Imitation

 

Chapter 4 of his book, The Ordeal of Change, is an essay written by Eric Hoffer, and its title is Imitation and Fanaticism. I quote the entire chapter which runs from Page 20 through Page 26 of his book, and then I comment on its content.

 

Hoffer: “At present, the modernization of a backward country is still largely a process of Westernization—that transplantation of practices, methods and attitudes indigenous to Western Europe and America.”

 

My response: I could just anticipate a Progressive going into a tirade over Hoffer’s sentence above, the arrogant assumption that the West (America and Europe) were not only more advanced materially, economically, militarily, and technically than backward countries in the developing world, but that Hoffer likely assumed that Westerners were more advanced culturally too than primitive, backwards, superstitious, uncivilized Third World peoples.

 

Hoffer might think these thoughts, as a member of the generation that he belonged too, and I think he would, if he did so regard Third Worlders, be more correct than incorrect. Third Worlders do need Western technology, individualism, republicanism, democracy, prosperity, science, reason, individualism, and its quasi-egoistic Judeo-Christian morality.

 

With Hoffer, intellectually superficial ideologues can easily dismiss him and condemn him as racist, patriarchal and a defender of brutal Western colonialism, but they would be mistaken, erroneous and willfully blind about this fine and good man. Deep down, taken in context, Hoffer the brusque believes that all people, from every nation and every race, are more or less created equal, and that with the right values, they no longer need to be collectivist, uncivilized or backward.

 

Hoffer: “This means the rapid modernization is above all a process of imitation which renders rapid modernization so explosive and convulsive.”

 

My response: This is a rich, complex sentence of few words. Hoffer assumes that Third Worlders are groupist, altruistic, clan-driven, or tribal peoples who lives in tyrannies, more or less socialist economically. Rapid change or rapid modernization is never a good idea, especially for downtrodden, communal people of the Third World that must become frustrated, seek a mass movement with its narrative to worship and extend as true believers or passionate fanatics. War, revolution, totalitarian government, and civil war are almost guaranteed. The situation is inherently explosive and convulsive.

 

 

The ordeal of change can be withstood if people admit they are sinners, groupists, selfless, altruistic second-handers that hate themselves on a personal level, and that hatred becomes a social complex of interactive games and rituals, often long practiced and institutionalized as becoming traditional behavior patterns.

 

People must admit that change is history unfolding in their lives, and it cannot be prevented, but it can be wisely managed and survived. Rapid change destabilizes, so even if change is rapid, if each citizen in a country is educated to be an egoist and rational supercitizen, she will have internal, stoic stability to not become upset, not to learn to hate herself, or need to flee herself, plunging deep inside some toxic mass movement to erase her personal consciousness of herself.

 

When a people know how to live while experiencing history commencing around them, while being maverizers, in this way the ordeal of change is converted into change as opportunity for constant growth, constant potential to lead a richer, more prosperous, more creative life.

 

Humans, basically evil and basically conservative (in the bad way) and fiercely irrational and anti-intellectual—despising any new ideas—must act like mobs and true believers when change is an ordeal for them. Their poor reactions, dumb responses, and panicked stampeding is not their fault, but their so misbehaving is predictable, without Mavellonialist values to guide them into making lemonade from the lemons of history laid at their feet.

 

My translation of Hoffer’s sentence is what I believe he is offering here.

 

 

 

Hoffer: “Contrary to what one would expect, it is easier for the advanced to imitate the backward country than the other way around.”

 

My response: Here is another of Hoffer’s dramatic, consequential, original insights: it easier for the successful, the victorious and the advanced to imitate a backward country than for the less successful, the defeated, the stagnant and the backwards to imitate the advanced, as they should be doing to catch up.

 

This sentence again, is rich with assumptions and implications. But, before I delve into them, note again Hofferian paradox at work here (The truth is often or mostly the opposite to, contradictory towards or  unwelcome with what popular conclusions or narratives on how things work, espoused by a mistaken or illusion-embracing majority is mistaken but believe their take is correct, because the web of lies that they live by is the aggregation of falsehoods, large and small.) is at work, as he points out that the inability of the backward to imitate the advanced is not what people anticipate.

 

My interpretation of this sentence shows that those that are more successful, more advanced, and victorious might well be superior in their approach, and, often, that superior approach is conducive to or organically arises out of reasoning and individuating.

 

Backward nations that are less successful and less victorious might well, due to their altruist-collectivist morality, their tyrannical political arrangement, their socialist economy and group living, will not allow their individual citizens to work hard enough and creatively enough to help the society advance. 

 

Those that are more advanced are more rational, energetic, self-sacrificing of the self to improve the self for the self, industrious, persistent, focused, driven and maverizing. With this focused behavior of self-improvement, success necessarily follows, and that means one does better and goes farther. With this increase in self-esteem, these advanced individuals feel secure enough to be realistic about themselves, that other countries, even those that are considered to be backward, are superior at some things than the advanced peoples (everyone is good at something), so the advanced feel self-secure to admit that they are  deficient in some areas, and need to imitate and learn from the backwards peoples, and they do.

 

Hoffer is suggesting that we cannot grow and advance unless we as self-actualizing individualists are willing to admit where we are flawed and second-rate, and are willing to acknowledge where someone else is better at some desirable skill, and that we need to imitate them fully to get better at what they are good at and we are not good at. We cannot grow unless we imitate the successful. Imitating those more skilled than us is how we grow and advance, but of course we must openly praise them and acknowledge our dependence on them, and give them full credit for what they devised or originated. As the successful individuator imitates those more skilled than him at some craft, he can blend their innovations with his ow creative, singular perspective and then create new skills and new insights to be shared with the public. Then it is to be hoped that other individuators can recognize his brilliance and superiority and then praise him, credit him. Then they can imitate him to grow themselves, and this creative, healthy competition, sharing and cooperation will benefit all individuators--society will be advanced by these means.

 

Hoffer is implying that those that are group-living, nonindividuating in collectivist tyrannies around the world, will remain backwards; they desperately need to imitate the more advanced superior ways of the West, but cannot and will not because they so lack in self-esteem and feel worthless and their immoral lazy behavior and self-indulgence, doing nothing with their lives. Their nonindividualism and non-performing makes them feel inferior because they are inferior,  but this inferiority is not genetic or racial, but is a volunteer individual choice to do nothing and not imitate those father ahead.

 

Their collective pride and their inability to admit openly that they are inferior is so painful, that they just wall off any consideration of praising those that are superior, admitting their own lagging deficiency, and with their neglected obligation to catch up by imitating their betters. Their collective pride and their denial of reality will push them to refuse to advance, to imitate their hated superiors.

 

Hoffer: “The backward and the weak see imitation as an act of submission and a proof of their inadequacy.”

 

My response: To some degree to lag behind, being inferior, backward and weak requiring that one imitate the more successful, is an act of submission and proof of their inadequacy. My reaction: so what, admit your inferiority, and man up and imitate those better than you at some skill; it is time to start to grow and catch up and perhaps surpass those that were superior to you so that then they must imitate you to catch up. Those inferior in skill and knowledge are not innately inferior, and they are only inferior if they refuse to imitate the successful, get going and catch up.

 

We need to quit pitying ourselves and feeling bad about our lousy, inferior status. That lousy inferior status accurately described how one is performing and behaving as an inferior, backwards, less successful, less victorious people. This fault is based in our voluntary acceptance of being inferior and backwards, and our determination to behave according to our ethical standard, our altruist-collectivist moral code.

 

Just as many blacks and Indians in America have not caught up enough with middle class whites in America, their backwards and inferior performance is this unwillingness of the less successful to imitate the more successful, and it holds America back, hurts all but mangles the blacks and Indians more than anyone else.

 

I think Arabs hate the Israelis because the Israelis are more successful and are God’s chosen people (Jews are likely God’s most chosen people but all peoples are God’s chosen people, especially if Arabs and other peoples imitate Jewish success to maverize and become quite successful.

 

And whites in America and Europe are the most advanced, successful cultures, over all due to their individualism, their freedoms, their capitalism, but too many whites and too many Jews where ever they live, still are more collectivist, group-oriented, nonindividuating and motivated by altruist-collectivist morality, so they persecute, hate and attack those great souls among them that they should be imitating instead of gaslighting and going off against their white betters.

 

Hoffer: “They must rid themselves of their sense of inferiority, must demonstrate their prowess, before they will open their minds and hearts to all the world can teach them.”

 

My response: Here are the facts. All individuals vary in talent and intelligence, but, each person, is more or less equal in his natural and supernatural aptitude to become the best version of herself, with the science/art of Mavellonialst self-realization to guide and inspire them. Each person is to carry her cross as an agent of the Good Spirits, a living angel, and the original thinking, creativity and insights produced by each such God-faithful person are almost unimaginably, unlimitedly rich, and fecund.

 

Every individuator has a natural capacity to be superior to every other human being in some unique way that grows out of her life quest as an individuators. Once people everywhere know and accept this truth, then all can lose their aversion to learning from their “betters”, now able to imitate them now undergoing the confessed borrowing of the skilled techniques of the betters, and then add to such skill sets, the individuator’s singular, original new view of what one has learned and assimilated. Imitation is thus the next ladder step on the climb to self-improvement and superior art and skill and knowledge acquisition.

 

Hoffer: “Most often in history it was the conquerors who learned willingly from the conquered. The backward, says de Tocqueville, ‘will go forth in arms to gain knowledge but will not receive it when it comes to them.’ Thus the grotesque truculence, posturing, conceit, brazenness, and defiance which usually assail our senses whenever a backward country sets out to modernize itself in a hurry stem partly from the desperate need of the weak for an illusion of strength and superiority if they are to imitate rapidly and easily.”

 

My response: It matters not if the self-esteemed professed by a backward people or a backward individual is based upon being accomplished and confident, or just pretending to be accomplished and confident. The only thing that matters is that the faked or actual self-esteem actually motivates the backward to imitate the advanced, frankly accompanied by the very daring admission of inferiority and stating one’s determination to catch up. These imitative steps can lead the backward to gain some or a lot of new knowledge skills and talents so that they may catch up to or even surpass the advanced, and then their self-esteem is realistic and merited; they got up, dusted themselves off, imitated their betters, and built fine, impressive lives for themselves. That is most desirable for each citizen and for the people of that nation catching up and not feeling really good formerly about themselves.

 

Jordan Peterson is wise and a genius, but lately he seems more collectivist and irrational than for individualism and reason. He defines evil as Luciferian pride of the individual who is left-brain arrogant, fanatical, militant, close-minded, evil, and mistaken. I believe that that is Luciferian pride but that is the false and wicked pride of joiners and the selfless without self-esteem. Christ-like pride is that true and ennobling good pride, the moderate pride of individuators and the self-interested.

 

It is the collectivists that are the most arrogant, fanatical (collectivist will not abandon their bad values and culture and imitate their betters and get going and just grow.) and militantly resistant to change, reform and improvement.

 

It is this Luficerian collectivist pride of the backward and inferior that keeps them from growing and changing. It is sobering to realize how stubborn they are and how they cling to their bad, backwards heritage. They will not advance because they refuse to advance, and there is no help for them until they choose to do something about their sordid conditions.

 

Hoffer: “Communism’s unquestionable appeal to backward countries avid for modernization is due only in part to the example of Soviet Russia lifting itself out of backwardness by its own efforts and in a relatively short time. More immediate and decisive is the Communist’s proven ability to ready a backward society for victory on the battlefield. Though it remains doubtful whether a Communist regime can instill in the masses an enduring readiness to work, there is no doubt that it knows how to mold a backward population into an effective army, and instill it with a fanatical will to fight. The Western democracies, try as they might, cannot generate pride, enthusiasm, and a spirit of self-sacrifice in a population poignantly conscious of its backwardness and inferiority. Christianity and democracy did not take root in Asia and Africa because they did not come as instruments for the conversion of the weak into conquerors.* Nationalism and industrialization, two other gifts of the West, can serve such a purpose and have found a ready acceptance. It is significant that when asked the Jesuits first came to China to save souls they were asked by the Emperor to cast cannon and were made masters of ordnance.

 

*Islam came as such an agency, and its spread has been phenomenal in both Asia and Africa. Even at this moment it is still winning converts in the heart of Africa. One cannot help thinking that were the Moslem missionary to combine his religious preaching with the technical know-how—link Islamization with industrialization—the spread of Islam might again be phenomenal.”

 

My response: The Communists were a collectivist people serving the holy cause of Marxism with the zealous fervor of true believers. Combine that with their facility for building native armies for peoples regarding native military victory as the quickest means of arming native peoples with pride and confidence, Westerners cannot match Leninist appeal to native peoples to fight fanatically for their chosen cause, with collective pride, enthusiasm and a eager desire for self-sacrifice met, a new ism to disappear inside. Westerners cannot match that.

 

I hope over time, since Hoffer wrote this, that nationalism, capitalism, and industrialization will have helped Third World peoples advance. I wish they would adopt American values too.

 

Hoffer: “Seen as a process of imitation, it becomes understandable why the Westernization of a backward country so often breeds a violent antagonism toward the West. People who become like us do not necessarily love us. The sense of inferiority inherent in the act of imitation breeds resentment. The impulse of the imitators is to overcome the model they imitate—to surpass it, to leave it behind, or, better still, eliminate it completely. Now and then in history the latter was done first: the imitators began by destroying the model and then proceeded to imitate it. We are apparently more at ease when we imitate a defeated or dead model.”

 

My response: Because people are born depraved, with little self-esteem, they have not the residual natural self-confidence without regarding imitating someone more skilled or advanced as an act of being and feeling inferior, of submitting to a process of humbling humiliation. This leads to feeling resentful of the imitator, hating it, seeking to wipe it out. If the imitators can kill off the imitated, who are thus humiliated, then the imitators can then imitate the imitated without feeling degraded and embarrassed by admitting they desire what they were not good at. Is not human rationalization a wonderful twist of reasoning?

 

Much better would it be to teach people to live as individuals and individuators with a fair degree of wholesome self-esteem, so that imitating someone superior or more advanced is not regarded as self-humiliation and self-surrender, but as a practical if painful option for self-development without no need to take revenge on the superior person, people or culture.

 

Hoffer: “It is of course to be expected that imitation will be relatively free of resentment when it is possible for the imitators to identify themselves wholeheartedly with their model. It is the great misfortune of our time that in the present surge of Westernization so many factors combine to keep the awakening countries from identifying themselves with the West they imitate. The fresh memory of colonialism, the color line, the difference in historical experience, the enormous gap in living standards, the fear of the educated minority in the backward countries that democracy and free enterprise will rob them of their birthright to direct, plan, and supervise—all these combine to create an attitude of suspicion and antagonism toward the West.”

 

My response: Only self-confident individuators and supercitizens would be so personally successful, confident, grateful, honest and without resentment that they could identify themselves with their model as much as they should in a mode of praise, gratitude, and appreciation, while blending what is learned and imitated with what is native to the borrowers. Only a people that are not noninidviduators and group-livers, with a tradition of pure altruist-collectivist morality, can avoid resenting and seeking revenge against the imitated, a total waste of time. That destructive pride that prevents those that are inferior from learning from those that are superior is the false pride of those lacking individualism, reason, and self-regard.

 

Hoffer: “Less obvious is the fact that imitation is least impeded when we are made to feel our act of imitation is actually an act of becoming the opposite of that which we imitate. A religion or civilization is most readily transmitted to alien societies by its heretical offspring which come into being as a protest and a challenge. Heresies have often served as vehicles for the transmission of ideas, attitudes, and ways of life. India influenced the Far East by a heresy it rejected (Buddhism) and Judaism impressed itself upon the world by a heresy it rejected (Christianity). Christianity itself, after it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, spread outside the core of the Graeco-Roman world mainly by its heresies. The Nestorians were Semites, the Jacobites Egyptians, and the Donatists Berbers. And if Communism seems likely to become a vehicle for the transmission of Western achievement to non-Western countries it is due partly to the fact that Communism is a Western, and particularly a Capitalist heresy which the West rejected.”

 

My response: It seems as if people naturally conclude that the enemy of their enemy is their friend, and his values, heretical in the eyes of one’s enemy, makes that doctrine pleasing for the resentful to adopt.

 

I would suggest that a secure egoist could imitate without waiting for the heretical version to motivate him to imitate openly, with no concern about losing face.

 

Hoffer: “Since I have called Communism a Capitalist heresy it may not be out of place to consider here briefly the nature and genesis of heresies. A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor. There is hardly an instance of a declining system giving birth to a heresy and being supplanted by it. At the birth of Christianity the militant spirit of Judaism was at a white heat, and Christianity was one of several Jewish heresies. Christianity itself was bursting with heresies during its youthful growth, and later during its militant ascendancy in the West. A time of great religious fervor is optimal not only for the rise of saints and martyrs but also for the pullulation of schisms and heresies. Where there is static orthodoxy or sheer indifference there is little likelihood of fervent deviations and mutations. It is a measure of Capitalism’s vigor that it could produce so powerful a heresy. To call Communism a heresy, as Toynbee and others have done, is to shut one’s eyes to the present state of Christianity and to misread the true nature of Communism.”

 

My response: Hoffer seems correct in his characterization of heresies and defining Communism as a vigorous Capitalist heresy. It could be that times of turmoil and cultural decline where old and new clash, the smashing of opposite tendencies, cultures and principles do uproot groupist peoples from their dogmatic slumber as non-individuals hiding in their collectivities. Once awakened, these upset, frustrated people must invent new collectivities, new cultural stories and new principles to build groupist havens to hide inside of once again.

 

Those that are startled into individuality will come up with new concepts and new theories, both the new orthodox and its rival heresies, so the law of historical moderation dictates that the clash of contrary principles stirs the creative juices in people’s consciousness.

 

Hoffer: “As I said, a heresy is a by-product of exuberance and ebullience. It is by exaggerating, overfulfilling, and reaching out for extremes that a heresy break away from the parent body. There is apparently no surer way of turning a thing into its opposite than by exaggerating it. Professor Joseph Klausner said of Jesus that by ‘overfilling Judaism he caused his disciples to make of it non-Judaism’; and it is by overfilling Capitalism that the Communists make of it non-Capitalism.”

 

My response: Yes, that historical law of moderation and Being dictate that one extreme leads to another, its opposite, and this begats heresies, but, likely ideational moderation or diversification of concepts, in the long run, is good for humanity to wrestle with.

 

Hoffer: “Ever since Capitalism has come into its own we have caught glimpses of the Capitalists’ dreams of omnipotence. It is a dream of total non-interference—of a ‘company state’ rather than a company within a state. Some Capitalists tried to realize this dream in distant colonies where they were unrestrained by the mores and traditions of their homeland. But only a Communist regime succeeds in making the wildest Capitalist dream come true right in the home country. A monolithic company—the Communist Party—takes possession of a whole country. It not only owns every acre of land, every building, factory, etc., but has absolute dominion over the bodies and souls of every man, woman, and child. The aim of this super-Capitalist company is to turn the captive population into skilled mechanics and so shape their souls that they would toil from sunup to sundown, thankful to be alive and blessing their exploiters. It is only natural that such a ‘company state’ should aspire to turn itself into a holding company of the whole planet.”

 

My response: The aim of these proponents of an absolute socialist monarchy to rule the entire earth is the Progressive dream come true as everyone’s nightmare.

 

Hoffer: “Even when a Communist regime is wholly free of Stalinist viciousness it can still be seen as an attempt to overfulfill Capitalism. In a Capitalist system the productive process is hampered by the trivial motivation of the owner, the recalcitrance of the worker, and the capriciousness of the consumer. It needs a prodigious expenditure of energy and substance to counteract the vitiating effect of these factors. Communism, with one sweep, rids Capitalism of the anarchic owner, worker, and consumer. It makes of production an uncompromising deity which brooks no interference from any quarter.

 

Finally, Communism is repeating a pattern followed by other heresies when it strives to separate Capitalism from the Capitalists. The Christian heresy detached Judaism from the Jews, and the Protestant heresy separated Catholicism from the Catholic hierarchy. And remembering the battle cry of the Kronstadt uprising it is permissible to predict that the slogan of an eventual Communist heresy will be: ‘Communism without the Communists.’

 

My response: Human history has, in one sense, been the slow, evolution of the rise of individualism in everyone, at the expense of group-living, group identifying, group morality and an emphasis on group pride and group rights.

 

Would that Communism without the Communists be the rise of 140 countries, free market constitutional republics, run by individuating supercitizens.

 

Hoffer: “An awareness that rapid modernization is essentially a process of imitation helps us not only to make sense of the turmoil in the backward countries but also to gauge the durability of all that is being achieved there at present. When we see how wholly different the social and political conditions are in the undeveloped countries from what they had been in Europe and America at the birth of the machine age, it is natural to wonder whether the transplantations of Western achievement to these countries is likely to be viable. However, when we keep in mind that what we are observing is an act of concerted imitation the view changes completely. Conditions which are optimal for origination are necessarily optimal for imitation. Origination requires a more or less loose social order in which the individual has leeway to tinker, follow his hunches, and take risks of his own. On the other hand, rapid imitation is facilitated by social compactness, regimentation and concerted action. The individual who is a member of a compact group  is more imitative than the individual who is on his own. The unified individual is without a distinct self and, like the child, his mind is without guards against the intrusion of influences from without. The paradox is then that rapid modernization requires a primitivization of the social structure. The collectivist bias of backward countries is thus likely to be an aid rather than a hindrance in their race to catch up with the West.”

 

My response: Since the Third World was catching up with the West, more or less, by imitating Westerners, it seems that as collectivist peoples, a collectivist heresy like Communism was an attractive heresy for them to copy as a mean of rapid modernization.

 

I do not disagree with Hoffer that conditions optimal for origination are not the same as conditions optimal for imitation. I was recommending that a loose structure of citizens in a free-market setting was the ideal permanent alternative for nudging those from developing countries to modernize and awaken by imitation of those with superior skills, technology and values and then making those adopted improvement personal and creatively customized and further improved by the borrower who is a self-realizer. The self-realizer can imitate and originate, at various times in her life, always truthful about who influenced her specifically, but then allowing her imitative efforts to serve her maverized objective of being a person that innovates and originates.