On Page 20 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer has two entries which I shall quote and then comment on.
Hoffer (H after this): “ 24
It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.”
My response: Each individual and his nation that sport unfulfilled desires, are the ones that are dynamic and ambitious.
Seeking change and improvement are desires, if done for creative, loving, economic and fulfillment motives, are desirable for no one would individuate without unfulfilled desires to complete.
If it is a collective desire, like today Russia seeking to conquer Ukraine, then that unfulfilled desire is an ugly end to work towards.
H: “ 25
The propensity to action is symptomatic of an inner unbalance. To be balanced is to be more or less at rest. Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one’s balance and keep afloat. And if it be true, as Napoleon wrote to Carnot, that ‘the art of government is not to let men grow stale,’ then it is an art of unbalancing. The crucial difference between a totalitarian regime and a free social order is perhaps in the methods of unbalancing by which their people are kept active and striving.”
My response: Amen. Mass movements, in their active phase, seek to agitate and stir up the sleeping masses, to rile them into awakeness, rudely disconnected and isolated as atomistic individuals without supporting social and group structures, to goad them to hurl themselves headlong into the nearby mass movement thoughtlessly. Once the mass movement overthrows the existing order, then the masses can be stirred up by constant badgering, whipping and coercive manipulation to compel them to sacrifice and work for the state.
In a free social order, if people are taught to individuate, to run the country as supercitizens, to grow their wealth through trade and productive work, these instructed ambitions will nudge people to be active and make things better.
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