Hoffer's Working And Thinking On The Waterfront June 1958--May 1959, Pages 31-36

 

I am writing out each paragraph in Eric Hoffer’s book, Working And Thinking On the Waterfront June 1958—May 1959, Pages 31-36. I will comment as I go. Here it is: Hoffer (H after this): “August 27

Eight hours on the same ship. Steady grind all day long, and I had neither the time or the inclination to write a line.

August 27

In the morning on the bus I heard a Negro longshoreman argue that the ‘No Smoking’ signs are put up by the fire insurance companies. Pretty soon they will have ‘No Smoking’ signs inside the house, even in the bedroom. In other countries people smoke wherever they please but here the insurance companies are running things.

I haven’t had a good look at the bay all day. The feeling of being rushed drains the capacity for enjoying things.”

My response: Ever the intuitive genius and philosopher, Hoffer seems right that being rushed drains the capacity for enjoying things. I much endorse and favor our capitalist American economic system, bustling and hard work, but a civilized people, a maverizing people, need to stop and smell the roses some once in awhile too.

H: “In the morning I read an article by Max Nomad ‘Masters Old and New.’ Writing in 1937, he clearly discerns the intelligentsia as the coming elite in both capitalist and non-capitalist countries. But the article is without a hint of the intellectual’s role in history, and the significance of his dramatic comeback in the twentieth century.”

My response: Both Nomad and Hoffer, both Jews (Hoffer an illegal Jewish immigrant from Bavaria to America?), both very isolated intellectuals, separately and independently concluded that intellectuals were dangerous participants in and often rulers of elites controlling society or out to overthrow the existing elite. They love power and dominance and their cruelty corresponds to how far they must go to get and keep accumulated power.

Hoffer the original thinker goes beyond Nomad and suggests that intellectuals paid an unrecognized role in history, and that they coming to the fore in the 20^th century poses real

hazardous conditions, if left unchecked, for the masses everywhere.

I looked up Max Nomad in Wikipedia, and they quote this paragraph which he wrote and which I would like to, as an aside, comment on. Here it is: “I remain a lone-wolf philosophical anarchist whose sympathies go out to the poorest of the poor struggling for more and more of the good things of life. But I feel akin only to those rebellious but politically unattached intellectuals who dream of justice and an equal chance for everybody, but know, as I do, that, given the eternal recurrence of predatory elites, and the incurable ignorance and gullibility of the masses, a privileged and educated minority will always rule and exploit the uneducated majority.[4]”

My response: Note that Nomad is a lone wolf like Hoffer, though he is a reformer and Hoffer is not, at least not politically though he is a moralist.

Nomad is a reformer for bettering the living conditions of the poor and downtrodden, but accurately has appraised wicked, fatalistic human nature as dooming people to the eternal recurrence of predatory elites of all stripes everywhere and always running things and running rough shod over the incurably gullible, ignorance, compliant, masochistic, prideless (lacking the positive pride of self-esteeming) masses. Thus a privileged and educated minority will always rule and exploit the uneducated majoirty.

Actually the masses as individuating anarchists supercitizens will break the recurring, unjust pattern.

H: “August 28

Eight hours on the same ship. We follow the ship tomorrow to Alaneda. The hard work during the last three days is affecting my stomach. Something gets tied up in a knot when I strain my guts. I shall try to straighten it out tonight by drinking hot tee and relaxing.

August 29

Finally finished the ship. Eight and a half hours in Alameda. I am weary and on edge. I must slow down or even stop work for a week.

I must get hold of a biography of Bentham. His transition from a preoccupation with the all-seeing eye (panopticon0 to the promotion of the general welfare is an instance of the intimate connection between the intimate connection between the intellectual’s idealism and his innermost craving for a role of supervision (Vision and Supervision).”

My response: We are to beware of and always oppose idealists promoting their program or cause for through its acceptance in society, they seek to grab concentrated power to rule the masses. Same old story.

H: “September 1

I just read the introduction to Men of Words. It is not bad. I also copied Sections 8 to 11. I have so far 40 pages of manuscript. The things is crude and fragmented, bit it is a beginning.

September 3

Eight hours on the Arizona Maru at Pier 24. An easy day, and I am off tomorrow. My head worked in spasms. The beginning of Part 2 must tackle the problem of the optical milieu for literature. I shall trace the chain of events which led to the appearance of written literature in Egypt, Sumer, Palestine, Greece, and China. But the main thing is to outline the conditions optimal for literary creativeness.

After all, the chief value of history is not that it helps us understand the present or decipher the future but that it furnishes us with clues concerning the manner in which man is affected by his natural and social environment. We cannot experiment with humanity, but history is a record of how man reacted to variety of conditions.”

My response: I approve of and concur with Hoffer that history can offer us clues and perhaps a record of how human should react to change and not react to change.

H: “September 4

I have said it again and again. The only thing that will cure the Negro’s ills is that the Negro community perform something that will win it the admiration of the world. Yet it is difficult to see what this something might be. A Negro revolt in Mississippi; a desperate battle to the last man, a Negro Alamo. Or an excellent negro school for song and dance. Or an excellent trade school. Or a model organization for mutual help. It is the slow, hard way, and the indications are that the Negro will not take it.”

My response: Is it not that blacks cannot collectively or individually step up their game: they can if they will and I hope all people of all races and ethnic groups collectively and individually step up their game even more so, choosing to foster individuation among the young.

H: “He would rather derive pride from an identification with the achievement of colored races elsewhere. Yet I doubt whether even a triumphant Ghana could ever be to the Negro in America what Israel has been to the Jews.

The crucial question is whether the Negro will ever give up his alibi of discrimination.”

My response: Alibis hold all down and back, not just blacks. The individualist is one who shreds all of his alibis along the path of discovering and realizing his identity and talents. This blacks must do to of they will be made whole.

H: “

You do not give up the imperishable advantage of an alibi for the short-lived exhilaration of achievement. (Our successes only buoy us for a short time and then we must evolve further to remain self-esteeming, Ed Says.) There is trouble ahead. For the less justified the Negro’s alibi the more passionately will he cling to it, and the louder he will voice his grievances.

Were I a genuine American I would believe in the possibility of the automatic absorption of twenty million Negroes into the body of American life; that almost overnight, without special effort or an intermediate phase, the Negro in America can become a human being first and only secondly a Negro.”

My response: Over thirty million blacks will not be fully absorbed into the body of American life until the black in America can be a human being first (As a human being a person is a unique person who could maverize if she willed to be a person separate and distinct from their racial and ethnic identification.

H: “September 16

Seven and a half hours discharging cargo at Pier 17. It was very hot but work did not seem irksome. One of the reasons is that I got a good night’s sleep, and my partner (Juan Gonzales) though not much of a worker is a pleasant person to be with.

In the morning while eating breakfast, it occurred to me that the equivalent of a Khrushchev in the West is to be found not among the politicians but among the businessmen. A Communist regime is capitalism gone berserk. It is incredible how many insights one obtains while viewing a ruling Communist party as a company of merchant adventurers lodge in the body of a backward country.

During the day a winch driver I knew only by sight came over to talk. He started out with the union but immediately passed over to his own affairs. He must have been married for a long time since he has two grandchildren. His wife now is partly paralyzed, and as he talked I could sense the despair and bitterness simmering inside him. The must have been slovenly, lazy and self-centered even while she was well, and now paralyzed she is a millstone around his neck.”

My response: It is often observed and commented that we never know the private hell and suffering another person is enduring or struggling against, or perhaps is being defeated by. All we can do is commiserate, be a good friend, and pray for them, maverick to make sure we don’t make a mess of our lives, so we are then a burden to our family, friends, loved ones and the taxpayer.

H: “September 29

What is the optimal milieu for creativeness in literature, art, music, etc.? It is a milieu that rewards excellence. Cosmo the Elder reverenced talent the way the pious revere saints.”

My response: My version of what would be the optimal milieu for creativeness being fostered, rewarded, encouraged and promoted would be a milieu, familial, cultural and social, which identifies the self-realizing individual as the primary locus and vehicle for the creation of excellence, brilliance and originality in society. A society which bolsters the individuating individual as its norm, its mode of behaving and acting for its average, typical citizen, that is a society which rewards and reveres excellence, and the people mostly will live up to high high, noble standard of expected behavior and performance.

H: “When the Arab civilization was at its height, the Ommiad caliphs gave poets and scholars precedence over officials, and some of them were governors of provinces. To Louis XIV a good sentence was a major achievement.

In an optimal milieu there is considerable leisure. When the people are engrossed in some feverish pursuit so that they are neither bored, nor dream dreams, nor nurse grievances, creativeness will be anemic.”

My response: I believe Hoffer is an authority and expert of the first rank as to setting up a milieu optimum for fostering creativeness, but I believe a deeper motive would lead each of the masses, if they learn to esteem themselves, think for themselves and choose to maverize, then they are optimally motivated for internal reasons to take advantage of the ideal milieu Hoffer has discovered.

Finally, an optimal milieu is one in which the creative are in close intercourse with each other—hating, loving, envying, admiring; where faces flush, hearts flutter, and minds swell with the passion to rival and emulate.

September 30

The Embarcadero Freeway is building rapidly, yet one rarely sees more than three workingmen on the job. There are, of course, more than three, but the organization of the work is such that no one stands around. The same holds true on other jobs. Though it would be difficult to prove that the American workingman is the best in the world, it is nevertheless true that the American way of doing things is determined largely by the American workingman’s attitude toward work.’

My response: America, with its capitalist economy, its individualism, its love of working and its vitality for life, fostered a work culture of being organized, resourceful, innovative and productive working men and working women. That was California in 1958, not in 2026. See what the wrong values have wrought there, and everywhere in America.

H: “I do not know how it is with workingmen elsewhere, but I cannot see an American workingman fitting in and feeling at home anywhere outside this country.

I am beginning to believe that I shall never finish the book on the intellectuals. I am making no headway and the outline I have done does not help much. It is a peculiar situation: the material I have collected on the intellectual can be used in connection with all manner of topics but not with the intellectual as such.”

The Balance

 

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.

They Go Together

 

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 Values Take Root

 

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.

Hoffer's Working And Thining On The Waterfront, June 1958-May 1959, Pages 25-30

 

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.”

An Updated Defintion

 

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.

Dolly Parton

 

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.