I will write out below his diary entries and comment on them where necessary.
Hoffer (H after this): “June 1, 1958
5 A.M. I am getting self-righteous. This usually happens after a long stretch of work. I remember Tolstoi saying somewhere that work makes not only ants, but me, too, cruel.”
My response: When people are tired, or stressed from too much work or working too long, they can turn nasty. Just scapegoating or blowing off steam. When I was about 12 years old, and it was -20F after school and we were feeding cows, and apparently my Dad got cranky with my brother and me for some work offense feeding cows on our farm. Later, when chores were done, he was warming himself by backing up to the cherry-red wood stove in the farmhouse, and he may have been apologizing, for he said that cold weather could make him mean, though I do not much recall that behavior.
H: “4 P.M. Went to the dentist to have my teeth cleaned. Lili and the boy met me afterwards and we went to the beach. We had a good, plentiful meal at the Hitchrack. It is long since I tasted such good liver. The boy had learned several dirty words. Lili did not seem alarmed.
10 P.M. Went to the union meeting. Again the contrast between the shallowness of the discussion of the abstract and the originality in tackling the practical. There were weariness and boredom in the first half of the meeting, which dealt with the Sobell* case. (*Morton Sobell was convicted as a spy in 1951, in connection with the Rosenberg case. The radicals are still agitating for his release.) In the second half the subject was the hiring hall and how to deal with chiselers on the scrap-iron jobs. The solutions offered were original and wonderfully simple. The simplicity gave an impression of subtlety.”
My response: Both Hoffer and I are blue-collar workers, like him, I have noted many times that my peers are wonderfully clever and creative at solving practical problems. People can think for themselves: they do not need an elite to think for them, to direct them. I go one step beyond Hoffer (Actually, below, Hoffer catches up with me by speculating that practical blue collar workers might be able to do intellectual, speculative pondering, theorizing and playing with ideas-- with a subtle, original twist, and why not?) in asserting that the masses are as smart, more or less, as anyone else in leadership positions. and that the masses as self-taught, individuating intellects could be as original sand elegant as nay at solving abstract puzzles as well.
It also occurs to me that the abstract is shallow and dull when the union intellectuals droned on and on because their ideological uniformity of speaking with one voice makes them dull, repetitive and dumb.
NOTE: I spoke too soon—below Hoffer speculates whether that blue collar longshoreman, so original and subtle in solving practical problems, could handle playing creatively with abstract ideas, and my resounding response is hell yes. There is no educated or intellectually superior elite anywhere, of any race, superior to the masses in being able to solve both practical problems and speculative ventures. All have the talent, and if all or most would individuate, the masses would finally have a full opportunity to demonstrate their stuff and abilities, and this would go a long, long way to dismantling and discrediting elites being needed to supervise the masses anywhere.
H: “It would be fascinating to see whether the longshoremen’s originality in solving practical problems could be canalized into theorizing and the play with ideas. We know a canalization in the opposite direction. In the middle of the nineteenth century the intellectual energy of New England was drained into practical channels of mining, engineering, railroading, and the like, during the opening of the West. The feats of practical organization of the Rockerfellers, Morgans, and even the Carnegies were the feats of potential philosophers plunged into an atmosphere of action.
I am aware of how much I have to watch myself. The pitfalls are all around me: not only self-righteousness but also deprecation of others. The others are not the people I work and live with but the intellectuals in general. There is a danger I might come to think of most of them as sterile, pretentious and futile. And it is strange that this attitude is pronounced at a time when my creative flow is at its thinnest.”
My response: What I admire most about this original, brilliant, moderate philosopher is his brutal honesty about all things, life and people, including himself. He knows that he, I and everyone born basically evil and we are most susceptible to being corrupted when we hate an enemy deserving to be hated too much, enemies like power-hungry intellectuals working to overthrow and rule lovely America, which Hoffer reveres.
Even a moral great soul like Hoffer, if his wrath and hatred of elites waxes excessively, then he is in constant danger of being transformed into one of them, a self-righteous, oppositional hater, whose hatred will hollow out his self-esteem, his great self-love, and then resentment, bitterness and a complete loss of humility and objectivity has allowed him to become what he hates most. Hoffer was keenly aware of that danger and temptation, but kept himself humble and in check, so that he could fight them calmly and cooly, so that the reader can understand his loathing of and wariness towards all elites as the perennial enemies of humankind and human well-being, as they surely are.
Implicit in Hoffer’s voluminous writings warring the mass to be wary of intellectuals is his endorsement of the masses as talented commoners who could and should run their own affairs and self-realize. The masses as organized individualist should run society all the time, in all institutions fro the bottom up.
H: “June 2
The present depression, even if it turns out to be temporary, and our lag in science and technology have shaken my confidence.”
My response: Even the bold, confident, ultra self-reliant Hoffer felt unsure, down and self-doubting at times, and that is completely understandable and acceptable for humans naturally suffer from depression and low self-esteem.
But the key takeaway here is to rally again and again and such a feisty approach will help one rebound.
H: “The disillusionment with America is not likely to follow the course of the disillusionment of the British which we experienced between two world wars. The chief weakness in this country is the inability to keep the industrial plant in full operation all the time. The weakness in England was that it had to sustain the edifice of Empire on a shaky economic foundation. I doubt whether being or not being a great power would deeply affect our lives in this country. What matters is the crisis of confidence in our know-how and ingenuity.”
My response: This insightful genius knows everyday Americans are so progressive, innovative and proficient as entry-level individuators, individualists with some self esteem and some egoist morality, would only remain self-confident if they sense their America can-do, know-how and ingenuity could be renewed and demonstrated routinely all across the population as they validate their lives by creating, thinking, doing, not by being a member of the nation, or British empire, though those things matter too.
H: “I am cheered when I realize that things vital for my welfare or prospects have completely escaped my mind. Preoccupation with the self has always seemed to me unhealthy.”
My response: Though Hoffer is an implicit egoist and an implicit or unconscious proponent of individuating, egoist morality and individual-living, notice that he regards preoccupation with the self to be unhealthy, and he is right to criticize self-obsession as sick and he will not live that way, so he avoids that subjective, corrosive kind of narcissistic individualism, which is really altruistic/collectivized narcissism at work.
When people are interested in the objective be it infinity within or without, or objectivity inside materially or the external physical world, the self is happiest when it is busy, creative, productive, competent engaged loving and developing: there little depression and sick stultifying self-absorption occurs, Hoffer the great soul carries on an intellectual and metaphysical dialogue with his self-realizing self and that is self-interest and self development not self-preoccupation. It is the collectivist, the joiners, who wallow in self-obsession and it is unhealthy.
H: The analysts and the prognosticators have not shown up well on the French crisis. In this case the man in the street was a better judge than the experts.”
My response: Hoffer loves paradox, and truth is often paradoxical: ironically the less educated less intellectual masses often are more rational, realistic and truthful than the elites experts whose ideology and fanaticism and groupthink often makes them dumb.
H: To an intellectual words—parliament, democracy, dictatorship, fascism—loom large. To the general run of people, the chief question is whether, and how smoothly, a thing works. The government of France, call it by any name, has not worked during the last decades. To make it work you have to get it out of the hands of the people who have played with it until now.”
My response The intellectuals, the ideologues, are fixated upon and words words to guide them in how to choose rule and make decisions about things in the real world, whereas the grounded, sensible, realistic masses, are more pragmatic and goes with what is effective and functions or not.
H: “June 4
None hours on the German ship Dortheim on Pier 26.
On the way to the job it occurred to me that the homogenizing effect of Communism is partly due to its inducement of passionate rudeness. People of all nationalities become somewhat alike when swept away by a fit of rudeness.”
My response: When people are grateful, at peace and self-loving, there is no need to be rude to self or others. When people lack self-esteem, travel in packs, whose insides are strewn by passionate strife, who burn with resentment, being rude to the self and other is a way of venting this unhappiness, and when it becomes institutionalized as a practice, it unites heterogenous but frustrated peoples.
H: “On the job I had for a partner the voluble Negro, ‘Cigar’ Barlow. He is a fairly effective speaker at union meeting, somewhat of a rabble-rouses but his conversation is pretentious and empty. He had gone to see and hear Billy Graham, but could not tell me why he was so impressed. He uses high-sounding cliches.
Character seems to be more typical among Negroes than among Whites. The unctuous hypocrite, the barefaced cheat, the windbag, the lecher, the miser are immediately identifiable, and remind one of types one has read about in old books and fairytales. There must be a large element of playacting in the Negro’s life. My hunch is that any change in the fortunes of a Negro would immediately show itself in every detail of his life. There will be a new play, and a new role acted with minute attention to every detail.”
My response: It could be that playacting, practicality and loud extroversion are group behaviors, so when people are joiners, their lack of deep individuality might be compensated by them by showing the world a loud, showy, melodramatic but superficial individuality as a character, but it is a compensation not an actuality. Blacks generally are more groupist than whites, so playacting and theatrical character roles being assumed by them as adults, might be more prevalent and evident, than among whites who generally are a bit more individualistic, they know it, and can be individualistic without the color and playacting.
H: “On and off during the day I have been thinking about woman’s role in American political life. My feeling is that, on the whole, women will vote against the workingman. They will side with anything that smacks of an upper or ruling class. Women elected Eisenhower, and they were shocked by Truman’s commonness.”
My response: It is noticeable even today that women for Democrat more than men do, and men vote Republican more than women do.
H: “June 5
Finished the German ship at Pier 26. Six hours. I have the impression that many Scandinavian longshoreman are anti-British. They speak of the British the way the anti-Semites speak of the Jews. According to Axel (the Swede I talked with today) the British own every mine, mill and factory in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. How come then that Britain seems to be hard up? Answer: it’s only the poor in Britain who are hard up.
It is perhaps true that ignorance tends to be extremist. Our opinions about things we do not know are not likely to be balanced and moderate.”
My response: It seems likely.
H: “My mind went back to the possibility of canalizing practical intelligence into intellectual channels (And why not, Ed Says.) One of the peculiarities of the Occident has been the ability to distill spiritual impulses from practical pursuits. The Italian Renaissance was born in the marketplace, in the workshops of artisans. Pure science emerged from the pursuits of architects, navigators, and craftsmen. The Greeks extracted geometry from surveying, and their philosophy probably received its first impetus from the invention of coinage about 700 B.C.It was but a step from seeing coins as the common denominator of all values to the speculation that the manifold appearance of things is due to different states and arrangements of a fundamental substance.”
My response: Hoffer is speculating that commerce can feed individualism, philosophizing and the creative mindset, another paradox and likely true.
H: “
June 6
Four hours on the Lurline at Pier 35. In the afternoon I took Lili and the boy to the circus. The child seemed hardly interested in the stunts and spectacles. My impression is that he can get excited only about something that has a direct relationship to him. In the zoo and in the park there is a personal confrontation between the animals and himself. This lack of enthusiasm for the circus reminded me that he shows no interest in animated toys such as pecking birds and other mechanical animals. He becomes passionately attached to the sculpture of a bird or an animal, no matter how crude, and he spends hours tinkering with wheels and gears.
June 8
A long day, loading rice on the Hawaiian Pilot in Encinal. There have been intermittent downpours. Had it not been for the pleasantness of my partner it would have been a miserable day. Between loads I observed sparrows feeding on patches of scattered rice on the deck. How timid they are! Are these blobs of life without fear? They come down from the edge of the roof like a cloud and spread out like a carpet. They seem to keep away from spots where the rice is think as if fearing a snare.”
