Control

 

On Page 111 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer writes two entries which I quote and then comment on.

 

 

Hoffer: “          196

 

The control of our being is not unlike the combination of a safe. One turn of the knob rarely unlocks the safe. Each advance and retreat is a step towards one’s goal.”

 

My response: Hoffer, the realistic, patient ontological moderate, is stating that self-development or growth is never just linear, never without hitches, setbacks and complications; still, for she who stays at it, progress can be made, fumbling and stumbling along each day.

 

 

Hoffer: “          197

 

 

Conservatism is sometimes a symptom of sterility. Those who have nothing in them that can grow and develop must cling to what they have in beliefs, ideas and possessions. The sterile radical, too, is basically conservative. He is afraid to let go of the ideas and beliefs he picked up in his youth lest his life be seen as empty and wasted.”

 

My response: The clue to translating Hofferesque entries into regular English is to understand that he regards humans as naturally weak, not very nice, lazy, group-living and conformist. They need a sense of self-worth to go on living: if that sense of pride in the self is based upon individuating and being of good and loving character, then the self will proudly openly acknowledge being what one actually is. One dares speak the truth to the self and out in the public because the self is not an ish or nonentity.

 

Where—and this is standard and normal for most people—when the life lived is sterile, empty, and wasted because the altruistic nonindividuator just lays around in the pack decade after decade getting little or nothing done—the desperately need sense of personal worth must be based on a lie and self-deception. When is an ish and a nonentity, then the imaged, imagined self displayed to the self and to the world must be a fake, because the self cannot stand dealing with what one is actually without going mad or committing suicide.

 

One is a self-proclaimed stagnant conservative or a sterile radical that clings to his old ideas, beliefs, associations, and possessions because, behind them and underneath them there is not self, no soul, to ground all of these rationalizations and fancies.