To Change

 

On Page 87 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer has one entry which I will quote and then comment on.

 

Hoffer: “          151

 

To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are. Whether this being different results in dissimulation or a real change of heart—it cannot be realized without self-awareness.”

 

My response: Hoffer, the Mavellonialist and implicit promoter of egoist-individualist ethics, informs the reader that we can desire to be different from what we are—negatively because we are fleeing from our loathed, unwanted selves; positively, because we have embraced an imperfect self as it is, but we realize that our talent, potential and moral improvements can be made possible by rigorous, persistent self-application—but we cannot change who we are unless we come to know ourselves (The self is largely not knowable, infinite and ineffable, but is increasingly knowable as we individuate.), discover our essence and live and act to make the essence real and improved and improving. We define and conceptualize the self and its telos, and then work to become our dream.

 

Hoffer: “Yet it is remarkable that the very people who are most self-dissatisfied and crave most for a new identity have the least self-awareness.”

 

My response: People without self-esteem, whose lives are irremediably ruined, who consciously hate themselves and their lives, they crave a new identity which is actually a personal conversion or the adoption of being invisible, a nonentity, a nonperson subsumed into the mass movement or group arrangement in which the self being fled from ceases to exist as a separate consciousness.

 

The initial self-awareness of these groupist nonindividuators was very minimal even when they are still somewhat conscious, semi-independent and rudimentarily individualistic. They lived in the truth a bit, but once they adopt their new identity of being a fully joined nonperson, self-awareness has disappeared, and what arises for the remnant individual consciousness is living, believing and thinking whatever the group’s group-awareness, group consciousness and group-personality dictates for the absorbed true believer to think and feel.

 

Only when the new identity sought and gainable is an organic evolution arising voluntarily, out of a loved and esteemed self with wholesome, sane self-regard, and some sophistication assumed already in self-awareness, is the adopted, new identity of a fairly self-satisfied but still ambitious self-seeking self-growth of the individuating young person.

 

Hoffer: “They have turned away from an unwanted self and hence never have a good look at it. The result is that the most dissatisfied can neither dissimulate nor attain a real change of heart. They are transparent, and their unwanted qualities persist through all attempts at self-dramatization and self-transformation.”

 

My response: Hofer warns that the un-self-aware cannot adopt a genuine self, and they can even simulate a fake, artificial self in a credible fashion.

 

One can only change, really change, if one is self-aware, having loved the self enough to enjoy getting to know it and appreciate, despite its flaws and limitations: that the self has not given up on working to make that battered self better or less unsavory. Once one comes to know the esteemed self to a fair degree, then self-awareness is awakened: the self-appraisal is fairly accurate and realistic, and the self is ready to take on a new identity, especially linked naturally to the emerging self if one self-realizes.

 

The maverizer is self-aware, has made his peace with the self, and so takes on a new identity growing out of his fulfilling his life quest.

 

The nonindividuator, self-avoiding and not self-aware, cannot take on a new identity because he really does not want a new identity: he wants to move from being a weak, stunted, displeasing identity as self towards becoming a reduced status for the self: life as a pure follower, a group non-entity, buried deep within the gang or the pack.