The Proud

 

I was scrolling on Facebook a few days ago (Today is 3/27/26.) when I came across a meme from whom I believed was popular, televised, respected Catholic Bishop and intellectual, Bishop Robert Barron.

Barron was telling his anonymous audience that the most grievous sin against God was the sin of pride. I have got into this in great detail elsewhere, which I will not reiterate here, but I wish to quip that the greatest sin against God is humility: For it is the masochistic, humble, nonindividuating, selfless agent of low-esteem, once his group-living mode of existing inflames in him a sense of entitlement, exceptionalism and ardent devotion, nested either in his tribalism or ideological cause, who is prideful on steroids, the kind of pride that scoffs at and denies God’s sovereignty over humans.

Golden Rule Redux

 

It is time to introduce an updated version of the ethical reciprocity rule, classically referred to as the Golden Rule. If an individual is a rational egoist and individuator, she would seek that one victimizes no other person and never permits another person to victimize oneself.

The psychology of victimization is the number one device resorted to by bullies and tyrants to justify their aggressive push to gain social, legal, economic, institutional and political clout.

Elites Usually Decide

 

Elites usually set the theme or narrative that governs what goes on in every society in every generation. Eric Hoffer regards this meme as axiomatic, and I rarely disagree with him, and I do not here either.

His Chapter 4 in his book, The Temper of Our Time, is entitled A Name For Our Age. I will write out and respond to the entire chapter which runs from Page 71 through Page 91 of his book, and will comment where appropriate.

Here it is—(Hoffer or H after this): “The general impression seems to be that the age in which we live is the age of the masses. Half the time when you open a book or start a discussion you find yourself dealing with mass production, mass consumption, mass distribution, mass communication, mass culture, mass this and mass that. We blame the masses for our ills: for the vulgarization of our culture and politics, for the meaninglessness of our way of life, and of course, for the population explosion.”

My response: We are a mass culture but if our culture and politics are vulgar, if the masses would maverize, the vulgarity would disappear. If we have abandon God, so our lives are empty and meaningless, we need Jesus, good deities, Mavellonialism, and good old American culture to right that ship, and enjoy meaning and purpose, bursting at the seams.

H: “Actually, America is the only country in which the masses have impressed their tastes and values on the whole of a society. Every-where else, from the beginning of time, societies have been shaped by exclusive minorities of aristocrats, scribes, businessmen, and the hierarchies of sacerdotal or secular churches. Only in America did the masses have a chance to show what they could do on their own, without masters to push them around, and it needed the discovery of a new world to give them the chance. But in America just now the masses are on their way out. With the coming of automation 90 percent of the common people will be unneeded and unwanted.”

My response: Only in America have the masses been able to impress their tastes and values upon society as a whole. Almost everywhere else, through out human history, aristocrats of all stripes have called the shots. It is my contention that in America, with constitutional republicanism, capitalism, individualism sand egoist-altruist ethics, was a singularly unique historical change, where the masses ran things, where equality was rather common, and class structure not so pronounced.

By contrast through out history and in prehistory, where elites run things and impress their tastes and values upon the masses, there class structure is rigid and vertical, poverty, tyranny, human rights abuses, slavery are the norm, with all repressed due to predominating altruist morality and collectivist politics and economics. Where altruism and groupism are the norm, there elites run things, there unnatural suffering and evil is maximized.

When the masses run things, especially if they were individuating anarchist supercitizens, there egoism and individualism will bring about free, prosperous, happy masses running things.

As for automation or AI making the masses superfluous, unneeded and unwanted, the masses will need to continue to work and grow business so they make themselves needed, feel needed and self-wanted.

H: “Nor is there room any longer for the special aptitudes and talents of the masses. There was a time in this country when the masses acted as pathfinders and pioneers.”

My response: America was the first mass society in history, the first real democracy or republic where the little people ran things, but now elites are starting to run things again, as the people lose their grip on power and say-so, but as individuators, the masses could here stay on top, and then let that mass culture spread across the globe.

H: “They plunged into the unknown, cleared the land, built cities, founded states and propagated new faiths. The masses built America and for almost a century shaped its future. But it is no longer so. America’s future is now being shaped in fantastically complex and expensive laboratories manned by supermen, and the masses are on the way to becoming a waste product no one knows what to do with. No. Our age is not the age of the masses but the age of the intellectuals. Everywhere you look you can see intellectuals easing the traditional men of action out of their seats of power. In many parts of the world there are now intellectuals acting as large-scale industrialists, as military leaders, as statesmen and empire-builders. By intellectual I mean a literate person who feels himself a member of an educated minority. It is not actual intellectual superiority which makes the intellectual but the feeling of belonging to an intellectual elite.”

My response: From the 1960s until today, America has been ruled by intellectuals not the masses, and they, the elite rulers, are not intellectually superior, but they really believe they are—and often the masses believe they are--because they hold superior rank and power to run things. The human need to gain rank over others is so alluring and all are easily corrupted by and addicted to crave to hold power and rank over others.

H: “Indeed the less valid his claim to intellectual superiority the more typical will be the intellectual. In Asia, Africa, and Latin America every student, every petty member of the professions, and every clerk feels himself equipped for national leadership. In Britain and Western Europe the intellectual, though not as assertive in claiming his birthright to direct and order society, nevertheless feels far superior to the practical men of action, the traditional leaders in politics and business. In Communist countries the intelligentsia constitutes the ruling class.

In America the educated have not until recently developed a clear-cut, unmistakable intellectual type. There has been a blurring of types in this country. The differences are relatively slight between the educated and the uneducated, the rich and the poor, the old and the young, civilians and soldiers. It is remarkable how many topics there are—sports (including hunting and fishing), cars, gadgets, diets, hobbies, the stock market, politics—in which Americans of all walks of life are equally interested and on which they can all talk with expertise. The paradox is that it is this sameness which gives to every human type in this country a striking singularity in the eye of the foreign observer. When Edmund Wilson went to London some years ago the British intellectuals could not believe their eyes: Edmund Wilson looked like a businessman. In 1963, a delegation of American longshoreman to Latin America found it hard to convince local labor leaders that they were bonafide workingmen. To a foreign observer, the American businessman is classless; ‘grandee, entrepreneur and proletarian all in one.’* (*Richard Hertz, Man on a Rock (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1946), p. 28.)”

My response: Hoffer the worldly, insightful practical sociologist has uncovered something traditionally at work in America. Here class differences and tastes in culture, and values are relatively the same across different classes, and intellectuals and the ruling elites see the world largely the same as and share values with the working people (look at billionaire President Trump with his lunch-bucket, prom-American outlook) and poor sees the world, and the society is relatively classless with a large middle class and a not unsubstantial upper middle class. Implicit in the original observations and accurate Hofferian conclusions, if I may extrapolate that America is the only or nearly only country ever run by the masses, and is a society of individualism, freedom and democracy, an ideal political social, cultural and economic arrangement, that it is relatively a classless society with some rich, some, poor, a huge middle class, fairly large upper middle class.

Americans: They share values and they are largely one class whereas a feudal or Marxist or Soviet country is run by a few at the top, a few in the middle, but most are really poor. These impoverished masses are nonindividuating, groupist enduring slavery, want, tyranny and the frustrating ethics of altruism-collectivism, whereas to be American is to anticipate enjoying individuating, liberty, equality, peace, law and order, capitalism, democratic governance and egoist-individualist ethics—or heading that way.

Where elites run things and impose their values on society, there the stratification is entrenched and stark; their the ruling class does not share the values and culture of the masses. Hoffer does not quite say all of this as I did but he said some of it and anticipates all of it.

H: “The American intellectual has not always been what he is now. When you read what New England intellectuals were saying about common people early in the nineteenth century you are reminded of what British and French colonial officials were saying about the natives when the clamor for independence rose after the last war: ‘Wait and see what a mess these savages will make of things.’

A resemblance between intellectuals and colonial officials strikes us at first sight as incongruous. We associate colonialism with soldiers and businessmen. I remember how when I first read about the Italian Catholic hierarchy in northern Europe during the late Middle Ages, I was struck by how much it resembled a colonial regime. There was a continuous flow of tribute from the North, and cushy jobs for young Italians. It reminded me of the relations between Britain and India in the heyday of the British Raj. I saw the Reformation as a colonial revolution, and it seemed to me quite logical that is should have fostered national as well as religious separatism. Luther was a colonial revolutionary. ‘In the eyes of the Italians,’ cried Luther, we Germans are Teutonic swine. They exploit us like charlatans, and suck the country to the marrow. Wake up, Germany!’ Though I knew that the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was made up of intellectuals, it did not occur to me at the time that here was an example of colonialism by intellectuals. I could not connect intellectuals with colonialism.”

My response: Hoffer the clear, original thinker connected the dots, and is concluding that the intellectual, in any other political arrangement but America is like a colonialist and member of the elite ruling class, expressing its own values and culture and inflicting them upon the exploited, pliant masses. Through out history intellectuals were part of the elite that rules society and imposed their tastes on the masses, and intellectuals view that as their mission in life. They usually admit it openly and feel justified in ruling others. They are groupists not individualists and they disallow individual's freedom and power to run one’s own life.

H: “With the lessons of the present before our eyes we know better. We know that rule by intellectuals—whether by an intelligentsia in a Communist country, by native intellectuals in the new countries, or by Professors in Portugal—unavoidably approaches a colonial regime.”

My response: Hoffer’s realization and then updated generalization was that intellectuals in a society not run by the masses will be a society dominated by the elites who rule it, and these harsh, cruel overlords and over-ladies will run their nations just like they would if they were colonial administrators of a far-flung empire with colonies around the world. These woke and Progressive intellectual rulers, professors and other college-educated rulers of the institutions in America by 2015, that nearly captured all American institutions—public, private, educational, religious and military, Hollywood and mass media—leaders of the cultural Marxist mass movement, were ready to rule the masses in America ready to rule them as ruthlessly and without understanding as colonial intellectuals ruled over natives in the far-flung British empire.

H: “This is a colonialism that begins at home. Hence, too, the obvious fact that the liberation movements in Asia and Africa which were initiated and won by native intellectuals, have not resulted in democratic governments but in a passage from colonialism by Europeans to colonialism by natives.”

My response: Hoffer is informing us that all elites, intellectuals and the rest of them constituting the elite, are really just colonial administrators, enforcing their brand of tyranny upon the local population. I think Hoffer's analogy of ruling intellectual elites as interchangeable with colonial administrators of old is apt. Notice that native elites did not bring democracy to ex-colonial nations: aristocrats hate democracy and kill it every time.

H: “The typical intellectual everywhere is convinced that the common people are unfit for liberty and self-government. It is instructive to read what Patrice Lumumba wrote about the African masses before he became Saint Lumumba. In his book, Congo, My Country, written before Congo’s independence, Lumumba proposed to the Belgian rulers that they assimilate the African intellectual and together form an elite. As to the masses: ‘The status quo will be maintained for the uneducated masses who would continue to be governed and guided, as in all countries, by the responsible elite—the white and African elite.’

What does an economy run by intellectuals look like? It is colossal: big plans, big statistics, steel plants, factories, dams, power houses—the biggest ever. The intellectuals cannot be bothered with the prosaic business of producing food, clothing, and shelter for the people. He wants to start at the end and work backward. He pants for the grandiose, the monumental, the spectacular. Though factories, dams, etc. are practical things, the intellectual sees them as symbols of power and lordship rather than means for utilitarian ends.”

My response: Intellectuals lack common sense, practicality, modesty, realistic expectations.

H: “In Russia they build the biggest steam shovel ever made, while everywhere in the country you see people carrying brick and mortar on wooden platforms, four men lifting at four corners, because there are neither buckets or wheelbarrows. It would be hardly possible to make sense of rule by intellectuals without taking into account their consuming passion for grandeur. ‘The human heart,’ wrote D. H. Lawerence, ‘needs, needs, needs splendor. gorgeousness, pride, assumption, glory and lordship. Perhaps it needs these more than it needs love; at least even builders of a heaven on earth have made a nightmare of the words of Jesus that ‘whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of heaven as a child shall in no wise enter therein.’ And it is in this nightmare that the schoolmaster’s wildest dream is coming true: when he speaks the whole world listens. And how these schoolmasters do talk. Four-hour speeches, six-hour speeches—a schoolmaster’s heaven.

In international affairs the coming of the intellectual has brought to the fore the cult of naked power. To an intellectual in power liberalism, the readiness to compromise, and moral considerations are the mark of a paper tiger, and the sight of a paper tiger incites him to a most reckless ferocity. Never before has there been such a disdain for truth and the ‘court of world opinion.’ The intellectual in power seems to understand only the simple language of divisions, warships, bombers, and missiles. He has a most sensitive nose for iron determination. Who would have dreamed fifty years ago that the intellectual ready to give their lives for the oppressed would make an article of faith of cynicism and the big lie? Who would have thought that power would corrupt the idealistic intellectual more than it does any other type of humanity?”

My response: Because centralized power so sickens intellectuals, they should never be allowed to run anything.

H: “The age of the intellectual is full of surprises and paradoxes. One would have thought, for instance, that in societies dominated by intellectuals the atmosphere would be ideal for the performance of poets, writers, and artists. What we find instead is that a ruling intellectual tends to hamper or even stifle the creative individual. The reason for this paradox is that when intellectuals come to power it is as a rule the meagerly endowed among them who rule the roost. The genuinely creative person seems to lack the temperament requisite for the seizure, exercise, and, above all, the retention of power.”

My response: It is not that intellectuals who seek power over others only do so if they lack ability, that gathering power to themselves is a substitute for creative endeavor, be they personally gifted or not. Rather an intellectual too lazy to discipline herself to become creative and wield the power of powerfulness, settles for being a mediocrity seeking power over others, the corrupting power of powerlessness.

H: “If Hitler had had the talents (Actually Hitler did potentially but did not because he gave up to soon and believe he could not, so he could not; then he wanted to not hate himself, so he took his murderous revenge upon humanity be killing and destroying, and we like him are all immensely talented and immensely destructive if that is how we choose to live and express ourselves—Ed says, disagreeing with Hoffer here.) of a great painter or architect, if Lenin and Stalin had the makings of great theoreticians, if Napoleon and Mussolini had it in them to become great poets or philosophers, they might not have developed an unappeasble appetite for power,”

My response: To reiterate, those that do not create or use as individuators personally their positive, loving power to build and create, the power of powerfulness; then they work for Satan and Lera, and destroy and maim and smash, and they wield institutional, political, tyrannical power, the power of powerlessness.

H: “Now, one of the chief proclivities of people who hunger for literary or artistic greatness but lack talents is to interfere with the creativeness of others. They derive an exquisite satisfaction from imposing their taste and style on the gifted and the brilliant. Throughout most of history the creative intellectual was at his best in societies dominated not by ‘men of words’ but by men of action who were culturally literate. In Florence of the Renaissance, Cosimo the Elder, a banker who dreamed of having God the Father on his books as a debtor, reverenced talent the way that the pious reverence saints. Though he was the first in the state, and unequaled in fortune and prestige, he played the humble disciple to scholars, poets and artists.”

My response: Men of words, or intellectuals, suppress individuality and creativity, while cultured bankers historically are more pro-intellectual and tolerant of creativity in others because as egoists, capitalists, business-people or trades-people, they are more individualistic and creative or tolerant of creativity than are authoritarian, aristocrat intellectual elites, who are very groupist and conformist, jealously intolerant of talented others enjoying their intellectual independence. Hoffer instinctively knows the more egoistic bankers like Cosimo are more tolerant of talent in other individuals than are petty, jealous authoritarian prescriptive intellectuals, groupist and controlling. I go farther and urge the people to be individuators; all are talented so as intellectuals, they can do banking as a sideline, and as bankers, they can be brilliant mathematicians as individuators. All may have fun as experts or as amateurs in all kinda of ways in all kinds of diverse fields.

H: “And how do the common people fare in societies possessed by intellectuals?”

My response: Not well: the educated elites in America by 2015 with their mass movements and holy cause, cultural Marxism or Marxist postmodernism, these true believers would run a society as totalitarian and vicious as anything under Pol Pot.

H: “It is well to remember that all through history the masses have found the intellectual a formidable taskmaster. In the past, rule by intellectuals went hand in had with the subjection or even the enslavement of those who do the world’s work. In India and China where the scholarly Brahmins and Mandarins were at the top for millennia, the lot of the masses was oppression, famine, and grinding poverty. In no other society have the weak been treated so mercilessly. In ancient Greece an aristocracy of intellectuals, unequaled in body and mind, had its foot on the neck of a large population of slaves. Even in Palestine, where after the return from Babylonian exile the scribes and their successors, the Pharisees, were in power, the common people were considered outcasts unfit even for piety. During the Middle Ages a hierarchy of clerks left the common people to sink into serfdom and superstitious darkness.

One cannot escape the impression that the intellectual’s most fundamental incompatibility is with the masses.”

My response: I agree with the brilliant Hoffer that the intellectual’s most fundamental incompatibility is with the masses, not because the educated elite are smarter, better or even different from the masses: they just have more power, money and education that the masses. That the intellectuals actually believe they are genetically better and smarter than the masses, inferior, immoral naughty children who need and deserve to be ruled by the elite with a whip in their hand—this is part of historical lies the haves recount to justify what they do the have-nots.

The masses need to run things always, never trusting any elite to run their lives for them. Only as individuated supercitizens, will the masses be those political creatures, half-intellectual and half-electrician or nurse, who will competently run things and keep elites decentralized, powerless, toothless.

H: “In every age since the invention of writing he has given words to his loathing of the common man. Yet, knowing all this, we were not prepared for the fate that has befallen the masses in the present age of the intellectuals. A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will. Charles Pe’guy saw it long ago, before the first World War. The intellectuals, he said, dealt with the people the way a manufacturer deals with wares; they were capitalists of people. Yet the ruling intellectuals see themselves as champions and spokesmen of the people, and call their societies ‘people’s democracies.’”

My response: Always intellectuals and social justice warriors claim to be for the people, but all they ever want and seek, behind their lies and self-justifications, is power over the people as their aristocratic masters and mistresses.

H: “When intellectuals come to power they develop a profound mistrust of mankind. They do not trust each other, but their deepest distrust is of the common people. Tell a Russian, Chinese, or Cuban commissar that the masses, if left to themselves, would perform well, and he will laugh to your face. He knows that the masses are incurably lazy, stupid, and dishonest.”

My response: The masses are basically evil, as we all are, and we are all naturally but not incurably lazy, stupid and dishonest, and we will act that way as long as the elites ruling us treat us as if that is are we are capable of—it is most unwise to underestimate how easy people are to accept that they are nothing, capable of nothing, and things will never get better, so why try, as long as their ruling elites, their culture heritage, and their cliques reinforce this terrible, depressing narrative upon the masses, upon the young. We can do better if we esteem ourselves, dare to maverize, dare to build a life, a better future for ourselves, for our families, for society.

What just occurred to me was what a kind and decent man Hoffer was, that he really loved the masses, here in America and everywhere, as he wanted them to run their own lives, their societies, finally to have a chance to be free, happy, prosperous, fulfilled, content, enjoying their few years on this mortal coil.

H: “You have to watch them all the time, breathe down their necks, push them, and crack the whip if you want anything to get done. The ratio between supervisory and producing personnel is always highest where the intellectuals are in power. In a Communist country it takes half the population to supervise the other half.

The intellectual does not believe in high wages. Affluence, he thinks, corrupts the people. He wants them to work not for filthy money, (People need to work for high wages, not for words and a holy cause.--Ed Says) but for a holy cause, for the fatherland, for glory, honor, the future. He wants to ennoble them by making them work for words. The ability to induce people to work for words, can, of course, be of vital importance to poor countries trying to get ahead. But enthusiasm is perishable and cannot serve for the long haul. Sooner or later, the working people in societies ruled by intellectuals refuse to perform. They labor-fake, act dumb, and pilfer the cargo the moment the intellectual turns his back. They cannot be frightened with prison since in these societies the difference between life outside and inside prison of one of degree rather than of kind. So you have to introduce the death penalty for economic offenses, and you have to build high wire fences and brick walls to keep the masses from running away.

Closely allied to the intellectual’s attitude toward the masses is his incompatibility with America.”

My response: Intellectuals are inherent elitists and aristocrats: whether educated or otherwise, they hate the masses and vie against them fearing the masses would treat them the same way in reverse if they came into power, and if revenge occurred to them, if they united, got angry and revolted.

America is the land of the self-governing masses, so intellectuals hate it and want it toppled and overthrown, and the virulent hatred of American and the deep, strong passion of Progressives who have overthrown and now direct the Democratic Party in America, these Marist postmodernists seek to supplant the American Way with their holy cause, cultural Marxism, so that America ruled by elites is the realized nightmare, a severe, socialist tyranny which they seek to instantiate and inflict upon American masses. The cultural Marxists have come close to succeeding their dream being achieved, getting their way here.

H: “With rare exceptions, foreign intellectuals, even when their interests incline them toward us, cannot really stomach America. In France some years ago, the French writer Francois Mauriac found himself at a lunch table with Cardinal Spellman. He tells us that all the time he was conscious of a feeling of revulsion. ‘Most probably,’ he says, ‘I would have felt closer to the Dalai Lama.’ This from a very French Catholic intellectual about an American cardinal. British intellectuals have said they feel more at home France, Germany, Russia and even in India than in English-speaking America.

Wherever American influence penetrates it rouses the fear and the hostility of intellectuals. What is there in American influence that so offends and frightens the foreign intellectual? What happens when a country begins to become Americanized? We have been told so often that America has a business civilization that you would expect American influence to manifest itself first in its effect on foreign businessmen. We find instead that the Americanization of a country means, above all, the de-proletarianization of its working class—the stiffening of the workingman’s backbone, and the sharpening of his appetites. He not only begins to believe that he is as good as anyone else but wants to look and live like everyone else. In other words, the Americanization of a country amount to giving it a classless aspect, a sameness that suggests equality. It is this that the foreign intellectual fears and resents. He feels the loss of the aristocratic climate as a private hurt. It is a drab, uninspiring world where every mother’s son thinks himself as good as anyone else, and the capacity for reverence and worship become atrophied. This to the intellectual is truly a ‘godless” world, and this ‘vulgarization’ and the debasement against which he rails.

Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve monumental things in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words.”

My response: I have noted elsewhere that individualists are more rational, moderate, temperate and modest, able to achieve monumental things without all the drama and words; words and drama must be displayed and orchestrated by intellectuals, so passionate, extreme and theatrical, their excessive enthusiasm showing.

H: “Think of it: Our unprecedented productive capacity, our affluence our freedom and equality are not the end product of a sublime ideology, an absolute truth, or a Promethean struggle. The skyscrapers, the huge factories, dams, powerhouses, docks, railroads, highways, airports, parks, farms stem mostly from the utterly trivial motivation of profit.”

My response: There is nothing trivial about the profit motive, and it should serve as our primary and often only motivation for acting and choosing to act.

H: “In the eyes of the foreign intellectual, American achievements are illegitimate, uninstructive and uninspiring. An Indian intellectual protested that America has nothing to teach because all her achievements came about by chance.

Equally galling is the fact that until now America has run its complex economy and governmental machinery without the aid of the typical intellectual, and wherever American influence penetrates, the services of the intellectual somehow cease to be indispensable. When an American consulting firm was brought in to straighten out the affairs of a South American company, the first thing it did was fire two-thirds of the pencil pushers, most of whom were university graduates who would rather starve than perform manual labor.

The intellectual’s loathing of America is of long standing. Heine spoke of the country as ‘the prison of freedom’ and saw in our equality a tyranny more stifling than any despotism. Carlyle and a whole tribe of nineteenth century British intellectuals were appalled by our commonness and alarmed by our materialism. Renan saw the end product of our democracy as ‘a degenerate populace having no other aim than to indulge the ignoble appetites of the vulgar.’* (*Saul Bellow echoed Renan when he said that affluence has ‘left us without a system of values’ and made America ‘a pig heaven.’) Freud protested: ‘I do not hate America. I regret it. I regret that Columbus discovered it.’ In his ‘Reflections on America’ Jacques Maritain tells in vivid words how the foreign intellectuals, out of their fear and hatred of the common man, have been telling each other that the common man’s continent is ‘a great death continent populated only with machines and walking corpses,’ a world ‘only intent on sucking all the vitality and the creative instinct of the universe in order to foster with them the levelling power of dead matter and a swarm of automatic ghouls.’

Thus it seems that the protagonists of our present age are not in America and Russia, or in America or China, or Russian and China, but America and the intellectuals. Though the indications are that America will somehow manage to come to terms with governments by intellectuals in Europe, the prospects are not promising for a modus vivendi with dominant intellectuals in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. A letter recently received from an American diplomat serving in Asia says: ‘I am always surprised at the amount of raw, venomous hatred for the U.S., that is displayed by everyone with more than six years of education in this part of the world. Strangely, the poor and illiterate masses remain well disposed towards the U.S., but that will certainly disappear with the next generation . . . By recognizing as a constant factor the hostility of the underdeveloped intellectuals, we would avoid the costly effort in trying to win world public opinion, and cold-bloodedly realize what they already know—that we are by our basic nature and destiny a subversive force in these societies, and that our own security lies in the transfer of power to the masses and to real mass leaders, not elite class leaderw.’

Time seems to be working for the intellectuals. With the spread of automation the intellectuals will be everywhere on top, and the common people unneeded and unwanted. In Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed a brash intellectual shoots of his mouth on the subject: ‘For my part, if I didn’t know what to do with nine-tenths of mankind, I’d take them and blow them up unto the air instead of putting them in paradise. I’d leave only a handful of educated people who would live happily ever afterward on scientific principle.’ I’m quite certain that nothing of this sort is going to happen to us. Still, the question remains: How can common people safeguard themselves against tyranny by intellectocracy?”

My response: Only as anarchist individuating supercitizens can the masses fend off and safeguard themselves against tyranny by intellectocracy.

H: “Strangely enough, the answer, though not easy, is relatively simple. Just as tyranny by an aristocracy or a plutocracy can be most effectively checked by turning everyone into an aristocrat or capitalist, so tyranny by an intellectocracy can be neutralized by turning everyone into an intellectual.”

My response: Well, there I found what I did not know Hoffer had concluded fifty years before I thought it up on my own: the masses can neutralize any intellectocracy or any ruling elite by becoming capitalists and each of them aristocrats and intellectuals, which is about equivalent to my suggestion that each of them self-realize into anarchist individuating supercitizens.

H: “This of course means society as a university, with a Berkeley-style ‘Free Speech Movement’ acting as a formidable opposition against tyranny from any quarter.

Since the central concern of the Great Society must be the realization and cultivation of its human resources, it might have to turn itself into a school even if there were no need for a safeguard against any sort of tyranny. But as we try to visualize society as a school—a country divided into hundreds of thousands of small school districts, each charged with the realization of its natural and human resources—we find the pleasant surprise that what we have would be less society as a school than society as a playground. A wholly automated society would demand only a token effort from the individual and give him back the child’s freedom to play. The relatively small number of people in each school district, with their various interests and pursuits, would have the time and inclination to know each other, learn from and teach each other, compete with and spur each other. There would be no dividing line between learning and living. All that schoolmasters can teach in a classroom is as nothing when compared with what we cannot help teaching each other on a playground. ‘Man,’ said Walter Bagehot, ‘made the school; God the playground.’”

My response: I like and approve of Hoffer’s suggesting that a society of learning, individuating adults-- or children for that matter—likely learn better and with more enthusiasm when learning is experienced, gained and conducted less in the classroom, but moreso in the world of experience, the playground of life.

All Are Welcome

 

I subscribe to The Cavalier Chronicle and enjoy their short, weekly homily on Page 7. The one for 7/23/25 was entitled United We Stand: “God’s grace offers to everyone a relationship with Him. No one person is better. We all can participate. We don’t have to qualify, but we do need to accept God’s offer. This week in church, reaffirm you relationship with God, and your fellow believers. He has made both groups into one. Ephesians 2:11-21.”

My response: There is something remarkably democratic about Christian doctrine that Christ’s grace is equally accessible to all.

Access For All

 

I subscribe to The Cavalier Chronicle and I enjoy their weekly homily on Page 7. From 7/16/25 is a homily entitled Even-Steven, which suggests all people are born equal in God’s eyes, and all people have equal access to God, no favorites, no disfavorites. God loves all equally, and that is comforting, and seems individualistic for favoritism and disfavoritism are more likely group practices.

Here is the homily: “Scripture assures us that as God’s adopted children we have ‘family privileges’. We are joint heirs with Christ. We can approach the throne boldly and ask God with confidence. That’s powerful privilege! Hear the reading of the will this week in church. He destined us all for adoption as His children through Jesus Christ. Ephesians 2:11-21.”

The Messiah

 

I subscribe to The Cavalier Chronicle, and they carry a weekly homily on Page 7, and the one for 9/10/25 was entitled The ‘Aha’ Moment: “Jesus asked His disciple Peter: ‘who do you say I am?’ With the help of the Holy Spirit, Peter correctly identified Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God. So who do YOU say Jesus is? Improve your answer this week in church. You are the Messiah. Mark 8:27-38.”

My Response: Amen.

The Infant

 

I subscribe to The Cavalier Chronicle, and on Page 7 they carry a weekly homily and the one from 1/14/26 is entitled Recognition: “The Magi recognized baby Jesus as someone special. He was someone to honor and bow before. We need to come to the same realization. Pay homage to Jesus this week in church. They knelt down and paid Him homage. Matthew 2:1-12.”

My response: We need to so recognize Jesus too.

Steady

 

I subscribe to The Cavalier Chronicle and on Page 7 every week they share a short homily. The one from 1/28/26 is Falling Out Of Love?. Here is is: “Our divorce rates demonstrate how easy it is to ‘fall out’ of love. Thankfully, God is not like us. God’s love is consistent, always for us and steadfast. Bathe in the love of God this week in church. How precious is you steadfast love, O God. Psalm 36:5-10.”

My response: You never really possess strong, healthy self-esteem unless you love God, and God loves you back, and you know it every day.

Head That Way

 

I subscribe to The Cavalier Chronicle, and they publish on Page 7 a short, weekly homily which I enjoy writing out and analyzing. The one from 1/7/26 is entitled Gain Wisdom: “Wise teachers of old counseled the young to seek wisdom. Jesus, as a human being, received His wisdom from God.”

My response: It is easier and far more likely that the young will seek wisdom if their elders are wise, value wisdom, teach the young to seek it ever, and to be close to a benevolent deity who will convey his or her wisdom with his or her apt student, just like the Holy Spirit and God provide for young Jesus.

The young person should seek to read a lot, study and experiment a lot, come to know a lot, and grow in skill, expertise and competence, and maverize to become an original, deep thinker. It helps also if God is in the wisdom-seeker’s soul for the prudent, rational, sensible yet imaginative youngster with love in her heart is much more likely to receive and generate wise propositions and judgements.

Homily: “He listened and learned by drawing close to God. We would do well to do likewise. Gain more of God’s wisdom this week in church. And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years. Luke 2:41-52.”

My response: In a modest fashion, may you like Jesus grow in wisdom with your growth in years lived.

Well-Situated

 

I subscribe to The Cavalier Chronicle and they publish a weekly homily on Page 7; the shared below is from 2/4/26 and is entitled Stand On Solid Ground: “The old hymn says that relying on anything but God is unreliable. It’s like building on loose sand. We want to build our life on solid ground of God’s love and instruction. Shore up your life’s foundation this week in church. O Lord, my rock and redeemer. Psalm 19.”

My response: Amen.

The Beginning

 

I subscribe to The Cavalier Chronicle, and every week they post a homily on Page 7. The one presented below is from 1/21/26, entitled The First Step: “Jesus’ formal ministry begin with his baptism. It marked a specific event and time. We too need to mark when we’ve made a decision or experienced a change. This week in church, think about your baptism. Did it change you? Jesus also had been baptized. Luke 3:15-17, 21-22.”

My response: The internal spiritual and/or ethical light bulb need never come on, but, should one choose to make a statement as to what one will do with one’s life, one takes that first step, towards building a beautiful life.

Numbers 35:16-30

 

In these passages, from The New American Bible, are the legal statutes, given by Yahweh to Moses to share with the Israeli people, which govern murder. They set up laws and guidelines, but provide justice for the accused too, because two witness are required to provide evidence to put the accused to death.

Note that God approves of the death penalty being meted out to murderers. Still, it was a society with laws and moral code (The Ten Commandments).

From the Holy Bible (KJV) there is not much more to report, but the word murder is replaced by smiting another.

Numbers Chapter 31

 

This Chapter 31, from The New American Bible, from Numbers is where Moses, as ordered by Yahweh to assemble an Israeli army of soldiers, sends these soldiers to commit genocide by putting all Medianites to death. Moses and Yahweh were infuriated when the soldiers initially only killed the Medianite men, sparing the women and children.

Some modern thinkers dismiss Yahweh as a cruel, barbaric, vindictive, bloodthirsty deity, subsidizing genocide against those worshiping other deities including pagans like the Medianites. I read online that the Hebrews, like most or all other ancient peoples, regarded their tribe or their nation as the only true humans, that those from other tribes were subhuman. Well, we all know from genocidal regimes in the 20^th century, we know what happens when people from neighboring tribes or nations are dismissed as subhuman; it is not immoral to kill those who are subhuman.

I do not want Christians, Jews or Muslims to wipe out any worshiper of a rival religion, but, there may be just wars too; it is complicated. We should not exterminate whole peoples as a general rule, though Yahweh’s campaign to purify Palestine as the land of the chosen people who exclusively worshiped Yahweh may be required such measures as wiping out the Medianites.

I as a moderate am not against rival deities and the worship of them as long as they are good deities, but if those following corrupt pagan faiths are devil worshipers, then they should be vigorously opposed, though Old Testament style wiping them out may go too far.

One helpful online article I glanced at suggested that Yahweh was the chief executive of a theocratic state, so to capture and purify the land of Canaan, neighboring tribes with their pagan deities and fertility cult practices, child sacrifice, temple prostitutes of both sexes, worshipers putting their feces on the altar as a sacrifice to Baal , Anath and Asherah, may have required brutal practices of genocide just to shock wayward Israelites from turning on Yahweh, a just God.

There is no doubt that Yahweh or God does allow for just war. Hebrews were not pacifists.

From the Holy Bible (KJV) here is a quote from Numbers 31:1-2: “And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Avenge the children of Israel of the Medianites: afterward shalt thou be gathered unto thy people.”

My response: This campaign against the Medianites was Moses’s last main assignment for he would die and be gathered unto his people, so it seems that the Hebrews believed in an afterlife where Moses’s family reside immortally as spirits.

In these passages from the Holy Bible, it becomes clear that Yahweh wants extermination of the Medianites to occur to rid Palestine of a people detrimental to Yahweh setting up Israel or Canaan as a land ruled by God’s covenant. It is also clear that Yahweh is a jealous God and does not want His people fraternizing with pagan neighbors with their pagan deities.

From what I was able cursorily to glean from AI and online articles on Baal and Anath, god and goddess of farming cults, seem to be powerful rivals, these the Medianites and Moabites were formidable enemies of Yahweh, the monotheistic God of the desert and wilderness,, seeking to use Balaam to curse Israel who were getting too strong. The Medianite women seduced Israeli men to worship Baal and engage in idolatrous and sexually promiscuous acts.

Yahweh blessed the Israelites as His chosen people, and when the Medianites and Moabites recruited Balaam to curse Israel, that infuriated God so God had Moses recruit an army of Israelites to kill the Medianites and Balaam, a Medianite.

Here is an AI search I did for why Yahweh wanted to slay the Medianites: “Including results for

1. why Yahweh killed the midianites

1. biblehub.com › q › why_did_god_order_killingWhy did God command killing Midianites, including children?

The command in Numbers 31 regarding the Midianites, including the devastating reality that children were destroyed, is one of the most challenging narratives in the Old Testament.

1. www.gotquestions.org › Numbers-31-17-MidianitesWhy did God command the Israelites to completely destroy the ...

May 31, 2023 · As strange as it may sound, the ultimate good of the Midianite males may not have come about without their being killed by the Israelites in warfare. This is “brass tacks” and gets to the root of whether one thinks that man was made in the image of God or whether one makes a god in the image of man. “

My response: I believe that man is made in the image of God more than man makes a god in the image of men.

AI: “

1. en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Numbers_31Numbers 31 - Wikipedia

They killed the men, including their five kings and Balaam, burnt their settlements and took captive the women, children and livestock. Moses commanded the Israelites to kill the boys, and women who had sex with men, and spare the virgin girls for themselves.

1. enduringword.com › bible-commentary › numbers-31Enduring Word Bible Commentary Numbers Chapter 31

Take vengeance on the Midianites: The Midianites were a nomadic people associated with the people of Moab in Numbers 25. God commanded that they be attacked in retribution for their part in the seduction of Israel into sexual immorality and idolatry.

1. www.sefaria.org › sheets › 422202Matot: What about the Midianite genocide? | Voices on Sefaria

How can we address the moral dilemma posed by the massacre of Midianite women and children in parshat Matot.

1. inspirepearls.com › blogs › bibleWhy Did God Tell Moses to Kill the Midianites – Inspire Pearls

Mar 4, 2026 · The command for Moses to lead the Israelites in the killing of the Midianites is a difficult but significant part of biblical history. It highlights the seriousness with which God views sin, especially when it influences His chosen people, and underscores His commitment to justice and holiness. “

My response: That God would order Moses and the Israelites to start a holy war, a just war, to wipe out the Medianites does overtly, violently make clear to pagan peoples, pagan neighbors, and to the Israelis themselves that Yahweh is not messing around, that His chosen people have agreed to worship him and be holy, virtuous and moral, and the refusal or rebellion against so doing and living will not be tolerated, that sin will be swiftly, completely and totally punished and vanquished. Yahweh is not playing and sinning has consequences which shall be visited upon the sinners by Yahweh.

1. 
   

Numbers 30-:2-3

 

In Chapter 30:2-3,of Numbers, Yahweh has Moses lay out the consequences of vowing something to God. My stance is that people should move with hesitation, deliberating carefully

about what and to what degree they pledge to God, if they should pledge anything to God, or if they posses the faithfulness, the will and consistency to meet and maintain what they promised God.

A person should deliver or strive mightily to deliver unto God what they promised to share with God. People should tread light here, not because it is an inherently bad idea to make vows to God, but because we may not be resolved or disciplined enough over a lifetime to fulfill our pledge, our promise.

God will not be pleased if we do not fulfill our pledge. I believe that God would not mind at all that we only promise what we can deliver, or must promise to do our best. Breaking a promise made to God is serious business. Look before one leaps, I recommend.

On the other hand, inherent in our very existence as rational beings with a soul, God wants of us or demands of us a pledge of some kind of devotion, service to and loyalty rendered unto God as the price of residing in God’s moral universe, as our share of the bargain, our personal and collective fulfilling of the covenant between humans and God that exists, whether any of us wish to abide by it or not, an obligation God imposes upon us in exchange for the gift of life, the free gift of divine grace, the gift of being spiritually, materially, morally, emotionally, intellectually and socially provided for by God.

This natural and supernatural vow which God obliges us to make (Refusing to make this commitment, or even try minimally to honor it is to reject God and God’s covenant with Adam and Eve and all their descendants. We are refuse to make that vow or honor that vow, but we are not free from divine justice, being sent to hell or Purgatory for 3,000 years, say for siding with Satan and Lera, vowing our allegiance to them.

We all serve either the Light Couple or the Dark Couple, whether we deliberately, explicitly make such a pledge or not, or even are aware of our divine requirement to make such a pledge, and then to live up to it. To make no such vow, or refuse to make such a vow, or cynically make such a vow, while knowing one is lying, facile and betraying God, God reads all hearts and such infidelity shall not go unavenged.

So, make the minimal vow necessary—and be faithful to it through out your life, as much as a depraved sinner like you and me can commit to and perform favorably towards—demanded of each of us by the Divine Couple, but think long and hard about vowing beyond that, and, if one does make so overt, extraordinary vow to serve the Divine Couple, then one had better well do one’s best to fulfill it.

Here is what Moses told the Israelites, as translated in my The New American Bible: “Moses said to the heads of the Israelite tribes, ‘This is what the Lord has commanded. When a man makes a vow to the Lord or binds himself under oath to a pledge* (*30, 3: A vow . . . a pledge: here the former signifies the doing of some good deed, in particular the offering of some sacrifice; the latter signifies the abstaining from some licit action or pleasure; cf 14.) of abstinence, he shall not violate his word, but must fulfill exactly the promise he has uttered.”

My response: Moses and the Lord are letting God’s people know that God detests a liar, a poser, a giver of quick, easy assurances of mutual covenant and vow, all the while knowing one will not keep one’s word, nor intends to. Those who play games with God will be discovered and punished immediately or sooner or later. It is just best to cease these deadly games.

Gentle means of self-mortification or asceticism are reasonable and healthy, advise Roman Catholic theologians online, as long as it does not veer over into self-harm (whipping one’s own back for example) and is conducted with reverent prayer at the same time.

In the biblical footnote, the pundit differentiates between a vow to do a good deed, and a pledge to deny the self some licit action or pleasure.

Here is the same passages from the Holy Bible (KJV)—Numbers 30:1-2: “And Moses spake unto the heads of the tribes concerning the children of Israel, saying, This is the thing which the Lord hath commanded.

If a man vow a vow unto the Lord, or swear an oath to bind his soul with a bond, he shall not break his word, he shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth.””

My response: I just love this Elizabethan Age vernacular/religious English dialect. Notice that letting easy false words and empty reassurances proceed to God from one’s lips are verbal insults to God which Yahweh commands the promiser not to do, or cease doing posthaste. To swear an oath to God is to bind one’s soul to God, and that is a most serious promise, not to be lightly pledged, or treacherously disregarded when it is inconvenient.

Numbers 27:15-17

 

When Moses is about to die, Yahweh instructs him to view the Promised Land from the Abarim Mountains, but that he will not be allowed to enter Israel and die there, a punishment of Moses by Yahweh for Moses’s misbehavior during the people’s rebellion against God in the desert of Zin.

Here is Moses responding to God’s instruction, as reported in my The New American Bible: “Then Moses said to the Lord, ‘May the Lord, the God of the spirits of all mankind,* (Here is the footnote for 27,16: The God of the spirits of all mankind: the sense that God knows the character and abilities of all men and therefore knows best whom to appoint—cf Acts 1,24--, or, more probably, that God is Master of life and death and therefore can call Moses from this world whenever he wishes; cf the same phrase in Nm 16:22, where ‘spirit’ evidently means ‘the life principle.’) set over the community a man who shall act as their leader in all things, to guide them in all their actions, that the Lord’s community shall not be like sheep without a shepherd.”

My response: I have not problem with this Roman Catholic theological interpretation of these Biblical lines, that God is Master or Mistress of all the spirits of mankind, the Master or Mistress of the life principle so God can call us home whenever He or She decides to. Yahweh thus picked the leader of the next generation to replace Moses, Joshua.

Here are these same lines from the Holy Bible (KJV): “And Moses spake unto the Lord saying, Let the Lord, the God of the spirits of all the flesh, set a man over the congregation.

Which may go out before them, and which may go in before them, and which may lead them out, and which may bring them in, that the congregation of the Lord be not as sheep which have no shepherd.”

My responseL I appreciate that this interpretation highlights that Yahweh is the God of the spirits of all the flesh, that is of all mortal souls. Yahweh wants a leader or shepherd to guide His flock, His sheep.

I would suggest that we now teach in 2026, people to maverize so that they can worship God and live well without a shepherd to guide them anymore—nonindividuators and collectivists require leaders much more than do individuators and individualists who can lead themselves wisely.

Hoffer On Blacks

 

In Chapter 3 of his book, The Temper Of Our Time, a chapter titled The Negro Revolution. Eric Hoffer offers his take about blacks, their nature, their challenges, their prospects. This Chapter 3 runs from Page 47 to Page 69, and I will type it out and comment on it where needed.

Here it is: Hoffer (H after this): “ 3

The Negro Revolution

The Plight of the Negro in America is that he is a Negro first and only secondly an individual.”

My response: This bold declaration is dead accurate: blacks have been and still are stereotyped racistly and racially, by others and by themselves, as black first, and an individuals only second. As an egoist morally and a supremely unbigoted person, I suggest that no human being can get very far, if she does not insist that she be regarded as an individual first, and a member of whatever racial or other group associations she belongs to, only secondarily.

Indeed, I generalize and gently refute Hoffer’s proposition, which may have been so in the 1970s—but need not be black destiny in 2026--that blacks are only their racial identity first, and individuals second. Hoffer is not a racist, or much of one--as I too am not a racist, or much of one--rather he likely was right to be alarmed that that American blacks, due to their ancient tribal history in Africa and perhaps by genetic predisposition are some of the most collectivist, altruistic, and group-oriented people in the world, and that genetic liability and their ancient communal heritage, holds them down and back, from advancing, from making wealth and pride for their people. The good news is they are as smart, talented and able to develop morally as any other racial or ethnic group, but they must become rational egoism to move forward.

To be groupist, altruistic, collectivistic and nonindividuating is to be evil, emotional, immoderate, more criminally inclined, more undeveloped and less enterprising than one otherwise would be.

It initially matters not whether blacks or any peoples who communitarianism and groupism is holding them down and back, are able to come up with a program of reform and progress which is the group doing better as a whole, or isolated individuals in that group excelling, excelling without their group’s support, and without even aid from others of the group obstructing one. All must be reform-oriented for things to get better.

The message is: blacks are smart and talented, as capable as anyone else. That being my premise, there is no excuse for blacks as a community and as individuals not to excel as well as the Jews or Japanese have done consistently. With a pride in themselves collectively and individually, that they are so proud and their standards of individual performance are so high, demanding consistent, perpetual, self-excellence in performance from themselves, and nothing less, these individuators of color will discover that by their own efforts and accomplishments, the sky is the limit.

I believe Hoffer is writing this or suggesting this, even if he is part-racist or stubbornly uses the word Negro. Deep down he knows blacks can cut the mustard, and because they can, he wants no one to baby them or feel sorry for them, or offer them welfare checks. Get the hell out of the way, and just see what these fine people can do on their own, without interference or subsidies.

It is time for black Americans to transcend and abandon as irrelevant and old news, the black story as very communal, very group-oriented people, who are irretrievably crippled and stunted due to a heritage, whose lingering suffering from discrimination and being psychologically crippled by a having ancestors who were enslaved in America, predestines for American blacks a bleak future, a pitfall constructed and distorted by altruist morality.

H: “Only when the Negro community as a whole performs something that will win for it the admiration of the world will the Negro individual be completely himself.”

My response: I work with many blacks, native Americans as well as African immigrants, and I have know they do not lack ability at all, but they need the Western values, and they need to work hard, and build something technically, in farming, and in business, which no other people have done: that will make them admired and respected around the world, and such achievement will make them feel proud of their own skill and abilities, and then they will be self-esteeming individuals. From their industry, their originality and their inventiveness, this is how blacks will come to esteem themselves, and thusly win and earn the approving, onlooking world’s appreciation, and there is no cheap substitute or that.

H: “Another way of putting it that the Negro in America need pride—in his people, their achievements and their leaders—before he can attain self-respect. At present, individual achievement cannot cure the Negro’s soul, No matter how manifest his superiority as an individual, he cannot savor ‘the unbought grace of life.’”

My response: There is no doubt that blacks come from a strong tribal background in Africa, and that to some degree flavors how they live and perceive, even today. If they maverize, then they can began to feel proper, healthy pride and self-esteem, and the more their leaders and more people in their community do likewise, it will be easier to stand out and alone to achieve, and to feel accepted in America as one of our cherished peoples and individuals, finally being granted and feeling ‘the unbought grace of life which other Americans more readily are granted by society, and receive from society, a gift of social acceptance of one of the successful groups of Americans, a sense of acceptance which motivates people to live up to such a fine reputation, if they esteem themselves at all, and perform to match this high self-image.

H: “The predicament of the Negro in America then, is that what he needs most is something he cannot give himself; something, moreover, which neither governments, nor legislatures, nor courts, but only the Negro community as a whole, can give him.”

My response: If of course his community, through its leaders and members do better, that reflects well upon the individual black, but I go a bit beyond Hoffer here, and suggest as blacks maverize, more and more and more of them commit themselves of a life of maverizing, they as individuals can give themselves respect that way too.

H: “Despite the vehement protestations of Negro writers and intellectuals, the Negro is not the white man’s problem.”

My response: It is a lie and a stunting, unworthy alibi for blacks or any human being to protest that the Negro is the white man’s problem. Each black, and each individual black, is her own problem. Only she can choose to be nothing and amount to nothing; only she can hold herself down and back, by simply refusing to work hard every day to be a better woman, a better human being.

Only she can serve God and self-realize: if she accepts that she is her own problem and she must solve her own problem, then, guided by egoist-individualist morality to self-actualize, she will blaze in the night sky like a meteor, and wondrous will her life of artistic and intellectual achievement, and wealth accrual be to behold. Hoffer does not suggest this explicitly, but it is implied by him, the quiet egoist moralist.

H: “On the contrary, the white man is the Negro’s chief problem.”

My response: Yes, the white man is the Negro’s chief problem because blaming whitey for one’s personal failure to excel for many blacks, has long served as a useful rationale, for never getting off of one’s duff, and becoming all that one can be.

The developing individuator does not look to others to save him, nor does he look to others attributing to them the power to keep him down and back. He regards others in this sense as irrelevant. He wills to self-realize and their fumbling efforts to hold him down and back within the pack of nonindividuators will fail. He lets none interfere with his plan of action to individuate actively, and he wastes not his life, time, energy and power allotment from God, seeking to control others, to gain power over them, to prevent them from self-realizing. Nor does he allow them to get a grip on him. None of these dead-end, pointless games appeal to him any longer.

H: “As things are now, the Negro is what the white man says he is—he knows himself only through white hearsay.”

My response: A groupist allows others to define him; black victims have allowed white actual or putative victimizers to define who they are, what they can do, what they are.

Blacks, like all humans, as rational egoists and individualists, would spurn any attempt to define who they are and what are the upper limits of their moral, intellectual, cultural and artistic capacities. They would snarl defiantly in the face of any mouthy, prescriptive define: “I define me; I define what I am and what I can do. Get the hell out of my life and my affairs, forever.”

H: “That which corrodes the soul of the Negro is his monstrous inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against him. To annul the white hearsay and be what he chooses to be the Negro must become his own playwright, stage his own play, and cast himself in a role of his own choosing. It must be a heroic play, staged in a part of the country where the Negro’s wrongs are glaring, and the attempt to redress them attended with deadly risks.”

My response: Hoffer’s wisdom and kindness towards blacks and all people and peoples is magnificently on display in this paragraph just above. Peoples and people must write their own narrative, be their own playwrights, stage their own play, and cast themselves in the role of individuators, in a specialty of their own choosing. This heroic self-staging to live as a maverizer and living angel is not a foolproof plan for success for blacks as individuals and as a block of Americans, but it is the next best thing to it.

I suspect that native Americans (the Cherokees, the Navajos, and isolated individuals in many bands and tribes across America) as individuators within a tribalist community, like blacks, need to bootstrap their way to richer, more enriching lives. They can do this if they adopt rational egoism as their moral system and try real hard to be all they can be.

H: “There are counties in Alabama and Mississippi, where Negroes are a majority. If a single, such country, preferably a small one, could be quietly organized to elect a sheriff and defend him from interference from the outside, there would be set in motion a course of events which could bring salvation to the Negro in every part of the country. It would be salvation by disciplined, controlled violence, with opportunities for magnanimity. If a Bull Connor or a Sheriff Clark comes to such a county, he is disarmed, given a good lunch, and driven back to the county line. To say that the odds are enormous against such a staged small-scale Negro Alamo ending in success is beside the point. Defeat here would mean more in increments of Negro self-respect than any number of victories in New York or San Francisco. The Negro needs genuine, unequivocal heroes.”

My response: Yes, Negroes need genuine, unequivocal heroes, heroic men and women of color for black youth to look up to and emulate as white boy scouts had white heroes to look up to and emulate.

H: “Martyrs or slogan-slingers cannot make history.”

My response: Social justice warriors are not heroic.

H: “Surely, if in Israel a few thousand fugitives from gas chambers stood up on their hind legs and defied forty million Arabs it should be possible for American Negroes to stand up to a pack of cowardly white trash.”

My response: Amen.

H: “The black counties in Alabama and Mississippi are more truly the homeland of the Negro than Palestine is the homeland of the Jew. Yet one has the impression that the Negro has no taste for the patient, quiet organizational work which is the taproot of any durable social improvement.”

My response: If millions of American blacks were individuators, they could readily united, cooperate and work, patiently, quietly at room temperature, to do work as individuals and as a community, which would impress no only themselves but the entire world. If blacks believe they can do this, then sooner or later they will do it and then the American “unbought grace of life” will be bestowed upon them by society too.

H: “The prevailing feeling seems to be that everything the Negro needs must come full grown from without.”

My response: That is complete false and erroneous: anything anyone needs or hopes to achieve must be made, assembled, or fabricated by the self for the self, or it is not an organic and lasting possession constructed by the creator as a gift to that creator, a self-generated homage to the creator.

H: “When James Baldwin went to Israel several years ago there was something in him that kept him from seeing what he should have seen; namely, a paradigm of what the weak can do to heal their souls.”

My response: The man works magic with words: Israel can serve as a paradigm to blacks and native Americans of what the weak can do to heal their souls.

H: “He wrote instead an article for Harper’s magazine in which he said that a cynical Britain and a cynical America gave Palestine to the Jews. To Baldwin it is self-evident if you have something because someone gave it to you.”

My response: Baldwin the intellectual, the altruist and Leftist, assumes you have something because the system gave it to you and you lack something because the system deprived you of it. Nonsense, most of the time you have something of substance when you earned it, and none can deprive you of it, unless they are confiscatory tax collectors, robbers or swindlers.

H: “He seems unaware of the fact that no one can give us freedom or take away our shame and all that we can expect from others is that they wish us well.”

My response: Amen, so eloquent.

H: “One begins to wonder whether the American Negro has the capacity to create a genuine community with organs for cooperation and self-help.”

My response: They had this capacity in tribal villages in Africa for tens of thousands of years, so with egoist ethics and proper self-pride here, they will come around.

H: “You strain your ears in vain amid the present Negro clamor for a small voice saying, ‘Leave us alone and we will show you what we can do.’ If it be true that the only effective way to help the Negro is to help him help himself, then the Negro’s aversion to, or perhaps incapacity for, a self-starting, do-it-yourself way of like makes it questionable whether he can ever attain freedom and self-respect. One cannot think of another instance where a minority striving for equality has been so deficient in the capacity for mutual aid and cooperation.”

My response: If black youth were brought up to work hard, discipline themselves, to maverize under the guidance of egoist morality, no doubt all of Hoffer's doubts above could be assuaged.

H: “Almost invariably when a Negro makes his mark in whatever walk of life his impulse is to escape the way of life, the mores and the atmosphere of the Negro people. He sees the Negro masses as a millstone hanging around his neck, pulling him down, and keeping him from rising to the heights of fortune and felicity. The well-off or educated Negro may use his fellow Negroes to enrich himself (in insurance, newspaper publishing, cosmetics) or to advance his career in the professions or in politics, but he will not lift a finger to lighten the burden of his people. Thus, the most enterprising and ambitious segment of the Negro population has segregated itself from the Negro millions who are left to wallow in the cesspools of frustration which are the Negro ghettos.

The Negro leaders seem to have little faith in the character and potentialities of the Negro masses. Their words and acts are largely directed toward non-Negro America. They are not aware of the Negro masses as a reservoir of power and an an instrument of destiny. And this lack of faith in the Negro masses is dictating the singular pattern of the Negro revolution. Its objectives, tactics, and finances are not predicated on massive Negro backing.”

My response: It is very disturbing that black leaders and blacks who are prosperous and have made it into the middle class and upper classes are not giving back to their community, but more importantly mentoring and sponsoring the young, showing them there is hope and a concrete way forward that works, a path built upon getting educated, obeying the law, working hard to provide for oneself, and forging a personal dream of improvement, and then following through upon chasing after it.

Once blacks like all Americans learn to live in accordance with egoist ethics and a teleology of maverizing, it will not matter so much what the leaders of the community think or believe about black masses, though heroic individuals in the community who have made it are always an inspiration to the aspiring young paying attention.

H: “A cursory check among my Negro fellow longshoreman on the San Francisco waterfront (there are some 2,000 of them earning between $7,000 and $10,000 a year) showed not one of these questioned have been asked to contribute to the Negro cause and not one of them has come near a CORE picket line, whereas many white longshoreman receive requests for money from Negro organizations, and some of them, and their daughters, are passionately involved in CORE affairs. Whether it be legitimate or not to expect as much from the Negro as we expect from ourselves (Negros are our equals, so we should not coddle them, but expect always as much from them as we expect from ourselves—Ed Says.), it is clear that we can expect little from the Negro so long as he does not expect much from himself.”

My response: None can save anyone but oneself. No black or any other human can be saved unless he expects and awful lot from himself and works hard and creatively to make it happen..

H: “Since the revolution has no roots in the Negro masses it cannot grow.”

My response: Another brilliant Hofferian insight: the only real revolution lasting reform only comes from the bottom up, from the people themselves as their promoters, implementers, sustainers. And genuine reform or revolution must be, by the audience, accepted as voluntary. The organizers educate and persuade only, and their pressure is gentle, not punitive, legal, tolerant and peaceful. The masses will only do something well if they heart is in it, if they choose to adopt a program of personal or societal reform willingness, not at gun point from thugs working for zealous elite interests.

H: “It cannot engage in long-range programs which after a period of maturing may yield an abundance of striking results. It goes for immediate, showy objectives. It operates wholly in the present, and has no thought of the future. In the past, wherever there were many wrongs to right, the one least capable of yielding palpable results was attacked first. In early nineteenth century England the abuses which called for remedy were many. There was unimaginable poverty among the masses, and a lack of protection by the law of the weak, yet the attack which rallied all the reforming forces was directed against parliamentary corruption. One has the feeling that the prospect of Negro equality would have been brighter had the first target been disfranchisement rather than segregation. But the Negro leaders, having no faith and no roots in the Negro masses, cannot wait for votes to yield results. They cannot heed Nkrumah’s advice: ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all others shall be added unto it.’”

My response: Hoffer is making the wise point that no reform is genuine, embedded or lasting unless it is championed by the people from the bottom up, an organic uprising of protest. If the people initiate it or adopt this cause, then it takes root and they are willing to change and personally commit to work towards, expanding the reform in their personal lives socially and communally, as well las legislatively in the community, the state, the nation.

Reform, at bottom is always a do-it-yourself, voluntary pledge, and no college-educated leaders, elites or limousine white-liberals can alter that basic reality, thus much of the black revolution since World War II forward has ben artificial, superficial and skin-deep. In other words, it never took hold because the masses weren’t in on it, and never will be until and unless it is their idea.

For a movement or reform to become popular within the targeted community or audience, the leaders must work with each member of the masses who populate the community, doing the slow, heavy, arduous lifting of persuading and revealing to them why joining and personalizing the reform is advantageous and morally desirable.

Hoffer wants to see the black masses, from the bottom up, with some help from their leaders and idealists at the top, take ownership of their personal and group reform, and implement it in their private lives first, and then secondarily as a political process or plan.

When and if black Americans adopt a love of capitalism, the philosophy of individuation and egoist morality, there will be no holding them back at all.

Hoffer is saying all of this or implying it, and many dismissed him as a racist for his tough-love approach to telling blacks that they must solve their own problems as individuals and as a minority, and that the failure to make progress rest squarely on their shoulders, not with anyone outside their community. Hoffer told blacks and liberals in his day the truth, and they weren’t having it, and I know he was marginalized by intellectuals and liberals, labeled and smeared as a crude, heartless white supremacist, but he was nothing of the sort. In his frank acceptance of blacks as his equals, he expected them to bootstrap themselves up on their own financially, culturally and as individuating individuals solely on their own, and that liberating approach is one of love, respect and complete non-racism. Progressives hate blacks, assuming they are inferior and cannot make it on their own, which is utter tripe.

H: “The questionable nature (Questionable as fake cause, run by clueless, phony idealists, Progressives with no understanding of human nature and black natures, doomed to utter failure from the get-go—Ed Says,) of the Negro revolution manifests itself in its choice of enemies. It wants an abundant supply of tame enemies—real enemies are too dangerous—and the way to come by tame enemies is to declare that your friends, the white liberals, are enemies because they are white. One can almost smell the psychological twist when a James Baldwin or a LeRoi Jones vilifies and baits white liberals who have championed the Negro cause their whole lives. So utterly convinced are Baldwin and Jones of the irredeemable worthlessness (None are worthless, let irredeemably so, unless that is how that individual or his minority group choose to low-rate themselves; such self-rejection is not true, but how one misperceives oneself does become true or reality for any person who low-rates, underestimates and short-changes himself: if he says he is no good, and cannot and will not amount to anything, well, then, his future is set: failure, loss, suffering and decline until he dies—Ed Says.) of the Negro people that anyone who thinks well of the Negro must seem to them simple-minded or just dishonest.

By a similar twist the Negro revolution tries to obtain tame substitutes for its only legitimate substitutes.* (*This chapter originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 1964 published there in slightly different form. I do not know whether the participation of the Negro masses in the civil rights movement has increased appreciably in the last two years. There is still no vivid awareness that genuine emancipation is a do-it-yourself job. There is still a shying away from quiet, patient organization, and a penchant for showy, quick results, and for tame enemies and tame battlegrounds. There is still the illusion that achievements are echos of words. The present clamor for Black Power conveys the impression that power is something that comes in cans and all you have to do is reach out and grab it.).”

My response: This entire asterisked paragraph is one of Hoffer’s most articulate, accurate, incisive criticisms which he ever wrote. I agree with it completely. Real revolution is personal, and an individuator is the most revolutionary revolutionary to ever exist, and her effort is quiet, gentle, peaceful, intellectual and conducted by her with endless, patience, energy, will and focus. When enough individuators become supercitizens and band together, they will revolutionize first their county, their state, their country and the world, and blacks are most welcome in this vanguard of reform, and will do it as well or better than any one else, of any other color.

H: “Until recently, the revolution has had no stomach for Mississippi and Alabama—except for occasional forays. Hence we find the head of CORE in 1964 announcing to the world, from the steps of the San Francisco City Hall, that San Francisco is Mississippi. The Reverend Galamison from New York, who on that day happened to be in our city, amplified the statement by saying that San Francisco is worse than Mississippi. Even Martin Luther King is reported to have said that the Negro’s real problem is in the North and not in the South. In short, the voice of the Negro revolution is telling us day in, day out, without hesitation and without qualification, that it is we outside the South who are the Negro’s real enemies; it is we who oppress him, exploit him, and brutalize him.”

My response: Hoffer like me is conservative but non-bigots in any significant or harmful sense: we dispute and reject these reverse racist historical accusations against white America and lovely Americans by white Progressives and some blacks. We deny it all, and welcome our black brothers and sisters to self-actualize, to be empowered to get a handle personally each over her own life, not worrying about the chattering class who makes personal success an impossibility by making this a collectivist issue, about racist groups versus groups of victims of color. It was all a lie and unworkable and still is today. Only blacks’ adopting Mavellonialist, liberating values will give these fine people an actual, beneficial revolution, a way out and up; nothing else matters, nothing else will work, nothing else is the unvarnished truth, and Hoffer consciously and instinctively wrote of this 62 years ago as dangerous, empty foolishness.

H: “How does this sound to our ears, and how does my kind of people react toward it?

The simple fact is that the people I have lived and worked with all my life, and who make up 60 percent of the population outside the South, have not the least feeling of guilt toward the Negro.”

My response: Whites should feel no guilt about blacks in America, and if anyone in this great, noble nation of remarkable opportunity and singular lack of bigotry cannot or has not made it, guilt should be felt, but only by every person who is a nonindividuator, who has not cut the mustard, because she has refused to discipline herself sufficient to will, work and think big, so she can cut the mustard. Success and liberation is a do-it-yourself task, and one should feel guilty if one took the easy, lazy, cowardly way of, drifting through life, amounting to little or nothing, playing the victim, that dastardly excuse, the lie which justifies a life of non-action, non-self-improvement and personal mediocre track records. Each failed person, black or white, has only herself to blame if she is a failure, and she should feel guilty. If she made it, she has only herself to praise for getting it done, and she has a right to feel proud of what she determined to get done, a life of talent potential be actuated, a gift back to God, growing cosmos, growing God’s kingdom here on earth.

H: “The majority of us started to work for a living in our teens, and we have been poor all our lives. Most of us have only a rudimentary education. Our white skin bought us no privileges and no favors. For more than twenty years I worked in the fields of California with Negroes, and now and then for Negro contractors. On the San Francisco waterfront, where I spent the next twenty years, there are as many black longshoreman as white. My kind of people do not feel the world owes us anything, or that we owe anybody—white, black, or yellow—a damn thing.”

My response: We owe no one anything and no one owes us anything. We should enslave no one and hurt no one, and we cannot allow anyone to enslave us or hurt us. There is the presupposition of moderate morality as the base of egoism, that we make it on our own, and we live off of none, and that is love, pure love, and any other Leftist or Fascist effort or scheme to link or clump people together as group-identifiers is racism, cruelty and hatred, naked, pure and operational.

H: “We believe the Negro should have every right we have: (quality of opportunity, not quotas, hiring and promotional preferences or guaranteed, legislated equality of outcome—Ed Says.) the right to vote, the right to join any union open to us, the right to live, work, study and play anywhere he pleases. But he can have no special claims on us, and no valid grievances against us.”

My response: I agree.

H: “He certainly has not done our work for us. Our hands are more gnarled and workbroken than his, and our faces are more lined and worn. A hundred Baldwins could not convince me that the Negro longshoreman that come in every morning to our hiring hall shouting, joshing, eating, and drinking are haunted by bad dreams and memories of miserable childhoods, that they feel deprived, disabled, degraded, oppressed, and humiliated. The drawn faces in the hall, the brooding backs, and the sullen, hunched figures are not those of Negroes.

Equally absurd is the contention that the American Negro is alienated from America. Despite discrimination, the Negro actually seems more at home in this country than any other segment of the population. It is doubtful whether even the Negro intellectual could transplant himself and prosper. The white men who populated this continent, most of them peasants, were not the type that transplant well. Their incredible homesickness not only made them perpetual wanderers but also gave them a feeling of being strangers on this planet; it drove them to impose their own man-made world on God’s creation to a degree never attempted before, and undoubtedly contributed to America’s unprecedented dynamism.

Even when it tries to be gentle, the voice of the Negro revolution grates on us and fills us with scorn. The Negro seems to say: ‘Lift me up in your arms. I am an abandoned and abused child. Adopt me as your favorite son. Feed me, clothe me, educate me, love me, baby me. You must do it right away or I shall set your house on fire or rot at your doorsteps and poison the air that you breathe.’

To sum up: The Negro revolution is a fraud.”

My response: Hoffer is repudiating the Negro’s revolutions’s legitimacy and his tough love, no-holds-barred criticism of the leftist liberation motif might be just what is needed.

H: “It has no faith in the character and potentialities of the Negro masses. It has no taste for real enemies, real battlegrounds, and desperate situations. It wants cheap victories and the easy way. A genuine mass movement does not shy away from desperate situations. It wants above all to prove the validity and potency of its faith, and this it can do only by acting against overwhelming odds, so that whatever it achieves partakes of the miraculous. Indeed, where there are no difficulties the true revolutionary will deliberately create them, and it often looks as if the chief function of his faith is to get the revolutionary out of difficulties he himself created.

I have said that the Negro outside the South can have no special claims on us and no valid grievance against us. This does not mean that the Negro is not in real trouble and that he has no desperate problems which others do not have to face.

This country has always seemed good to me chiefly because, most of the time, I can be a human being first and only secondly something else—a workingman, an American, etc. It is not so with the Negro. His chief plight is that in America he cannot be first of all a human being. This is particularly galling to the Negro intellectual and to Negros who have gotten ahead: no matter what and how much they have, they seem to lack the one thing they want most. There is no frustration greater than this.”

My response: I accept that Hoffer is likely correct that in his day and perhaps even now blacks, no matter how successful, could not be treated as a human being first, thus enjoying the unbought grace of life that whites like Hoffer himself enjoyed and were granted by the community and society. My suggestion to blacks and any person not treated as a human being first, not granted the unbought grace of life which make them feel welcome and secure in the community or nation that they work and thrive in—if they are thriving—I say let none define yourself: maverize and buy that respect for yourself, by that unbought grace of life for yourself, no matter if 99% of other American insist still upon denying you the unbought grace of life, the human right to be treated as a human being first. If you declare yourself special and wonderful and maverize, then eventually the rest of society will catch up and agree with your self-descriptive characterization of yourself as worthy of the unbought grace of life being granted you, that you must be treated as a human being first. Blacks cannot thrive until they grant themselves first and foremost these self-assignations whether society confirms that self assessment or not.

H: “Second, if every trace of discrimination was wiped out overnight, the Negro outside the South would still be in the throes of a soul-wrenching crisis, and we must know something of the nature of this crisis if we are to make sense of what is happening in the Negro ghetto. The Negro writer Ralph Ellison has pointed out that the American Negro is now undergoing a double drastic change. By merely crossing the Mason-Dixon Line he steps from feudalism into the maelstroms of industrialism, and from legal subjection to legal equality. Now, everything we have learned about the pains and difficulties inherent in an adjustment to the new underlines the enormous handicaps which beset the Negro in any attempt to begin a new life and become a new man.”

My response: Hoffer is right that blacks coming from Dixie to the North faced very stressful adjustments in finding work in the industrialized North, and being flung into an area where legal equality was a reality, but, that is no reason for blacks then or now to cease adjusting and being reborn as maverizers, because it is too hard for them. Blacks who I work with resonate no lack of intelligence or talent which I can detect, so, they just need to make small adjustments as each of them reinvent themselves, and just keep at it, until they catch up, succeed and more or less match or beat whitey at his own game. Daunting yes, Mr, Hoffer, but doable.

H: “The Negroes who emigrate from the South cannot repeat the experience of the millions of European immigrants who came to this country. The European immigrants not only had an almost virgin continent at their disposal and unlimited opportunities for individual advancement but were automatically processed on their arrival into new men: they had to learn a new language and adopt a new mode of dress, a new diet, and often a new name. The Negro immigrants find only meager opportunities for self-advancement and do not undergo the ‘exodus experience,’ which would strip them of traditions and habits and give them a feeling of being born anew. Above all, the fact that in America, and perhaps in any white environment, the Negro remains a Negro first, no matter what he becomes, puts the attainment of a new individual identity beyond his reach.”

My response: I do not underestimate Hoffer’s pessimistic assessment that it is harder for blacks to be born again as American individualists with a uniquely American identity, harder by far for them than for immigrant whites of the last century. But I refuse to accept that there cannot be blacks transitioning from being collectivist peoples from the poor, racist South who can never take on the new identity as prosperous, freer American individualists. If and as real esteem was earned and gained by each of them through their own efforts, while being a person of color, if blacks had training in individuating and egoist ethics, they could make the transition and it would help if whites would welcome then to be individualists who have the American identity as upper middle class patriots and lovers of America with conservative and republican values loving freedom, prosperity and civili society and a love of western values. If white could show by example, by encouraging and informing blacks who are successful that they can go call the way to being accepted as they are reborn as anarchist individualistic supercitizens, then they--blacks--could transcend all the challenges, daunting and substantive, which have prevented blacks in America from historically individuating as a personal victory and life story. For each black adult, so a desirable goal will be difficult but doable if they work hard enough, long enough and self realize.

Get going make God, yourself and your people and all whites white proud of you, the new you that has made constructed and donned a new personal identity as an American patriot, an America lover, an American rational egoist and individualist first, then a black person and a member of the black ethnic group second, that there can be blacks adopting this new identity which they come to love and promote, and their self-esteem and happiness would climb through the roof..

H: “Mr. Ellison describes the fantastic forms which the groping for a new identity often assumes in the bedlam atmosphere of the Negro ghetto: ‘Life becomes a masquerade, exotic costumes are worn every day. Those who cannot afford to hire a horse wear riding habits; others who could not afford a hunting trip or who seldom attend sporting events carry shooting sticks.’”

My response: It seems commonly recognized that black Americans have a flare for bright colors in their clothing, exotic, flamboyant dress and perhaps an exhibitionistic proclivity to be striking and noticeable in demeanor, and that is surface self-expression, more to do with being extroverted, than communicating one’s individuality as an individuator.

It matters not one whit to me how fantastic anyone, black, white or another hue, dresses or speaks, but what counts is their intelligence, their love of philosophy, their original thinking, their artistic development, their beautiful moral characters, nature and crafted over time.

H: “It seems doubtful, therefore, whether the Negro can adjust himself to a new existence as an individual on his own. He cannot cross alone the desert of transition an enter an individual promised land. Nor can he avail himself of a genuine mass movement to give him a sense of rebirth and sustain him until he can stand on his own two feet.”

My response: Again, blacks may need help from white or their own black peer groups to nudge them towards becoming reborn as individualists and individuators, and to some degree each of them can do it on their own. My solution is that every avenue should be presented to blacks to help them become reborn as American individuators and America-loving patriots.

We may be able to get this done without a black mass movement in America.

H: “Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement (We are too wealthy, too moderate and too egoistic, which leads to per capita fairly high individual self-esteem, and those who esteem themselves, are not discontented enough in quiet times, or frustrated enough in time of turmoil to seek out a rising mass movement in America—though cultural postmodernism is going strong and dangerously as the first successful mass movement to take hold in America—a sure sign that Americans lack self-esteem now, that they are frustrated, passionate and groupist--Ed Says.).

What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult or a corporation. Unlike those anywhere else, the masses in America have never despaired of the present and are not willing to sacrifice it for a new life and a new world.”

My response: Note that Hoffer labels shattered, lost souls seeking to find refuge from their hated selves by fleeing into the collective matrix, the sociological and metaphysical phenomena which is a current mass movement, as willing to sacrifice the present and their own lives, and he is not normatively approving of self-sacrificing, and in this way, again I see some convergence of thinking between him and Ayn Rand, though she rejects any sort of self-sacrificing as unfortunate and wicked.

H: “In this, the American Negro, despite his handicaps, does not differ fundamentally from his fellow Americans. He has no extravagant dreams, visions, and no wild hopes. He cannot conceive of anything more grand and desirable than the life lived by a middle-class American. Another way of putting it is that the American Negro minority is more American than minority. It cannot generate the alchemy of the soul which enables ‘the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty . . . and things which are not to bring to nought things that are.’ Like his fellow Americans, the Negro sets his heart no on ‘things which are not’ but on things he sees in store windows.”

My response: It comforts me to accept the reassuring truth that American blacks are American to their core, and could not go home to Africa again. It gives me hope that black Americans, who since World War II, have done so well integrated into the US military institutions, that they will be able to adopt full acceptance and living in accordance with individuating, rational egoism and loyalty to The American Way Culture, which will bring them fully into the ‘normal grouping of regular Americans who then enjoy the unbought grace of life, which accompanies being part of this society, deep down, and that comforts a people mightily.

H: “Hence, when the Negro masses act, you have looting orgies and not a mass movement. It is questionable, therefore, whether it will be a mass movement that would cure the ‘nowhereness’ and ‘nobodyness’ of the Negro ghetto and lead the Negro out of the present crisis.

But what of Elijah Muhammad and the Black Muslim movement. Alone of all the Negro leaders Elijah Muhammad has a vivid awareness of the vital need of a new birth in any drastic human transformation, and he alone has mastered the technique of staging a new identity. In one sense the Black Muslim is trying to do to the Negro what America automatically did to the millions of immigrants from Europe. By joining the Nation Of Islam the Negro is stripped of his habits, attitudes, opinions, beliefs, etc. He is given a new name, a new religion, and a new way of life. He is processed into a new man. That in order to do this Elijah Muhammad had to concoct doctrines of breathtaking, almost insane, absurdity should not come as a total surprise to anyone aware of the fantastic quality of man’s nature. Often in human affairs the simplest ends can only be reached by the most roundabout and outlandish means. And the fact is that the Black Muslim movement can point to many solid achievements. It has transformed idlers, criminals, junkies, and drunkards into clean-living, purposeful human beings.”

My response: If we reach out to the black community and use persuasion and steady pressure to invite their people to become reborn—not by such drastic, collectivistic, cultish means as the Black Muslim movement--to transform and create themselves each by her own efforts, reborn as a singular individuator, over time, we can help blacks become solid, contributing Americans, not a drag on the system any more.

H: “Yet it is highly doubtful whether in this country the Nation of Islam could ever become a movement of powerful sweep and drive. America simply is not favorable for the unfolding and endurance of genuine mass movements. The enormous digestive and assimilative capacity of this country is nowhere demonstrated more strikingly than in what it has done to mass movements. It has made of Puritanism a forcing house of successful capitalists; it turned Mormonism into a school of business tycoons; and even American Communism is becoming a preparatory school for successful real-estate dealers.* (*On the San Francisco waterfront the Communists are the most effective capitalists.) And now the Black Muslim movement is being Americanized; it is equipping its converts for success in practical affairs. If Elijah Muhammad or his successor has vision, he will realize that the future of his movement lies not in America but in Africa. It is conceivable that an Islamic heresy hatched by Negroes, preaching the primacy of the Negro race, and coupled with American industrial knowhow might become an unequaled instrument of empire in Africa. It confined to America, the Black Muslim movement may eventually become a holding company of stores, banks, factories, and farms. The most it could aspire to would be a miniature Utah with a mosque in its new capital of New Mecca.

As to the other black nationalist groups which are springing up across the country, they are manifestations of the Negro’s passion for alibis and the easy way out. They are a plunge toward the impossible to escape the arduous tasked required to attain the possible. As a black nationalist all you have to do is shoot your mouth off about the fire next time, and about grabbing six or seven Southern states, founding a Negro empire and breathing down the neck of a cornered, frightened white America. Your heart swells with heroic negritude, and you don’t have to lift a finger to do a thing.

Finally, I cannot see how the American Negro can escape the identity crisis by identifying himself, in the world of Martin Luther King, ‘with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean.’ Assuming, as I must, that the American Negro is as American as I am, I cannot see at present in the whole of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, a single achievement, a single personality even, to inspire me with wholehearted admiration, to set my heart and mind on fire, and prompt me to identify myself with it. It is possible to see how a James Baldwin or a Malcom X, lusting for a taste of power, can identify himself with a pseudointellectual dictator like Nkrumah. But it is inconceivable that a Negro longshoreman should swell with pride at the thought of a megalomaniac pie-card who fancies himself a lord of creation.

Surely, it should be the other way around: it is the American Negro who should demonstrate to the world what Negro energy, initiative, skill, and guts can do, and serve as an object of identification for Negroes everywhere.”

My response: I agree: as individuators American blacks would be exception thinkers, workers, inventors, poets, producers.

H: “It is the American Negro that the new Negro nations of Africa should be able to turn when they want to build factories, dams, and railroads, or create an army, or start an irrigation system. Again one cannot help thinking that what a handful of Jews in Israel have done for the self-respect of Jews everywhere, and what they are doing to help new nations in Asia and Africa, should not be so utterly beyond the reach of twenty million American Negroes who breathe the air we breathe and share the work we do.

The question remains: What can the American Negro do to heal his soul and clothe himself with a desirable identity? It has to be a do-it-yourself job. Anything done to and for the Negro must be done by Negroes.”

My response: Right on.

H: “There cannot be a non-Negro Moses leading Negroes to a promised land. Non-Negro Americans can only offer money and goodwill. As we have seen, the Negro cannot look for a genuine mass movement to lead him out of the frustration of Negro ghettos, nor can he attain self-respect by an identification of Negroes and negritude outside America. What, then, is left for him to do?

The only road left for the Negro is community building. Whether he wills it or not, the Negro in America belongs to a distinct group, yet he is without the values and satisfactions which people usually obtain by joining a group. When we become members of a group, we acquire a desirable identity, and derive a sense of worth and usefulness by sharing in the efforts and achievements of the group. Clearly, it is the Negro’s chief task to convert this formless and purposeless group to which he is irrevocably bound into a genuine community capable of effort and achievement and which can inspire its members with pride and hope.

Whereas the American mental climate is not favorable to the emergence of mass movements, it is ideal for the building of viable communities; and the capacity for community building is widely diffused. When we speak of the American as a skilled person we have in mind not only his technical but also his political and social skills.”

My response: For any community of individualists to thrive, the population needs technical skills but social and political skills too—great point.

H: “Once, during the Great Depression, a construction company that had to build a road in the San Bernardino Mountains sent down two trucks to the Los Angeles skid row, and any who could climb onto the truck was hired. When the trucks were full, the drivers put in the tailgates and drove off. They dumped us on the side of a hill in the San Bernardino Mountains, where we found bundles of supplies and equipment. The company had only one man on the spot. We began to sort ourselves out: there were so many carpenters, electricians, mechanics, jackhammers, and even foreman. We put up the tents and the cook shack, fixed latrines and a shower bath, cooked supper, and the next morning went out to build a road. If we had to write a constitution we probably would have had someone who knew all the whereases and wherefores. We were a shovelful of slime scooped off the pavement of skid row, yet we could have built America on the side of a hill in the San Bernardino Mountains.

I have no way of telling whether two truckloads of Negroes would have performed as well. (If they are egoists and individualists, they could do it—Ed Says.) What I know is that the distance between the average and the exceptional is greater in a Negro than in a white group; and it is plausible that a Negro group might have needed an injection of leadership from without to get organized. (If they were egoists and individualists as white culturally are predisposed to be, they would need only minimal supervision as was afforded the white skid row workers building the San Bernardino Mountain Road—Ed Says.) This suggests that the mobilization of Negro energies is hardly conceivable without the reintegration of the Negro middle class with the Negro masses.”

My response: It would help blacks perhaps the most, but any ghetto population of any color or nationality would do better with middle class people of their own color working with them to get projects done, for middle class and upper class people are more egoistic and individualistic than are the super-rich and the impoverished.

H: “When I speak of vigorous Negro communities, I do not mean Negro ghettos. You can have an effectively functioning Negro community even when its members live anywhere they please. What I have in mind is Negro centers, societies, agencies, loan associations, athletic clubs, and the like. You can see such communal organs functioning among the Jewish, Japanese, Chinese, and other minorities. My feeling is that right now the Negro in San Francisco, and probably elsewhere, is ripe for some grand cooperative effort. It could be the building of a model Negro suburb, or a Negro hospital, a Negro theater, a Negro theater for music and dance, or even a model elementary or trade school. You need dedicated men and women to mobilize and canalize abilities and money toward a cherished goal. It is being done in America every day by all sorts of people. Someone has to start these things—a single individual or a small group. In San Francisco the two thousand affluent longshoreman could be such a group.

The healing of the Negro by community building will be a slow process, and the end results, though a durable source of pride and solid satisfaction, will not be heavenly. There is no heaven on earth and no promised land waiting for the Negro around the corner. Only the rights and the burdens and the humdrum life of the run-of-the-mill American.”

My response: Hoffer seems racist and he may be a bit, as we all are, but, substantively he is not. He knows only blacks can save blacks at all, and only individual blacks can liberate themselves to work and self-actualize as individuals who flourish because they self-realize.

It is hard work and slow going, but worth whatever the individual is willing to expend to be all she can be. Black people are loaded with intelligence and talent, but each of them must agree to enjoy their tribal tradition, a holdover from tribal living in Africa hundreds of years ago, a heritage crippling blacks as a minority and as individuals, with all the tribal stressing of altruist morality, collectivist economics and polity, group-living, group-identifying, and support for lives of nonindividuating.