Shocking Change

 

In his book, The Ordeal of Change, from Pages 1 to 5, Eric Hoffer writes a Chapter 1 essay called drastic change, which I quote and then comment on.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “It is my impression that no one really likes the new. We are afraid of it. It is not only as Dostoevsky put it that ‘taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear most.’ Even in slight things the experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding.”

 

My response: We are naturally very conservative, passive, fatalistic creatures who would avoid encounters with the new at all costs, if necessity would not prevent us from dealing with irksome change.

 

H: “Back in 1936 I spent a good part of the year picking peas. I started out early in January in the Imperial Valley and drifted northward, picking peas as they ripened, until I picked the last peas of the season, in June, around Tracy. Then I shifted all the way back to Lake Country, where for the first time I was going to pick string beans. And I still remember how hesitant I was that first morning as I was about to address myself to the string bean vines. Would I be able to pick string beans? Even the change from peas to string beans had in it elements of fear.”

 

My response: To fear the new is typical, but one must possess the will and confidence to give it a try, and then see if one can handle these changes.

 

H: “In the case of drastic change the uneasiness is of course deeper and most lasting. We can never be really prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis of self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs inordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.”

 

My response: Change is a given part of life, and the crisis of self-esteem is a hit that all people are inflicted with as they fumble forward trying on the new. Hoffer, the implicitly egoist moralist, intuitively sensed that the ideal, desirable, and wholesome psychological state that the modern human must adopt, possess and become is to a person of high personal confidence and high self-esteem requisite for each human to be strong enough to, and sure of the self enough to survive and work her way through being unavoidably buffeted by the winds of change.

 

Hoffer: “The simple fact that we can never be fit and ready for that which is wholly new has some peculiar results. It means that a population undergoing drastic change is a population of misfits, and misfits live and breathe in an atmosphere of passion. There is a close connection between lack of confidence and the passionate state of mind and, as we shall see, passionate intensity may serve as a substitute for confidence. The connection can be observed in all walks of life. A workingman sure of his skill goes leisurely about his job and accomplishes much though he works as if at play. On the other hand, the workingman new to his trade attacks his work as if he were saving the world, and he must do so if he is to get anything done at all. The same is true of a soldier. A well-trained soldier will fight well even when not stirred by strong feeling. His morale is good because his thorough training gives him a sense of confidence. But the untrained solder will give a good account of himself only when only when animated by faith and enthusiasm. Cromwell used to say that the common folk needed ‘the fear of God before them’ to match the soldierly cavaliers. Faith, enthusiasm and passionate intensity in general are substitutes for self-confidence born of experience and the possession of skill. Where there is the necessary skill to move mountains there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.”

 

My response: Hoffer is advising that drastic change is the constant modern destabilizing factors undermining people self-confidence, their sense of fitness and competence. When people are reduced to being passionate misfits, then mass movements and social chaos flourish, and that is undesirable.

 

Faith is a good deity, enthusiasm about our pursuits and some passionate intensities are healthy, as long as one internally controls and moderates them by balancing them with reasonableness, calmness, confidence and skill.

 

This dispassionate stoic, especially an individuators, will be misfitted and daunted when encountering massive change, like anyone else, but with his self-training, self-confidence and unwillingness to abandon to self no matter what happens externally, he will possess the self-possession and skill to flail around like everyone else embracing the wholly new, until he stumbles into ways to cope with it and make it manageable, so he is stabilized, calm, competetent and confident. It seems that Hoffer could suggest that this individuators’s approach to handling drastic change is one way for humans to survive the modern age.

 

H: “As I said, a population subjected to drastic change is a population of misfits—unbalanced, explosive and hungry for action. Action if the most obvious way by which to gain confidence and prove our worth, and it is also a reaction against loss of balance—a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one’s balance and keep afloat. Thus drastic change is one of the agencies which release men’s energies,, but certain conditions have to be present if the shock of change is to turn people into effective men of action: There must be an abundance of opportunities, and there must be a tradition of self-reliance. Given these conditions, a population subjected to drastic change will plunge into an orgy of action.”

 

My response: If a population were individuators, highly self-reliant and so confident and self-regarding, that crises, drastic change, and colossal personal failure will frustrate them and slow them down, without their falling apart. Either rich opportunity and chance for action will allow them to fill fit, worthy and compensating, or they will invent their own opportunities out of nothing—they will not be stopped or thwarted for very long.

 

H: “The millions of immigrants dumped on our shores after the Civil War underwent a tremendous change, and it was a highly irritating and painful experience. Not only were they transferred, almost overnight, to a wholly foreign world, but they were, for the most part torn from the warm communal existence of a small town or village somewhere in Europe and exposed to the cold and dismal isolation of an individual existence. They were misfits in every sense of the word, and ideal material for revolutionary explosion. But they had a vast continent at their disposal, and fabulous opportunities for self-advancement, and an environment which held self-reliance and individual enterprise in high esteem. And so these immigrants from stagnant small towns and villages in Europe plunged into a mad pursuit of action. They tamed and mastered a continent in an incredibly short time, and we are still in the backwash of that mad pursuit.”

 

My response: Hoffer studied, learned from and offers lessons to be learned from American history. Groupist peoples need not joint mass movements or revolutionary movements as passionate misfits fleeing their rotten, detested personal lives.

 

Given training as individualists and egoists, especially individuators, in a free market, republican society, they can create wealth and build a life for themselves, including a calm, pleasing existence where they fit in, and have fabricated a world fit to match their new natures.

 

H: “Things are different when people are subjected to drastic change find only meager opportunities for action or when they cannot, or are not allowed to, attain self-confidence and self-esteem by individual pursuits. In this case, the hunger for confidence, for worth and for balance directs itself towards the attainments of substitutes. The substitute for self-confidence is faith; the substitute for self-esteem is pride; and the substitute for individual balance is fusion with others in a compact group.”

 

My response: Where people are born into countries that are authoritarian in governmental structure, and feudalist or communist economically, there, there will be only meager opportunities for action, money-making, and business ventures so remarkably plentiful and uplifting in a free society of free market economic.

 

Where people cannot gain self-confidence and self-esteem by personal effort, they must settle for intoxicating, enticing but ultimately toxic substitutes, all with the selves having fled into various collectivist arrangements where the self can escape the guilt of being a blemished individual.

 

Rational faith in God is uplifting, but overly passionate faith if a good deity or in any ism is a form of demon worship. It is collectivist pride in one’s ism, mass movement or group that substitutes for lost self-esteem. The poor substitute for individual balance is fusion with others in the compact group, the social occurrence that is the well from which hell broth erupts, poisoning all who drink from this source.

 

H: “ It needs no underlining that this reaching out for  substitutes means trouble. In the chemistry of the soul, a substitute is almost always explosive if for no other reason than that we can never have enough of it. We can never have enough of that which we really do not want. What we want is justified self-confidence and self-esteem. If we cannot have the originals, we can never have enough of the substitutes. We can be satisfied with moderate confidence in ourselves and with a moderately good opinion of ourselves, but the faith we have in a holy cause has to be extravagant and uncompromising, and the pride we derive from an identification with a nation, race, leader or party is extreme and overbearing. The fact that a substitute can never become an organic part of ourselves makes our holding onto it passionate and intolerant.”

 

My response: Hoffer the egoist moralist equates what is organic, original, and growing out of the self are ideas, causes, associations and ambitions consistent with the rational and creative work produced by the self, and that self is confident but not strutting, self-regarding but not narcissistic, and at peace.

 

Where those seeking self-esteem and self-confidence are unable to acquire them, they settle for substitutes of which they can never have enough of what they really do not want and did not want. The passionate true believer is uncompromising, inordinately proud, and violently intolerant but he will never be happy or contented.

 

H: To sum up: When a population undergoing drastic change is without abundant opportunities for individual action and self-advancement, it develops a hunger for faith, pride, and unity. It become receptive to all manner of proselytizing, and is eager to throw itself into collective undertakings which aim at ‘showing the world.’ In other words, drastic change, under certain conditions, creates a proclivity for fanatical attitudes, united action, and spectacular manifestations flouting and defiance; it creates an atmosphere of revolution. We are usually told that revolutions are set in motion to realize radical changes. Actually, it is drastic change which sets the stage for revolution. The revolutionary mood and temper are generated by the irritations, difficulties, hungers and frustrations inherent in the realization of drastic change.

 

Where things have not changed at all, there is least likelihood of revolution.”

 

My response: Here is another Hofferian paradox: it is not revolution that brings radical change, but it is drastic change that is the mother of revolution. With drastic change, the reality of a misfitted self becomes self-consciously recognized by the self that wants sand prizes self-forgetfulness above all else.

 

When the action and opportunities are lacking for the self to act, then the self seeks dissatisfying, explosive substitutes—faith, pride, and unity. The collective gates of hell are now opened wide as monsters pour out into the world.