Soul-Saving

 

On Page 86 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer has one entry which I quote and then comment on.

 

Hoffer: ‘           150

 

In this godless age, as much as in preceding religious age, man is still preoccupied with the saving of his soul.”

 

My response: Hoffer is cautious about reform plans. Most reformers are collectivist and idealist, with zero appreciation for what makes people tick: the world would be better off if these willful zealots did nothing. We usually cannot make things much better, but our ill-conceived, mandated, clumsy public regulations enforced on the masses usually make things much worse, often intolerably so.

 

We should not be so morally ambitious and filled with sententious, self-congratulatory idealism: our altruist-collectivist activists claim that federal mandates will uplift and save the souls of millions, when, in fact, they have the opposite effect—soul-raping and soul genocide.

 

Our idealistic goals necessarily, self-consciously must be much more modest and limited: reform must be generally a private, voluntary effort by each person independently undertaken (if she so elects), left up to each individual who, as a child, can be taught a little about self-realizing and self-control, and then he is left alone, as we idealists reluctantly must agree to leave it up to him on his own to decide how to live.

 

Hoffer: “The discrediting of established religions by enlightenment did not result in the weakening of the religious impulse. A traditional religion canalizes and routinizes the quest for salvation. When such a religion is discredited, the individual must do his own soul-saving and he is at it twenty-four hours a day. There is an eruption of fanaticism in all departments of life—in business, politics, literature, art, science and even in lovemaking and sport. The elimination of the sacerdotal outlet thus results in a general infection and inflammation of the social body.”

 

My response: People are not born good, and they are born passionate and irrational more than reasonable and temperate, though they can learn to be more sensible and practical.

 

People do not like themselves and run in packs where they hide anonymously from themselves and their nagging moral sense, so they can avoid being free, independent, and forced by reality to confront the self and build a life of competence, hard work, and reward on self-correction.

 

They gain a desperately sought-after, substitute sense of worth and vicarious sense of soul-saving comfort from a quasi-collectivist organized religion, and they find some relief from guilty and self-nausea; They find home and hope for salvation in some group church of modest value, to which they belong. Their quiet lives of inner despair and discontent are manageable, unless secular idealists, as they did in the Enlightenment--and as the Progressive postmodernists are committing today—undercutting and gaslighting the standing social order, its metanarrative and its cultural story and faiths, pushing the masses into frustration, mandated, unwanted awareness of the self, violently jerked into awakeness, in full naked public exposure.

 

People will seek any replacement mass movement—which the gaslighters and revolutionaries know and planned upon--any holy cause to worship, something to believe in, something to tell them they have some worth, something whose guru absolutely promises their souls will be saved. People want their souls saved by vicarious means, by collectivist religions rather than doing the hard work and answering the call from God to maverize personally, the only way that a soul can be saved by the self willingly living as God lives, as an individuating individuators.

 

People must have faith, must believe in something, must strive to save their souls, and must find self-worth somehow, however ludicrously crafted. Holy causes will spring up where legitimate religions are cast down.