The First Accuser

 

On Page 109 if his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer has two entries which I quote and then comment on.

 

Hoffer: “          192

 

By accusing others of a crime we committed or are about to commit, we drain all force from any accusation which may be leveled against us. We attach a quality of hollowness and incredibility to the formula of indictment.”

 

My response: Hoffer does not think well of human nature. We often do not mind committing a crime, or not feeling guilty about having committed a crime, and may well plan to commit a similar crime in the future. One of the misapplications of human ingenuity occurs when an evildoer accuses others of a crime that he has committed, and he cleverly schemes to deflect blame from himself, and also by blaming others, he lessens whatever guilt that he may have felt inside for his criminal acts.

 

 

Hoffer: “          193

 

If what we do and feel today is not in harmony with what we want to be tomorrow, the meeting with our hope at the end of the trail is likely to be embarrassing or even hostile. Thus it often happens that a man slays his hope even as he battles for it.”

 

My response: Hoffer is so understated in so many ways, but his entries are rich with possibilities, so I will take liberties and assume things about the entry above, which he did not say, which I cannot prove, but that seem to be coherent with his worldview and what he writes over time.

 

My theory: I believe that God made humans to serve God, oneself, humanity, and the world by living a holy and virtuous life of self-realization, and that living as an advanced individual and individuators, whose self-realization is one’s telos, is the charge that God makes against each human.

 

I believe Hoffer thinks this way, roughly, only he replaces God with nature, because God does not exist, he stated often. As an aside, if he, an atheist like Ayn Rand, espouses that nature demands from humans that the self-realize, then there is some until now undiscovered convergence in their thinking.

 

Returning to Hoffer entry 193, if what we do and have done fails to match our permanent goal of self-realizing as a life plan, when we see how little we have accomplished when we are old, and life has passed us by, the meeting of our dashed hope when pitted against our pathetic performing and mediocre performance, we will be racked by guilt and self-contempt.

 

We have two ways to go when young or middle-aged, and yet somehow glimpsing this sad result of a life poorly performed by becoming an old nonindividuator.

 

We could man up and maverize, and then do well and feel well about our lives and performance as our adult performance tracks well with our adolescent hopes.

 

Far more typically, we will settle the issue permanently by erasing or burying our sense of hope to maverize. If the hope is extinguished, then we will be mediocrities, but we will have deceived ourselves long enough, and lie hard enough, often enough, that we come to promote and feel righteous about being a group-living, nonindividuating, popular mediocrity as moral, desirable and preferable and superior to a life of maverizing.