From his book The Ordeal of Change (written between 1952 and 1963), Eric Hoffer in Chapter 2 (The Awakening of Asia) writes about what happens to sleepy peoples when drastic change startles them awake. I will quote the entire essay, from Page 6 through 13, paragraph by paragraph, and then comment on what he wrote.
Hoffer: “The tendency is to ascribe the present revolution in Asia to Communist agitation, or see it as an upheaval against foreign domination or misrule by corrupt native governments. Though there is a large element of truth in these views they somehow fail to go to the heart of the matter.”
My response: I have often commented elsewhere upon Hofferian paradox, his knack for pointing out what the world claims is happening, versus what is really going on, and what he ascribes as what is going on. His writer’s resort to this device of paradox often comes across as counterintuitive to the reader, but Hoffer is usually right.
In this particular essay, he is pointing out that, at the heart of the matter, the awakened Asian peoples were upset, because much disruptive change has occurred, and then revolt against the native status quo arose, driven not so much by Communists, anti-colonial native resentment, or native repulsion of corrupt native governments, but by the loss of traditional values and culture, the shattering of being groupist in a warm, communal existence.
Hoffer: “The nations of Asia have for uncounted centuries submitted to one conqueror after another and been misruled, looted and bled by both foreign and native oppressors without letting out a peep. If then the masses are now rising in protest, it is not because domination and corrupt have become unduly oppressive, but because the masses today are not what they were in the past. Something has happened to change their temper. We are told, it is true, that an awakening has taken place in Asia. But if this ‘awakening’ is to be more than a metaphor, it must refer to specific changes in individual attitudes, inclinations, and aspirations. We ought to know what these changes are and how they were brought about.
My response: Hoffer often disagrees with standard explanations.
Hoffer: “The same is true of Communist agitation: its effectiveness is Asia is due less to the potency of the propaganda than to the temper of the people it is trying to propagandize. When not backed by force, Communist propaganda can persuade people only of what they want to believe, and it can make headway only when it gives people something they desperately desire. It seems obvious that we cannot began to speculate on the state of affairs in Asia unless we have a fairly clear idea of the individual attitudes, inclinations, and, above all, desires prevailing there at present. What is it that the ill-fed, ill-clad, and ill-housed masses in China, India, and Indonesia, etc., so desperately desire?
Economic theory can give only a dull and unconvincing answer. One thinks of the shouting and marching, and the sea of upturned faces one has seen in newsreels and photographs—grimacing, passionate faces, each framing a gaping mouth. One wonders what is going on behind these faces and what is it that the gaping mouths shout. Do they shout for bread, clothing, and houses? Do they clamor for the good things of life? Do they call for freedom and justice? No. The clamor that is rising all over the Orient is a clamor for pride. The masses in Asia will sacrifice every economic benefit they have, and their lives too, to satisfy their craving for pride. The sea of open mouths roars defiance and not economic grievances and demands. As we shall see, this clamoring for pride is a characteristic manifestation of the process of awakening, and it is by probing the nature of this process that we are most likely to reach the core of our problem.”
My response: Hoffer, the latent egoist moralist, is an absolute expert on groups and their social and governmental living arrangements and relationships. I believe he implicitly suggests that that all humans would find sanity, goodness, the good life, and happiness, if they were individuators.
Asian peoples, even more collectivistic than Westerners, though in no way inferior, lived for thousands of years in very tight collectivities, grounded in altruist-collectivist morality.
As long as their traditional way of life and their group structures were intact, these peoples endured tyranny, want, suffering and human rights abuses, without much radical outrage and revolt. When they were recently awakened from their traditional collectivist slumbers, they were deprived of their group pride in their traditional values, structures and social dispensation. No people can live without pride, so this is why they were or seemed ready to revolt by the 1950s; they were less angry about suffering injustice, than they were about losing their communal culture and collectivities that so long comforted them warmly and tribally kept any hint of individualism per person at bay. I believe this is what Hoffer is leading up to—this interpretation of Asian unrest.
If I am correct in suggesting that Hoffer is a moral egoist, then he would likely accept that wholesome, realistic self-esteem is healthy pride, positive pride. It is an earned state of self-consciousness, always provisional, always based upon one’s moral character and accomplishments, never granted for life. One must reinforce being proud of one’s character and accomplishments by continual self-realizing anew each day for a lifetime.
If Asian peoples, as historically, radically groupist as they are, when jolted awake by drastic, rapid change—as they were in the 19th and 20th century—found their traditional collectivities and cultural narratives shattered or crumbling, it is understandable that the kind of collective self-esteem, or group/national/ tribal or racial pride that they felt and paraded would be so diminished and reduced, that they might well be motivated to grab onto substitute sources of collective self-esteem or tribal pride in their country, in Communist agitation, in revolutionary ideology.
Neither individualist nor groupist can long endure life’s uncertainties, struggling and suffering without a compensatory sense of pride, and collective self-esteem is the eagerly required pride that these Asian peoples sought after. I think this is what Hoffer is alluding to as the cause of much of the upheaval and turmoil roiling Asia in the 50s when he wrote this essay.
Hoffer: “To say that the impact of the West was a chief factor in the awakening of Asia is not to say that it was oppression and exploitation by the Western colonial powers that did it. For not only are oppression and exploitation an old story in Asia, but the colonial regimes of the British in India and of the Dutch in Indonesia were fairly beneficent—more so perhaps than any regime those countries ever had or are likely to have for some time. I am convinced that were the Western colonial powers a hundred times more beneficent, and had they been animated from the very beginning by the purest philanthropic motives, their impact on the Orient would still have had the fateful consequences we are witnessing at present. For Western influence, irrespective of its intentions, almost always brought a fateful change wherever it penetrated, and it is this change that is at the root of the present revolutionary unrest.”
My response: I concur: unsettling change that shattered the group structures and memes did upend and dislodge millions upon millions of Asians, so they sought mass movement like substituted collective pride, and a place to hide from their spoiled, frustrated personal lives. Collectivized peoples become explosive and passionate when encountering violent, prodigious social upheaval.
Hoffer: The change I had in mind is of a specific nature—the weakening and cracking of the communal framework. Everywhere in Asia before the advent of Western influence the individual was integrated into a more or less compact group—a patriarchal family, a clan or tribe, a cohesive rural or urban unit, a compact religious or political body. From birth to death the individual felt himself part of a continuous eternal whole. He never felt alone, never felt lost, never saw himself as a speck of life floating in an eternity of nothingness. By trade, legislation, education, industrialization, and by example, it cracked and corroded the traditional way of life, and drained existing communal structures of their prestige and effectiveness. The Western colonial powers offered individual freedom. They tried to shake the Oriental out of his lethargy, rid him of his ossified traditionalism, and infect him with a craving for self-advancement. The result was not emancipation but isolation and exposure. An immature individual was torn from the warmth and security of a corporate existence and left orphaned and empty in a cold world. It was this shock of abandonment and exposure which brought about the awakening of Asia. The crumbling of the corporate body, with the abandonment of the individual to his own devices, is always a critical phase in social development. The newly emerging individual can attain some degree of stability and eventually become inured to the burdens and strains of individual existence only when he is offered abundant opportunities for self-assertion and self-realization. He needs an environment in which achievement, acquisition, sheer action, or the development of his capacities and talents seems within easy reach. It is only thus that he can acquire the self-confidence and the self-esteem that makes an individual existence bearable or even exhilarating.”
My response: I believe Hoffer is articulate and accurate in describing how the mid-twentieth century awakening of Asia roused in those awakened groupists a burning need for replacement ism, culture and social collectivities to substitute for their traditional communal existence, now threatened or severely altered; their replacement collectivist institutions were sought by them to serve up to them on a platter, a substitute collective pride in themselves and their way of life, to stand in for their lost group pride in their traditional collectivities and cherished ways of life.
What a Mavellonialist like me can offer Asians and all earthlings, is some basic training in living as an individuating supercitizen, who learns to provide his own abundant opportunities for self-assertion and self-realization. Concomitantly, he can substitute real pride or self-esteem for fleeting group-pride or unearned pride in his groupist associations, and their justifying stories.
Hoffer: “Where self-confidence and self-esteem seem unattainable, the emerging individual becomes a highly explosive entity.”
My response: Here is where a culture and society of individuators, politically free, living their egoist ethics as free marketers in a law-abiding, peaceful society, would invent their own access to activities that would offer them self-confidence and self-esteem. A nation of individuating supercitizens would emerge and evolve as self-esteeming maverizers. They would be change, welcome change, and do change at room temperature, with little or no need to resort to political upheaval, revolution, war, or violence to effect needed or unavoidable social change. Supercitizens would not become frustrated, passionate, true believers desperately seeking explosive change to construct a makeshift, collective home to hide from themselves inside of.
Were the lifestyle of individuating to become popular and accessible among the Asian masses, they would not only endure and survive bracing change, but they would welcome it, flourish in its introduction swirling around them. They would then do change without becoming scared, confused, lost, angered or mass-movementized. They would embrace change, find, and keep their individual pride and self-esteem; to accomplish these goals, they would have to have abandoned their natural craving for herd-living as nonindividuators, who justify their evil and mediocrity, resorting to a web of lies which we can name collective-self-esteem. As maverizing supercitizens, their basically conservative natures would absorb waves of change without change, that historical march of time and action, without this ontological, invading inevitability much hurting them.
Hoffer: “He tries to derive a sense of confidence and worth by embracing some absolute truth and by identifying himself with the spectacular doings of a leader or some collective body—be it a nation, a congregation, a party, or a mass movement. He and his like become a breeding ground of convulsions and upheavals that shake a society to its foundations. It needs a rare constellation of circumstances if the transition from a communal to an individual existence is to run its course without being diverted or reversed by catastrophic complications”
My response: This remarkable man wrote this paragraph, perhaps as early as 1952, perhaps as late as 1963. Hoffer the genius and kind man long ago sensed that people were not born basically good and that innate-per-person, self-loathing, or self-hatred, or lacking self-esteem is the essence of being born evil. Selflessness, or group-orientedness, is the natural, human affliction. As long as a people like the Asians lived within their compact communal structures, with its collectivist culture and inherited mythologies to comfort people personally, to allow them to live and die as change and the history unfolds each day in their lives, they were able to remain largely hidden from beckoning God, and the horrible responsibility to run their own lives.
When drastic change and history smash that traditional, communal cocoon, in which they reside and hide eagerly from themselves, the masses are awakened, no longer able to feel proud of themselves with that false, shallow, substitute, unfulfilling sense of collective pride or group-driven self-esteem, they awaken, angry, bitter, confused, resentful, frightened, seeking radical ideology and mass-movement allegiance to restore some semblance of their collective pride.
The superior alternative, when facing drastic change, is to come fully awake, to self-realize, to leave the group and individual-live, that is the last thing that they resolve to do. Who wants to stand on one’s own resources and efforts, in a lonely, cold reality, and self-develop and go against the group, to be ostracized and persecuted, just to maverize and then feel some merited sense of self-esteeming or personal pride?
I would suggest that the Mavellonialist, emerging culture of citizens as adult individuating supercitizens will offer the American Way as a successful pathway for the people of the world to evolve out of communal existence into a community of individual existing.
Hoffer: “Europe at the turn of the fifteenth century witnessed a similar release of the individual from the corporate pattern of an all-embracing Church. At the beginning, the release was accidental. A weakened and discredited Church lost its hold on the minds and souls of the people of Europe. There too, the emergence of the individual was less a deliberate emancipation than an abandonment. But how different were the attending circumstances then from what they are now in Asia. The emerging European individual at the end of the Middle Ages faced breathtaking vistas of new continents just discovered, new trade routes just opened up, the prospect of fabulous empires yet to be stumbled upon, and new knowledge unlocked by the introduction of paper and printing. The air was charged with great expectations and there was a feeling abroad that by the exercise of his capacities and talents and with the aid of good fortune the individual on his own was equal to any undertaking at home or across the sea.”
My response: Hoffer turns to European history coming out of the Middle Ages to make his case that the precedent for the rise of individualism in Asia in the mid-20th century was undertaken by Europeans over 400 years earlier. It seems as if the rise of individualism on earth is largely a European and Western story and adventure, but it needs to become the story of individuals that maverize among all peoples, of all races, of all backgrounds, from every country on earth.
The emancipation of the individual as individuators, from the shackles and chains of miserable slavery as individuals as groupists who are nonindividuators, will be the adventure and opportunity of the rest of the 21st century, and this hopefully gentle revolution must be consciously planned and put into practiced everywhere for all, Asians, and non-Asians.
We are smart creatures—when we want to be-Dr. Stephen Hicks is always reminding us: this indicates we can devise free, lawful, peaceful, free-market economies and social structures which give each earthling the fabulous opportunity to do her thing and become the best version of herself. The challenge is there, but abundance, resources and wealth either are available or we can fabricate them, to nudge all to find a means to leave behind communal existence, embracing individual existence, and the needed source of pride (genuine, earned self-esteem) is available to each maverizing maverizer, as they endure daily change as we earthlings pass through time, change and history, all metaphysical, unstoppable, realities.
Hoffer: “Thus by a fortuitous combination of circumstances, the fateful change from a communal to an individual existence produced an outburst of vitality that has since been characteristic of the Occident and marks it off from any other civilization. Yet even so, the transition was not altogether smooth. The convulsions of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation stemmed from the fears and passionate intensities of people unequal to the burdens and strains of an individual existence.”
My response: We cannot imagine how our economy, knowledge, talent, and high culture will almost unlimitedly grow in quantity and surpassing excellence as the masses in all or any country pass from communal existing to individual existing as individuators and supercitizens.
If we teach our young to be stoic, rational, and calm, no matter how much chaos, catastrophe, war, and social upheaval surrounds them, to maverize and think of ways to build a new way of peaceful, civilized, lawful, free societal living, then these indviduator citizens will be able to find self-esteem without joining ideology-driven mass movements. They will sustain and enjoy the individual existence, without resorting to groupism and meretricious group-driven, collectivist self-esteem.
Hoffer: “No such exceptional combination of circumstances attended the crumbling of communal life in Asia. There the awakening of the individual occurred in a landscape strewn with the litter and rubble of the centuries. Instead of being stirred and lured by the breath-taking prospects and undreamt-of opportunities, he finds himself mired in a life that is stagnant, debilitated, and inordinately meager. It is a world where human life is most plentiful and cheapest thing, and where millions of hungry hands grab at the meanest prize and meagerest morsel. It is, moreover, an illiterate world, where even rudimentary education confers distinction and lifts a man above the common run of toiling humanity. The articulate minority is thus prevented from acquiring a sense of usefulness and worth in the world’s work, and is condemned to a life of chattering, posturing pseudo-intellectuals.”
My response: We no longer require a world with such huge, intricate hierarchies and institutions, especially governmental ones, beyond a lean, minimal set envisioned by Ayn Rand and America’s Founders, our constitutional republic, and our capitalist economy.
Where each person is not minimally but is highly educated and self-realizing (the majority of adults), then each maverizers can work in private enterprise in some capacity, and feel useful and worthy and still maverize, without elites running much of anything.
Hoffer: “The rabid extremist in present-day Asia is usually a man of some education who has a horror of manual labor and who develops a mortal hatred for a social order that denies him a position of command. Every student, every minor clerk and officeholder, every petty member of the professions feels himself one of the chosen.”
My response: It is human nature not to like ourselves, and we are desperate to gain needed group pride, that fake, substitute groupist self-esteem (A lie told by Satan, other group-members and by the self to the self, the lie that living as a nonindivdiuator hiding in the herd is a basis for feeling the self is worthy, where the self-sought pleasure and ease and never pushed the self-much while alive. God is displeased.)
We can gain this negative, false group-pride by being part of the ruling elite, or a popular, conformist insider with tangible social rank and respect in the social hierarchy of one’s clique. When modestly educated people are able to rise above the masses, to rule the masses and look down upon them, this corrupting temptation is almost impossible for any of us to resist succumbing to. This is how power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Hoffer: “It is these wordy, futile people who set the tone in Asia. Living barren, useless lives, they are without self-confidence and self-respect, and their craving is for the illusion of weight and importance, and for the explosive substitutes of pride and faith.”
My response: The only workable, enduring defense, the masses can resort to defeat and contain educated, nonindividuating, collectivized, power-addicted, true-believing elitists and their mass movement addiction to the explosive substitutes for positive individual pride, collective pride and faith, is to unite and organize among themselves and raise themselves up by their bootstraps as individuating supercitizens that rule and ordered about all elites that used to run the country. This could work in any country on earth.
Hoffer: “It is chiefly to these pseudointellectuals that Communist Russia directs its appeal. It brings them the promise of membership in a ruling elite, the prospect of having a hand in the historical process, and, by its doctrinaire double-talk, provides them with some sense of weight and depth.
As to the illiterate masses, the appeal of Communist preaching does not lie in its ‘truths,’ but in the vague impression it conveys to them that they and Russia are partners in some tremendous, unprecedented undertaking—the building of a proud future that will surpass and put to naught all the ‘things that are.’”
My response: The awakened frustrated masses joined the Communist mass movement because it offered them the best chance to find a new ism and social order where their collective pride and cocoon to hide from the self, could be reestablished—and the revolutionary story and new collectivities seemed so appealing, modern, and up to date.
Hoffer: “The crucial fact about the awakening of Asia is that it did not come from an accession of strength. It was not brought about by a gradual or sudden increase of material, intellectual, or moral powers, but by the shock of abandonment and exposure. It was an awakening brought about by a poignant sense of weakness.”
My response: It does not matter if the awakening is brought about by a poignant sense of weakness. The change occurred. History has spoken, so we need to help peoples become individuating supercitizens with earned, wholesome, justifiable self-esteem and personal pride. This is ideally what the awakening of a people should lead to.
Hoffer: “And we must know something about the mentality and potentialities of the weak if we are to understand the present temper of the people in awakening Asia.
It is often said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.”
My response: The power of powerfulness does not corrupt, and this power is the innate power given by the Divine Couple to each baby so she can maverize and make the kingdom of God be expanded and maintained on earth while she is alive on her watch. She, if she obeyed the Light Couple and becomes willfully a maverizing supercitizen, then she will allow no other human, an elite or a mob, to rob her of her share of power or entice her to rob other individuators of their share of divine power allotted them to make something of their lives.
The evil power of powerlessness is what Hoffer is referring to above. That dark and cruel form of power corrupts the few, the elite, but these putatively selfish users and monsters are selfless and other-interested for the most part. They are groupist parasites and criminals, living off the herd that they exploit, abuse and dictate to.
They are the sadists who have gathered all or most available all the power and money for themselves, these rulers inflict the power of powerlessness upon the masses who freely choose submit to them. Thusly the many are corrupted by their weakness, their voluntary, masochistic willingness to be abused slaves without power or resources; this stunted, miserable existence is what they settle for and believe this is what they deserve. Their real motive is to hide in the enslaved, nonindividuating group, just so they can avoid individually awakening, confronting the Good Spirits, taking up their personal burden and cross of individuating, to develop their talents and capacities to help run and expand God’s kingdom on earth.
Hoffer: “Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the fruits of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of their inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression. St. Vincent de Paul cautioned his disciples to deport themselves so the poor ‘will forgive you the bread you give them.’ But this requires, in both giver and receiver, a vivid awareness of God who is the father of all, and a living mastery of the religious idiom which we of this day do not, and perhaps cannot, have in full measure. Nor can we win the weak by sharing our hope, pride, or even hatred with them. We are too far ahead materially and too different in our historical experience to serve as an object of identification. Our healing gift to the weak is the capacity for self-help. We must learn how to impart to them the technical, social, and political skills which would enable them to get bread, human dignity, freedom, and strength by their own efforts.
My hunch is that in mastering the art or the technique of helping the weak to help themselves we shall solve some of the critical problems which confront us, not only in our foreign relations but also in our domestic affairs.”
My response: My response: I believe Hoffer the atheist was a wise and kind as well as a brilliant philosopher. When he points out above how hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are fruits of weakness, he is pointing out that evil thinking and evil behavior are crops planted in the soil of the individual soul, in his selfless, altruistic, nonindividuating, group-living role, where selflessness, group-orientedness and self-hatred that are the spiritual core of his individual consciousness. His poignant awareness of his shabby personhood necessarily causes the bubbling into his human, social consciousness from the subconscious and unconscious of this suffering human, such awful, antisocial attitudes, and behaviors.
The strong for Hoffer are those that are the ruling elites, but he also seems to suggest that the strong are individual and individuators without much social or institutional power beyond their slightly upper middle-class position.
For Hoffer, the weak are the ruled, subjugated, suffering masses, but the weak are also those that wield the power of powerlessness, whether they are the ruling elite, or the subjugated masses, who all support and put up with group-living and hierarchical strata and misallocation of power, money, liberty, and resources.
Hoffer the wise wants peoples in the developed West, and everywhere, to engage in self-help, so they can save themselves. Only they will they feel real pride in their earned status and victories. If we could encourage people to maverize, that would greatly assist them on the road to self-helping.
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