I think the individuator, on average, would be a person of solid common sense, and moderate judgment. One way to construe this would be that he would be idealistic, ever out to improve things, all while living in the world, allowing his practical sense and material needs to be bet without guilt or flinching or refusing to work for his daily bread.
There are lots of interesting Prager U interviews now in late 2026, and with Dennis at reduced capacity, Marissa Streit has come to the fore. She was interviewing someone recently, and one of them repeated a comment from the late, great Charlie Kirk that hit me like a ton of bricks, as original and profound,. Kirk had said that faith and freedom go together, and that just intuitively seems correct to me.
God is a God of love, and gave us free will to worship De if we will, as we will—though there are consequences for our choices. God had made it a metaphysical axiom for reality, likely for all eternity that faith and freedom are connected, and go intimately together, that we cannot have one without the other. I would throw in love and reasoning as well for good measure.
It seems to me that if faith, freedom, love and reasoning go together, then adding egoist-altruist ethics together should bind them together even more tightly.
Imagine how free and healthy and equalizing it would be if this togetherness principle guided our political relations, informal and formal, ad hoc and structural.
Where do values take root? Where do they come from? The answer may be complex and multifaceted, and it probably is, but I am supplying three answers, rather a simple response at that.
God is the great deity, A Being whose near perfect nature is love and spiritual and moral goodness, all in one and all that the same time. Humans being born sinful and fragile, but still of free will empowerment and endowment, lack the instincts to know what to value, what to choose, and how to act, based on their feelings, their intuition, their instincts. These rational beings require a moral code—preferably egoism—s standard against which to measure, to compare and contrast potential moral choices to realize the right choices to make and how to act. God is the first and primary source of these moral codes like the Ten Commandments.
Nature is the second source and of secondary importance to providing people with instinctual or hunch-engendered preference as to how to carry on, how to choose.
Nature can also serve as a moral laboratory for humans to study to know how to live. For example in Switzerland, if a squirrel gathers and stores or hides nuts so it has food to survive the winter, the farmer could observe these behavior and conclude that he should set aside farm foodstuffs so his family will not starve to death in the pending winter on his doorstep.
Third, from society and/or history we can observe how our ancestors lived, and if we were smart, we could learn what to do and how to live to flourish and be happy, and what is the outcome of ignoring or flouting these wise practices by ancestors.
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.”
Here is a definition for egoism, which I came up with yesterday, 9/8/26: an egoist is a person inisting that you keep your cotton-pickin hands off of his power, his wealth, his property, his life, his mind, his freedom of expression, and his liberty.
He also promises to so treat you in return.
Today on Facebook (9-7-26), I saw a posting about Dolly Parton that she knew even as a child that Jesus loved her and that through God all things are possible.
Jesus does love all humans, and this fine woman just knew it by intuition, and yes through God all things are possible. Miracles occur all the time, though what we pray for is never guaranteed to come about as we demand, for that is magic (coercing supernatural outcomes which we dictate). If God wills that our prayers will be answered as we wish and expect, it can occur, no guarantees ever, though.
I have been warning the public for about five years that woke Leftists/Democrats/Progressives were the political expression of a deeper, older, more sinister and revolutionary ideology, Marxist Postmodernism. Below I will copy and paste an article from 9/7/26 Townhall.com, which I believes proves I was right. If one studies cultural Marxism as a mass movement on the march in America in 2026 it explains why Democrats think, choose and act as they do.
This article today is written by Rachel Alexander, and is called How The Left Turned Into A Cult. She refers to it as a cult, which is nearly equivalent or synonymous with my identifying Leftism as an ideological mass movement.
Here is Rachel (R after this): “Years ago, no one would have imagined the Democrats weakening laws against child molesters, promoting men to compete against women in biological sports and putting conservatives behind bars for their political views. Now they blindly accept it, with their only defense turning the debate around and bashing President Donald Trump (TDS).”
My response: These true believers no longer hide their fanaticism, and are proud of themselves.
R: “Cults are defined as top-down, with high control, us-versus-them thinking, and punishment of doubt. Democrats who disagree are considered heretics and purged from the party. A classic example is the ostracism of Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA). Because he opposed the Democrat Party on some issues, he is now shunned and has almost been pushed out of the party. A poll from Quinnipiac found that most Pennsylvania Democrats want him out. He is not up for reelection until 2028, but three Democratic members of Congress — Brendan Boyle, Chris Deluzio, Summer Lee — and others are already floated as challengers.
Even though Fetterman votes with Democrats 88 percent of the time, that’s not enough because they are policing beliefs, not votes.
How did they get to this stage? It’s like heating up a frog slowly in water; it happened so gradually Democrats didn’t realize it. With the mainstream media covering for them every step of the way (only 3.7 percent of journalists are Republicans), Democrats saw only positive spin, which ignored how crazy their party was becoming.
Consequently, there is very little division within the Democrat Party, unlike the Republican Party. They cleverly line up candidates for races that rarely have viable primary opponents, unlike Republicans who think individually and don’t tell each other what to do. So the Republicans end up wasting massive amounts of money against each other during the primaries, leaving them with less money for the general election opposing Democrats.”
My response: She describes the behaviors of ideological-cultural true believers eloquently with examples. Notice how she praises Republicans for thinking individually and not telling each other what to do. That is generally true, but there are RNOS who need to grow a pair and hang tight with a program that conservatives agree to unite on and back to hold back the Democrats who are utterly united and speak with one voice, one mind.
R: “The Democratic Socialists are taking over the party, increasing the authoritarian tilt. Avowed communists are running for office and winning. A hispanic gay Democrat friend of mine told me he is unwelcome at Democrat events in Arizona because he is perceived as too moderate; he doesn’t use the jargon of the Democratic Socialists, adopting stylistic lingo like talking with a barrio accent. Several far-left Democrats attempting to win offices in the Arizona Legislature this year ran on a platform of “No Safe Seats,” primarying moderate Democrats.
The left now conducts violent riots everywhere, especially on college campuses, inner cities and ICE facilities. They celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They want violent criminals released from prison, including illegal aliens.
The Democrat elite culture enforces their package of “sacred silence” — systemic racism, “gender-affirming” care as settled, “climate change” as a moral emergency that ends tradeoffs, Jan. 6 as the only serious threat to the republic — that is non-negotiable. Data that cuts the other way, such as crime spikes, the dangers of medical-transition evidence, pandemic school-closure costs, and the atrocities of illegal immigration, is not weighed; it is labeled as bigotry or “misinformation.”
Like cults, they use loaded language and exclude anyone who diverges from this Orwellian groupthink. They have changed the language to force their viewpoints into it: Latinx, “birthing persons,” “equity” (not equality), “undocumented,” “gender-affirming,” and “mostly peaceful” are now common. This is how cults shrink thought, because if you cannot say “woman,” you cannot argue about women’s sports.”
My response: With their loaded language enforced on all members, they guarantee totally internal conformity and unity. The free will and independent thinking and strong personality of each of these submitting, enthusiastic true believers have vanished and these empty souls, these breathing flesh-and-blood ghouls are a formidable monster speaking with one voice.
R: “Similar to Maoist “struggle sessions,” Democrats demand public apologies for old jokes or votes, known as “ritual confessions.” The point is not truth; it is submission.
They control who you may read and talk to, through big tech blocking and shadowbanning conservative points of view (thank goodness Elon Musk bought Twitter, so there is now one big tech platform that doesn’t ensure one monolithic political view).
Manichean cosmology justifies using radical language to discredit the opposing side. To Democrats, Republicans are considered evil and illegitimate, fascists, a “threat to democracy” and racists by structure.
The end justifies the means to today’s Democrats. They pressure big tech and large corporations, treat courts as illegitimate when they lose and utilized COVID-19 emergency powers that outlasted the era.
They sit around in secret meetings plotting how to take Republicans down with lawfare, concocting legal schemes that don’t follow the law — but by judge-shopping, they can ensure sympathetic rulings. They pretend the targeted Republicans are being prosecuted for odd violations of the law, not their politics, in order to fool the public. The mainstream media dutifully reports this spin.
The few Democrats who have left the party now understand that they were in a cult. Some became red-pilled due to COVID-19; the lockdowns and vaccine mandates opened their eyes. I’ll never forget the huge number of nurses who started following me on X during COVID. Fetterman says his values did not change; the party did.
This should come as no surprise since Democrats are the party of groups — minorities, LGBTQ, unions, etc. — whereas Republicans are the party of individual rights. Republicans value free thought and debate. Democrats treat everyone collectively, with their special interest groups making the decisions for all. “
My response: Rachel writes that the Democrats are the party of groups whereas Republicans are the party of individual rights. They are a mass movement, and there are no individuals inside their cult, and their cause is run by the elite with totalitarian clout.
R: “Democrats used to claim to be the party of free thinking years ago. The ACLU was formed to protect fringe viewpoints. But all of that has disappeared, and the left doesn’t even use that type of language anymore. The ACLU only defends fringe left-wing views now, with rare, minor exceptions. Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz was the epitome of the old-style classical liberal. He’s since seen the light and left the Democrat Party.
How far will it go? The left now openly acknowledges they want to destroy the country and tear it all down to be rebuilt from scratch. Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won her Democrat primary and now faces a Nov. 3, 2026 general election for New York’s 13th congressional district, is co-founder of a group that called for “nothing short of the total collapse” of the “American empire,” with the goal to “eradicate America” and “Western civilization.”
This is how communists come into power: total allegiance to the cult, with any dissent swiftly and brutally punished. It will be terrifying to see how far they get.”
My response: God bless and save America, the greatest country in the world. If the Democrats destroy America as they fervently plan to do if they can get enough power and control to complete their Communist revolution here, then humanity might go down too. It seems as if an evil spirit is controlling the Progressives now.
