Jailkeeper

 

Eric Hoffer, on Page 64 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, has two entries which I will quote and then comment on.

 

Hoffer: “          106

 

There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brother’s keeper will end up being his jailkeeper.”

 

My response: If Hoffer was an unavowed egoist because he did not speak in metaethical language, this might be the kind of witty proverb he would write, pointing out the evil inherent in altruist-collectivist morality, the corrupting, addiction to power over others, the deep craving to control them.

 

Hoffer: “          107

 

There is perhaps in all misfits a powerful secret craving to turn the whole of humanity into misfits. Hence partly their passionate advocacy of a drastically new social order. For we are all misfits when we have to adjust to the wholly new.

 

My response: It seems that one implicit t6definition that Hoffer provides for the misfit is the key to understanding this entry. A misfit is a person that never did or currently does not fit in with his family, his community, his professional group, or with the majority of his fellow citizens in a nation—or perhaps he does not fit into any of these collectivities all at once.

 

If he is a groupist, a group-liver, an altruist-ethicist and a nonindividuator—and most people are such, whether they are fitting in or are dislocated, frustrated misfits—his natural status as a discontented joiner that formerly belonged inside the existing social order, is now kicked loose and free, an angry, bewildered, passionate, confused, lost soul desperately searching for a mass-movementized holy cause to join and disappear into.

 

He feels that if he is a misfit, then all should feel his pain and misery by being reduced to his misfitted existence, because misery loves company. Also, if he can assist in being down the current social order, making all misfits and frustrated fanatics, he has brought them down to his level, and he longer feels inferior to them for formerly being fit, superior and satisfied with things as they were under the old order.

 

If we were individuators, then we could be permanently, beneficially, part-fitting and part-misfitted; as maverizers, calm, enthused, adaptable, smart and innovative, loving the new while fitting it into the old. We still could enjoy the standing social order while without living tranquilly without need for revolution to spur needed change.