Elites usually set the theme or narrative that governs what goes on
in every society in every generation. Eric Hoffer regards this meme
as axiomatic, and I rarely disagree with him, and I do not here
either.
His Chapter 4 in his book, The Temper of Our Time, is entitled A Name
For Our Age. I will write out and respond to the entire chapter which
runs from Page 71 through Page 91 of his book, and will comment where
appropriate.
Here it is—(Hoffer or H after this): “The general impression
seems to be that the age in which we live is the age of the masses.
Half the time when you open a book or start a discussion you find
yourself dealing with mass production, mass consumption, mass
distribution, mass communication, mass culture, mass this and mass
that. We blame the masses for our ills: for the vulgarization of our
culture and politics, for the meaninglessness of our way of life, and
of course, for the population explosion.”
My response: We are a mass culture but if our culture and politics
are vulgar, if the masses would maverize, the vulgarity would
disappear. If we have abandon God, so our lives are empty and
meaningless, we need Jesus, good deities, Mavellonialism, and good
old American culture to right that ship, and enjoy meaning and
purpose, bursting at the seams.
H: “Actually, America is the only country in which the masses have
impressed their tastes and values on the whole of a society.
Every-where else, from the beginning of time, societies have been
shaped by exclusive minorities of aristocrats, scribes, businessmen,
and the hierarchies of sacerdotal or secular churches. Only in
America did the masses have a chance to show what they could do on
their own, without masters to push them around, and it needed the
discovery of a new world to give them the chance. But in America just
now the masses are on their way out. With the coming of automation 90
percent of the common people will be unneeded and unwanted.”
My response: Only in America have the masses been able to impress
their tastes and values upon society as a whole. Almost everywhere
else, through out human history, aristocrats of all stripes have
called the shots. It is my contention that in America, with
constitutional republicanism, capitalism, individualism sand
egoist-altruist ethics, was a singularly unique historical change,
where the masses ran things, where equality was rather common, and
class structure not so pronounced.
By contrast through out history and in prehistory, where elites run
things and impress their tastes and values upon the masses, there
class structure is rigid and vertical, poverty, tyranny, human rights
abuses, slavery are the norm, with all repressed due to predominating
altruist morality and collectivist politics and economics. Where
altruism and groupism are the norm, there elites run things, there
unnatural suffering and evil is maximized.
When the masses run things, especially if they were individuating
anarchist supercitizens, there egoism and individualism will bring
about free, prosperous, happy masses running things.
As for automation or AI making the masses superfluous, unneeded and
unwanted, the masses will need to continue to work and grow business
so they make themselves needed, feel needed and self-wanted.
H: “Nor is there room any longer for the special aptitudes and
talents of the masses. There was a time in this country when the
masses acted as pathfinders and pioneers.”
My response: America was the first mass society in history, the first
real democracy or republic where the little people ran things, but
now elites are starting to run things again, as the people lose their
grip on power and say-so, but as individuators, the masses could here
stay on top, and then let that mass culture spread across the globe.
H: “They plunged into the unknown, cleared the land, built cities,
founded states and propagated new faiths. The masses built America
and for almost a century shaped its future. But it is no longer so.
America’s future is now being shaped in fantastically complex and
expensive laboratories manned by supermen, and the masses are on the
way to becoming a waste product no one knows what to do with. No.
Our age is not the age of the masses but the age of the
intellectuals. Everywhere you look you can see intellectuals easing
the traditional men of action out of their seats of power. In many
parts of the world there are now intellectuals acting as large-scale
industrialists, as military leaders, as statesmen and
empire-builders. By intellectual I mean a literate person who feels
himself a member of an educated minority. It is not actual
intellectual superiority which makes the intellectual but the feeling
of belonging to an intellectual elite.”
My response: From the 1960s until today, America has been ruled by
intellectuals not the masses, and they, the elite rulers, are not
intellectually superior, but they really believe they are—and often
the masses believe they are--because they hold superior rank and
power to run things. The human need to gain rank over others is so
alluring and all are easily corrupted by and addicted to crave to
hold power and rank over others.
H: “Indeed the less valid his claim to intellectual superiority the
more typical will be the intellectual. In Asia, Africa, and Latin
America every student, every petty member of the professions, and
every clerk feels himself equipped for national leadership. In
Britain and Western Europe the intellectual, though not as assertive
in claiming his birthright to direct and order society, nevertheless
feels far superior to the practical men of action, the traditional
leaders in politics and business. In Communist countries the
intelligentsia constitutes the ruling class.
In America the educated have not until recently developed a
clear-cut, unmistakable intellectual type. There has been a blurring
of types in this country. The differences are relatively slight
between the educated and the uneducated, the rich and the poor, the
old and the young, civilians and soldiers. It is remarkable how many
topics there are—sports (including hunting and fishing), cars,
gadgets, diets, hobbies, the stock market, politics—in which
Americans of all walks of life are equally interested and on which
they can all talk with expertise. The paradox is that it is this
sameness which gives to every human type in this country a striking
singularity in the eye of the foreign observer. When Edmund Wilson
went to London some years ago the British intellectuals could not
believe their eyes: Edmund Wilson looked like a businessman. In 1963,
a delegation of American longshoreman to Latin America found it hard
to convince local labor leaders that they were bonafide workingmen.
To a foreign observer, the American businessman is classless;
‘grandee, entrepreneur and proletarian all in one.’* (*Richard
Hertz, Man on a Rock (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina
Press, 1946), p. 28.)”
My response: Hoffer the worldly, insightful practical sociologist has
uncovered something traditionally at work in America. Here class
differences and tastes in culture, and values are relatively the same
across different classes, and intellectuals and the ruling elites see
the world largely the same as and share values with the working
people (look at billionaire President Trump with his lunch-bucket,
prom-American outlook) and poor sees the world, and the society is
relatively classless with a large middle class and a not
unsubstantial upper middle class. Implicit in the original
observations and accurate Hofferian conclusions, if I may extrapolate
that America is the only or nearly only country ever run by the
masses, and is a society of individualism, freedom and democracy, an
ideal political social, cultural and economic arrangement, that it is
relatively a classless society with some rich, some, poor, a huge
middle class, fairly large upper middle class.
Americans: They share values and they are largely one class whereas a
feudal or Marxist or Soviet country is run by a few at the top, a few
in the middle, but most are really poor. These impoverished masses
are nonindividuating, groupist enduring slavery, want, tyranny and
the frustrating ethics of altruism-collectivism, whereas to be
American is to anticipate enjoying individuating, liberty, equality,
peace, law and order, capitalism, democratic governance and
egoist-individualist ethics—or heading that way.
Where elites run things and impose their values on society, there the
stratification is entrenched and stark; their the ruling class does
not share the values and culture of the masses. Hoffer does not quite
say all of this as I did but he said some of it and anticipates all
of it.
H: “The American intellectual has not always been what he is now.
When you read what New England intellectuals were saying about common
people early in the nineteenth century you are reminded of what
British and French colonial officials were saying about the natives
when the clamor for independence rose after the last war: ‘Wait and
see what a mess these savages will make of things.’
A resemblance between intellectuals and colonial officials strikes us
at first sight as incongruous. We associate colonialism with soldiers
and businessmen. I remember how when I first read about the Italian
Catholic hierarchy in northern Europe during the late Middle Ages, I
was struck by how much it resembled a colonial regime. There was a
continuous flow of tribute from the North, and cushy jobs for young
Italians. It reminded me of the relations between Britain and India
in the heyday of the British Raj. I saw the Reformation as a colonial
revolution, and it seemed to me quite logical that is should have
fostered national as well as religious separatism. Luther was a
colonial revolutionary. ‘In the eyes of the Italians,’ cried
Luther, we Germans are Teutonic swine. They exploit us like
charlatans, and suck the country to the marrow. Wake up, Germany!’
Though I knew that the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was made up
of intellectuals, it did not occur to me at the time that here was an
example of colonialism by intellectuals. I could not connect
intellectuals with colonialism.”
My response: Hoffer the clear, original thinker connected the dots,
and is concluding that the intellectual, in any other political
arrangement but America is like a colonialist and member of the elite
ruling class, expressing its own values and culture and inflicting
them upon the exploited, pliant masses. Through out history
intellectuals were part of the elite that rules society and imposed
their tastes on the masses, and intellectuals view that as their
mission in life. They usually admit it openly and feel justified in
ruling others. They are groupists not individualists and they
disallow individual's freedom and power to run one’s own life.
H: “With the lessons of the present before our eyes we know better.
We know that rule by intellectuals—whether by an intelligentsia in
a Communist country, by native intellectuals in the new countries, or
by Professors in Portugal—unavoidably approaches a colonial
regime.”
My response: Hoffer’s realization and then updated generalization
was that intellectuals in a society not run by the masses will be a
society dominated by the elites who rule it, and these harsh, cruel
overlords and over-ladies will run their nations just like they would
if they were colonial administrators of a far-flung empire with
colonies around the world. These woke and Progressive intellectual
rulers, professors and other college-educated rulers of the
institutions in America by 2015, that nearly captured all American
institutions—public, private, educational, religious and military,
Hollywood and mass media—leaders of the cultural Marxist mass
movement, were ready to rule the masses in America ready to rule them
as ruthlessly and without understanding as colonial intellectuals
ruled over natives in the far-flung British empire.
H: “This is a colonialism that begins at home. Hence, too, the
obvious fact that the liberation movements in Asia and Africa which
were initiated and won by native intellectuals, have not resulted in
democratic governments but in a passage from colonialism by Europeans
to colonialism by natives.”
My response: Hoffer is informing us that all elites, intellectuals
and the rest of them constituting the elite, are really just colonial
administrators, enforcing their brand of tyranny upon the local
population. I think Hoffer's analogy of ruling intellectual elites as
interchangeable with colonial administrators of old is apt. Notice
that native elites did not bring democracy to ex-colonial nations:
aristocrats hate democracy and kill it every time.
H: “The typical intellectual everywhere is convinced that the
common people are unfit for liberty and self-government. It is
instructive to read what Patrice Lumumba wrote about the African
masses before he became Saint Lumumba. In his book, Congo, My
Country, written before Congo’s independence, Lumumba proposed to
the Belgian rulers that they assimilate the African intellectual and
together form an elite. As to the masses: ‘The status quo will be
maintained for the uneducated masses who would continue to be
governed and guided, as in all countries, by the responsible
elite—the white and African elite.’
What does an economy run by intellectuals look like? It is colossal:
big plans, big statistics, steel plants, factories, dams, power
houses—the biggest ever. The intellectuals cannot be bothered with
the prosaic business of producing food, clothing, and shelter for
the people. He wants to start at the end and work backward. He pants
for the grandiose, the monumental, the spectacular. Though factories,
dams, etc. are practical things, the intellectual sees them as
symbols of power and lordship rather than means for utilitarian
ends.”
My response: Intellectuals lack common sense, practicality, modesty,
realistic expectations.
H: “In Russia they build the biggest steam shovel ever made, while
everywhere in the country you see people carrying brick and mortar on
wooden platforms, four men lifting at four corners, because there are
neither buckets or wheelbarrows. It would be hardly possible to make
sense of rule by intellectuals without taking into account their
consuming passion for grandeur. ‘The human heart,’ wrote D. H.
Lawerence, ‘needs, needs, needs splendor. gorgeousness, pride,
assumption, glory and lordship. Perhaps it needs these more than it
needs love; at least even builders of a heaven on earth have made a
nightmare of the words of Jesus that ‘whosoever shall not receive
the kingdom of heaven as a child shall in no wise enter therein.’
And it is in this nightmare that the schoolmaster’s wildest dream
is coming true: when he speaks the whole world listens. And how these
schoolmasters do talk. Four-hour speeches, six-hour speeches—a
schoolmaster’s heaven.
In international affairs the coming of the intellectual has brought
to the fore the cult of naked power. To an intellectual in power
liberalism, the readiness to compromise, and moral considerations are
the mark of a paper tiger, and the sight of a paper tiger incites him
to a most reckless ferocity. Never before has there been such a
disdain for truth and the ‘court of world opinion.’ The
intellectual in power seems to understand only the simple language of
divisions, warships, bombers, and missiles. He has a most sensitive
nose for iron determination. Who would have dreamed fifty years ago
that the intellectual ready to give their lives for the oppressed
would make an article of faith of cynicism and the big lie? Who would
have thought that power would corrupt the idealistic intellectual
more than it does any other type of humanity?”
My response: Because centralized power so sickens intellectuals, they
should never be allowed to run anything.
H: “The age of the intellectual is full of surprises and paradoxes.
One would have thought, for instance, that in societies dominated by
intellectuals the atmosphere would be ideal for the performance of
poets, writers, and artists. What we find instead is that a ruling
intellectual tends to hamper or even stifle the creative individual.
The reason for this paradox is that when intellectuals come to power
it is as a rule the meagerly endowed among them who rule the roost.
The genuinely creative person seems to lack the temperament requisite
for the seizure, exercise, and, above all, the retention of power.”
My response: It is not that intellectuals who seek power over others
only do so if they lack ability, that gathering power to themselves
is a substitute for creative endeavor, be they personally gifted or
not. Rather an intellectual too lazy to discipline herself to become
creative and wield the power of powerfulness, settles for being a
mediocrity seeking power over others, the corrupting power of
powerlessness.
H: “If Hitler had had the talents (Actually Hitler did potentially
but did not because he gave up to soon and believe he could not, so
he could not; then he wanted to not hate himself, so he took his
murderous revenge upon humanity be killing and destroying, and we
like him are all immensely talented and immensely destructive if that
is how we choose to live and express ourselves—Ed says, disagreeing
with Hoffer here.) of a great painter or architect, if Lenin and
Stalin had the makings of great theoreticians, if Napoleon and
Mussolini had it in them to become great poets or philosophers, they
might not have developed an unappeasble appetite for power,”
My response: To reiterate, those that do not create or use as
individuators personally their positive, loving power to build and
create, the power of powerfulness; then they work for Satan and Lera,
and destroy and maim and smash, and they wield institutional,
political, tyrannical power, the power of powerlessness.
H: “Now, one of the chief proclivities of people who hunger for
literary or artistic greatness but lack talents is to interfere with
the creativeness of others. They derive an exquisite satisfaction
from imposing their taste and style on the gifted and the brilliant.
Throughout most of history the creative intellectual was at his best
in societies dominated not by ‘men of words’ but by men of action
who were culturally literate. In Florence of the Renaissance, Cosimo
the Elder, a banker who dreamed of having God the Father on his books
as a debtor, reverenced talent the way that the pious reverence
saints. Though he was the first in the state, and unequaled in
fortune and prestige, he played the humble disciple to scholars,
poets and artists.”
My response: Men of words, or intellectuals, suppress individuality
and creativity, while cultured bankers historically are more
pro-intellectual and tolerant of creativity in others because as
egoists, capitalists, business-people or trades-people, they are more
individualistic and creative or tolerant of creativity than are
authoritarian, aristocrat intellectual elites, who are very groupist
and conformist, jealously intolerant of talented others enjoying
their intellectual independence. Hoffer instinctively knows the more
egoistic bankers like Cosimo are more tolerant of talent in other
individuals than are petty, jealous authoritarian prescriptive
intellectuals, groupist and controlling. I go farther and urge the
people to be individuators; all are talented so as intellectuals,
they can do banking as a sideline, and as bankers, they can be
brilliant mathematicians as individuators. All may have fun as
experts or as amateurs in all kinda of ways in all kinds of diverse
fields.
H: “And how do the common people fare in societies possessed by
intellectuals?”
My response: Not well: the educated elites in America by 2015 with
their mass movements and holy cause, cultural Marxism or Marxist
postmodernism, these true believers would run a society as
totalitarian and vicious as anything under Pol Pot.
H: “It is well to remember that all through history the masses have
found the intellectual a formidable taskmaster. In the past, rule by
intellectuals went hand in had with the subjection or even the
enslavement of those who do the world’s work. In India and China
where the scholarly Brahmins and Mandarins were at the top for
millennia, the lot of the masses was oppression, famine, and grinding
poverty. In no other society have the weak been treated so
mercilessly. In ancient Greece an aristocracy of intellectuals,
unequaled in body and mind, had its foot on the neck of a large
population of slaves. Even in Palestine, where after the return from
Babylonian exile the scribes and their successors, the Pharisees,
were in power, the common people were considered outcasts unfit even
for piety. During the Middle Ages a hierarchy of clerks left the
common people to sink into serfdom and superstitious darkness.
One cannot escape the impression that the intellectual’s most
fundamental incompatibility is with the masses.”
My response: I agree with the brilliant Hoffer that the
intellectual’s most fundamental incompatibility is with the masses,
not because the educated elite are smarter, better or even different
from the masses: they just have more power, money and education that
the masses. That the intellectuals actually believe they are
genetically better and smarter than the masses, inferior, immoral
naughty children who need and deserve to be ruled by the elite with a
whip in their hand—this is part of historical lies the haves
recount to justify what they do the have-nots.
The masses need to run things always, never trusting any elite to run
their lives for them. Only as individuated supercitizens, will the
masses be those political creatures, half-intellectual and
half-electrician or nurse, who will competently run things and keep
elites decentralized, powerless, toothless.
H: “In every age since the invention of writing he has given words
to his loathing of the common man. Yet, knowing all this, we were not
prepared for the fate that has befallen the masses in the present age
of the intellectuals. A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe,
Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented
on, processed, and wasted at will. Charles Pe’guy saw it long ago,
before the first World War. The intellectuals, he said, dealt with
the people the way a manufacturer deals with wares; they were
capitalists of people. Yet the ruling intellectuals see themselves as
champions and spokesmen of the people, and call their societies
‘people’s democracies.’”
My response: Always intellectuals and social justice warriors claim
to be for the people, but all they ever want and seek, behind their
lies and self-justifications, is power over the people as their
aristocratic masters and mistresses.
H: “When intellectuals come to power they develop a profound
mistrust of mankind. They do not trust each other, but their deepest
distrust is of the common people. Tell a Russian, Chinese, or Cuban
commissar that the masses, if left to themselves, would perform well,
and he will laugh to your face. He knows that the masses are
incurably lazy, stupid, and dishonest.”
My response: The masses are basically evil, as we all are, and we are
all naturally but not incurably lazy, stupid and dishonest, and we
will act that way as long as the elites ruling us treat us as if that
is are we are capable of—it is most unwise to underestimate how
easy people are to accept that they are nothing, capable of nothing,
and things will never get better, so why try, as long as their ruling
elites, their culture heritage, and their cliques reinforce this
terrible, depressing narrative upon the masses, upon the young. We
can do better if we esteem ourselves, dare to maverize, dare to build
a life, a better future for ourselves, for our families, for society.
What just occurred to me was what a kind and decent man Hoffer was,
that he really loved the masses, here in America and everywhere, as
he wanted them to run their own lives, their societies, finally to
have a chance to be free, happy, prosperous, fulfilled, content,
enjoying their few years on this mortal coil.
H: “You have to watch them all the time, breathe down their necks,
push them, and crack the whip if you want anything to get done. The
ratio between supervisory and producing personnel is always highest
where the intellectuals are in power. In a Communist country it takes
half the population to supervise the other half.
The intellectual does not believe in high wages. Affluence, he
thinks, corrupts the people. He wants them to work not for filthy
money, (People need to work for high wages, not for words and a holy
cause.--Ed Says) but for a holy cause, for the fatherland, for glory,
honor, the future. He wants to ennoble them by making them work for
words. The ability to induce people to work for words, can, of
course, be of vital importance to poor countries trying to get ahead.
But enthusiasm is perishable and cannot serve for the long haul.
Sooner or later, the working people in societies ruled by
intellectuals refuse to perform. They labor-fake, act dumb, and
pilfer the cargo the moment the intellectual turns his back. They
cannot be frightened with prison since in these societies the
difference between life outside and inside prison of one of degree
rather than of kind. So you have to introduce the death penalty for
economic offenses, and you have to build high wire fences and brick
walls to keep the masses from running away.
Closely allied to the intellectual’s attitude toward the masses is
his incompatibility with America.”
My response: Intellectuals are inherent elitists and aristocrats:
whether educated or otherwise, they hate the masses and vie against
them fearing the masses would treat them the same way in reverse if
they came into power, and if revenge occurred to them, if they
united, got angry and revolted.
America is the land of the self-governing masses, so intellectuals
hate it and want it toppled and overthrown, and the virulent hatred
of American and the deep, strong passion of Progressives who have
overthrown and now direct the Democratic Party in America, these
Marist postmodernists seek to supplant the American Way with their
holy cause, cultural Marxism, so that America ruled by elites is the
realized nightmare, a severe, socialist tyranny which they seek to
instantiate and inflict upon American masses. The cultural Marxists
have come close to succeeding their dream being achieved, getting
their way here.
H: “With rare exceptions, foreign intellectuals, even when their
interests incline them toward us, cannot really stomach America. In
France some years ago, the French writer Francois Mauriac found
himself at a lunch table with Cardinal Spellman. He tells us that all
the time he was conscious of a feeling of revulsion. ‘Most
probably,’ he says, ‘I would have felt closer to the Dalai Lama.’
This from a very French Catholic intellectual about an American
cardinal. British intellectuals have said they feel more at home
France, Germany, Russia and even in India than in English-speaking
America.
Wherever American influence penetrates it rouses the fear and the
hostility of intellectuals. What is there in American influence that
so offends and frightens the foreign intellectual? What happens when
a country begins to become Americanized? We have been told so often
that America has a business civilization that you would expect
American influence to manifest itself first in its effect on foreign
businessmen. We find instead that the Americanization of a country
means, above all, the de-proletarianization of its working class—the
stiffening of the workingman’s backbone, and the sharpening of his
appetites. He not only begins to believe that he is as good as anyone
else but wants to look and live like everyone else. In other words,
the Americanization of a country amount to giving it a classless
aspect, a sameness that suggests equality. It is this that the
foreign intellectual fears and resents. He feels the loss of the
aristocratic climate as a private hurt. It is a drab, uninspiring
world where every mother’s son thinks himself as good as anyone
else, and the capacity for reverence and worship become atrophied.
This to the intellectual is truly a ‘godless” world, and this
‘vulgarization’ and the debasement against which he rails.
Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to
achieve monumental things in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by
words.”
My response: I have noted elsewhere that individualists are more
rational, moderate, temperate and modest, able to achieve monumental
things without all the drama and words; words and drama must be
displayed and orchestrated by intellectuals, so passionate, extreme
and theatrical, their excessive enthusiasm showing.
H: “Think of it: Our unprecedented productive capacity, our
affluence our freedom and equality are not the end product of a
sublime ideology, an absolute truth, or a Promethean struggle. The
skyscrapers, the huge factories, dams, powerhouses, docks, railroads,
highways, airports, parks, farms stem mostly from the utterly trivial
motivation of profit.”
My response: There is nothing trivial about the profit motive, and it
should serve as our primary and often only motivation for acting and
choosing to act.
H: “In the eyes of the foreign intellectual, American achievements
are illegitimate, uninstructive and uninspiring. An Indian
intellectual protested that America has nothing to teach because all
her achievements came about by chance.
Equally galling is the fact that until now America has run its
complex economy and governmental machinery without the aid of the
typical intellectual, and wherever American influence penetrates, the
services of the intellectual somehow cease to be indispensable. When
an American consulting firm was brought in to straighten out the
affairs of a South American company, the first thing it did was fire
two-thirds of the pencil pushers, most of whom were university
graduates who would rather starve than perform manual labor.
The intellectual’s loathing of America is of long standing. Heine
spoke of the country as ‘the prison of freedom’ and saw in our
equality a tyranny more stifling than any despotism. Carlyle and a
whole tribe of nineteenth century British intellectuals were appalled
by our commonness and alarmed by our materialism. Renan saw the end
product of our democracy as ‘a degenerate populace having no other
aim than to indulge the ignoble appetites of the vulgar.’* (*Saul
Bellow echoed Renan when he said that affluence has ‘left us
without a system of values’ and made America ‘a pig heaven.’)
Freud protested: ‘I do not hate America. I regret it. I regret that
Columbus discovered it.’ In his ‘Reflections on America’
Jacques Maritain tells in vivid words how the foreign intellectuals,
out of their fear and hatred of the common man, have been telling
each other that the common man’s continent is ‘a great death
continent populated only with machines and walking corpses,’ a
world ‘only intent on sucking all the vitality and the creative
instinct of the universe in order to foster with them the levelling
power of dead matter and a swarm of automatic ghouls.’
Thus it seems that the protagonists of our present age are not in
America and Russia, or in America or China, or Russian and China, but
America and the intellectuals. Though the indications are that
America will somehow manage to come to terms with governments by
intellectuals in Europe, the prospects are not promising for a modus
vivendi with dominant intellectuals in Asia, Africa, and Latin
America. A letter recently received from an American diplomat serving
in Asia says: ‘I am always surprised at the amount of raw, venomous
hatred for the U.S., that is displayed by everyone with more than six
years of education in this part of the world. Strangely, the poor and
illiterate masses remain well disposed towards the U.S., but that
will certainly disappear with the next generation . . . By
recognizing as a constant factor the hostility of the underdeveloped
intellectuals, we would avoid the costly effort in trying to win
world public opinion, and cold-bloodedly realize what they already
know—that we are by our basic nature and destiny a subversive force
in these societies, and that our own security lies in the transfer of
power to the masses and to real mass leaders, not elite class
leaderw.’
Time seems to be working for the intellectuals. With the spread of
automation the intellectuals will be everywhere on top, and the
common people unneeded and unwanted. In Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed
a brash intellectual shoots of his mouth on the subject: ‘For my
part, if I didn’t know what to do with nine-tenths of mankind, I’d
take them and blow them up unto the air instead of putting them in
paradise. I’d leave only a handful of educated people who would
live happily ever afterward on scientific principle.’ I’m quite
certain that nothing of this sort is going to happen to us. Still,
the question remains: How can common people safeguard themselves
against tyranny by intellectocracy?”
My response: Only as anarchist individuating supercitizens can the
masses fend off and safeguard themselves against tyranny by
intellectocracy.
H: “Strangely enough, the answer, though not easy, is relatively
simple. Just as tyranny by an aristocracy or a plutocracy can be most
effectively checked by turning everyone into an aristocrat or
capitalist, so tyranny by an intellectocracy can be neutralized by
turning everyone into an intellectual.”
My response: Well, there I found what I did not know Hoffer had
concluded fifty years before I thought it up on my own: the masses
can neutralize any intellectocracy or any ruling elite by becoming
capitalists and each of them aristocrats and intellectuals, which is
about equivalent to my suggestion that each of them self-realize into
anarchist individuating supercitizens.
H: “This of course means society as a university, with a
Berkeley-style ‘Free Speech Movement’ acting as a formidable
opposition against tyranny from any quarter.
Since the central concern of the Great Society must be the
realization and cultivation of its human resources, it might have to
turn itself into a school even if there were no need for a safeguard
against any sort of tyranny. But as we try to visualize society as a
school—a country divided into hundreds of thousands of small school
districts, each charged with the realization of its natural and human
resources—we find the pleasant surprise that what we have would be
less society as a school than society as a playground. A wholly
automated society would demand only a token effort from the
individual and give him back the child’s freedom to play. The
relatively small number of people in each school district, with their
various interests and pursuits, would have the time and inclination
to know each other, learn from and teach each other, compete with and
spur each other. There would be no dividing line between learning and
living. All that schoolmasters can teach in a classroom is as nothing
when compared with what we cannot help teaching each other on a
playground. ‘Man,’ said Walter Bagehot, ‘made the school; God
the playground.’”
My response: I like and approve of Hoffer’s suggesting that a
society of learning, individuating adults-- or children for that
matter—likely learn better and with more enthusiasm when learning
is experienced, gained and conducted less in the classroom, but
moreso in the world of experience, the playground of life.
