Keeping Them At Bay

 Tom Shactman seems to be aware of who Eric Hoffer is sometimes, and other times, he seems not to understand what he is writing about with Hoffer in Shactman's biography on Hoffer. Let me quote from Shactman's book, and then comment on what he has written about Hoffer.

This excerpt is from Page 151, American Iconoclast: "Despite having more income, Hoffer remained at the Clay Street walk-up with no telephone, television or automobile. Earlier, his non-use of these device had signaled his relative poverty; now their absence  reflected his deliberate iconoclasm and served as a shield to protect him from celebrity seekers."

Shactman knows full well that Hoffer is a genius, a thinker of singular originality, a loner, an iconoclast, and a living paradox (A great soul and self-realizer that is half-real intellectual and half blue-collar longshoreman.).

Shactman seems like a woke socialist to me, so his ideological prism seems to blind him to Hoffer's greatness, because he does not understand Hoffer's moderate conservatism, or because he has an understanding of Hoffer's moderate conservatism and cannot tolerate it. He admires Hoffer but does not approve of him. He may not think Hoffer is a briliant genius. He may find him overrated. He definitely labels Hoffer a racist against blacks. If Hoffer is a racist, then he is not a good man for a racist is a hater, and a hater is bad. Hoffer is an individualist and wants blacks to live as an individualistic Americans and there is no better definition, from an egoist ethical point of view, of a a non-racist good person, than his public urging black people to live as individualists and individuators. Therefore, Hoffer is a good, unprejudiced man and Shactman gets this dead wrong.

Shactman likely disapproves of Hoffer's alarmism over the tyrannical ambitions that intellectuals hold against the masses to be governed and supervised. Activist intellectuals, in spite of their self-identification as activist social justice warriors, motivatied by compassion and love of humanity, are just would-be tyrants that hate the masses and seek endlessly to subjugate them. Intellectuals are wicked people when all they want is their share of elitist power wielded by ruling class intellectuals in big business and in the civil society, along with their functionary peers running the country as part of the Administrative State. There is not a more wicked person in the world than he that is addicted to power, seeking to enslave his neighbor or neighbors.

These are the intellectuals that scared the hell out of Hoffer. Hoffer sought to protect the American people from them by ringing the bell of warning against the clerisy. Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler and Mussolini were all intellectuals. Shactman is unaware of how lethal and toxic are his intellectual peers once they hold sway in running governments.

Let me explain the quote from Shactman's book, typed up above. Hoffer had a history of rebuffing people that got too close to him. He did this with Helen, he pushed back the university administrators that sought to bring them totally into their world. He rejected old friends, etc. By keeping himself off the grid, his deliberate iconoclasm did protect him from celebrity seekers. 

It also reveals his great-souled dilemma as an active, shining individuator as how he could continue to live, think, grow and write without being owned by groupists and group-oriented people that surround him everywhere by the hundreds and thousands.

As a great-souled individuator, I like Hoffer used every dodge and shield possible to keep packs and mobs of people away from me so that I can continue to enjoy my time, liberty and power as an isolated, individuator to self-realize.

Group-living groupists--sometimes overtly but usually subconsciously--surround and smother the life out of any budding individuator that seeks to stand out from the pack and to amount to something. They use their size, numbers and sheer social bulk to snuff the life out of any individualist in their midst, and they feel morally justified in doing so, even though that is a mortal sin for the individuating Mother and FAther command each of us to leave the pack and self-realize our great-souled talents an abilities.

In light of this Mavellonialist context, I think most of Shactman's criticisms against Hoffer can be met.