Eric Hoffer, in Chapter 1 of his 1967 book, The Temper of
Our Times, wrote this first chapter of his book, entitled A Time of Juveniles,
and it went from Page 1 through Page 19. I will type out the whole chapter
below, stopping where pertinent to make remarks. Here is Chapter 1:
Hoffer (H after this): “There was a week several days ago
during which the newspapers reported an epidemic of student riots spreading
from Istanbul to Teheran, Bombay, Saigon, Seoul, Tokyo, and Mexico City. Most
of the riots had an anti-American flavor. And I remember, how early one
morning, while waiting for the bus that would take me to the waterfront, I saw
the headline of another riot, and heard myself snorting with disgust: ‘History
made by juvenile delinquents!’
The sound of my words had a peculiar effect on me. Inside
the bus I did not look at the newspaper but sat staring in front of me.
Who makes history? Is it the old? How much of a role do the
young play in shaping events? Things were coming together in my mind. I
remembered that years ago I had inserted in The Passionate State of Mind an
aphorism which read: ‘History is made by men who have the restlessness,
impressionability, credulity, capacity for make-believe, ruthlessness and
self-righteousness of children. It is made by men who set their hearts on toys.
All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.’
This insight came to me from observing to willful
godchildren in action had been filed away in my mind and had not affected my
thinking. Now it seemed to me that we can hardly know how things happened in
history unless we keep in mind that much of the time it was juveniles who made
them happen.”
My response: Once again Hoffer’s brilliance and originality
come through loud and clear. Juveniles probably did make history, and it occurs
to me that juveniles and children are naturally groupist, group-identifying,
selfless, easily ruled by elites, that their natural and adopted societal moral
code of altruism would all coagulate into a system which prevented each citizen
from advancing much, not living her best life.
Notice too Hoffer’s axiom that all leaders strive to turn
their followers into children. I believe that is 100% accurate, and, masochistic
humans like being directed, enslaved, abused, degraded and ordered about by the
elites running their lives.
There cannot be universal democracy, or constitutional
republicanism everywhere until followers emerge en masse as individuating
anarchist supercitizens. As such they are not children, and no leader any
longer will be able to reduce them to that.
H: “Until relatively recent times man’s span of life was
short. Throughout most of history the truly old were a rarity. In an excavation
of one of the world’s oldest cemeteries, the skeletons showed that the average
age of the population at death was twenty-five, and there is no reason to
assume that the place was unusually unhealthy. Thus it seems plausible that the
momentous discoveries and inventions of the Neolithic Age—the domestication of
animals and plants; the invention of the wheel, sail and plough; the discovery
of irrigation, fermentation, and metallurgy—were the work of an almost
childlike population, and were perhaps made in the course of play. Nor is it
likely that the ancient myths and legends, with their fairy-tale patterns and
erotic symbolism, were elaborated by burned-out old men.”
My response: If Hoffer is correct, and it is the young and
juveniles that made history, the this all the more reason to teach the young
individuating and egoism, so they can grow up, run society well.
Hoffer was a remarkably original thinker, and this arises
from many unknown, internal sources at work in him, but I do know that he was a
nonconformist in no stylized way but especially in his innately great-souled
affiliation to individuating, in not allowing emotion to stunt his cognitive
and rational faculty, his refusal to group-live and group-identify. He
individual-lived and individual-identified by self-realizing.
Through all of these intellectual and intuitive meanderings
through a host of concepts and theories which he devised or encountered, he
latched onto the novel, impactful idea that the book of history was written and
playacted by humans who might well have been children and juveniles,
short-living, group-oriented, group-identifying, nonindividuating and selfless
for most of human history, and this is why totalitarianism, war, crime, injustice,
poverty and want are the human story.
Children and juveniles have written the sordid sad human
story and acted it out, with all its predictable disasters and shortcomings. A
middle class of anarchist individuating supercitizens will not be childlike and
immature.
Once individuating supercitizens are in the saddle of social
and political power, they will rewrite history leading to liberty, goodness,
justice, plenty, peace, and the by-product will be minimal evil in the world.
H: “The history of less ancient periods, too, reveals the
juvenile character of their chief actors. Many observers have remarked on the
smallness of the armor which has come down to us from the Middle Ages.
Actually, the men who wore this armor were not grownups. They were married at
thirteen, were warriors and leaders in their teens, and senile at thirty-five
or forty. The Black Prince was sixteen when he won fame in the battle of
Cr’ecy, and Joan of Arc seventeen when she took Orleans from the English. Without
some familiarity with the juvenile mentality and the aberrations of juvenile
delinquency it would difficult to make sense of the romanticism, trickery, and
savagery which characterized the Middle Ages; troubadours and chroniclers gave
them no mercy. Nor did things change markedly in the sixteenth century.
Montaigne tell us he hardly ever met a man as old as fifty. Salvadore de
Madariaga says of Spain’s great age (1550-1650) that in those days ‘boys of
fifteen were men; men of forty were old men.’ He adds that when the dramatists of
that age designated a man as old they meant a man of about
forty—yellow-skinned, wrinkle-faced, and toothless. Charles the Fifth became
emperor at the age of twenty. Francis the First became King of France at
twenty-one, and Henry the Eighth King of England at eighteen.
The questioned is whether the juvenile mentality is confined
to adolescents. Do people automatically grow up as they grow older? Is not
juvenility a state of mind rather than a matter of years?”
My response: My hunch is that we do grow up emotionally as
we age, but cases of arrested development among adults still fielding a
juvenile attitude are not at all uncommon.
H: “Are there not teenagers of every age? Cardinal Giuliano
della Rovere was elected pope at the age of sixty. He took the name Julius the
Second in honor of Julius Caesar, whom he esteemed as the greatest man who ever
lived, and whose career he was determined to emulate. So on the threshold of
old age he put on a helmet and cuirass, mounted a horse, and set out to become
a conqueror. Clearly the juvenile mentality may persist or re-emerge in later
life, even in old age.
In all times there are people who cannot grow up, and there
are times when whole societies begin to think and act like juveniles. The
twentieth century in particular has seen juvenilization on an almost global
scale. No one can fail to discern the juvenile character of Communism, Fascism,
racism (the Ku Klux Klan), and the mass movements erupting at present in the
underdeveloped parts of the world. Almost all the leaders of the new or
renovated countries have a pronounced juvenile element in their makeup.”
My response: It seems right and does not surprise me that
Hoffer observed, at the time of his writing this book—and likely for leaders
throughout most of history—that almost all leaders of the new countries have a
pronounced juvenile element in their makeup.
If leaders of a pack, a mob, a nation, got there and stay
there by saying, doing and proposing what their followers want said, done and
proposed, and these leaders, above all else, desire to stay as rulers on top of
the heap, they either exhibit internal juvenile traits and thinking, or assume
publicly juvenile traits and thinking, to match the juvenile traits and
thinking of their group-oriented followers. Where leaders and followers of
political movements are driven by, owned by and seek to perpetuate and extend
the reach of the power of powerlessness through their national mission, the
nature of the leaders and followers is feeling over thinking, nonindiviuating,
altruism, group-identifying. These psychic patterns are juvenile psychology and
actions. By stark contrast, individuating anarchist supercitizens are mature,
healthy adults who put the thinking and actions of childhood aside to grow and
develop.
H: “Arthur Koestler suggests that there is in the
revolutionary ‘some defective quality’ which keeps him from growing up.”
My response: The revolutionary does not lack talent, the
ability to love, mature and individuate: he only chose to run away from adult
duties so now he plays the resentful victim of the world and seeks revenge on
the world by bringing a holy cause, destruction and violence down upon the
people working to get it done every day, living with their wounds, sucking it
up and moving on.
He is not inherently defective unless he is severely
mentally ill. Most revolutionaries are demonically possessed with destroying everything
because they chose to allow a demon or demons into their souls or consciousness,
and now their viciousness and cruelty is without bottom or limits.
H: “The indications are, however, that the present trend
toward juvenile behavior has been gathering force for over a century and has
affected people who cannot be classed as revolutionaries. Such behavior was
rampant on the frontier and in the gold-rush camps, and the American go-getter,
though he has no quarrel with the status quo, is a much a perpetual juvenile as
any revolutionary.”
My response: Hoffer does not want mature adults or the teens
to be smitten by the juvenile bug, lest it become a permanent, revolutionary
bent on their part. Rather, for the American go-getter (all systems go to make
the dollars and grow the economy) or even an artist, writer or any other
individuators, might actually be a perpetual juvenile, in that she is never
plateauing and then remaining at the level for the rest of her life.
Hoffer might be less against an adult that is perpetually
being juvenile, if in action or in creating, their juvenility serves well them
and society. If their juvenility is a violent attack upon the system, then
juvenility of this kind is corrupt and condemnable.
H: “Militant nationalism, too, though not primarily
revolutionary in character, fosters juvenile manifestations in all sorts of
people. Laurens Van der Post calls nationalism ‘the juvenile delinquency of the
contemporary world.’ Clearly, the juvenile pattern is not confined to people
with ‘some defective quality, which keeps them from growing up, but may arise
or be induced in all types.”
My response: I agree with Hoffer than anyone can think or
act like a juvenile long after he or she should have matured out of such
primitive but prevalent thinking, psychology, and action.
H: “To understand the process of juvenilization we must know
something about the genesis of the juvenile mentality in the adolescent. We
shall not get anywhere by looking for differences in the brain structure or the
nervous system between adolescent and adult. I know of no demonstrable
differences. The reasonable approach is to assume the adolescent’s behavior is
induced largely by his mode of existence,”
My response: This makes perfect sense to me, that one of
juvenile, passionate, discontented/frustrated attitude and demeanor is strongly
nudged to so exist and so react to the world based on his mode of existence as
a nonindividuator, as an altruist and groupist: all these self-orientations
that increase self-loathing, immature self-expression and self-expressing. The
junvenilization of the individual can occur in the life of a teenager, or in
any 40-year-ols adult who is decompensated or decompensating.
H: “by the situation in which he finds himself. This would
imply that adults, too, when placed in a similar situation would behave more or
less like juveniles.”
My response: Hoffer suggests that being healthy and
self-esteeming or anxious and self-loathing are individual behavior patterns or
personal world orientations, likely induced or heavily pressured by social
pressures, especially since most people are groupists, and these social
pressures can override natural personality traits.
H: “Now, the chief peculiarity of the adolescent’s existence
is its in-betweenness: it is a phase of transition from childhood to manhood, a phase of
uprootedness and drastic change. If our assumption is correct, other types of
drastic change should evoke a somewhat similar psychological pattern.”
My response: I believe Hoffer is spot on once more, that
times of drastic change and turmoil where the lives, institutions, and shaken
confidence in and trust by the masses for a people’s grand narrative or
metanarratives, forces a second adolescent phase upon many perhaps most adult
citizens undergoing the painful drastic change. As calm, strong, versatile,
rational individuators, they would be equipped to endure drastic change without
panicking and seeking a mass movement and holy cause to believe in and escape
from the self-inside of.
As emotional, passive, subjugated, fatalistic
nonindividuators and groupists, most citizens can be radicalized and
juvenilized because they were not habituated to adjust to drastic change at
room temperature, by crafting a self-realizing self-identity and reborn self of
high self-esteem which empowers them to quietly, quickly, smoothly absorb all
changes with minimal upset and emotional indigestion.
H: “There should be a family likeness between adolescents
and people who migrate from one country to another, or are converted from one
faith to another, or pass from one way of life to another—as when peasants are
turned into industrial workers, serfs into free men, civilians into soldiers,
and people in undeveloped countries are subjected to rapid modernization. One
should also expect active people—whether workingmen, farmers, businessmen, or
generals—who retire abruptly, and even women undergoing a change of life, to
display proclivities and attitudes reminiscent of juveniles.
Let us have a close look at the experience of change. After
the Second World War backward countries in Asia and Africa began to modernize
themselves in an atmosphere charged with passion and a deafening clamor. As a
naïve American I asked myself why the sober, practical task of modernization—of
building factories, roads, dams, schools, and so forth—should require the
staging of a madhouse. In The Ordeal of Change I tried to find answers to this
question. My central idea was that drastic change is a profoundly upsetting
experience, that when we face the new and unprecedented our past experience and
accomplishments are a hindrance than an aid.”
My response: That we are born evil, fatalistic, emotional
not rational, conservative not adaptable, and then we run in groups, are taught
that our moral ideal is selfless self-sacrifice to others and the general
interest, it seems clear to me that the deck was stacked against humanity, the
we were determined to fail, and it makes one appreciate and be in awe of how
the West did as well as it did coming
out of the Age of Enlightenment.
H: “What Montaigne said of death is also true of the wholly
new: ‘We are all apprentices when we come to it.’ We are misfits when we have
to fit ourselves into a new situation. And misfits live and breathe in an
atmosphere of passion.”
My response: Hoffer the implicit egoist ethicist often
explains that misfits (juvenilized adults with shattered self-esteem are
enthusiastic emotional wrecks and capable of wild mood swings) are hysterical
and enthusiastic, so emotion is the evil (more evil than not) way of responding
to the world and making decisions. Misfits are altruistic and run in packs. Fit
self-esteeming and fitting-in adults that are rational and sensibly,
proportionately emotional, adjust to drastic change coolly, competently,
confidently, rarely missing a beat, adjusting a bit at a time, but continually,
absorbing all changes in a quiet, practical, sensible way without alarm, panic,
or stampeding. This is the ideal behavior we seek in each of the masses, if
they are ever to cope with drastic change peacefully, orderly, and carefully.
Both Ayn Rand and I regard being rational more than
emotional as the primary way to be good, to be moral, and to choose wisely in
response to what others and the world throw at us, and Hoffer’s noting that misfits
live and operate in a world of passion, does indirectly suggest that he would
agree with Rand and I that a self-esteeming egoist who thinks more than he
emotes, while doing both, is best situated to deal well with incoming drastic
change.
H: “We used to think that revolutions are the cause of
change. Actually, it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for
revolution. The difficulties and irritations inherent in the experience of
change render people receptive to the appeal of revolution. Change comes first.
Where things have not changed at all there is the least likelihood of
revolution.”
My response: Once more Hoffer supplies the reader with a
paradox and the realized truth to be learned by sorting out the unexpected
reality behind the paradox. We all assumed revolution breeds change, when it is
the other way around.
When significant enough or cumulatively occurring small
changes amass, then the people are awakened from their dogmatic slumbers, and
begin to stir and may become frustrated. If they were trained to live as
egoistic, rational individuators, absorbing drastic change would unfold almost
seamlessly. Then, their revolutions would be peaceful, successive, constant,
nonviolent and transform the system within the system. It is only where
groupist, passionate altruists are slammed up against the jolting, drastic change
that there the masses might stampede into a mass movement and hold onto its
accompanying holy cause, guru leader and his violent revolutionary plans and
solutions, a desperate seeking for a way out, doomed but irresistible for them.
H: “Now the fact is that the staging of a madhouse in the
process of modernization is not peculiar to backward countries in Asia and
Africa. Long before the present awakening of backward countries we had been
living in an apocalyptic madhouse staged on a global scale by Germany, Russia
and Japan, which set out to modernize themselves at breakneck speed. Moreover,
the mass movements, upheavals and wars which are a by-product of change
indicate there is more to the experience of change than a state of unfitness,
that the process involves the deeper layers of man’s soul.:”
My response: I am curious to see where this line of thinking
goes, because Hoffer is an atheist, so when he alludes to man’s soul, he is
referring to human, personal consciousness.
H: “After all, change such as the world has seen during the
past hundred and fifty years is something wholly unprecedented and unique in
mankind’s experience. From the beginning of recorded history down to the end of
the eighteenth century the way of life of the average man living in the
civilized centers of the earth had remained substantially unchanged. To the
Arab historian Ibn Khaldun it was self-evident that ‘past and future are as
alike as two drops of water.’ The technology developed during the late Neolithic
Age lasted almost unchanged down to the industrial revolution. A greater gulf
lies between us and Washington than lay between him and the Egyptian farmers
who labored for Cheops.”
My response: It occurs to me that the rise of Western
industrialism, and the Western moral tradition of modest, partial egoist
ethics—Christian quasi-individualism still dominated by altruistic-collectivist
morality—The Age of Reason, democracy, republicanism, materialism,
capitalism, secularism and science are
both the civilized fruits of drastic change accelerating after 1800 in the
West, and the expediter of more and better and faster unleashed drastic change,
which leads to technology, affluence, much knowledge and wondrous consumer conveniences,
which we enjoy and are prime examples of real human material and moral
progress.
Humans cannot further advance morally, intellectually,
spiritually, materially, politically, creatively and physically without
welcoming drastic change in the forthcoming decades, but always, always with
the stern reminder that the masses must live as egoistic, logical, tranquil
individuators, able to canalize and frame, meter and manage incoming change and
the rate of change so that the status quo is not destroyed by it, and the
masses are not misfitted by an inability to adapt and remake their eve reborn
selves to fit the brave new world hurling down upon them.
H: “It would be legitimate, therefore, to assume that there
is in man’s nature a built-in resistance to change. It is not only that we are
afraid of the new, but that deep within us there is a conviction that we cannot
really change, that we cannot adapt ourselves to the new and remain our old
selves, that only by getting out of our skin and assuming a new identity can we
become part of the new. In other words, drastic change creates an estrangement
from the self, and generates a need for a new birth and a new identity. And it
perhaps depends on the way this need is satisfied whether the process of change
runs smoothly or is attended by convulsions and explosions.”
My response: Thinkers and reviewers have labeled Hoffer as a
moderate conservative and as an ethicist and social critic, and I believe all
these attributions apply to him. He and I both affirm, consciously for me and
unconsciously for him, that, if people are rational, calm, self-esteeming,
self-realizing and versatile, almost all of them can retain their core self
while generating each of them for themselves, a reborn new selfhood and an
updated personal identity, and, if enough people were taught how to live as
anarchist individuating supercitizens then the process of change normally would
proceed in a country or community smoothly and peacefully, without civil war,
the rise of dictatorships, or anarchy and lawlessness in the streets.
H: “It is of interest to have a quick look at the means
employed by changeless primitive societies to tackle the one critical change no
society can avoid: namely, the change from childhood to manhood. In the Congo,
boys at the age of fifteen are declared dead, taken into the forest and there
subjected to purification, flagellation and intoxication with palm wine
resulting in anesthesia. The priest-magician (n’ganga) who is in charge teaches
them a special language, and gives them special food. Finally comes the rites
of reintegration, in which the novices ‘pretend not to know how to walk or eat
and, in general, act as if they were newly born and must relearn all the
gestures of ordinary life.’* (*Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage Chicago:
Phoenix Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 81. In several
Australian tribes the boy is taken violently from his mother, who weeps for
him. He is subjected to physical and mental weakening to simulate death, and is
finally resurrected and taught to live as a man.”
My response: Unless the child dies off, and the adolescent
is reborn as a man or woman, that youngster, as a juvenile delinquent, may well
be a scourge to society. If each young teenager was to metaphorically die and
be reborn as an individuating adult with an accompanying identity as such, all
would gain. Again, to remind the reader, as the bewildering rates of drastic
change further accelerate as expected, even the individuators will be very
challenged to keep pace, so, she must be aware of her peril and opportunity,
and work hard to rebirth herself with a new identity—within her spiritual identity
of being the woman she is over the decades of development—as often as needed to
remain able to fit in with surrounding change and transmutation.
H: “The interest of the rites is in their motif of rebirth
rather than in any bearing they may have on change in a civilized society. In
the modern world change overtakes a whole population, and the denouement is not
a return to an immemorial way of life. Here the sense of rebirth and a new
identity is created by mass movements, mass migrations, or by a plunge into the
perpetual becoming of sheer action and hustling. One becomes a member of a
glorious Germany, a glorious Japan, a nation of heroic warriors destined to
conquer the world; or one joins a revolutionary or religious movement which
envisages a new life and one sees oneself as one of the elect marching in the
van of mankind; or one actually immigrates to a new country and becomes a new
man. Thus a time of drastic change is likely to become a time of wild dreams,
extravagant fairy tales, gigantic masquerades, preposterous pretensions,
marching multitudes with banners waving and drums beating, messiah bringing
glad tidings, and mass migrations to promised lands.”
My response: Hoffer is delineating two different paths of
rebirth, a personal route, and a group route as a member of a mass movement.
The discombulated youngster must be reborn and adopt a new identity if she is
to survive.
H: “The tale of Moses and the Exodus is a luminous example
of the difficulties encountered, and the outlandish means that have to be
employed, in the realization of drastic change Moses wanted to accomplish a
relatively simple thing: he wanted to transform the enslaved Hebrews into free
men. But being a genuine leader, Moses knew that the task of endowing liberated
slaves with a new identity and immersing them in a new life was not at all
simple and required the employment of extravagant means. The Exodus from Egypt
was the first step. But more vital was the fiction of a chosen people led by a
mighty Jehovah to a promised land—the kind of milieu essential for a drastic
human transformation.
Now, the human transformation which took place during the
last one hundred years was not the turning of slaves into free men but drastic
changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution; yet, here too, the sense of
rebirth and a new life was generated by exoduses (mass migrations), the fiction of a chosen people (nationalism),
and the vision of a promised land (revolutionary movements). It is fascinating
to see how in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century the
wholesale transformation of peasants into industrial workers gave rise not only
to nationalist and revolutionary movements bringing the promise of new life,
but also to the mass rushes to the new world, particularly United States where
the European peasant was literally processes into a new man—made to learn a new
language, adopt a new mode of dress, a new diet, and often a new name. One has
the impression that immigration to a foreign country was more effective in
adjusting the European peasant to a new life than migration to the industrial
cities of his native country. Internal migration cannot impart a sense of
rebirth and a new identity.”
My response: Hoffer clearly points out and lays out how
humans will react to drastic change. Either as individuators and egoists, they
rationally, quietly, efficiently, throughout their busy, satisfying lives of
discipline, work and purpose-fulfillment, self-realize while adopting a new
self-identity and being reborn several times in their lives as needed and as
doable (while retaining their constant core self over time, a life time), or as
nonindividuators and collectivists, selfless groupists, the unfortunates will
be misfitted by external reality, rapidly, drastically changing. They will
adopt a collective identity of the mass movement which they are hiding inside,
and their rebirth as a true believer is not a pretty result, destructive both
to each of them, and to society at large.
H: “Even now, the turning of Italian and Spanish peasants
into industrial workers is probably realized more smoothly by immigration to
Germany and France than by transference to Milan and Barcelona. So, too, the
Negro who comes to New York from the West Indies adjusts himself more readily
and smoothly to the new life than the Negro who comes from the South.”
My response: My wife and I both work African immigrants and many
of these particular people are on fire and materially excelling, likely beyond
the general achievement levels of American blacks and whites. One guy and his
wife--I work with him--just last year bought a $700,000 house in Cottage Grove,
and put down $400,000 from their previous house sale, a house paid off in 15
years.
Native peoples get stuck in a rut in America and anywhere,
but foreigners who come here often appreciate the fabulous opportunities and
equality of opportunities for those that work hard here.
How do we inspire nonperforming native Americans of all
stripes to excel, if they choose not to be ambitious and self-disciplining? I
suggest teaching them Mavellonialist ethics as perhaps the best way to motivate
them to choose to work to excel, of their own free will, once they realize that
they must take care of themselves, if they would claim to esteem themselves.
H: “The juvenile, then, is the archetypal man in transition.
When people of whatever age group and condition are subjected to drastic change
they recapitulate to some degree the adolescent’s passage from childhood to
manhood. Even the old when they undergo the abrupt change of retirement may
display juvenile impulses, inclinations, and attitudes. This is particularly
true in this country, where leisure is not an accepted component of the active
life. Thus retired shopkeepers and farmers have made Southern California a
breeding ground of juvenile cults, utopias, and wild schemes. The Birch
movement with its unmistakable flavor of juvenile delinquency was initiated by
a retired candy maker and is sustained by business executives, generals, and
admirals.
The significant point is that juvenilization inevitably
results in some degree of primitivization. We are up against the great paradox
of the twentieth century: namely, that a breakneck technological advance has
gone hand in hand with a return to tribalism, charismatic leaders, medicine
men, credulity, and tribal wars. The tendency has been to blame the machine.”
My response: When we consider that the last 125 years or
longer have been drastic change after drastic change hitting people pell-mell,
it is not surprising that people are regressing into adolescent discontent;
once their discontent morphs into frustration, and there are millions of them
suffering from the latter condition, it stands to reason, that people seek
charismatic leaders, mass movements, holy causes and divide the world into my
tribe versus all other tribes. With shatters egos, they must escape themselves
and run into the flock.
The machine age did not cause this: what it did was expose
human’s raw inability to cope with change because as joiners, nonindividuators,
groupists, altruists and collectivists, people by nature lacked the
self-esteem, developed reasoning prowess, psychological versatility, mental
toughness, and iron will to withstand whatever fate throws at them, for they
could not take a licking and keep on ticking.
H: “There is a considerable literature on the barbarizing
and dehumanizing effects of the machine:
how it turns us into robots and slaves, stifles our individuality, and dwarfs
our lives.”
My response: Actually, as basically evil self-haters running
in packs since we were created or our ancestors came down from the trees, our
essential natures render us barbarians, who hurt and dehumanize ourselves and
each other because we are selfless and social. We have never enjoyed much
individuality, and being robots and slaves has been the human story, painfully
enduring small, petty lives of suffering and want is the human story before the
Age of the Machine even dawned.
H: “Most of the indictments of the machine come of course
from writers, poets, philosophers, and scholars—men of words—who have no
first-hand experience of working and living with machines. It should also be
noted that long before the advent of the machine age the typical intellectual
looked upon common people who did the world’s work as soulless robots and
automated ghouls.”
My response: Elite men of words, through the ages, were the
soulless robots and intelligent ghouls directing, abusing, and parasitically
living off the masses, so is it no wonder that the masses did not behave well,
or rationally, so it was easy for their parasitic rulers to regard them
contemptuously as inferior. The masses never had a chance to be anything else
but failures and mediocrities, dictated by their natures and training in
altruist morality.
H: “It is true that in the early decades of the Industrial
Revolution, when men, women and children had to be dovetailed with iron and
steam, the factories were agencies of dehumanization. But we of the present
know that communion with machines does not blunt our sensibilities and stifle
our individuality.”
My response: I agree, we are not made less but are made
better and more by the Age of the Machine.
H: “We know that machines can be as temperamental and
willful as any living thing. The proficient mechanic is an alert and intuitive
human being. On the waterfront one can see how the ability to make a forklift
or a winch do one’s bidding with precision and finesse generates a peculiar
exhilaration, so that the skilled lift driver and the winch driver are as a
rule of good cheer, and work as if at play. Even if were proven beyond a doubt
that the assembly line makes robots of workers it still only affects a small
fraction of the population, and cannot be held responsible for the nature of
the whole society.”
My response: Again, Hoffer is correct the machine usually
does not dehumanize, but most uplifts and liberates humans away from a state of
nature, so they can begin their upward ascent.
H: “No, it is not the machine as such but drastic change
which produces this social primitivism. The rabid urbanization of untold
millions scooped off the land has been the central experience of our age, and
the need of these uprooted millions for a new identity has generated and shaped
the temper of our time. Whatever the means employed to satisfy this need, the
result will be some degree of primitivization. Where a new identity is found by
embracing a mass movement the reason is obvious: a mass movement absorbs and
assimilates the individual into its corporate body, and does so by stripping
the individual of his opinions, tastes, and values. He is thereby reduced to an
infantile state. This is what a new birth really means: to become like a child,
and children are primitive beings—they are credulous, follow a leader, and
readily become members of a pack. Immigration produces a similar reaction. Like
a child the immigrant has to learn to speak, and how to act and assert himself.
Finally, primitivization also follows when the search for a new identity
prompts people to be eternally on the way by plunging into ceaseless action and
hustling. It takes leisure to mature. People in a hurry can neither grow or
decay; they are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.”
My response: When one is reborn, it is a primitive,
child-like state, but it is assumed or hoped that the adaptive, healthy adult
would begin to mature and grow almost right away, heading back towards adulthood with her new identity
and renewed self.
H: “But is social primitivization a fortuitous, unfortunate
by-product or does it have some function in the process of change? What is it
that society needs above all when it has to adjust itself to wholly new
conditions? It needs utmost flexibility, a high degree of human plasticity. Now
a society juvenilized and primitivized, whether by a mass movement, mass
migration. Or immersed in ceaseless hustling, tends to become a homogeneous,
plastic mass.”
My response: This negative, collectivist mode is only one means
of spurring the masses to change and be impressionable. It can also be done by each
individual searching for answers herself as she determines to proceed as an
individuating supercitizen, then the childhood, initial stage is shortened, and
soon the self begins to recover from the shock of adjustment, and begins to
maverize and adjust as much as required to match and flourish in the new
reality.
H: “We who have lived through the Stalin-Hitler know that
one of the most striking functions of a mass movement is the inducement of
boundless human plasticity—the creation of a population that will go through
breathtaking somersaults at a word of command, and can be made in the words of
Boris Pasternak, ‘to hate what it loves, and love what it hates.’
The True Believer is, then, a plastic human type thrown up
by a century of ceaseless change. The adaptation to change has also produced
the American hustler, a type as juvenile, primitive, and plastic as the True
Believer, but functioning without ideology and the magic of communion.”
My response: The American hustler is the individual citizen
and somewhat an individualist with enough success, fitness and victory
operating in his life, so that his juvenility and plasticity do not shatter him
as a person, and he follows the orders which he commands for and of himself,
and the individuating supercitizen could emerge from this type of new human,
reborn and with a new or update identity.
H: “The immigrant, too, having been stripped of his
traditions and habits, is easily molded. Finally, there is the plastic type of
the warrior. All through history, conquerors have learned more willingly and
readily from the conquered than the other way around. The conqueror does not
see imitation as an act of submission and proof of his inadequacy. It is a fact
that nations with a warrior tradition, such as the Japanese and the inheritors
of Genghis Khan in Outer Mongolia, find the tradition of modernization less
difficult than nations of subjected peasants such as Russia and China.”
My response: I count this remark about conquerors being able
to learn from the conquered rather than the other way around as one of Hoffer’s
most original and important generalizations. Blacks and Native Americans, many,
perhaps most of them, have had an awful time assimilating. It seems that the
conqueror has a heritage of being victorious, thus enjoying some residual
self-esteem, so thus, he can learn from his conqueror without feeling degraded,
because he has his own legitimate sources of self-pride independent of the
conquering people, so he can learn from them without feeling dehumanized or
embarrassed.
Conquered people with no former or no remembered former proud
heritage, from before being conquered and subjugated, lack much self-esteem,
so, for them to learn from the conquerors is felt by them to be further
humiliation and degradation, so they refuse to assimilate, grow and change, and
in America this means hurting themselves to spite the conquering people, with
their white and Western values and principles, values and principles among the
best in the world, and it is a loss for anyone not to adopt them. Only by providing
conquered minorities with egoist ethics, can we provide the young with a sense
of worth and accomplishment which they devised, created, and worked for, so now
they can objectively esteem themselves, and learn from whomever without feeling
minimized and reduced by borrowing from conqueoring peoples.
Now they can advance
and progress because they esteem themselves. It will no longer do for conquered
people to refuse to learn from conquerors because they have imprudently
associated worthy values practiced by the conquerors as unworthy because they
are associated with the conquerors. Such regressive resistance holds human down
and back from advancing for when any minority fails to progress and move
forward, it hurts all internally belonging to a nation and internationally.
Muslim worldwide need to adopt Western values and blend them with their own.
H: “There is a kernel of practicalness in the preposterous
tendency of an Indonesia or an Egypt to cast its people in the role of
warriors. It is also plausible that the defeat of forty million Arabs by tiny
Israel is rendering modernization of the Arab world more difficult and painful.
The throes of the machine age stem, then, not from the
machine as such but from the social dislocation caused by the rapid
urbanization of millions of peasants. It was this abrupt change in the life of
the European masses in the second half of the nineteenth century which released
the nationalist, revolutionary and racialist movements that are still with us.
A similar change in the backward countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America is
now setting off social tremors that keep our world in a state of perpetual
shock.
Where large-scale urbanization of peasants has taken place
without industrialization, the social consequences have been equally explosive
as we have seen in recent decades in Latin America. In largely
non-industrialized Argentina, Cuba, Uruguay, and Venezuela, townsmen already
outnumbered countrymen. Here rapid industrialization when it comes will find
masses of urbanized peasants ready to be processed into factory workers, and
the result is likely to be a considerable easing of social unrest rather than
revolution.
The curious thing is that with the spread of automation we
may see something like the present Latin American pattern emerging in the
advanced industrialized countries. The banishing of workers by automation from
factories, warehouse, docks, etc. will fill the cities with millions of
unemployed workers waiting for something to happen. Condemned to inaction, and
deprived of a sense of usefulness and worth, they will become receptive to
extremism, and to political and racial intolerance. Thus it seems that in our
present world problems come and go but the by-products remain the same, and the
end of The of Juveniles is nowhere in sight.”
My response: There is much to unpack in this final
paragraph, but I will try to be brief and parsimonious with my response. Hoffer
knew that workers in the service sector and those in the trades all need to
work to acquire and keep a sense of usefulness and worth, lest they become
receptive to extremism and to political radicalism. He worried about the social
by-product of automation upon the working masses in America but somehow that
seemed not to come about as new jobs and new opportunities gave people jobs,
money, something to do and a feeling of social usefulness, all good for social
stability.
I worry about AI and the coming of millions of robots able
to displace and work for free, so corporations and businessmen will lay off
millions of humans allowed to live on a government check without earning it.
That would be foolish and socially destructive, for revolution
or civil unrest or civil war would ensue.
My suggestion is for us to teach the masses egoist ethics, creative
practicalness as individuating supercitizens, so they invent millions and millions
of new jobs and businesses to keep themselves independent, self-sustaining,
content and feeling useful. Leisure and high art they can do as creators, but
they still need to work with their hands, and hustle, not allowing robots to
push them aside.
The despicable and unfortunate Time of the Juvenile will not
expire until 78% of the masses as adults are anarchist individuating
superictizens.
