Too Easy

 

 

 

A push-button civilization has no feeling for change by growth—the change that proceeds quietly, and by degrees scarcely to be perceived. The remarkable thing is that the theologian, too, has no feeling for development by growth. His conception of creation and change is as much a push-button affair as that of the technician and the revolutionary.”

 

My response: How does this genius says so much with so few words, and yet pack so much meaning in so few a number of words?

 

Written in 1954, he knew the push-button civilization of the future could lead to a world of humans as drones, non-workers, and non-producers supported by an army of slave robots. Things could become too automatic, too effortless, too easy in the years to come.

 

Here is the dreaded future where humans could be aristocratic parasites earning a living just by existing, not effort, so that would deprive all humans of meaning, purpose, and pride because they knew they earned their way: a dreaded future with computers, smart-technology and a world of comfort, luxury, ease, leisure and opulence where a human being might even have an implanted computer chip, a genetic alteration implanted, or receive some miracle drug that quadruples the intelligence, strength and life expectancy threefold—all personal gains that are unearned, without struggle, without merited exertion and personal risk, the only means of accruing a sense self-esteem based on self-discipline and uplifting, hard work.

 

Hoffer is for self-realization as the telos for each human individual, though his advocacy of egoist ethics as a life of self-actualization is more implicitly embedded in all that he writes, rather than explicitly proclaimed.

 

He is advising that humans need to spend their lives working for money to support their families and to personally individuate too, and this slow, arduous exertion to improve is steady and incremental, quiet change by growth that is barely perceivable, but over the long haul is real, significant and cumulative, as the mature person works hard and innovatively to self-develop. There are no shortcuts to becoming and being excellent: it is an earned state, and the individuators is morally obligated to refuse to allow robots, comforts, and technology to bribe one into a corrupting, deadly state of being a parasite provided for by the system. Such beguiling, counterfeit, paradisical living is a life of hell and personal abnegation of responsibility, as commanded of each soul by the Good Spirits.

 

One can have one’s cake and eat it too: one can enjoy the luxuries, benefits, and blessing of modern technology but one must work hard and evolve intellectually, creatively, morally, and practically through self-discipline and earned achievement and a merited sense of pride and self-esteem.

 

There is an inkling of the ontological moderate in all of Hoffer’s thinking: he is a metaphysical realist and an ethical and ontological moderate. He seems to assume that the laws of the universe running the natural world require each human agent to seek and use moderate, balanced, nuanced approaches to solving problems.

 

The idealist must be a practitioner of an extreme, dangerous, unrealistic brand of idealism that is not made humane, humanized, or rendered sensibly instrumental, blended with pragmatism, that living is a do-it-yourself enterprise without exception or workable substitute lifestyles. The life well-lived and obligatory for all to undertaken is hard work and efforts but the rewards are there for those that work hard, dig in, and seek to live.

 

It is the fanatic, the true-believing, impractical idealist, the revolutionary, the theologian, the technocratic scientist/researcher/technician that chauvinistically touts technology as the sole, ultimate solution for all human problems: these mentally lazy absolutists have easy solutions for incredibly complex, intractable cultural, societal, human challenges.

 

They are drastic and nihilistic in insane, pathological, eager willingness and supreme confidence to just blow up the prevailing dispensation with one push of the revolutionary button to obliterate the existing structures, and then replace it with brand new structures and a metanarrative that will instantaneously, miraculously, automatically just function perfectly to fill the void, that pile of ashes, the remnant of the holocaust they lit, to wipe out the old and usher in the new.

 

All revolutionaries, radicals, idealists, and ideologues, left or right, religious or secular, are really clones of each other: altruist-collectivist dreamers who envision that they are bringing heaven to earth via push-button revolutionary upheaval, when they will but introduce a Reign-of-the-Beast murderous, totalitarian dystopia which will make Mao’s cultural revolution look like a walk in the park.

 

What Hoffer is warning us is that deep-down, all human problems are caused by the failure of the individual to take up his cross, to maverize and to serve God. The only workable solution is for the individual to take up his cross, to maverize and to serve God. It is slowly, voluntary, nonviolent, painful, frustrating work, but one, can make progress over the years as one persists, never quitting, never despairing (the sin Dennis Prager warns us against), never ceasing to grow in spiritual strength, divine love, wisdom, knowledge and creative excellence of attitude and output. When millions of humans figure this divine duty out and take up their crosses and struggle forward each day, only then can things get better, a little better, but if enough of them do it well enough, long enough, things will get a whole lot better.

 

Should the next generation fail to continue the good self-realizing work and heritage bequeathed to them by the previous generation, things will rapidly devolve back to collectivist, group-lived hell, suffering and mediocrity as the default norm lived across the earth: without God, egoism and morality, things will again fall apart and disintegrate in only a few short years.

 

This Mavellonialist ideal society is no easy, push-button miracle magically waved into reality by some zealous dreamer by a snap of his fingers, or his flipping a toggle switch.

 

Americans as individuating supercitizens, would well realize that reform is difficult and not externally decreed by elites in Washington, Harvard, Hollywood, TikTok, the New York Times or from the Vatican. Reform is one person at a time, and it is slow, difficult, and freely chosen, or it must fail. Sorry, idealists, I never promised you a rose garden.

 

 

Hoffer: “          174

 

It is the homesick that keep shifting about. The uprooted millions from Europe who landed on our shores were certainly not the cosmopolitan type who transplant well. They remained homesick all their lives and kept moving westward.

 

The Jews, homesick for the Promised Land, have been on the move for two thousand years.”

 

My response: Hoffer is so concise and yet each word, each concept is pregnant with meaning, so a white paper may not be lengthy enough to capture the essence of each entry.

 

Hoffer was so prescient: I equate the cosmopolitan types that he identified 80 years with the college-educated, global elitists today, that are rootless and at home with living anywhere on the globe as long as they are men of words and men of action, serving willingly and proudly as part of the current aristocracy, the ruling technocratic elites running government and institutions in countries across the world.

 

But these people are totalitarians and parasites, intellectuals on the top of society, living off  the people they detest, feel contempt towards, and strive to dominate, manage and reduce, and to keep in their place.

 

The masses need to feel they belong somewhere geographically and culturally, and this can be achieved if a generation of Americans were reared up as individuating supercitizens to run America and feel at home in America.

 

I ask myself: who are these homesick people that Hoffer mentions but does not define? I will define them, and I hope I do not miss the mark.

 

A people or an individual are homesick when they are, as a group or as an atomistically-existing separate individual, they are alienated physically and spiritually. In the case of the peasants and burghers from Europe that were flung unceremoniously upon America’s shores, these group-oriented, nonindividuating collectivists (collectivized as being groupist) were geographically and spiritually awakened from their warm, dogmatic pack slumbers in Europe, thrust into wakefulness, painful and cold, in America and left to fend for themselves.

 

Many become individualistic and capitalistic, and this made them materially successful and grew America, but it did little or nothing to alleviate their profoundly, lonely, scary feelings of being lost, alienated from a warm group cocoon in which to hide from themselves, and to feel cared for by their favored group structures.

 

Those that did not find a replacement group structure in America to join and flee from the self and the obligation to run one’s own life on one’s own, they remained, anomic, rootless, wandering like street people, no center, no home, no sense of belonging.

 

Some of these homesick people were discontented, verging on frustration in their alienated state and status, but found no purpose, home, or sense of belonging while working and living as Americans, and homesickness and wandering were their destiny for a lifetime as they kept moving west, seeking a home, a refuge, a group to dissolve inside of, never finding it for whatever reason.

 

The only lasting cure is to maverize full-bore but that is a cold, invigorating, frightening adventure that most people cringe away from and flee.

 

Hoffer notes that the Jews in the Diaspora have been homesick for 2,000 years. Now, Hamas wants to kill them all: the Jews are the native Palestinians and Israel is their homeland. They are not apartheid, racist, oppressive colonizers, and imperialists—the new blood libel from the modern Islamic and Progressive anti-Semites and Jew-haters.

 

 The Jews are willing to coexist peacefully with Muslim neighbors, but the latter are unwilling to live quietly together side by side with the Jews. We must never again allow the Jews to be butchered, nor their homeland taken from them anymore. Never again.