weak, in the hands of the government, become collectivist campaigns of murder and terror on a grand, grand scale.

 

Hoffer : “           44

 

Great evils befall the world when the powerful begin to copy the weak. The desperate devices which enable the weak to survive are unequaled instruments of oppression and extermination in the hands of the strong.”

 

My response: I wrote the paragraphs just above, not realizing that the tools used by the weak to cope do become state weapons of unimaginable terror in the hands of the strong, the elite ruling society. This is the passage that I was recalling from reading this book fifty years ago.