My introduction: Robert Graboyes is an economist, journalist, and musician.
He seems very accomplished.
He wrote an article in October, 2023, entitled Intellectual Tyrants Beget
True Believers.
I copied and pasted his entire article below, and will comment on what he
writes about Eric Hoffer.
Graboyes (G after this): “
Intellectual Tyrants Beget True Believers
The Essential Book for Times of Madness
Robert F. Graboyes
Oct 29, 2023
Eric Hoffer in the Oval Office with President Lyndon
Johnson, October 1967.
.
INTELLECTUAL TYRANTS BEGET TRUE BELIEVERS:
The Essential Book for Times of Madness
This month, the terrorist group, Hamas, visited unspeakable,
deliberate, one-on-one violence on thousands of Israeli civilians and, to an
unprecedented extent, proudly advertised its brutality to the world. In
America and Europe, disturbingly large numbers of academicians, students,
activists, and politicians—mostly on the political left—openly celebrate,
rationalize, minimize, sidestep, or ignore the atrocities. In the streets and
on university campuses, mobs threaten and deliver bodily harm and property destruction
upon those who oppose their agenda. In New York City, police advise Jews to
remain inside during pro-Hamas demonstrations. At New York’s Cooper Union,
Jewish—not just Israeli—students were locked in the school’s library for their
protection while pro-Hamas marchers pounded on doors and windows.
Paradoxically, many of the pro-Hamas enthusiasts are members of the
very demographic groups whom the objects of their adulation have openly sworn,
in writing and deed, to murder. None of this is inexplicable or even
surprising, if one has read a small but unfathomably deep book, published in
1951, by one of the most profound thinkers of the past century. That book is The
True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, by
longshoreman/philosopher Eric Hoffer. “
My response: My sense of Graboyes is that he well understands Hoffer and
will give him a fair interpretation.
Graboyes notes that The True Believer was a small but unfathomably deep
book, and it is only unfathomable because Hoffer is not yet understood 75 years
later. If one sees him, as I do, then perhaps the book can now make sense. I
regard Hoffer as an actual but implicit proponent of rational egoism, the
ethics of moderation, a passionate seeker for truth however painful to hear and
adjust to, a lover of capitalism, democracy, prosperity, law and order, and
individualism. He promotes the idea that these positive cultural and political
conditions are to be enjoyed by the masses that run America, rather permitting
America to be ruled by elites of any kind: professional intellectuals or other
elites.
Hoffer is also an actual but implicit
critic in his in-depth study and implied criticism of altruism, group-living,
depraved human nature, intellectual abuse of power, begins to render his
brilliance and originality more coherently understandable. It is the latter set
of ethical and cultural immoral conditions which hold humanity down and back,
and allow intellectuals and others elites to continue to rule and abuse the
masses.
G: “Hoffer wrote The True Believer in an attempt to
understand how the barbarities of Nazism and Communism could
have arisen in a supposedly enlightened world. Though published nearly
three-quarters of a century ago, it reads as if written last year—or last week.
Reading it at a normal pace is a three-hour journey into the dark recesses of
the collective soul.”
My response: His first book is a three-hour journey into the dark recesses
of the collective soul. He knows what evil is, and it is us, and as groupists
and selfless joiners, under tyranny and socialism, there is no limit to how
wicked and cruel we people can be.
G: “Hoffer was the unlikeliest of philosophers—a humble laborer and
ascetic, whose origins are shrouded in mystery. Supposedly born in
1902, President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in
February 1983—three months before he died. He had also been the Oval Office
guest of President Lyndon Johnson in October 1967, just weeks after a blockbuster
CBS News interview with Eric Sevareid (repeated that November by popular
demand). President Dwight Eisenhower said Hoffer was his favorite philosopher.
In 1964, he became an adjunct professor at the University of
California—Berkeley. For two decades prior to that, he had worked as a
longshoreman on the docks of San Francisco, loading and unloading ships by day.
Each day, after leaving the docks, he went home to a spare, monastic Chinatown
apartment that lacked even a telephone. And there, he wrote a dozen or so
philosophical tracts in solitude.”
My response: Hoffer, the laborer and ascetic, amateur philosopher was a
great soul, and a loner on that level does his individuating in solitude.
Observe that Hoffer lives the role that I assign to a self-realizing egoist:
that a great soul is self-disciplining and ascetic while acting in his own best
enlightened interest.
G: “Heading backwards in time from The True Believer, Hoffer,
the man, fades into a riddle in a haze. No written records of Hoffer’s
existence precede his name in the 1940 Census. The first oral accounts place
him in California migrant worker camps in the 1930s. Before that, he claimed,
he was a Skid Row wanderer who contemplated suicide. He said he went completely
blind at 7 and that his sight miraculously returned when he was 15. At that
point, he said, he became a voracious reader out of fear that his blindness
would return. From Wikipedia:
“In his 2012 book, Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher,
journalist Tom Bethell revealed doubts about Hoffer's account of his early
life. Although Hoffer claimed his parents were from Alsace-Lorraine, Hoffer
himself spoke with a pronounced Bavarian accent. He claimed to have been born
and raised in the Bronx but had no Bronx accent. His lover and executor Lili
Fabilli stated that she always thought Hoffer was an immigrant. Her son, Eric
Fabilli, said that Hoffer's life might have been comparable to that of B.
Traven and considered hiring a genealogist to investigate Hoffer's early life,
to which Hoffer reportedly replied, ‘Are you sure you want to know?’ Pescadero
land-owner Joe Gladstone, a family friend of the Fabillis who also knew Hoffer,
said of Hoffer's account of his early life: ‘I don't believe a word of it.’ To
this day, no one ever has claimed to have known Hoffer in his youth, and no
records apparently exist of his parents, nor indeed of Hoffer himself until he
was about forty, when his name appeared in a census.”
A likely theory is that Hoffer was from Bavaria and entered the
United States illegally during a period of tight immigration restrictions.
It is also likely that we will never know his origins with any certainty. What
seems certain is that he was self-taught. And what is absolutely certain is
that his insights were fermented on the docks and on the streets—not in the
rarified chambers of the Ivory Tower.
Intellectual Tyrants
Before delving into The True Believer, here is a quick
introduction to Hoffer’s charm and the essence of his philosophy.
While Hoffer had been well-known to a broad span of readers since The True
Believer was published in 1951, his interview with Eric Sevareid on
September 19, 1967 made him a household name across America. For several years
afterward, he had a syndicated column that appeared in newspapers across the
country. The hourlong Sevareid interview can be seen in a series of YouTube
videos (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V), and they show a
powerful, burly, wildly gregarious, German-accented storyteller.”
My response: It seems likely that the interview with Sevareid made Hoffer
famous or at least better known.
G: “In the following four-minute excerpt, Hoffer asserts that, more
than any other group, intellectuals have a tendency toward corrupt megalomania.
Though spoken 56 years ago, his words apply in 2023 to the corrosive
illiberalism in America’s rotting universities—and in the broad range of
institutions influenced by those universities. In the lead-up to this clip,
Hoffer describes a shift in the American psyche, leaving behind an admiration
for quotidien business and gravitating toward a devotion to intellectuals. In
other words, abandoning doers for thinkers.”
My response: Grayboyes, in this paragraph is describing what Chris Rufo
documented, that intellectuals, professors, globalist elitists,
college-educated snobs, all in the ruling class, by 2021 did capture
ideologically most American institutions. I added that if we understand these
men and women of words as leaders of the current culturally Marxist mass
movement spread across the West, then their holy cause is what they worship and
believe in fervently, and they want the business of business and government in
America to be about ideological thinking, not making money and allowing the
people to be left alone, to run their own lives, without intellectual
aristocrats micromanaging them down to the last detail.
G” “Here is the central message of this clip and a window into
Hoffer’s mind:
“ERIC SEVAREID: Mr. Hoffer, you seem to have a fear about
the rise of intellectuals in political life and power. Why are you so
frightened of them.”
ERIC HOFFER: “First of all, I ought to tell you that I have
no grievance against the intellectual. All I know about the intellectual is
what I read in history and how I saw them perform in our time. And I’m
convinced that the intellectual—as a type, as a group—they are more corrupted
by power than any other human type. It’s disconcerting, Mr. Sevareid, to
realize that businessmen, generals even, soldiers, men of action are not
corrupted by power like intellectuals. … You take a conventional man of action.
He’s satisfied if you obey, huh? But not the intellectual. He doesn’t want you
just obeying. He wants you to get down on your knees and pray to the one who
makes you love what you hate and hate what you love. In other words, whenever
intellectuals are in power, there is total raping going on.” “
My response: Why would the intellectual—on average much worse than say
businessmen, general or soldier—be more corruptible, more power-hungry, more
vicious and be so ambitious hurt his victims to the maxim in controlling his
victims, utterly by soul-raping them as well as occasionally raping them
physically?
Hoffer here reveals his rational egoism, his understanding that moderation,
individualism, temperateness, living in liberty, in a capitalist, law-abiding
society are what render an agent to be good, act good, and not be too tempted
by power, because the businessmen, general or soldier, on average, more
individualistic, more temperate, and work more in the world than do
intellectuals so the former producers still have some level of self-esteem
which limits their interest in doing great evil for the sake of growing one’s
power of powerlessness.
By contrast, the intellectual, as a leader of the pack (guru leading a mass
movement) or as a warrior serving to advance his holy cause, is a man with no
self-esteem left, and his purely altruistic selflessness and self-sacrificing
have so suppressed his conscience, and let loose his craving for bottomless
infusions of evil power (the power of powerlessness) that he is capable of
doing absolutely anything to anyone without end or even modest restraint: this
soul-raper and murder par excellence is a selfless agent serving the collective
ideal, and his wicked behavior is justified as being for the good of all. With
no restraints on his cruelty, he cannot help himself, and will be as vicious
and torturous to his victims and subordinates as time and physical strength
allow him to be.
G: “And this month, October 2023, the figurative raping of which
Hoffer spoke spews forth from America’s universities in frenzied devotion to
literal raping—along with torture, murder, beheading, kidnapping, and
livestreaming the whole affair. October’s Harvard
CAPS/Harris Poll asked Americans whether they side with Israel or Hamas in
the ongoing conflict. (Israel versus Hamas, not Israel versus Palestinians.)
According to the poll, 84% favor Israel and only 16% side with Hamas. However,
among 18-to-24-year-olds the split is 52% for Israel and 48% for Hamas. In
other words, if your child is in college and you want to guess his or her
stance on Hamas, simply toss a coin; you’ll have close to a 50-50 chance of
getting the correct answer. At Harvard, 30 student groups declared Israel
“entirely responsible” for the attacks.
I’ll speculate that the percentages would be even more disturbing
among their professors. A Cornell professor described Hamas’s
bestiality as “exhilarating” and “energizing.”
True Believers
One can use The True Believer to plumb the depths of
terrorists’ and tyrants’ minds and motivations. There was, in fact, an
upsurge in interest in Hoffer’s book after the attacks of 9/11. But the book is
also an indispensable tool for understanding their camp followers, such as
those silencing, maligning, assaulting, threatening, and encircling Jewish students
on American campuses this month—while university administrators issue tepid
tsk-tsks, if that.”
My response: Note that not only Hamas and the Palestinian people are pure
altruists and fanatics serving radical Islam, but their camp followers, on
American campuses and among Progressives, are finding common cause as
neo-anti-Semites, and what these Israel-haters and Jew-haters have in common is
that they all serve a mass movement forwarding their holy cause, though Hamas
serves radical Islam and the professors and students in America serve a
different holy cause, cultural Marxism.
G: “Hoffer maps out the necessary elements for a fanatical movement,
including whom it recruits, how it recruits them, and how it holds them.
In short, a fanatical movement seeks bored underachievers, offers purpose for
their aimless lives, and discourages questioning. In many ways, an alarming
proportion of Generation Z, which includes today’s college cohort, has been
primed since infancy for such recruitment—by professors, by K-12 teachers, and
by their parents.
TARGETS FOR RECRUITMENT: Whom does a mass movement seek to recruit?
Hoffer writes:
· “The
great general knows how to conjure an audience out of the sands of the desert
and the waves of the ocean.”
· “There
is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass
movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. In almost all the
descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of mass movements there is
reference to vast ennui; and in their earliest stages mass movements are more
likely to find sympathizers and support among the bored than among the
exploited and oppressed.”
· “[Followers]
must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the
feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or
some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They
must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of
the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved
in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap.”
· “The
rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are
easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led.”
“Bored, discontented, inexperienced, persuadable, and well-to-do”
could easily be the motto of a sizable percentage of Generation Z. They
send texts in lieu of personal friendships. They play video games instead of
creating their own activities. They are restricted to their homes and yards.
Their teachers and professors indoctrinate them and discourage critical
thinking. Their activities are planned and tightly supervised by adults. They
demand and are granted “safe spaces.” They are trained to search for and howl
about “microaggressions.” All of this shelter absolves them of any need to work
out differences with others and to develop a tolerance for differing opinions.
Their putative educators instill in them a hatred of dissent and a predilection
for shaming those who stray from received doctrine. In the name of “equity” and
other assorted buzzwords, professors train these perpetual tabulæ rasæ to
despise others on the basis of immutable characteristics—race, gender,
sexuality, nationality, religion. They are involuntarily celibate and view
marriage and family as unreachable (and perhaps undesirable) goals. Their
aimless mediocrity is fueled by the vast financial resources of their parents
and of taxpayers. “
My response: Graboyes, in the paragraph just above, points out how
frustrated Generation Z misfits are already true believers and they stereotype
any heretics and opponents based upon their group-memberships—race, gender,
sexuality, nationality, religion—no one is an individual, and everyone is a
group-creature, group-living, group-identify and a joiner and clone of the
group description of what its typical member is and how she is to act, and that
we only live and create a self-identity as loyal members of our collective
units, and these group characteristics roles and believes are a person’s destiny
and irrefutable. Who can be more racist than true beleivers?
Their diagnosis of people is crap, and their solution (universal
group-living as pure nonindviidadtuing joiners within a mass movement, active
or out of power or settled an running things) is worse. Human suffering, want
and death are the norm when totalitarian socialists run things, be their system
sacred or secular.
G: “ In a recent essay, “Whence Fall
Snowflakes?” I asserted that, “A toxic fragility has settled in
over America’s universities.” I described a colleague’s experience in
a prestigious graduate program as akin to “a dreary Maoist struggle session,”
in which, “[s]tudents dutifully climbed to their particular rungs on the
intersectional ladder and admitted the sins that indelibly stain those on their
particular rungs.”
Not all members of Generation Z and not all their educators and
parents fit the above descriptions. But enough do to begin
extinguishing the principles of the Enlightenment.”
My response: I saw that Graboyes criticizes these college intellectuals and
their Generation Z zombie followers for seeking to wipe out the principles of
the Enlightenment, and that is consistent with the hostility to all thing
American and Western by the postmodenist Marxists radicals.
G: “MEANS OF RECRUITMENT: Once the mass movement identifies its
targets, what does it offer them as means of recruitment? Again, from
Hoffer:
· “Not
only does a mass movement depict the present as mean and miserable—it
deliberately makes it so. … It views ordinary enjoyment as trivial or even
discreditable, and represents the pursuit of personal happiness as immoral.
· “A
mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the
desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for
self-renunciation.”
· “A
man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is
not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other
people’s business.”
· “The
burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of
attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand
is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave
our lives puny and meaningless.”
· “Unless
a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome
burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join
a mass movement to escape individual responsibility,”
The professoriate portrays all things undesired as existential
threats to mankind and mankind itself as an existential threat to earth. An
endless list of issues—climate, COVID, gas stoves, firearms, immigration,
population, GMOs, automobiles, and on and on—are presented in terms of
impending doom and scientific certainty. Free speech is despised and censorship
imposed.
A substantial percentage of college students today incur vast debts
in pursuit of college educations that provide them with few marketable skills
and strip them of the capacity for critical thinking. For many who
secure employment, this prior regimentation is reinforced and preserved in
amber by armies of bureaucrats, administrators, consultants, and human
resources apparatchiks. Hence the loud squeals from the Diversity, Equity, and
Inclusivity (DEI) clerisy whenever some illiberal manifestation is challenged
or exposed.
Teachers demand that elementary school children publicly confess
their “white privilege.” School curricula vilify the “white-adjacency”
of Jews and Asians. “Colonialism” is reduced from a legitimate topic of
historical research to a blood libel. A Stanford lecturer last week dismissed
the Holocaust and demanded that Jewish students retreat into a corner to
instill in them the notion that oppression of others is baked into their DNA.
Students who lack training to perform any useful service thus seek
meaning in off-the-rack activism handed them by the intellectuals whom Hoffer
feared.”
My response: I like just about all of Graboyes points above.
Revolutionary progressivism and their young devotees are working to burn down everything
and replace it with totalitarian nothing.
G: “MEANS OF RETENTION: And finally, once a mass movement has its
recruits, how does it hold on to them? Hoffer writes:
· “[A]ll
of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance.”
· “What
Pascal said of an effective religion is true of any effective doctrine: it must
be ‘contrary to nature, to common sense and to pleasure.’”
· “If
a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither
unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable.”
· “We
can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine
that is understood is shorn of its strength.”
· “To
be in possession of an absolute truth is to have a net of familiarity spread
over the whole of eternity. There are no surprises and no unknowns. All
questions have already been answered, all decisions made, all eventualities
foreseen. The true believer is without wonder and hesitation.” “
My response: Once people are hooked, they stay
believers for life, even if the mass movement withers away or ends.
G: “When the alarms change suddenly from, say, global cooling to
global warming or from masks-are-stupid to
masks-are-essential-when-you-are-driving-alone-in-your-car, one must not
question the change. It is Science™, and to ask questions is proof of
stupidity or wickedness. Training students to accept such shifts carte blanche
is a process akin to breaking mustangs or training poodles.
The end result was described remarkably well by Ben Rhodes, Deputy
National Security Advisor under President Barack Obama. It was, I
suspect, a Kinsleyan Gaffe—i.e., an occasion when a politician accidentally
tells the truth. In explaining the Obama Administration’s
nuclear deal with Iran, Rhodes (whose brother was then president of CBS News) attributed
their success to having constructed an “echo chamber” of gullible
journalists:
“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They
call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the
outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we
talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of
being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know
nothing.”
As described by the Washington Post:
“Rhodes set up a team of staffers who were focused on promoting the deal,
which apparently included the feeding of talking points at useful times in the
news cycle to foreign policy experts who were favorably disposed toward it. ‘We
created an echo chamber,’ he told the magazine. ‘They [the seemingly
independent experts] were saying things that validated what we had given them
to say.’”
Rhodes, of course, was describing journalists and experts whose
professional mission is supposed to be providing accurate information, written
from a background of knowledge. And yet, Rhodes says, in effect, that
journalists are merly credulous sock puppets and policy experts are nothing
more than ventriloquist’s dummies.
Now consider what all this might suggest about the journalists’ and
experts’ younger siblings on American college campuses. Filter those
observations through Hoffer’s The True Believer, and you begin to
understand the appalling and otherwise inexplicable behavior occurring on
campuses, in the streets, and across the internet this month . . .”
My response: Grayboyes is illuminating in revealing that the current crop of
journalists are gullible, uninformed zealots that do not think independently or
question the party line. Note how educated journalists, professors and students
all believe ignorant foolish things. It is their true believing epistemology,
that what their group says is true and good, that is true and good, whether it
is or not. What heretics, dissidents and rival groups say is true and good is
never true and good, not even a little bit, whether it is true or not.
When groupists fanatics prize conformity to groupthink over critical
thinking, this is how smart, educated people end up believing and do unwise,
immoral, even cruel things. They are militant and defiant in justifying their
stupidity and wickedness too, for they really believe they are morally superior
to and smarter than any that oppose them. When someone lies and is evil but is
convinced they are truth-telling and virtuous, that person is the hardest one
to enlighten and persuade to be a good person once again.
