Hoffer On Nature

 

In his book, The Temper of Our Time, Eric Hoffer, in Chapter 5, which runs from Page 93 through Page 117, present a chapter entitled The Return Of Nature. I write out the whole chapter and then comment on it where important to do so.

Here it is: Hoffer (H after this): “The Return Of Nature

All through life I had a feeling of revulsion when told how nature aid us and guides us, how like a stern mother she nudges and pushes man to fulfill her wise design. As a migratory worker from the age of eighteen I knew nature as ill-disposed and inhospitable. If I stretched on the ground to rest, nature pushed its hard knuckles into my sides, and sent bugs, burs, and foxtails to make me get up and be gone. As a place miner I had to run the gauntlet of buckbrush, manzanita, and poison oak when I left the road to find my way to a creek. Direct contact with nature almost always meant scratches, bites, torn clothes, and grime that ate its way into every pore of the body. To make life bearable I had to interpose a protective layer between myself and nature. On the paved road, even when miles from anywhere, I felt at home. I had a sense of kinship with the winding, endless road that cares not where it goes and what its load.”

My response: Hoffer the thinker built his unique views based on his own genius, his original take on the world, grounded in his prodigious reading and phenomenal memory But, he was not romantic nor idealistic—he lived always in the real world, and his sense of realism (his lived experience) and solid common sense come through in the paragraph above.

Hoffer intuitively understood that humans, the rational animals, are alien to inhospitable nature; we do not belong there, and never will. We are aliens when strolling in the woods. There, our accurate sense of strangeness makes us feeling lonely because, on some level, we really belong nowhere, and on some level we detect it. We cannot ever be in pure harmony with the natural world without first obliterating our individual human consciousness. We have to murder the self spiritually to become one with nature. For humans, low-level living angels, when at their best, are part of and actively contributing members of the race or kinds of sentient, smart creators, lesser by far versions of the Pantheon of existent good deities, who created the cosmos literally out of nothing, or out of eternally existent but unorganized prime matter and energy just existing in its naked chaos, who breathed into prime matter and energy a guiding, organizing rational principle or logos to organize and create the natural world operating in line with natural laws introduced by these sentient deities.

As a side bar, I want to offer that humans feel alone and lonely because they are—social companionship or immersing oneself in nature are somewhat effective palliatives, but are not meaningful, ultimately satisfying substitutes, for curing the only real, lasting heartache undermining the self-esteem of each living human: we feel lonely and alone because we are, often lonely in the crowd where we hide, lying by living our groupist, collectivist lives. Only if we individuate while communing with a good deity whom we serve, that is the only cure for painful loneliness which corrodes the human heart beyond recognition. This damage occurs where each person refuses to maverize, and fails to acknowledge with directly by self-realizing and serving a good deitiy.

Hoffer recognizes that humans are strange, unnatural creatures who belong nowhere except with each other or with God, so humans need to build their own society apart from nature, an artificial, unnatural complex society where man feels most at home in.

Hoffer too implicitly suggests that nature is evil and that human society, a human construction, when its people are moral and loving, it is morally good or superior to nature, and he accepts this Christian and Western point of view.

H: “Almost all the books I read spoke worshipfully of nature. Nature was pure, innocent, serene, health-giving, bountiful, the fountainhead of elevated thoughts and noble feelings. It seemed that every writer was a ‘nature boy.’ I assumed that these people had no share in the world’s work, and did not know nature at close quarters.”

My response: There is no doubt that the tree huggers and nature-lovers have an overly optimistic, rosy, idealistic misconception of nature, which Hoffer and I do not metaphysically have, but till I hug trees and love nature, all while realizing it is beautiful, though often brutal, cruel and harsh. We should enjoy nature as it is, not as we preconceive it to be.

H: “It also seemed to me that they had a grievance. For coupled with their admiration of nature was a distaste for man and man’s work. Man was a violator, a defiler and deformer.”

My response: Hoffer the genius cuts through the thicket with a sharp machete: those that revere nature excessively, also loathe humans, their endeavors and mere presence on earth, especially if they alter the natural landscape. Anyone that hates humans and wants a natural world with no human presence—these radicals hate humans, and wish we were dead and indeed would kill us off if they had the totalitarian means of committing genocide. There are no nastier idealists than these haters of humanity.

H: “The truth about nature I found in the newspapers, in the almost daily reports of floods, tornados, blizzards, hurricanes, typhoons, hailstorms, sandstorms, earthquakes, avalanches, eruptions, inundations, pests, plagues, and famines. Sometimes when reading about nature’s terrible visitations and her massacre of the innocents, it seemed to me that we are surrounded by devouring, pitiless forces, that the earth was full of anger, the sky dark with wrath, and that man had built the city as a refuge from the hostile, nonhuman cosmos. I realized that the contest between man and nature has been the central drama of the universe.”

My response: I like and agree wholeheartedly with Hoffer in what he mentions in this paragraph. Yes, the endless vying between men and nature is one of the central dramas of the universe.

I also think humans built cities as a refuge against a hostile, inhuman cosmos, but also they built cities so that they would finally find and enjoy a human-friendly refuge in the universe where they no longer felt so meaningless and lonely. Humans only can find a home or receive emotional comfort from their own kind and that mostly must occurs in the city, away from nature, away from a home unnatural and unwelcoming to humans that most unnatural, fantastic creature half beast, half angel.

H: “Man became what he is not with the aid, but in spite of, nature. Humanization means breaking away from nature, getting out from underneath the iron necessities which dominate nature. By the same token, dehumanization means the reclamation of man by nature. It means the return of nature.”

My response: A return of nature does dehumanize humans, but a complete distancing of human lives from nature dehumanizes us too but less so, so the happy, moderate medium is to be more distant from than submersed into nature, but to do both at the same time in a balanced way.

H: “It is significant that humanization had its start in the fact that man was an unfinished, defective animal.”

My response: Nature or God or both made humans as unfinished, defective animals, and thus we are born basically evil in that low self-esteem or self-loathing comes naturally to us because instinctively we humans intuit that we are freaks of nature, twisted, unhappy, violent, lusting, unfinished, defective creatures: that God or nature or both made such hapless, untoward, angry monsters and them tossed us naked and hungry into nature where we never really will fit in, it is no wonder we hurt ourselves and seek to smash and destroy everyone and everything under the sun; we have a grievance against God and nature for creating us as defective freaks, and when we choose to be evil, we seek revenge upon all humanity, all manner of living things, against Being itself.

Perhaps becoming an ethical adult, to a large degree, is learning to forgive ourselves, each other, God and nature, for our existential burden, our unhappiness and necessitated suffering; if we can learn to love ourselves, to love others, to love and obey God, and to love, make a living off of nature without seeking to submerge ourselves in it, or allow it to overwhelm us and subdue us again, then we have a chance to lead good, constructive lives and make a contribution to the world, without allowing it to tear us up anymore, nor any longer being dominated by our impulse to smash nature as a grinding vendetta to be acted upon.

As a metaphysical moderate, I always regard the glass of human life as both half full and half empty at the same time, depending how one looks at the human condition. To be created or evolve as a rational mammal, born into this world, each of us, as unfinished, defective creatures is the human blessing and the human curse, both at the same time, depending on one’s perspective. If one is a pessimist and fatalist, one will feel sorry for oneself and doing nothing to uplift oneself or to make one’s existential burden bearable, or even to live morally as a net positive influence in the world. If one maverizes, then one can appreciate that we mostly do not belong to or in nature and yet do not fit wholly, easily away from nature; for, on the other hand we are half-angel, but more than that, we are bit more than half natural, and this bestial nature of ours renders us repugnant to our supernatural ladies and lords, were they unforgiving of our repulsiveness, which they are not at all.

As beasts, we are repulsed by the goodness, the unnaturalness and supernaturalness of angels and good deities. We recoil from their offer for us to join and be as alike them as we can be, finding common ground with living angels and the good deities in whose image and likeness we aspire to and to a large degree can emulate, as we individuate and strengthen the better part of our natures. Humans are unique in the universe, free, having free will, and are not determined to be mere natural creatures, biological robots, their opposite number, purely perfected, purely more angels, lovely to be sure, but one-dimensional somehow. Human nature is much richer than that, stimulating, terrible and horrifying to know and experience when we allow the demonic in us to run wild and wreak havoc upon ourselves and the world.

H: “Nature dealt niggardly with him from the beginning. It brought him forth naked and helpless, without inborn skills, and without specialized organs to serve him as weapons and tools. Unlike other animals, man was not a born technician with an in-built tool kit. Small wonder that for millennia man worshiped animals, nature’s more favored children. Yet this misbegotten creature had made himself lord of the globe. (Humans have the powers of reason and by thinking, humans have gained mastery or the appearance of mastery over nature and this planet—Ed Says.). He has evolved fabulous substitutes for the instincts and the specialized organs that he lacked, and rather than adjust himself to the world he has changed the world to fit him.”

My response: Agains, as a metaphysical moderate, I urge caution and balance here. Humans should be activistic enough to change the world to some degree or a large degree to fit him, but, to a lesser and not easy to calibrate or specify, humans must fatalistically, stoically learn to adjust to the world as it is, and just endure what nature delivers to them.

H: “This, surely, is the supreme miracle. If history is to have meaning, it must be a history of humanization, of man’s torturous ascent through the ages, of his ceaseless effort to break away from the rest of creation and become an order apart.”

My response: History does have meaning and it is a history of people becoming individualistic or human, a torturous ascent out of nonindiviudated group-living, slowly edging towards individuated individual living, only as living angels are human an order apart.

Hoffer is so wise, so articulate, so perceptive at reading the human heart: human history will only have meaning if it is the written record of human progress or humanizing themselves as actualized individuators, being of nature, loving nature, and intimately interacting with nature every day, all the while self-realizing as mini-Creators of the cosmos, a modest personal version of the Creators, the Light Couple, the Mother and Father, the lesser good deities and the Good Spirits.

H: “Man became human by finishing himself. Yet his humanness is never finished and final. Man is not only an unfinished animal; he is an unfinished man.”

My response: Humans can only find meaning, become happy and fulfilled by finishing themselves, becoming human. I agree that Hoffer is implying my lifestyle suggestion for each agent to individuate and develop his potential, and I agree that our humanness is never finished and final, that we expire before we could reach perfection—not doable even if we lived 1.000 years. Yes, humans are not only unfinished animals but unfinished humans.

H: “His human uniqueness is something he had to achieve and preserve. Nature is always around us and within us, ready to reclaim us and sweep away all that man has wrought and achieved.”

My response: Our fallen natures within us and fallen nature outside of us will easily reclaim us if each new generations is not taught Christian morals plus individuating. We have to learn anew each generation born, and we can lose civilization in one generation or in 35 years short period.

H: “Man’s chief goal in life is still to become and stay human, and defend his achievements against the encroachment of nature. Nature is in almost complete possession of us when we are born. The child has to be brought up and made human. And no sooner is this accomplished than comes a crisis, from childhood to manhood, in which nature reasserts itself. The humanness of the adolescent is a precarious thing, He has to be reborn to manhood and be rehumanized. Indeed, every drastic change from one way of life to another constitutes a strain which may crack the uppermost layers of the mind, and lay bare the less human layers. Hence a time of drastic changes, even when the change is a leap forward, is a time of barbarization. Each generation has to humanize itself.

The contest with nature has the refined trickery we have come to associate with totalitarian wars. There are fifth columns, subversions, and a constant probing for soft spots. Just as man uses the forces of nature to subdue nature, so does nature use men to dehumanize their fellow men; and it is in the city that nature’s fifth column finds its most fertile ground.”

My response I rarely contradict Hoffer or disagree with him and I do not do so here either but if the city apart from nature is where humans have a chance of individuating and humanize themselves, then how can Hoffer affirm that the city is nature’s fifth column, its most fertile ground? Let us see how he works out this contradiction, or how I have to do so.

H: “The birth of the city was a crucial step in man’s separation from nature. The city cut man off not only from the nonhuman cosmos but also from clans, tribes and other primitive modes of organization. A self-governing city with populated by more or less autonomous individuals has been the cradle of freedom, art, literature, science, and technology.”

My response: Only in the city can autonomous individuals arrive and escape, defeat and overcome the stultifying repression causes by clans, tribes and other primitive modes of organization based in group living, altruism, collectivism, nonindividuating and a lack of ambition and curiosity.

H: “But the city that has been a citadel against the nature around us cannot defend us against the nature within us, in our lusts and fears, and in the subconscious cellars of our minds. It is in the city that man’s lusts and fears have free play, and dehumanization spreads like the plague. The lust for power in particular has shown itself to be antihuman. We savor power not when we move mountains and tell rivers whither to flow but when we can turn men into objects, robots, puppets, automata, or veritable animals.”

My response: Hoffer most always knows what is true and expresses it clearly, concisely, eloquently, which is why I read and comment on everything he wrote—if I live long enough. The desire not to rearrange nature ( the positive power of powerfulness) but to rearrange, capture, control and remake people is power savored by those whose are tyrants (the negative power of powerlessness).

H: “Power is the power to dehumanize, and it is in the city that this lust finds human material to work on. It is easier to dehumanize man in the mass than than any individual man. Thus the city has been the breeding ground of all movements and developments that tend to press men back into the matrix of nature from which he has risen.”

My response: This is tricky to unpack. In the city is where humans are humanized and individualized and can progress. It is in nature where they are dehumanized and collectivized and advancement fizzles. Then Hoffer adds that it is in the city, at a later stage, where people are dehumanized and collectivized once more. Can he write consistently or make up his mind.? He really is not contradicting himself. He is just laying out two horns of the human dilemma and somehow extremism is human undoing for humans in the city, and that the answer to the riddle or contradiction that one one hand humans find earthly salvation, personal humanization and can grow as individuals in the city when things there promote human goodness and development, and then, on the other hand, when cities turn corrupt, there people are at their worst, the most cruel, unjust, radicalized, nonindivudating, stratified and altruistic; Cruel humans in the city on average may be much more brutal than people living so close to nature in tribal settings are. It is likely that he is instilling in the reader a cautionary that nature is inside us as well as outside us, so we do our best and greatest as individuals in the city, but that we are the most destructive pack creatures once the city goes from being a civilized center of human development into a vast ghetto where life is cheap, crime and lawlessness are rife, and suffering is the lot of millions of people. In short we are at our best and at our worst most bestial in the city.

Yes, the city is where people are able to individualize and progress and be humanized. But when the city reaches a certain size its critical mass is the collective or the mob, and at that point, the city become a dehumanizing environments, where collectivism and stagnation result Perhaps people living in a string of connected suburbs of no more than 10,000 pope is the way to get the best of city living without its downsides.

H: “A fateful feature of the war with nature is its circularity. Victory and defeat run into each other. Just when man seems to be within reach of his ultimate goal he is likely to find himself caught in a trap. Everywhere there are booby traps and pitfalls, and nature strikes back from unexpected quarters. A most recent example of this is the splitting of the atom. Man cracked nature’s strongbox only to discover he had cracked Pandora’s box of ills and woes and evil spirits, and let loose the poisonous mushroom cloud of total annihilation.

One thinks of the fantastic spectacle of the nineteenth century when the Industrial Revolution seemed to make man’s dream of total victory over nature come true, and the prospect of a man-made world blanketing the whole of the globe seemed within reach. The fateful fact that man was not inventive enough to automate his second creation, that his machines were half-machines lacking the gears and filaments of thought and will, set in motion a process of mass dehumanization that turned the machine age into a nightmare. Human beings had to be used as a stopgap for inventiveness. Men, women, and children were coupled with iron and steam. The machines were consuming human beings as fast as coal. It was as if nature had infiltrated the metal of the machines and subverted the manmade world. Factories, mass armies, and mass movements would strip people of their human uniqueness and transmute them into a homogeneous, malleable mass.”

My response: It seems that though generally humanizing, the machine age and the city could be used to dehumanize and tyrannize people too. We cannot go back to the Stone Age, so what is the happy medium that gives humans the advantage urban living and technology without their downsides?

H: “Lenin, the leader of a mass movement, recognized that the ‘hard school’ of the factory was readying people for a totalitarian dictatorship. The mass armies trained people in obedience and mass action. At the same time, Lenin’s revolution saw as its main task the conversion of peasants into factory workers and soldiers. Thus industrialists, generals, and revolutionaries worked hand in hand. And not they alone. Carlyle’s glorification of brute force, Gobineau’s race theories, Marx’s economic determinism and his theory of class struggle. Darwin’s and Pavlov’s zoological sociology, the dark forces of Wagner’s music, Nietzsche’s cult of the superman, and Freud’s emphasis on the less human components of the human soul were all part of a blind striving to reintegrate man with nature.”

My response: All of these forces and influences working to reintegrate man with nature, when the way up and out is to keep man, a beast of nature, somewhat separate from nature so he could become human and humanized., ultimately as egoistic individuals and individuators.

H: “The deliberate dehumanization practiced by Stalin and Hitler was an intensification and acceleration of something that had been going on for decades. There was hardly an enormity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed and even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”

My response: This frightening pattern of new ideas concocted by intellectuals—often bad ideas-- often becoming implemented, nightmare social practices and public policies in the future is a cautionary tale, reminding us to look before we leap, to do small experiments with new ideas to flesh out the unintended consequences of them upon society, before we ruin society by implementing them pell mell.

H: “Even such clear-cut opposites as the fascination with science and the romantic back-to-nature movements were actually pulling in the same direction—helping to equate man with nature, and cooperating in the dehumanization of man. They who leaped ahead and they who plunged backward arrived simultaneously at the gates of the twentieth-century annihilation camps.

One of the strangest features of man’s war with nature is its undeclaredness. The men who are in the forefront of the battle are as a rule unaware that they are fighting a war.”

My response: We must be self-aware that we are fighting a war against nature, that we are to fight that war against nature, and not against other humans, and nature itself does not want us to know consciously it is our enemy because then one is better able to combat a recognized enemy—whether nature hide’s its motivation of anti-humanism by being nonverbal, or because Satan works to keep humans ignorant so we are easy to defeat and control, remains unclear.

H: “They are usually animated by a hunger for profit or for spectacular action. I have not come across a clarion call to mankind to abandon war between brothers and to mobilize all its energies in a titanic struggle with the nonhuman universe. You can count on the fingers of one hand unequivocal expressions of the eternal enmity between man and nature. I can only think of Hardy” s ‘Man begins where nature ends; nature and man can never be friends.’ Thoreau, who sided with nature, recognized that ‘you cannot have a deep sympathy between man and nature,’ and admitted, ‘I love nature because she is not man but a retreat from him.’ Toward the end of his life, Thomas Huxley realized that man’s ascent was different from his descent. In his Romanes lecture, in 1893, he warned: ‘Let us understand once for all that all the ethical progress of societies depends not on animating the cosmic process, still less in running away fro it, but in combatting it.’”

My response: The war between humans and nature is natural and eternal for humans are unnatural, potential creators of nature and cosmos as are the benevolent God who breathed life into us, and raw nature or primordial chaos is devolved and entropy-oriented, not seeking to be ordered, arranged and lawfully regulated.

We need not attack or abuse nature, but should make our living off of it, while respecting it and not spoiling it or polluting it. This sensible perspective allows humans to enjoy nature without sentimentalizes a world that is hostile and foreign to us our needs and our happiness.

H: “There is an echo of man’s first blows against nature in some myths. The Babylonian God Marduk slayed the dragon Tiamath and created arable land out of her carcass. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to compensate for the meagerness of his physical endowments. Yet, on the whole, the impression conveyed by mythologies is of a close relationship between man and nature in which nature always has the upper hand and must be supplicated and propitiated. There is a Darwinian motif in the totemic assumption of a kinship between man and other forms of life. The whole structure of magic is founded on an identity between human nature and nature. Both the scientist and the savage postulate the oneness of man and nature. The difference between them is the savage tries to influence nature by means which have proved their efficacy in influencing human nature the way he deals with matter and other forms of life. The scientist reads the equation human nature=nature from left to right, while the savage reads it from right to left. Yet it is worth noting that Darwin, too, read the equation from right to left when he read cutthroat capitalist competition into the economy of nature.

In this as in other fields the uniqueness of the ancient Hebrews is startlingly striking. They were the first ones to enunciate a clear-cut separation between man and nature. Though monotheism was born of tribal pride—the desire to be the one and only people of a one and only God—it brought with it a downgrading of nature. The one and only God created both nature and man yet made man in Hiss own image and appointed him His viceroy on earth. Jehovah’s injunction to man (Genesis, Chapter 1) is unequivocal: Be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth. Nature lost its divine attributes.”

My response: I wonder if the Hebrews being adversarial towards nature was a critical aspect and logical entailment of their being God’s chosen people, while others pagan peoples of antiquity were worshiping nature as divine, and were submissive to nature, and thus hated the Hebrews with extra ardor because they were from God and the pagan peoples submitting to and worshiping nature are devil-worshipers and followers of Satan. The anti-Semites ancient and modern are just seeking to kill of their worst enemies, the chosen children of God, chosen though as flawed and fallen as any other people.

H: “Sun, stars, sky, earth, mountains, rivers, plants and animals were no longer the seat of mysterious powers and the arbiters of man’s fate. Though man had to wrestle with the earth for his bread, he was the masterful male ADAM, and the earth, ADAMA, a female to be beaten into submission. The writers of the Old Testament picked as a father of the race not Esau, a man of nature, whose garments, like those of Thoreau’s ideal man, smelled of grassy fields and flowery meadows, but his twin brother Jacob, who was all too human in his anxieties and cunning scheming, and who preferred the inside of a tent to the great outdoors, and the smell of lentil soup to the smell of trees and fields.

It is true that the downgrading of nature did not prompt the Hebrews to become mighty tamers of nature. Still, their endurance as a weak minority through centuries of persecution constitutes a great defiance of nature, putting to naught of the law of survival of the strong which rules the rest of life. Moreover, the mighty Jehovah did play a role in the rise of scientific and technological civilization of the modern Occident. It is hard for us to realize how god-conscious were the scientists and technologists active at the birth of the modern Occident. Jehovah was to them the supreme mathematician and technician who had created the world and set it going. To unravel the mysteries of nature was to decipher God's text and to rethink His thoughts. When Kepler formulated the laws of planetary motion he boasted that God had to wait 6,000 years for his first reader. These early scientists and technicians felt close to God; they stood in awe of Him yet felts as if they were of His school, and whether they knew it or not, aspired to be like Him. Perhaps one of the reasons that other civilizations, with all their ingenuity and skill, did not develop a machine age, is that they had no God who was an all-powerful engineer whom they could imitate and vie with.”

My response: I do not mind if scientists, humanists and humans in general imitate God the creator and engineer, but it is ill-advised to vie with God, for it won’t end well for us. In that instance that would be the bad kind of pride which God would punish, and secondly, we cannot be God the Father and God the Mother or Jesus at their won game.

If we agree to love, admire and serve these deities, then we can individuate as engineers, inventors, poets, creators with God enthusiastic approval, assistance and enthusiastic instruction, as long as we do not try to overthrow God. God is a Powerful Warrior and is not Nonviolent. When God wrath is incurred it is terrible to behold and I advise that no human bait and disrespect God, lest he or she be on the receiving end of divine wrath, not a smart place to be, ending up burning in hell afterwards. It is not moral or workable to scheme against those so loving, powerful and near eternal or eternal good deities. It is the wrong hill for humans to die on.

H: “The next great assault upon nature took place in the Neolithic Age when there was as yet no writing; thus it remained unrecorded and unsung. Yet it is legitimate to wonder whether the presence of scribes would have mattered one way or another—whether the ‘men of words’ would have been aware of the import of that which was happening before their eyes, let alone moved enough to declaim and sing. For when the second great assault came in the nineteenth century the ‘men of words’ were not in the fight, and, indeed, a great many of them sided with nature against man. It was precisely at the moment when the Industrial Revolution forged the weapons for total victory over nature that scientists, poets, philosophers, and historians, seized with a mysterious impulse, began to proclaim with one voice the littleness of man and his powerlessness to shape his fate. Man, declared Huxley, in 1860, ‘strives in vain to break through the ties which hold him to matter and the lower forms of life.’ Instead of being in the vanguard of the Promethean struggle we find the most gifted members of the species on the sidelines jeering at the clamorous multitude that set out to tame and straddle God’s creation.”

My response: This is fascinating speculation by Hoffer, that he was unsure that the assault of nature by humans in the Neolithic Age may not have had intellectual support, and that many intellectuals sided with nature against the masses which freed humans from nature’s iron grip during the Industrial Revolution. Humans cannot become human, humanized and individuated unless they dominate nature rather than be dominated by nature. When the masses do the liberating, they liberate themselves from being ruled by nature and by elites, including educated elites.

H: “The intellectuals entered the nineteenth century flushed with the conviction that they were the new makers of history. Had not their words set in motion the earthshaking events of the French Revolution? Coleridge boasted that the most important changes in the world had their origin not in the cabinets of statesmen or the insights of businessmen but ‘in the closets and lonely walks of theorists.’”

My response: I do mind that intellectuals have made history, but I do not like the outcomes: bloody revolution, world wars, weapons of mass destruction, totalitarian states oppressing billions of humans, violent purges, human rights abuses and mass movements.

If each one of the masses become as theorist, an intellectual aristocrat of the highest caliber and originality, then introducing new ideas, often revolutionary, will be received with careful scrutiny and even enthusiasm occasionally, from the attentive and judging individuated supercitizens.

These remarkable maverizers want and will insist upon peaceful, constant, steady, constructive, socially beneficial change without violent revolution that destructively missile-launches its bombs of chaos and commotion against the existing regimes with all of its traditions, lore, and grand narratives. Change without violent upheaval overthrowing a just, peaceful free government is the optimal goal. This is how we end violent terrorist revolutionary intellectuals making history as vicious dreamers and ideologues: the goal is for the smart masses to transform intellectuals into mere thinkers and talkers to be taken under advisement, never obeyed, and usually kept out of citadels of power, thus reducing them to being toothless, paper tigers, as they introduce their new ideas to society, without mass movements, war and revolution being introduced as corollaries.

H: “Heine was more blatant: ‘Mark this ye proud men of action; ye are nothing but the unconscious instruments of the men of thought who, often in humblest seclusion, have appointed you to your inevitable tasks.’ Few of the educated knew in first decades of the nineteenth century that they had an Industrial Revolution on their hands. Everywhere the intellectuals were strutting, posturing, and declaiming, each fancying himself a man of destiny. Then one morning they woke up to discover the power had fallen into the hands of their middle-class relatives, their lowbrow brothers, uncles, in-laws, who not only had taken possession of everything they could lay their hands on, but aspired to impose their values and tastes upon the whole society.”

My response: The values and tastes of the American middle class and blue collar society—adding in republican liberty, capitalism, constitutionalism, Christianity, egoist morality, and individuating individualism—become the cultural core of great and noble American Way, a fit system to live in and under, economic and political arrangement fit for all the world to adopt, elitists of all kinds being kept out of power.

H: “The revulsion from a middle-class society that came to dominate the nineteenth century alienated the intellectuals from the machine age. Writers, poets, artists, philosophers, and scholars poured their scorn on the money-grubbing, mean-spirited, sweating, pushing, hard-working philistines who dared vie with God.”

My response: When the industrialists, farmers, miners and philistines began to get materials and resources from nature, that was not vying with God, the creator of nature and everything else; rather, humans began to reinvent nature and make an artificial world outside of and beyond and yet always intertwined with nature, and that was not vying with God, but following God’s orders to build heaven on earth, for heaven wherever it is, is not a direct duplicate of some lovely mountain dell in the Alps in Switzerland.

H: “The steam engine,’ cried Baudelaire, ‘is the negation of God.’ Flaubert described his joy at the sight of weeds overrunning abandoned buildings, ‘this embrace of nature coming swiftly to bury the work of men the moment that his hand is no longer there to defend it.’ One also wonders how much the refusal to countenance history made by a despised middle class contributed to the tendency of the learned during the nineteenth century to downgrade man as a maker of history.”

My response: Because the intellectuals hated the common people when they made history in the 19^th century, this constantly gaslighting and undercutting their merited sense of sense worth and potential, has kept people down, back, submissive and still obeying, listening too and meekly accept the narrative which elites feed to them, much to the detriment of human advancement to this very day.

H: “The cold war between the intellectuals and the middle class that started more than a century ago has been gathering force in the twentieth century, and the intellectuals seem to be coming out on top. In many parts of the world the intellectual is just now at the center of the stage as ruler, legislator, policeman, military leader, and large-scale industrialist. One of the greatest surprises of the twentieth century was sprung by the educated when they came to power. Ghandi once said that what worried him most was ‘the hardness of heart of the educated,’ and it staggers the mind that education rather than educating the heart makes it more savage.”

My response: That intellectuals likely are the most corruptible and the cruelest of all human types was not predicted by anyone before Hoffer the wise. My hunch is that their aristocratic lust for power of powerlessness as rulers of the masses, their ideological purity, their utter selflessness to their holy cause, their perfectionistic idealism, their altruistic ethics, their love of being enslaved and enslaving the masses and their pure, groupism—all of these general character traits shared by intellectuals in power likely fill them with a pure, absolute self-loathing, an utter loss of self-esteem, that what is eliminated is their consciences, then there are no limits to their cruelty, their nihilism, their hardness of heartedness—not many veteran demons could be more evil. Now, to allow these people to bring about a totalitarian society, watch out!

H: “We have discovered that nature prefers to lodge its fifth column in the minds and hearts of the educated. We have yet to assimilate the fact that it took ‘a nation of philosophers’ to produce Hitler and Nazism, and that in Stalin’s Russia professors, writers, artists, and scientists were a pampered and petted aristocracy. These privileged intellectuals did not let out a peep against one of the most brutal tyrannies the world has seen. The Stalin cult was the work of intellectuals.* (*Stalin also liquidated intellectuals. The fact that when intellectuals hang together and attain power they often end up by hanging each other underlines the unconditioned savagery of ‘the bloody-minded professors.’)

It’s remarkable how worshipful of the machine intellectuals can become when the economy of the country is in their keeping, and how naturally they take to treating human beings as a cheap, all-purpose raw material. They have processed human flesh into steel mills, dams, powerhouses, etc., and it was all done in the name of a noble ideal. It needs an effort to realize that the twentieth century is the century of the idealist. No other century has seen so vast an expulsion of practical people from the seats of power and their replacement by idealists. In no other century has there been so powerful an attempt to realize ideals, dreams, and visions. The unprecedented dehumanization our century has seen was conceived and engineered by idealists.

Societies ruled by intellectuals tend to approach menageries: the fences and walls which usually enclose them are there not to keep anything out but to keep the animals from running away. The return of nature in these societies manifests itself not only in the attitude of the rulers toward the people, but in the attitude of the ruled toward the government.”

My response: Hoffer is drawing our attention to what he as identified as a pattern, an immoral pattern: A society favored, created and ruled by idealists/true believers/intellectuals is a society, a totalitarian monstrosity of maximalized suffering for the people, a society that is as close as it can be to inverting humane societies in a world of nature among humans ruled by the law of the jungle. When humans are treated like animals, they are completely dehumanized, but that was the unconscious desire of the idealists all along.

H: “In a Communist country, for instance, people tend to view the government as a force of nature, and the misfortunes that overtake them as natural calamities. You do not protest or conspire against a natural catastrophe, nor do you feel humiliated when struck down by a natural force.. You do not feel humiliated when the ocean spits on you, or the wind forces you to your knees. To outsiders, too, there is something terrifyingly unhuman about these societies. Every child is aware of Russia’s and China’s unhuman strength, while it needs an exceptional acuteness, a sixth sense almost, to have anything like a realistic grasp of America’s capabilities.”

My response: Here again I speculate, my hunch being that wisdom is rare, and likely individuators have it in spades, so they would be able to detect and approve immediately of wondrous American capabilities and its finest culture.

H: “Why should power corrupt the intellectual more than it does other types of humanity?”

My response: My hunch is that intellectuals are irredeemably elitist, the purest and most groupist of all human types, so there the power of powerlessness, the negative power of hatred and hating, is the most virulent, deadly, hard-hearted, merciless, ruthless and violent. They will do anything to be rulers, and will do anything to keep their power, narratives, rank and money, once they latch onto it.

H: “One of the reasons is to be found in the assumption that education readies a person for the task of reforming and reshaping humanity—that it equips him to act as an engineer of souls and a manufacturer of desirable human attributes. Hence when the power gives him the freedom to act, the intellectual will be inclined to deal with humanity as with material that can be molded and processed. He will arrange things so that he will not be thwarted by unpredictability and intractability of human nature. The antihumanity of the intellectual in power is not a function of his inhumanity. An elite of intellectuals are more vowed to the service of mankind than any other elite. But a savior who wants to turn men into angels will be as much of a hater of human nature as a monster who want to turn them into slaves and animals. Man must be dehumanized, must be turned into an object, before he can be processed into something wholly different from what he is. It is a paradox that the idealistic reformer has a mechanical, lifeless conception of man’s being. He sees man as something that can be taken apart and put together, and the renovation of the individual and of society as a process of manufacturing. Robert Owen used a manufacturer’s vocabulary to describe his intended reforms not mainly because he was a manufacturer but because he was a reformer. He spoke of his new social order as ‘the new machinery’ which ‘will facilitate the larger production of happiness.’

Another source of the intellectual’s corruption by power is that no matter how powerful he becomes he continues to utilize the devices of the weak. It is curious that even at the height of their power Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others tended to speak and act as if they were the leaders of ‘a company of poor men,’ of an oppressed tribe or a persecuted minority. Absolute faith and monolithic unity that enable the weak to survive are unequaled instruments of coercion in the hands of the powerful.

Finally, intellectuals in power are chronically afraid, and herein lies one more cause of their corruption by power. For the intellectual cannot admit to himself what it is that he is afraid of. When we are aware of the cause of our fear we can be afraid of only one thing, but when we cannot face the truth, fear becomes general. An elite of intellectuals is afraid chiefly of its own people and cannot admit it, hence the fear of the whole world; and when power is mated with great fear it become virulent.

As we have seen, the war with nature proceeds both around us and within us, yet we have no precise knowledge how the happenings of one front affect the other. Up to now, an increased command over nature around us did not automatically increase our humanness. On the contrary, in many parts of the world the taming of nature by rapid industrialization gave rise to a greater or lesser degree of social barbarization. Some thoughtful persons have questioned the wisdom of seeking further command over nature until means have been devised to prevent the misuse of the enormous power we already have in our hands. Nevertheless, the overcoming of nature, so crucial in the ascent of man, can be a most effective agency of humanization in the decades ahead—if for no other reason than it may divert aggressive impulses and wild energies for social strife. We are told a decade from now 60 percent of the people in this country will be eighteen and under. The Negro population is already more than half juvenile, and the same is true of the population of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The presence of a global population of juveniles spells trouble for everybody. No country is a good country for its juveniles, and even in normal times every society is in the grip of a crisis when a new generation passes from boyhood to manhood. The enemy is within the gates. The trouble with the juvenile is not that he is not yet a man but he is no longer a child. He has lost the child’s capacity for wonder and for total absorption in whatever it does, and its hunger to master skills. The juvenile’s self-consciousness robs him of genuineness, while his penchant for self-dramatization prompts him to extremist poses and gestures. In his restless groping for an identity, he will join any mass movement and plunge into any form of spectacular action. His humanness is a precarious thing, easily sloughed off. Both the Bolsheviks and the Fascists made use of juveniles to do the dirty work of killing.”

My response: Juveniles without identity and individuality are almost without conscience, so they can be weaponized to do the dirty work of killing as nudged on by their mass movement or their revolutionary government.

H: “My feeling is that the humanization of billions of adolescents would be greatly facilitated by a concerted undertaking to master and domesticate the whole of the globe. One would like to see mankind spend the balance of the century in a total effort to clean up and groom the surface of the globe—wipe out the jungles, turn deserts and swamps into arable land, terrace barren mountains, regulate rivers, eradicate all pests, control the weather, and make the whole land a fit habitation for man. The globe should be our home and not nature’s home, and we are no longer nature’s guests.”

My response: Hoffer wants us to humanize the globe, but we would wipe out half of the fauna and flora in doing so, so that is a complete non-starter. Without being so radically humanizing nature, we can be its natural ways and beauty and still clean the world up.

H: “A hundred years ago Alfred Russel Wallace envisioned the time ‘When man’s selection shall have supplanted natural selection; when the ocean would be the only domain in which that power can be exerted which for countless cycles of ages ruled supreme over all the earth.’ So, too, did the prophet Isaiah envision the total domestication at the end of time when the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and the kid, the lion and the calf, the bear and the cow shall lie down together, and a little child shall lead them.

There is a phase of the war with nature which is little noticed but has always impressed me. To me there is an aura of grandeur about the dull routine of maintenance. I see it as a defiance of the teeth of time. It is easier to build than maintain.”

My response: Hoffer’s recommendation that there is an aura of grandeur about the dull routine of maintenance as perhaps the most human and humanizing human effort to fight back against nature or entropy: to build a grand edifice or castle is temporary cosmos-building, but the lasting, more mature, and moderate or ethical cosmos-building or cosmos-maintaining is undertaken and accomplished by maintaining what we have arranged and constructed.

H: “Even a lethargic or debilitated population can be galvanized for awhile to achieve something impressive, but the energy which goes into maintaining things in good repair day in, day out is the energy of true vigor. When at the end of the last war several Western European countries lay in ruins, one could probably have predicted which of them would recover first by looking at their records of maintenance. So, too, in present-day Africa where some thirty new countries have come into existence, one might guess which of them is likely to be here fifty years from now by looking for the rudiments of maintenance.

From talking with the foreign-born longshoremen and ships’ crews I gained the impression that the capacity for maintenance is a peculiarity of Western Europe, the Scandinavian countries, the Anglo-Saxon world, and Japan. The reports of travelers confirm this impression. Lord Kinross, while traveling in Turkey, was struck that though the Turks made excellent mechanics they had no talent for maintenance; ‘indeed, until lately no word for maintenance existed in the Turkish language.’ Mr. Andr’e Siegfried sees the process of maintenance as ‘something which belongs essentially to the Westerner’ and thinks ‘it is here that we must look for his distinct characteristic.’

It is strange that in Asia, where civilization had its birth, the separation from nature and the ability to hold it at bay should be much less pronounced than in the younger civilization of the Occident.”

My response: I agree that Hoffer is right that Westerners are better able to separate themselves from nature and hold it at bay than are Easterners, and that this superior, Western aptitude is what humanizes humans and civilizes them. My guess is that Westerners generally are more individualistic, egoistic, rational, mechanical and engineers of an artificial human world than are Easterners (the difference is not based in ability and talent, but in right and wrong values).

H: “In Asia, Africa and Latin America the man-made world seems precariously stretched over the writhing body of nature. At the edge of every cultivated field, and around every human habitation, nature lies in wait ready to move in and repossess what man has wrested from its grasp. You see trees cracking walls, heaving blocks of stone from their sockets, and reclaiming once mighty cities. In Australia nature reclaimed the dog from its human domesticator and almost reclaimed man himself. One has the feeling that the true awakening and modernization of a backward country is hardly conceivable without the evolvement of the capacity for maintenance.

There is a story about Georges Clemenceau that when he traveled around the world in 1921 he came to New Delhi and was taken to see the huge Baker-Lutyen office buildings which were just then completed. He stood gazing at the buildings for a long time without uttering a word. Finally, the British officer who was with him asked what he thought of them. ‘I was thinking,’ said Clemenceau, ‘what ruins these will make.’ As so often with Clemenceau, his chance remark threw a searching light on the human situation. Standing at the heart of Asia, Clemenceau felt himself primarily an Occidental and saw the British Empire as Occidental rather than British. He also knew the days of the Occident in Asia were numbered, and that, once the Occident withdrew its hand, the dragon of Asia would move in and sink its yellowed teeth of time into all that the Occident had built and wrought, and gnaw away till naught was left but a skeleton of ruins.”

My response: Notice the archetypal alignments established by Hoffer in the above paragraph: The Asian dragon symbolizes nature and chaos, and the Western love of and duty to perform maintenance upon what one has constructed is a symbol of moderation, order and cosmos-maintained and cared-for not just built and then allowed to decline into ruination from consistent neglect and indifference.

Hoffer implicitly ties together maintaining the world that humans have wrought with maintenance is somehow the law of moral and metaphysical moderation being preached and practiced, and that that Western penchant for maintenance is what egoists and individualists do and it is a civilized, liberating, humanizing project.