Willing To Work

 

 

In Chapter 5 of his book, The Ordeal of Change, which runs from Page 27 through Page 42, I will quote what he writes and then comment on his ideas. The title of this chapter is The Readiness to Work.

 

Hoffer: “The other day I happened to ask myself a routine question and stumbled on a surprising answer. What is the uppermost problem which confronts the leadership in a Communist regime? The answer: The chief preoccupation of any government between the Elbe and the China Sea is how to make people work—how to induce them to plow, sow, harvest, build, manufacture, work in the mines, and so forth. It is the most vital problem which confronts them day in and day out, and it shapes not only their domestic policies but their relations with the outside world.”

 

My response: It is natural to be passive, lazy, resist working, to prefer pleasure and ease. It requires discipline, and self-respect to be motivated to work, hustle, and get things done to make money and to maverize.

 

Individualists and individuals, on average, are better workers than are joiners and groupists. With this assumption in mind, it is predictable that Communist regimes, based on ultra-groupism, no private property, and altruist-collectivist morality, would struggle to nudge its citizens to work.

 

Hoffer: One is struck by the strangeness of it: that a movement which set out to achieve a miraculous transformation of man and society should have succeeded in transforming into a miracle something which to us is entirely natural and matter-of-fact. In the Occident the chief problem is not how to induce people to work but how to find enough jobs for people that want to work. We seem to take the readiness to work almost as much for granted as the readiness to breathe. Yet the goings on inside the Communist world serve to remind us that the Occident’s attitude toward work, so far from being natural and formal, is strange and unprecedented. It was the relatively recent emergence of this attitude which, as much as anything else, gave modern Western civilization its unique character and marked it off from all its predecessors.”

 

My response: Hoffer here is mining original ground. Elsewhere, somewhere he wrote that it is the emergence of individualism in the West that pushed Europeans to work, as much as the other cultural and economic motivators like the Protestant work ethic, and capitalism (One can profit materially by working and creating wealth for oneself and one’s family.). Hoffer felt that the isolated individual, disconnected from his timeless, immersion in warm communal or tribal solidarity, is on his own and must each day prove himself to himself by his constant work and effort, to find identity and meaning in his ceaseless activity and work. I like this assessment of the sudden, historical arrival of people that preferred working to ease, comfort and doing little.

 

In the West, the strange, ahistorical aberration of the adults being eager and willing to work is unprecedented in all societies. The unwillingness and disinclination to work is typical for altruistic, fatalistic, group-oriented peoples living in authoritarian and feudal or socialistic economic regimes.

 

It did not hurt the Westerners were able to live in free societies and to access and direct their personal ingenuity, drive, ambition, and liberty to do what they wanted, including amassing personal property and wealth.

 

It seems to me that the willingness to work is an unnatural desire, a beneficial, learned, acquired virtue, that is a moral extension of the ethical assumption that we need to move and make something of our lives in service to God in order to lead a good and productive life.

 

My vision would be that a society of supercitizen individuators would take this willingness to work to a whole new level of activity, wealth-creation, and cultural output.

 

Hoffer: “In practically all civilizations we know of, and in the Occident for too many centuries, work was viewed as a curse, a mark of bondage, or, at best, a necessary evil. That free men would be willing to work day after day, even after their vital needs are satisfied, and that work would be seen as a mark of uprightness and manly worth, is not only unparalleled in history but remains more or less incomprehensible to many people outside the Occident.

 

The Occident’s novel attitude towards work is traced by some to the rules of St. Benedict (circa A.D. 500) which prescribed manual labor (six hours a day in the winter and seven hours in the summer) for every monk in the Benedictine monasteries. Hereby the contemptuous attitude of the classical world towards work, as fit only for slaves, was turned into reverence. The new attitude penetrated into the towns which usually grew around the monasteries, and from there were diffused farther afield. Still the fact remains that in the Middle Ages people did not show any marked inclination to work more than was necessary to maintain a fairly low standard of living. It was only in the sixteenth century that we see emerging a strange addiction to work.”

 

My response: Hoffer could be correct that Benedictine work rules for the monks were slowly spreading into the secular population. The ancient disdain for manual labor as the plight for inferior serfs, peasants, and slaves—off whom the various elites parasitically depended—was a deleterious approach to working, whether manual labor or managing an enterprise. All people need to work all the time with no class of drones and privileged parasites any longer preying on the masses.

 

Hoffer: “According to Max Weber and others it was Luther’s idea of the sacredness of man’s calling, and particularly Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, which infused a new seriousness in man’s daily doings. According to Calvin salvation and eternal damnation are predestined from the foundation of the world. No one can know whether he is one of the few predestined to everlasting life or of the many foreordained to everlasting death. But since it is natural to assume the chosen would succeed in whatever they undertake while the damned would fail, one was spurred to strive with all one’s might for worldly success as proof of one’s salvation. Erich Fromm complements this theory by pointing out that the unbearable uncertainty induced by this doctrine would by itself drive people to ‘frantic activity and a striving to do something.’

 

Still, it is highly doubtful whether the tremendous dynamism displayed by the Occident during the past four hundred years was fueled mainly by religious elements or derivatives. The decisive factor in the development of modern Western civilization was not the psychological effect of some religious idea or doctrine but the mass emergence of the autonomous individual.”

 

My response: Hoffer is correct that the religious ideas spurred the rise of Western autonomous individualism, but mass emergence of autonomous individualism in the West was the decisive impetus for the readiness to work.

 

My objection here is that Hoffer’s version of events, as he refers to the rise of the mass autonomous individualism in the West, was only a modest, partial, and incomplete transformation for each individual from being a groupist and joiner to becoming an individualist and loner. The mere partial awakening—becoming a bit individualistic while still group-living--was fateful but not nearly as revolutionary as it could have been, because altruism, groupism and Christian identification of self-interest as selfish and evil contributed mightily to retarding and reducing the degree of mass individual autonomy attained. Barely developed was the morality of egoism that accompanied or triggered the partial awakening of individuals in the West.

 

Hoffer: “And it is plausible that the Reformation itself was a by-product of the process of individualization.

 

We are not concerned here with the manner in which the individual was released from the compact corporate pattern of the Middle Ages. A fortuitous combination of circumstances, not the least of which was the spread of literacy by the introduction of paper and printing, brought about a cracking and crumbling of the feudal economy and a loosening of the grip of an all-embracing Catholic Church. Whether he willed it or not, the Western European individual, toward the end of the fifteenth century, found himself more or less on his own. Now the separation of the individual from the corporate body, even when it is ardently strived for, is a painful experience. The newly emerging individual is an unstable and explosive entity. This is true of the young who cut loose from the family and venture forth on their own; of persons who break away or are separated from a compact tribe, clan, community, party, or clique; of discharged soldiers separated from the corporate life of the army; and even of freed slaves removed from the intimate corporate life of slave quarters. An autonomous existence is heavily burdened and beset with fears, and can only be endured when bolstered by confidence and self-esteem. The individual’s most vital need is to prove his worth, and this usually means an insatiable hunger for action. For it is only the few who can acquire a sense of worth by developing and employing their capacities and talents.”

 

My response: Hoffer the implied egoist moralist is mostly correct in this depiction of the individual abandoned by corporate existence being forced to work to prove his worth each day so that he can esteem himself. Hoffer is shortsighted and mistaken in limiting to the naturally more talented and intelligent few the knack for acquiring a sense of worth by developing and employing their capacities and talents, while the average masses only find that required sense of personal worth by vigorous activity and work.

 

I protest that all people are immensely talented, and all can and must self-realize, finding their sense of worth—each of them—by developing to the fullest their capacities and talents, all while working, making money, and staying active. All need to do all these pursuits at the same time.

 

Hoffer: “The majority prove their worth by keeping busy. A busy life is the closest thing to a purposeful life. But whether the individual takes the path of self-realization or the easier one of self-justification by action he remains unbalanced and restless. For he has to prove his worth anew each day. It does not require the uncertainties of an outlandish doctrine of predestination to drive him to ‘frantic effort and a striving to do something.’

 

The burst of activity and creativeness we know as the Renaissance was in full swing before Luther and Calvin entered the field. It was the individualization of a once corporate society which manifested itself as an awakening and a renascence. The Reformation itself was a by-product of this individualization—a reaction against it. For there are many who find the burdens, the anxiety, and the isolation of an individual existence unbearable. This is particularly true when the opportunities for self-advancement are relatively meager, and one’s individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for. Such persons sooner or later turn their backs of individual existence and strive to acquire a sense of worth and of purpose by an identification with a holy cause, a leader, or movement. The faith and pride they derive from such an identification serve them as substitutes for the unattainable self-confidence and self-respect. The movement of the Reformation was to begin with such an escape from the burden of an autonomous existence.”

 

My response: My ethics of egoism would offer everyone a set of values to fortify her so she would neither require nor seek to escape from living fully as an autonomous individual. With Mavellonialist training, she will create her own narrative, her own meaning, her own art form, and even invent a new business so she can stay busy, fulfilled, and with a surplus of money to live on, making her own opportunities where none previously existed.

 

Hoffer: “Luther and Calvin did not liberate the individual from the control of an authoritarian church. ‘The Reformation,’ says Max Weber, ‘meant not the elimination of the church’s control of everyday life, but rather the substitution of a new form of control which was very lax, at that time barely perceptible in practice, and hardly more than formal, in favor of a regulation of the whole conduct which, penetrating to all departments of private and public life, was infinitely burdensome and earnestly enforced.* (* Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism—London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1930—pp. 36-37). The rule of Calvinism as enforced in Geneva and elsewhere was inimical to individual autonomy not only in religious matters but in all departments of life. Had Luther and Calvin had at their disposal the fearful instruments of coercion of a Hitler or a Stalin they would have perhaps herded by the emerging individual into the communal corral, and would have stilted the new Occident at its birth. As it was, the European individual mastered the Reformation and used it for his own ends. He used faith to lubricate his machine of action and legitimate his success. He rushed headlong into the thousand new paths to action and fortune opened by the discovery of new continents and trade routes, and the development of new sciences and techniques. He reached out to the four corners of the earth, carrying his restlessness with him and infecting the whole world with it.”

 

My response: I admire Hoffer for his account of the emergence of the autonomous individual from feudal corporate, collective existence, and I think he is spot-on.

 

Hoffer: “To an outside observer an individualist society seems in the grip of some strange obsession. Its ceaseless agitation strikes him as a kind of madness. And indeed, action is basically a reaction against loss of balance—a flailing of the arms to regain one’s balance. To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium. And if, as Napoleon wrote to Carnot, ‘the art of government is not to let men grow stale,’ then it is essentially an art of unbalancing. This is particularly true in an industrialized society which requires a population disposed to continued exertion and alertness. The crucial difference between the Communist regimes and the individualist Occident is thus perhaps in the methods of unbalancing  by which their masses are kept active and striving.”

 

My response: If the acting, working way of living is generally, morally superior, then upsetting the individual’s equilibrium so she metaphorically flails her arms to regain new, successive equilibrium, in a way this is moderate creativity by mixing opposite tendencies together, to spur one to act and work. Perhaps each individuators could deliberately upset her own equilibrium so she will struggle, learn more and then restore her balance, and this is a way of creating, growing, and doing productive work.

 

Hoffer: “The Communists started out as miracle workers. Not only were they to bring about a miraculous transformation of man and society but the material tasks, too, which they set themselves—the industrialization and modernization of vast territories—were to partake of the miraculous. These tasks were to be realized by the energies released by a creed, and they were to demonstrate the validity and superiority of this creed. To proceed soberly, after a careful mobilization of skill, equipment, and material, would be to act in the manner of men of little faith. One had to plunge headlong into one project after another, heedless of the waste and suffering involved. Faith, dedication, and self-sacrifice were to accomplish the impossible.”

 

My response: Hoffer is likely going to write below that the masses, the true believers in the Communist mass movement, were the laborers that fueled the miraculous transformation of Soviet society. These zealots worked feverishly hard while their revolutionary zeal held up; once the revolution was the new, hierarchical, entrenched status quo, as the fervor of the masses died out, so did their willingness to work extraordinarily hard much declined.

 

The moderate, rational, individualistic Westerners were of lesser intense faith, but their sober proceeding and careful efforts would make them better workers in the long run, as they volunteered to work with their readiness to work.

 

I do not think the logical, calm individual workers are people of little faith, but they are people of strong faith quietly expressed and gently shared in public, and they do worship through their heart-felt their creed, paying homage to a good deity. Bluntly stated, their faith is intense and deep, but never theatrically, loudly, zealously professed and publicly shared. Their faith is stronger and deeper than the louder, enthusiastic wailing and shouting from members of fundamentalist sects.

 

Hoffer: “Much has been said by all manner of people in praise of enthusiasm. The important point is enthusiasm is ephemeral, and hence unserviceable for the long haul. One can hardly conceive of a more unhealthy and wasteful state of affairs than where faith and dedication are required for the performance of unmiraculous everyday activities. The attempt to keep people enthusiastic once they have ceased to believe is productive of the most pernicious consequences. An enormous effort has to be expended to maintain the revivalist spirit and, inevitably, with the passage of time, the fuels used to generate enthusiasm become more crude and poisonous. The Communists started out with faith and extravagant hope, then passed to pride and hatred, and finally settled on fear. The use of Terror to evoke enthusiasm was one of Stalin’s most pernicious inventions. For he did succeed in extracting strength from crushed souls.”

 

My response: We need people to work but it must be voluntary, and the Stalinist employment of inflicting Terror on the people to extract strength from these crushed souls is pure soul-raping, and such is evidence that the gates of hell are open, and demons are inhabiting the souls of the secret police of the totalitarian state engaged in Terrorizing the tired, spent people.

 

Hoffer: “The Communists did not withhold their hand from other modes of unbalancing. The transportation of vast populations from one end of the land to another; the shifting of muzhiks to towns and of townspeople to farms; the periodic purges; the sudden changes in the party line—such were some of the crude jolts by which they tried to keep the masses from going stale.

 

There is no doubt that the Communists can point to tremendous industrial achievements during the last forty years. But even while Stalin was alive it must have dawned on some of the leaders that the technique of generating enthusiasm, despite their impressive potentialities, cannot achieve the smooth effortlessness which is the outstanding characteristic of a genuine machine age. If in order to keep the wheels turning you have to deafen ears with propaganda, crack the whip of Terror, and keep pushing people around, then you haven’t got a machine civilization no matter how numerous and ingenious your machines.

 

In an individualist society the mode of unbalancing is far more subtle, and requires relatively little prompting from without.”

 

My response: It seems obvious that each citizen needs to be induced or self-induce some degree of self-unbalancing as a psychological means of motivating the person to move, to act, to work, to reestablish equilibrium. Ayn Rand likely leads the world in suggesting that  to live is to move and work to build a decent life for oneself, and this subtle kind of pleasure as a habit will act as a jolt, self-induced, for the agent to get moving and work to reestablish personal equilibrium, and this process is repeated every day, and perhaps Hoffer’s concept of citizens requiring unbalancing to goad them to work and move, makes more sense in light of Rand’s take on the motive to live and strive.

 

I would like to build on Hoffer’s hint that for the individual, the mode of unbalancing is internal, subtle, and self-prompted: I would offer that an individuator could, to a much greater and increased amount or degree, unbalance herself to grow and evolve and originate.

 

Hoffer: “For the autonomous individual constitutes a chronically unbalanced entity. The confidence and sense of worth which alone can keep him on an even keel are extremely perishable, and must be generated anew each day. An achievement today is but a challenge for tomorrow.”

 

My response: All that Hoffer rights just above is so, but I do not worry that the atomistic individual, an isolated and chronically unbalanced entity, will not be able to produce enough new daily productive activity, income-gathering, or artistic expression that he will have much trouble being successful as an individuators, able to enjoy living alone and apart, a prosperous, happy, fulfilled, creator and producer. The more one maverizes, the more the gift of fecundity is given one by God.

 

Hoffer: “And since it is mainly by work that the majority of individuals prove their worth and regain their balance, they must keep at it continuously. Hence the ceaseless hustling of an individualist society.

 

No one will claim that the majority of people in the Western world, be they workers or managers, find fulfillment in their work.”

 

My response: In the future, when most American adults are individuating supercitizens, their maverizing will automatically give them their sense of fulfillment, be it through their hobbies, their paying job, their sideline artistic dallying, or all three.

 

Hoffer: “But they do find in it a justification for their existence. The ability to do a day’s work and get paid for it gives one a sense of usefulness and worth. The pay check and the profitable balance sheet are certificates of value. When the job requires exceptional skill or tests a person’s capacities there is an additional sense of exhilaration. But even a job of sheerest routine yields the individual something besides the wherewithal of a living.

The significance of a job in the life of the Occidental individual is made particularly clear by the state of mind of the unemployed. There is little doubt that the frustration engendered by unemployment is due to a corrosive sense of worthlessness than to economic hardship. Unemployment pay, however adequate, cannot mitigate it. In the Occident it is inaction rather than actual hardship which breeds discontent and disaffection. In America even the legitimate retirement after a lifetime of work constitutes a fearsome crisis. In the longshoreman’s union in San Francisco the award of a $200-a-month pension to a man over sixty-five, who had twenty-five years of service on the waterfront, brought in its wake a sudden rise in the rate of death among the retired. It is now recognized that men must be conditioned for retirement so as to endow them with a specific kind of endurance. Herbert Hoover on his eighty-second birthday echoed a widespread feeling when he said that a man who retires from work ‘shrivels up into  nuisance to all mankind.’

 

It is to be expected that where a sense of worth is attainable without effort, where one is born with it so to speak, the readiness to work is not likely to be pronounced. Thus in societies where the Negro race is officially designated as inferior, and every white person can be made to feel himself a member of a superior race, the pressure of individual self-assertion by work is considerably reduced. The presence of indolent ‘white trash’ is usually characteristic of such societies. A somewhat similar situation is to be observed in class- or caste-bound societies.”

 

My response: Hoffer and I are recommending that the Occidental individual—and really for all people everywhere on earth—even as but a half-awakened person, will find his sense of worth through becoming unbalanced, and seeking for work and/or creative production and original thinking, as a means of regaining each day a sense of inner balance, self-esteem, a sense of meaning, a feeling of worthiness based on achieving it.

 

Regarding his remarks about the Negro race and white trash, he really is suggesting that each member of those races or groups be identified as individuals so then each cannot find his sense of worth without effort at holding a job or writing poetry or both. No longer must group affiliation or the lack of group association with high status serve as an excuse for being automatically conferred a sense of worth without effort, or a sense of worthlessness, no matter how hard one works.

 

Hoffer: “The remarkable thing is that the Occident’s addiction to work is by no means synonymous with a love of work. The Western workingman actually has the illusion that he can kill work and be done with it. He ‘attacks’ every job he undertakes and feels the ending of the task as a victory. Those who, like the Negro, know that work is eternal tend to take it easy.

 

The individualist society which manifests a marked readiness to work is one in which individualism is widely diffused. It is the individual in the mass who turns to work as a means of proving his worth and usefulness. Things are different where individualism is exclusive, as it was in Greece.”

 

My response: Hoffer is not really suggesting that blacks are lazy: what he is characterizing is their collectivist morality, which is purer and less individualistic, on average than white or Occidental industriousness, based in activism and egoist morality, requiring hard work (and creative output) to gain that sense of worth. For collectivist peoples, work is seen as eternal, and unending, so there is no sense of worth coming from working hard so why bother killing oneself.

 

Hoffer’s original thinking is revealed wondrously when he points out that ancient, aristocratic exclusive individualists in Greece found their worth in creative output alone, not in physical or manual labor, left to inferior slaves and commoners.

 

I would like to see all adults in America be individuating supercitizens that were a blend of the mass and exclusive individual categories, both at the same time in the same person, so the person would gain her sense of worth by her physical labor and by her painting, as an average and exclusive person all in the same person.

 

Hoffer: “The exclusive individual will tend to prove his worth and usefulness by managing and leading others or developing and exercising his capacities and talents. Work, though it is hard and unceasing, is actually an easy solution of the problems which confront the autonomous individual, and it is not surprising that the individual in the mass would take this easy way out.

 

It hardly needs emphasizing that the individualist society we are talking about is not one in which every individual is unique—with judgments, tastes, and attitudes distinctly his own. All that one can claim for the individual in such a society is that he is more or less on his own; that he chooses his course through life, proves himself by his own efforts, and has to shoulder the responsibility for what he makes of his life. It is obvious, therefore, that it is individual freedom which generates the readiness to work. On the face of it this is rather startling. It means that when the mass of people are free to work or not to work they usually act as if they are driven to work. Freedom releases the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading. You do not go to a free society to find carefree people. When we leave people on their own, we are delivering them into the hands of a ruthless taskmaster from whose bondage there is no escape. The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.”

 

My response: The free individual must justify his own existence by his earning a paycheck and by his creative work; the optimum cultural, economic and political matrix for facilitating his work is a capitalist, free society.

 

Hoffer: There is a remarkable statement made in 1958 by the director of industry and commerce in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. ‘It is harder,’  he said, ‘to provide the members of a community with shelter, clothing, and food than to launch an artificial satellite.’ The words sound odd in our ears, but they underline a now familiar paradox: The revolutionary governments which have sprung up in recent decades in all parts of the world see themselves as the embodiment of the popular will, yet they do not know how to make the masses work. They know how to generate popular enthusiasm and how to induce in the masses a readiness to fight, but they seem helpless in anything which requires an automatic readiness on the part of the masses to work day in and day out. On the other hand, the same governments do not find it hard to create conditions favorable for the performance of scientists, professors, top technicians, and intellectuals in general. They know how to foster the exceptional skills requisite for the manufacturing of complex machinery and instruments, even the harnessing of the atom and the launching of satellites.”

 

My response: By reading The True Believer and The Passionate State of Mind, and understanding them considering egoist morality, it seems understandable that the essays written and published in his third book, The Ordeal of Change, naturally expand and enlarge upon his earlier ethical and psychological portrayals of the human condition. A background in Hoffer’s earlier works provides me a way to interpret his essays in this book.

 

 

Totalitarian, Communist states, populated by pure altruists and group-livers, can spur the masses to popular enthusiasm and a willingness to fight and die for their ism and nation, but these unfree, pure collectivized joiners cannot be instilled with a voluntary readiness to work, for that wondrous gift is natural and flows from a free, individualistic people, which those in Communist state are not.

 

The elite scientists, professors and intellectuals will work and perform, because they are appreciated if not free, and being appreciated and being allowed to help rule the masses—regarded as inferior, even subhuman—are working incentives to inspire them to work and produce.

 

Hoffer: “There is little likelihood that the intellectuals who constitute the leading element in these new governments would be receptive to the idea that, in the case of the masses, there is a connection between individual freedom and the readiness to work; that individual freedom is a potent factor in energizing and activating the masses. To an intelligentsia preoccupied with planning, managing and guiding, no idea will seem so patently absurd as that the masses, if left wholly to themselves, would labor and strive of their own accord.”

 

My response: Envision the masses in America as individuating supercitizens, left to run their own affairs with no elite to nudge them or to crack the whip, allowed to indulge their readiness to work for money and art as free individuals. These fine masses need no elite to rule and control them.

 

Hoffer: “The interesting thing is that the energizing effect of freedom seems confined to the masses. There is no unequivocal evidence that the intellectual is at his creative best when left wholly on his own. It is not at all certain that individual freedom is a vital factor in the release of creative energies in literature, art, music, and science. Many of the outstanding achievements in these fields were not realized in an atmosphere of absolute freedom.”

 

My response: Why would freedom energize the masses but not intellectuals? This is another of Hoffer’s profoundly original, brilliant, and significant points that demands highlighting and emphasizing.

 

The masses are downtrodden in group structures everywhere and always in authoritarian, caste societies with feudal or socialist economies. To become free and to be able to run their own affairs motivates them to work and perhaps maverize to gain balance and a sense of worth.

 

Not so for intellectuals. It seems likely to me that intellectuals, as part of the governing elite, are that kind of exclusive individualists that Hoffer referred to earlier, and they will work and create because they feel obligated to give back to society for the privileged status, rank, and wealth that society has bestowed on them, and they love status, recognition and power above all else.

 

Exclusive individualists are really elite members of collectivities and of high rank in a corporate body. They are privileged but not free, but eagerly give up freedom to enjoy high rank, their most sought-after goal. Thus, freedom would be shunned by them as an unwelcome curse. Because they are oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited, enslavers and enslaved, the power of powerlessness and the arrogance of these egoless rulers are factors which push them to loathe freedom and to flee from it as something malevolent, sick, or deformed. Thus, freedom would not energize them to be ready to work.

 

Hoffer: “Certainly in this country cultural creativity has not been proportionate to our degree of individual freedom. There is a chronic insecurity at the core of the creative person, and he needs a milieu that will nourish his confidence and sense of uniqueness.”

 

My response: We are free in America, but we have never been as free as we could have been, being held back by altruist-collectivist ethics as promulgated by the merchants of selflessness, both religious and secular. Because we were not raised to be egoists and individuators, our cultural creativity lagged our individual freedom.

 

If the individual is a great soul, his self-confidence and fierce yearning to live and thrive will provide him with all the nourishing he requires to bolster his confidence and sense of uniqueness.

 

Hofer: “Discerning appreciation and a modicum of deference and acclaim are probably more vital for his creative flow than freedom to fend for himself.”

 

My response: The great soul does not much care if others or the world defer to him or denigrate him to his face or behind his back. He is his own audience, and his own evaluator and outsiders are ignored for the most part. Only the insecure and group-oriented care one whit about the clerisy think of him and his work.

 

Hoffer: “Thus a despotism that recognizes and subsidizes excellence might be more favorable for the performance of the intellectual than a free society that does not take him seriously. Colderidge protested that ‘the darkest despotisms on the continent have done more for the growth and elevation of the fine arts than the English government. A great musical composer in Germany and Italy is a great man in society and a real dignity and rank are conceded him. So it is with the sculptor or painter or architect. . . . In this country there is no general reverence for the fine arts.’ It is of course conceivable that a wholly free might become imbued with a reverence for the fine arts; but up to now the indications have been that where common folk have room enough there is not much room for the dignity and rank of the typical writer, artist and intellectual in general..”

 

My response: With universal Mavellonialism across America there will be room enough among the common folks for the fine arts, when nearly everyone maverizes.

 

Hoffer: “The paradox is, then, that although the intellectual has been in the forefront of the struggle for individual freedom he can never feel wholly at home in a free society.”

 

My response: The intellectual was proposing individual freedom but actually this group-oriented elitist was never for individual freedom, and only one of the masses that individuates is the kind of individual that feels wholly at home in a free society. He is for individual freedom because that is what he is and how he lives.

 

Hoffer: “He finds there neither an unquestioned sense of usefulness nor favorable conditions for the realization of his talents. Hence the contradiction between what the intellectual professes while he battles the status quo, and what he practices once he comes to power.”

 

For the upper middle class Mavellonialist individuators, his sense of usefulness and favorable conditions for realizing his talents can only occur in a free society. He does not want to come to power or rule anyone—he just wants to be left alone and gives not a damn for communal approval or the lack thereof.

 

Hoffer: “At present, in every part of the world, we see how revolutionary movements initiated by idealistic intellectuals and preserved in their keeping tend to crystallize into hierarchical social orders in which an aristocratic intelligentsia commands, and the masses are expected to obey. Such social order, as we have seen, are ideal for the performance of the intellectual but not for that of the masses. It is the circumstance rather than the corruption of power which has been turning idealistic intellectuals in strident, ruthless slavedrivers.”

 

My response: We will have none of that: a society of upper middle-class individuating supercitizens rule none and are ruled by none.

 

Hoffer: “The vital question is of course whether the masses, energized and activated by freedom, can create aught worthwhile on their own.”

 

My response: Yes, the individuating masses will produce the brilliant and dazzling easily, repeatedly, profusely, and undoubtedly.

 

Hoffer: “Though the masses have been with us from the beginning of time we know little about their creative potentialities. In all the fifty centuries of recorded history the masses apparently only had one chance to show what they could do on their own, without masters to push them around, and it needed the discovery of the new world to give them that chance. In his Last Essays, Georges Bernanos remarks that the French Empire was not an achievement of the masses, but of a small band of heroes. It is equally true that the masses did not make the British, German, Russian, Chinese, or Japanese empires. But the masses made America. They were the vanguard:  they infiltrated, shoved, stole, fought, incorporated, founded and raised a flag—And all the disavouched, hard-bitten pack Shipped overseas to steal a continent With neither shirt nor honor to their back* (*Stephen Vincent Binet, John Brown’s Body (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1928).

 

It is this fact that gave America its utter newness All civilizations we knew of were shaped by exclusive minorities of kings, nobles, priests, and the equivalents of the intellectual.”

 

My response: Here is another remarkable Hofferian intellectual discovery of the first order: only and for the first time in human history the masses fabricated a country and culture called America: the masses made America. If American exceptionalism can provide training and encouragement for the masses to self-realize, one and perhaps all, then that will be a cultural revolution of startling proportions and significance.

 

Hoffer: “It was they who formulated the ideals, aspirations, and values, and it was they who set the tone. America is the only instance of a civilization shaped and colored by the tastes and values of common folk. No elite of whatever nature can feel truly at home in America. This is true not only of the aristocrat proper, but also of the intellectual, the military leader, the business tycoon, and even the labor leader.

 

The deprecators of America usually point to its defects as being those of a business civilization. Actually they are the defects of the mass: worship of success, the cult of the practical, the identification of quality with quantity, the fascination with the trivial.”

 

My response: None of these defects are serious and can be converted to self-realizing victory in the lives of each worker and burgher should he choose to maverize. The fascination with the trivial and with pleasure and diversions are tendencies that keep the masses here from taking themselves too seriously or being too ultraistic, and that leads in the maverizer to living by the moral standard of moderation.

 

Hoffer: “We also know the virtues: a superb dynamism, an unprecedented diffusion of skills, a genius for organization and teamwork, a flexibility which makes possible an easy adjustment to the most drastic change, an ability to get things done with a minimum of tutelage and supervision, an unbounded capacity for fraternization.

 

So much for the defects and virtues. What of the creative potentialities? My feeling has always been that the people I work and live with are lumpy with talents.”

 

My response: I do not know if Hoffer believed that the masses were talented enough to be individuators, but I know that they are.

 

Hoffer: “We do not know enough of the nature of the creative process to maintain that a sense of uniqueness is crucial to creative flow.”

 

My response: It is.

 

Hoffer: “Certainly, the American’s wariness of people with a claim to uniqueness is not synonymous with an aversion to excellence.”

 

My response: Because our Judeo-Christian heritage of altruistic-individualist morality makes us wary of people claiming to be special and unique, it does not follow that people claiming to be special, uniquely talented and intellectually superior are such, but they could be, as anyone can and should be, if she will but self-realize as the Good Spirits all have done, and order humans to so perform.

 

Hoffer: “The American perfects and polishes his way of doing things, whether in work or in play, the way the French of the seventeenth century polished their maxims and aphorisms. The realization of the creative potentialities of the masses hinges on the possibility of a diffusion of expertise in literature, art, music and science comparable with the existing expertise in mechanics and sports.”

 

My response: Hoffer usually is right in his views and is a truth-lover and truth-speaker, so the world is hurting as it neglects his wisdom and advice. Yes, Americans can be en masse individuators of impressive creative potential and output through the widespread, near-universal profusion of expertise in the fine arts as well as in mechanics and sports.

 

Further, from Mavellonialism, we need to agree to move Americans from altruist-collectivist morality over to egoist-individualist morality, from group-living to individual-living, from finding one’s identity with group-identifying, moving towards individual-identifying, by abandoning group rights in favor of individual rights.

 

With these changes, the creative potentialities of the masses will quickly be evident and realizable.

 

Hoffer: “We know of one instance in the past where the masses entered the field of cultural creativeness not as mere onlookers but as participants. We are told that Florence at the time of the Renaissance had more artists than citizens. Where did these artists come form? Craftsmen and their workshops played a vital role in the unfolding of the new painting and sculpture. The Renaissance was born in the marketplace. Almost all the great artists were apprenticed when children to craftsmen. They were mostly the sons of artisans, shopkeepers, peasants, and petty officials. The sixteenth-century historian Benedetto Varchi says of the Florentines: ‘I have always been very much surprised to see that in these men who have been accustomed from childhood to carry heavy bales of wool and baskets of silk and who spend all day and a large part of the night glued to their looms and spindles there should dwell so great a spirit and such high and noble thoughts.’ Everyday life was permeated by an interest in the procedures and techniques of the arts. One can hardly imagine a Florentine painter of the time making the remark, attributed to Marcel Duchamp, that ‘when painting becomes so low that laymen talk about it, it doesn’t interest me.’ Even the greatest of the Florentine painters and sculptors had an intimate contact with everyday life, and lacked the disdain of the practical characteristic of the artists of ancient Greece and of our time.”

 

My response: The common people should work practical jobs while doing fine arts, philosophy and sculpture, and the law of aesthetic moderation, or the clash of conflicting traits, suggests that humans are at their most profound and original, when the idealistic and impractical is intermingled with and smashes into the vulgar, practical and material, a collision deliberately orchestrated by the artist, a most productive arrangement meant to and which will stir his creative juices.

 

Hoffer: “Verocchio, Alberti, and Leonardo da Vinci had a passionate interest in practical devices, machines and gadgets. They were no more fastidious and no less ‘materialistic’ than artisans and merchants. There is no evidence that cultural creativeness is incompatible with relatively gross bents, drives, and incentives.

 

Though it may be questioned whether the lesson of Florence is applicable to a country of millions, it does suggest that the businesslike atmosphere of the workshop is more favorable for the awakening and unfolding of the creative talents of the masses than the precious atmosphere of artistic cliques. As we shall see, the increase in leisure due to the spread of automation makes the participation of the masses in cultural creativeness an element of social health and stability. Such a participation seems more feasible when we think of turning the masses into creative craftsmen rather than into artists and literati.”

 

My response: Let us convert America into Florence on a mass scale, where 200 million adults maverizers become creative craftsmen as well as artists and literati. The sky is the limit.