Bereft

 

5222024

 

Hoffer C

 

Bereft

 

On Page 121 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer  has three entries which I quote and then  comment on.

 

 

Hoffer: “          217

 

Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.”

 

My response: If we try harder to hide our emptiness than we do our evil and our ugliness, that tells me that we have a darn good moral reason to hide our emptiness. It would seem to suggest that being evil or ugly imply that the grievious sinners still possesses some individuality or personality, and the individual is good, and the group is sinful, unless tightly restricted, managed and minimized.

 

Where one is invisible, empty with no personality at all, that person is a black hole of pure evil and concentrated self-despising; that wretched state must  be kept hidden.

 

 

Hoffer: “          218

 

The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.”

 

My response: Our passions, urges, phobias and desperate seeking for pride of any kind—no matter how unmerited—these emotional drivers of low human behavior make group-oriented masses susceptible to being charmed and manipulated by wily gurus and demagogues.

 

 

Hoffer:  “         219

 

Man staggers through his life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.”

 

My response: It is natural and understandable that a person would seek to self-forget and escape into consciousness oblivion which being immersed inside a collectivity provides, but that is not living, individuating, or existing as a responsible adult, when one yields to self-surrender and evasion of duty.