Credulity

 

Eric Hoffer, on Page 75 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, has three entries which I shall quote and comment on.

 

Hoffer: “          128

 

 

Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny.”

 

My response: Socrates urged each human to come to know thyself, and maverizing is the optimum, lived, rational expression of learning, growing, self-realizing intellectually, spiritually, morally, physically, and emotionally; as one grows and becomes, one’s self-knowledge commensurately increases and deepens.

 

It is altruistic groupists, nonindividuating, emotional, anti-intellectual, group-living as falsehood-friendly joiners that have almost no self-consciousness or self-knowledge. Thus, flattery and calumny directed against one by others is gospel since one is other-oriented. What the self thinks about the self, for or against, does not cut much ice.

 

The individualist is self-oriented, and knows his worth and defects, where his actions and choices merit praise or blame. Neither praise nor blame from others much matters, because he is best situated to realize who and what he is, and how he should judge himself.

 

Hoffer: “          129

 

It is thus with most of us: we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.”

 

My response: Hoffer the champion of implicit egoist morality is signaling above that we are what others says we are, because we are group-creatures, taking on the characteristics of the prescribed, collective personality lived and exemplified by each individual avatar of such a group.

 

Hoffer: “  130

 

The people we meet are the playwrights and stage managers of our lives: they cast us in a role, and we play it whether we will or not. It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.”

 

My response: Group opinion is everything; personal opinion or self-assessment is of marginal worth.