I am writing out and comment Eric Hoffer’s entire book, Working And
Thinking On The Waterfront June 1958 May 1959. Here I write out and
comment on Pages 25-30. Here it is: Hoffer (H after this): “July 15
5 A.M. It is wonderfully good that I don’t have to go to work. A
four-day stretch of work gives a special flavor to a free morning.
Come to think of it: no particular place or particular day has ever
had a special flavor for me. No homesickness for a place, and no
looking forward to a holiday.”
My response: It saddens me that a genius and great soul like Hoffer
had no place to go for holidays, belonging everywhere and nowhere
like other fellow loner-giants (like I am). It causes great pain to
such a great soul, and it is a longing for companionship that never
subsides and is a gnawing emptiness which he must abide.
Still, if he can handle it, it spurs him to self-realize, and the
more he individuates, the greater is his expressed genius and
singularity, and the greater is his unpopularity and complete loss of
social standing but we all pay a price for the choices we make.
H: “The situation in Iraq is not yet clear. Yesterday five thousand
marines landed near Beirut. No one knows how the Russians will react.
The idea occurred to me that the present confused goings-on in the
Near East made good sense to members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
According to them, all that is happening in the world at present is a
prelude tot he battle of Armageddon which will take place on the
plain of Jezreeel. The return of the Jews to Israel has for its chief
purpose the readying of the battlefield. The kibbutzim which now dot
the plain of Jezreel are clearing and leveling the ground, and
draining the swamps. Movements of troops, whether in the frozen
expanse of Russia or in the heart of America, are preliminary stages
in the unfolding of the drama. Yesterday’s landing of five thousand
marines is a meaningful development. I wonder how many hypotheses
which make sense in nuclear physics are more valid than the
meaningful hypothesis of Jehovah Witnesses.”
My response: Intellectuals have noted elsewhere that Hoffer was no
neoconservative about Americans policing the world or engaging in
foreign wars. He approved of fighting Communism abroad, but also was
ambivalent about our foreign wars, as witnessed by his uneasiness
about the wisdom of sending thousands of Marines to Beirut in the
summer of 1958.
He also was afraid of Russia and America stumbling into World War II
and a nuclear holocaust, thus his wry remark as to whether the absurd
hypothesis given by the Jehovah Witnesses was any more absurd than
the shaky, reckless, wildly optimistic expectations of nuclear
arsenal scientists and technicians.
H: “July 22
Seven and a half hours on the Lurline at Pier 35. The depression of
spirit which weighed on me last night continues. I slept badly and
felt sleepy all day.
It is questionable whether total integration and removal of
discrimination would cure the American Negro of that which ails him,
and leave him without a grievance.”
My response: Hoffer wants blacks and all Americans to set aside all
alibis, most of which are socially constructed with iron-clad linking
of the individual’s identity and prospects to grouped others
characterized as victimizers and victims, all made plausible by
crying about social justice spouting altruistic-collectivistic
morality, and seeing all people and problems based upon each and
every person’s group identities. Such views are not only lies and
unrealistic, they offer no solutions to the suffering of blacks or of
any human being.
Deep down, the Good Spirits are self-actualized individualists, and
they expect the same from us if we would be successful in this world
and the next. Blacks or anyone else, on their own, have the innate
capacity and must internally assemble and gather as an integrated
whole, the self-esteem, will, confidence, courage, energy and
perseverance to bootstrap themselves out of any quagmire they happen
to be mired in, were born into, or stumbled into. Crawl out of the
swamp on your own and get moving, or die in the cesspit. At bottom it
is that simple, and that difficult. If you refuse to crawl out of the
pit, your immortal soul may be in danger, and you have laid a moral
and spiritual curse upon your children too, but exposing them to an
immoral, demonic or irreligious upbringing.
One must repudiate all justifications for not succeeding in decent,
minimally discriminatory, fair, equal America where hard work and
educating the self can lead to one become prosperous if not rich if
one will work smart, long and hard of equal, fantastic opportunity.
Hoffer knew the bulk of the blame and responsibility for black
under-performance in America lay with blacks themselves and the
victimization-peddling others using blacks to get and keep political
and social power (the power of powerlessness); blacks and their
Progressive, racist handlers are the ones holding them back, not
whitey, American societal laws or injustice.
For his hurling the truth at Leftists bigots all those years ago,
Hoffer was smeared as a racist, a lie and a despicable stain upon the
reputation of this fine, wise man.
H: “A Negro minority in a white world could perhaps never become
wholesome.”
My response: The only way blacks or anyone in America to become
wholesome is to embrace Mavellonialism and the American Way full
stop. With the right culture and values, the ascendancy of most
blacks in America would zoom into the stratosphere.
H: “In our union the Negro has total equality. There is no
discrimination in the assignment of jobs, in earnings, in election to
office. There are many Negro dispatchers, and a Negro business agent.
There are Negroes in the interunion leadership. Considering that most
of them are recent arrivals, and hence low in seniority, they have
achieved much without having to fight for it. Yet when you hear them
talk at our meetings you would think that our union is the darkest
South. The Negro living in a white world hates his black skin, and
probably agrees with the prevailing prejudice against him.”
My response: Hoffer elsewhere has often pointed out that when a
people suffer from racism and discrimination, they often secretly
agree with their attackers and accusers that they should hate their
black skin or whatever. Then the haters get rewarded perversely for
their blood libel-level lies against their victims: when their
victims, in the way they act and self-identify, agree with the
slanderous attacks upon them and live down to the low standard of
performance their detractors accuse them of being and doing.
Their self-esteem plummets to new lows, and the victims then refuse
to assimilate, and to adopt often better cultural and moral valuers
of the majority/haters culture and moral code. They then mimic in
non-action and under-performing the stereotypical caricature of
themselves that the lying bigots assigned to them. Then the bad
behavior becomes endemic and epidemic in the targeted group, a lived
reality, that never had to be, and never needs to be perpetuated into
the future, but probably will be. For it is now that group’s
traditional way of life. People are lazy and basically evil, so once
a bad way of life infects a community, an ethnic or racial group, it
is the bad way of life that is carried forth by the people being
destroyed by it, generation after generation. Never underestimate
people’s refusal to reform themselves, to accept wise guidance, or
to ignore God’s ministrations.
This lousy kind of conservatism is near impossible to eradicate
because its victims cling to it, their cultural addiction to
poisonous, ruinous values. People do not like themselves, and
secretly seek to punish themselves and maximize their personal
suffering, and it works well too. By poor choices and ignoring God’s
moral laws about how to conduct their lives, people sin and suffer
and their lives are a living hell because they will to continue to
sin.
We need to tear up no one and allow no one to tear us up, and this
way we can feel good about ourselves, and borrow superior cultural
values from wherever because we do not care what the holders of those
values say about us, for we just objectively weigh and scrutinize
their values, and adapt what is useful or beneficial for ourselves. I
think this approach would help blacks, native Americans and other
minorities to assimilate into the wonderful, superior white culture,
benefiting themselves and no longer being a drag on the entire
country, holding us down and back.
H: “But there are remarkable exceptions. I know several Negroes on
the waterfront who as workers and human beings have no match. They
are gentle, quiet, conscientious, and highly competent. I would give
much to have their life histories—how they managed to go through
life without being tainted and blemished.
August 4
Five hours on the Mikagesan Maru at Pier 23. I did some composing
during the short shift. The reason for today’s composing was partly
that we had hardly anything to do, since it was all heavy lifts, and
partly that I had nothing to read.
It is important that I should note the difficulty and pain I
experience in writing. It is incredible how vague is my memory of
past difficulties. It is only now, when I am beginning to go through
it again, that there is a revival of faded memories. Since the
publishing of a couple of books I have been cast in the role of a
writer and without being aware of the utter absurdity of it. I have
come to expect things to flow out of my finger tips. The truth is I
have to hammer out each sentence, and must hang on to an idea for
ages if aught worthwhile is to be written.
Last evening I sat down at the table to write and could make no
headway at all. The irritation was such that I had to dress and get
out of my room. I drifted to a cheap movie and saw an old Western
(The Far Horizon). It was eleven before I went to bed and I was up
at four-thirty.
August 15
Nine hours on the Dutch ship Batjan. As easy a day as one could wish
and no sort of unpleasantness. Still the depression this evening is
as black as yesterday. I must face the fact that the chief reason for
the depression is that I cannot compose.”
My response: When one is as successful and ingenious of a writer and
philosopher as Hoffer had become by 1958, he had dedicated his whole
life to writing philosophy, so for such an ambitious intellectual,
suffering severe writer’s block, would or could very depressing
indeed.
H: “August 16
Still on the Batjan at Pier 23. Today I somehow managed to compose
and make some progress on ‘Intellectuals as Schoolmasters.’ In
Jewish history between the return from the Babylonian captivity and
the destruction of the second temple the schoolmasters prevailed
against kings, nobles, and priests. The result was a school
possessing a nation rather than a nation possessing a school. In
China, too, during the period of the contending states, the schoolmen
were on the march. Confucius, Mo Ti, and their disciples felt
themselves qualified as rulers. The schoolmaster Mo Ti organized his
disciples into an army of experts in all departments of government.
In Greece, schoolmaster Plato maintained that cities will never have
rest until schoolmasters become kings. All through the ages
schoolmasters seem to have had the delusion that they could order
society as readily as they could a classroom. But it is probably the
twentieth century that will be seen in retrospect as the golden age
of the schoolmaster.
In all contemporary mass movements schoolmasters played a vital and
leading role. I am willing to bet that more than half of the leaders
in Africa are ex-schoolmasters. In the Nazi movement grammar-school
teachers played a prominent and fateful role. Now and then I am
inclined to think that the passion to teach, which is far more
primitive and powerful than the passion to learn, is a factor in the
rise of mass movements. For what do we see in the Communist world.
Half of the globe has been turned into a vast schoolroom with a
thousand million pupils at the mercy of a band of maniacal
schoolmasters.”
My response: These two paragraphs are Eric Hoffer at his best. It
seems that these nouns schoolmaster and intellectual are
interchangeable. There are several salient points raised here by
Hoffer, all excellent, all that should make the masses afraid. First,
schoolmasters have a bottomless taste for power, to instruct, to
control their subjects or students as part of the elite running the
government. Conclusion: Never allow intellectuals or schoolmasters to
run society.
Second, Intellectuals actually believe they are superior to the
masses, thus justifying as compassionate their sick, twisted
power-addiction to rule others as demonstrated by their insatiable
desire to lecture and think they have all the answers.
We cannot be individuators unless we seek to learn humbly knowing we
do not know it all while remaining curious to learn more. The desire
to teach is seductive a powerful inducement, tool and rationalization
for elitists to grab and maintain control and direction of the
masses. Conclusion: The masses need to be intellectual as
individuating individuals, and to maverize, to learn, allowing almost
no one for very long to instruct them, or they will take up arms and
cast of their schoolmasters and schoolmistresses.
Third, Hoffer has aptly identified that schoolmasters are fanatical
and deeply entrenched in all mass movements. Another reason woke
classrooms and institutions, run by schoolmasters, become factories
for rearing millions of selfless, true-believing little zombies is
that they have been broken and brainwashed by the intellectuals
running the educational hierarchy.
Parents need to heed Dennis Prager by pulling these kids out of
schools and colleges which are postmodernist Marxist child-wreckers
and home school the kids, or send them to private schools which
parents control. Conclusion: Deinstitutionalize society and
education bureaucracies, and if a schoolmaster is part of a mass
movement, head the other way.
Fourth, as fanatics the schoolmasters are cruel utterly vicious
maniacs Conclusion: Fight them to the death and never let them run
things, and never obey if they do.
Fifth, it chills me to think of how, since about 2010 intellectuals
and professors plotted to take over the institutions—especially if
huger learning—and then take over all institutions. Schoolmasters
and or intellectuals wish to rule, teach and prescribe—such is
their totalitarian mindset.
Conclusion: Neither America or the West is out of the woods, and the
cultural Marxists may yet carry the day.
H: “August 17
Still at Pier 23. Nine hours. Fishing fever has seized many of the
people working on this ship. The striped bass are running, and they
have been catching real big ones. The result was that half of the
time we were short-handed on a big pile of drums. The strain and
irradiation combined to make it an unpleasant day. Of course I
didn’t write a line.
August 24
Finished loading the Hawaiian Packer. The remarkable thing is that I
am less tired after a s0x-day retch of fairly hard work than after I
have often been after a one-day job.
What bothers me is that for the first time in my life I am becoming a
regular worker, and what’s more I am beginning to feel like one. I
wonder whether my preoccupation with the role of the intellectual,
and my antagonism towards him, have driven me to act the typical
workingman.
During the day I got to thinking about the dovetailing and mutuality
of inclinations. This came up in connection with the intellectual’s
need for pride. Being without an unequivocal sense of usefulness and
worth, the intellectual has a vital need for pride, which he usually
derives from an identification with some compact group, be it a
nation, a church, or a party.”
My recommendation for intellectuals—or anyone for that matter—that
has a desperate need for pride or a sense of self-worth, which they
lack and cannot stand to be conscious without, lacking it because
they do not individuate, do not work with their hands, are not
commercially active out in the world creating wealth, products and
services of need and demand; they do not feel a healthy pride int
themselves for accomplishment and creativity--is that they work some
with their hands and maverize—then they could genuinely feel good
about themselves, and no need to chase after the empty tainted
substituent of facile collective pride.
H: “The idea of a chosen people has been an invention of
intellectuals rather than of domineering men of action. But the
promotion of a compact, centralized social body not only satisfies
the intellectual’s need for pride but also offers him opportunities
for leading, directing, supervising, managing, and planning—pursuits
tailored to the needs and talents of the scribe from the first
invention of writing.
August 25
Eight hours on the Norwegian ship Evanger at Pier 41. The cargo was
cocoa beans and coffee. It was hard work part of the time, but I had
a good partner. I began to write the introduction to Men of Words. It
should be brief.
Just now I’m stuck with the beginning of Part 2. I need information
about the earliest examples of written literature in Sumer, Egypt and
China.”
