Below I will quote Chapter 3 or Eric Hoffer’s book, The Ordeal of Change. This essay runs from Page 15 through Page 19, and I will quote it and comment on it.
Hoffer: “Deeds and Words: There is little doubt that the Cold War has quickened the awakening and modernization that are now going on full blast in Asia and Africa. Communist pressure is accelerating the end of colonial tutelage, and both sides in the Cold War are wooing the emerging new nations with economic and military aid and with ready recognition of their status as sovereign states.
Now, no one gain gainsay the fact that this is the kind of wooing the United States has not been doing too well. Our generosity, diplomacy, and propaganda have not won for us a marked measure of wholehearted adherence. Our effort, thus far, seems to lack some essential ingredient. Particularly baffling has been the petulant and often sneering response to our unprecedented outpouring of money, food, raw materials, machines, and military aid. Awkwardness or tactlessness in our manner in our manner of giving cannot possibly explain this unexpected reaction.
Much has been written on our failure to gauge the temper and real needs of the people we try to help. It is implied that were our offering of aid comprehensive enough and manner of giving adequate we would have the world wholly on our side. Yet, the more one thinks on the subject the more one realizes that the attitude towards us is not mainly determined by the nature of our policies and our manner of giving.”
My response: Hoffer has a knack for discovering the truth. Below he will lay out what is the reality about third world countries, in the 50s, as to why they refused to go along with generous America. aid. Once again, he will highlight how what appears to be the case often is not reality on the ground.
Hoffer: “The baffling response we hear does not originate in the people we try to help but in a group of self-appointed spokesmen and mediators who stand between us and the people. This group is made up of teachers and students, writers, artists, and intellectuals in general. It is the articulate who are the source of the rabid anti-Americanism which has been manifesting itself in many countries since the end of the Second World War. One cannot escape the impression that there is a natural antagonism between these ‘men of words’ and twentieth century America. It is not the quality of our policies which offends them but our very existence.”
My response: The masses around the world love America but the clerisy and ruling elites of these nations despise America for even existing, and they will not be won over. It is almost as if the masses, when they see reality, are able to see the greatness, kindness, goodness and exceptionalism of America, the greatest country in the world, built of semi-individualism, capitalism and liberty. The masses intuitively sense that America is the refuge for the little people, and elites hate us for that same reason: they want the masses group-living, degraded, solely controlled by and utterly dependent on their local elites, and doomed to continue living in squalor, human rights abuse conditions, tyranny and collectivist economies.
Hoffer: “The intellectuals everywhere see America as a threat. Their petulant faultfinding is the expression of an almost instinctive fear, and it is of vital importance that we should understand the nature of this fear.
In almost every civilization we know of, and in Europe, too, up to the end of the Middle Ages, the equivalent to the intellectual was either a member of the ruling class or closely allied with it. In ancient Egypt and Imperial China the literati were part of the privileged population. They were magistrates, administrators, and officials of every kind. In India, the uppermost caste of the Brahmins was also the caste of the educated. In classical Greece, the philosophers, dramatists, poets, historians, and artists were also soldiers, sailors, lawmakers, politicians, and men of affairs. In the Roman Empire, there was an intimate alliance between the Greek intellectuals and the Roman men of action. The Romans needed the Greek intellectual—needed him to satisfy their craving for beauty which they could not satisfy by their own creativeness, and needed him also for the management of affairs at home and in the provinces. It was this dependence on the Greek intellectual, which eased the spread of Roman rule in the Hellenized part of the Mediterranean world. In Europe, too, during the Middle Ages, most of the educated people were of the clergy and hence members of an elite. But the fifteenth century, which saw the emergence of the modern Occident, also saw a fateful change in the status of the European intellectual.”
My response: I have often written that Hoffer, obsessed with warning the world about how dangerous to public well-being are idealists and intellectuals, knew them better than anyone else. Men of words are not compassionate—as they self-proclaim, self-righteously—rather they pretend to be compassionate because reforming in the name of the subjugated suffering masses is the ideologue’s favorite and most successful means of triggering regime change, so the disenfranchised intellectuals can then become part of the new ruling elite, which they view as their rightful destiny.
Hoffer: “The catastrophic events of the fourteenth century—the Black Death, which killed off a large part of the population and nearly half the clergy, and the divisions and disorders of the Papacy—weakened the hold of the Catholic Church on the European masses. This in conjunction with the introduction of printing and paper made it possible for education to escape the control of the all-embracing Church. There emerged a large group on nonclerical teachers, students, scholars, and writers who were not members of a clearly marked privileged class, and whose social usefulness was not self-evident.
In the modern Occident, power was, and still is, the prerogative of men of action, landowners, soldiers, businessmen, industrialists, and their hanger-ons. The intellectual is treated as a poor relation and has to pick up the crumbs. He usually ekes out a living by teaching, journalism, or some white-collar job. Even when his excellence as a writer, artists, scientist or educator is generally recognized and rewarded, he does not feel himself one of the elite.”
My response: Intellectuals in the modern Occident did not feel he was one of the elite, because he typically was not. The power and affairs of the modern Occident, prior to the rise of cultural Marxism, were run by men of action, not men of words.
To keep the West free, prosperous, and lawful, the masses as individuating supercitizens, or 1/3 entrepreneur or laborer in private enterprise, 1/3 men of words and 1/3 men of action, must function to keep the men of words out of power and out of politics, to keep them neutered and neutralized, less their explosive lust for power sicken new elites to seek to rule the masses.
Hoffer: “The intellectual’s passionate search for an acknowledged status and a role of social usefulness has been a ferment in the Occident since the days of the Renaissance. He has pioneered every upheaval from the Reformation to the latest nationalist or socialist movement. Yet the intellectual has not known how to retain a position of leadership in the movements and new regimes he has done so much to initiate and promote. He has usually been elbowed out by fanatics and practical men of action. This has been particularly so in the case of nationalist movements which have pullulated all over the Occident during the past hundred years.
These movements were usually pioneered by poets, writers, historians, scholars, and philosophers who hoped to find in the corporate warmth of the national state their rightful place as bearers of culture, legislators, statesmen, dignitaries, and men of affairs. The practical solid citizens who are now considered the pillars and guardians of patriotism, as a rule, kept shy of nationalist movements in their early stages, but moved in and took over once the movements became going concerns, and the national states began to consolidate. The intellectual was left out in the cold. He was no better off in the national state than in the dynastic state. One has the feeling that the intellectual has since tried to counter this usurpation by shifting his espousal from the national to the Socialist state.”
My response: The intellectuals start these causes, and then are pushed aside by the fanatics and men of action, but the clerisy resumes immediately seeking other avenues to power and say, what they seek first and always.
Hoffer: “In Asia and Africa, too, the wider diffusion of literacy, due largely to Western influence, gave rise to numbers of unattached men of words. Their search for a weighty and useful life led them, as it did their counterparts in Europe, to the promotion of nationalist and Socialist movements.”
My response: What Mavellonialism introduces every human being—interested and inclined to give self-realizing a serious go—is that the individual can discover their goal, a search for a weighty and useful life based on self-sacrificing the self of yesterday to the improving self of tomorrow for decade after decade of living, and none of this entails group pride, group living as educated clerisy ruling and directing the masses, oppressing them in a vain, empty pursuit of amassing the power of powerlessness to oneself.
Hoffer: “Now, although the homelessness of the intellectual is more or less evident in all Western and Westernized societies, it is nowhere so pronounced as in our common-man civilization. America has been running a complex economy and governmental machinery, and has been satisfying most of its cultural needs without the aid of the typical intellectual. Nowhere has the intellectual so little to say in the management of affairs. It is natural, therefore, that the intellectuals outside the United States should see in the spread of Americanization a threat not only to their influence but to their very existence.”
My response: Those foreign intellectuals recognized America and its common-man civilization as their mortal enemy. They did all they could to blunt the spread of Americanization into their countries, and, over the decades since Hoffer wrote this essay, intellectus and Progressives spread cultural Marxism across all American institutions, public and private, until recently they almost introduced a permanent Marxist dictatorship under Biden.
The only lasting remedy—let me repeat it again—to limiting the influence and even the existence of elites of any and all kinds, each populated in part of power-hungry intellectuals, is to raise up a generation of Americans who are individuating supercitizens running our free market constitutional republic. Only such an elite group of citizens render elite rule and hierarchies inefficient, and not much longer even required.
Hoffer: “It is strange when we consider the difference between our social order and that of a Communist country we rarely refer to the striking difference in its attitude toward the intellectual. There is no doubt that the intellectual has come into his own in the Communist world. In a Communist country, writers, artists, scientists, professors and intellectuals in general are near the top of the social ladder, and feel no doubt about their social usefulness. They are the ideal of the rising generation. Czelaw Milosz says of the intellectual in Communist countries that ‘never since the Middle Ages has he felt himself so necessary and recognized.’ *The people who come over to us from the Communist regimes are mostly men of action—soldiers, diplomats, sportsmen, technicians, and skilled workers. The intellectual, even when he can travel outside the Communist world, rarely takes advantage of the opportunity to escape.”
My response: Note that the common people, men of action, into common affairs, do escape from Communist regimes, if they can, but the intellectuals love where they live. Each knows where he belongs—either in free, prosperous America for the men of action, but willing slavery in squalid, socialist regimes, for men of words.
Hoffer: “* This is not contradicted by the fact that intellectuals have been imprisoned and liquidated in Communist countries. What the intellectual craves above all is to be taken seriously, to be treated as a decisive force in shaping history. He is far more at home in a society that weighs his every word and keeps close watch on his attitudes than in a society cares not what he says or does. He would rather be persecuted than ignored.”
My response: This is a rich paragraph. The intellectual is the ultimate groupist: he just wants to be part of the ruling elite running society. He is fanatical, cruel, authoritarian, and completely ruthless in gaining control over and keeping control over the people. As a subjugator and enslaver, he is fine, deep down, with being persecuted or executed, in a totalitarian state. There he is important enough to warrant being persecuted. Note that these enslavers and subjugators of the masses have no problem preferring enslaved, subjugated, and persecuted by the totalitarian state they reside in, rather than be free and ignored in lovely, tolerant America. Liberty is not a value they cherish.
Hoffer: “The Communists always had an acute awareness of the fateful relations between the intellectual and the established order. They are convinced, in the words of Stalin, that ‘no ruling class has managed without its own intelligentsia.’ In the Anglo-Saxon world, social stability has been maintained without the wholehearted allegiance of the intellectuals. But, with the advent of the Cold War, the attitude of the intellectual towards the prevailing dispensation has everywhere become a factor in national survival. For in a Cold War words count as least as much as deeds. Our chief handicap in the bidding for souls is that is going on in every part of the world has been our lack of words. Our deeds could not prevent a gang of double-talking murderers and slanderers from posturing a saviors of humanity. Only by a masterly use of words could we have evoked a vivid awareness of the loathsomeness of Stalin and his work, and communicated it not only to friends and neutrals, but to Communists themselves.
My response: The brilliant Hoffer is warning individuating supercitizens everywhere that they must personally be very advanced philosophers, mighty articulate and intellectually advanced, so they as a people will have the words and articulateness to match their deeds, so murderers and slanders on the Left or the Right, be they religious or secular, are no longer able to use lies, brainwashing and disinformation to control what they masses think, say, believe and do.
Hoffer: “Our men of action, however able and well-intentioned, cannot be our spokesmen in the battle for souls’”
My response: Perhaps Dennis Prager, Mark Levin, Jordan Peterson, and I can fill that gap.
Hoffer: “Whatever the hands that guide our policies, the voice that makes itself heard must be the voice of our foremost poets, philosophers, writers, artists, scientists, and professors. Only they can get around the roadblock which bars our way to the dispirited millions everywhere. Just as in time of a hot war there is an automatic rise in our appreciation of men in uniform, so in time of a cold war there must be a general awareness of the vital role the intellectuals have to play in our struggle for survival. And they must be given a share of the shaping and execution of policies which they will be called upon to expound and defend.”
No comments:
Post a Comment