Toughness Helps Us Get Ahead

 Being tough (strong willed, indomitable spirit, can-do positive attitude, physical and moral courage) helps us survive, get ahead, and even self-reinforces if we have the daring, vision and will power to self-realize.

Jordan Peterson alludes to this toughness when he posits two unassailable truths: that life is suffering, and it is suffering tainted by malevolence. His brand of gritty, pessimistic realism is positing that life is difficult, but that we are tough enough to overcome all that it throws at us, if we shoulder adult personal, and ethical responsibility to do something positive, even grand, with out lives, and that shouldering of responsibility is where meaning is found, meaning that sustains us, fulfills us, even makes us happy (Jordan does not say this but it is implied in his line of thinking, I assert.) in that mature sense of doing what we can to bring love, justice, liberty, decency and the advancement of knowledge to the world inside us and around us.

Now, I will switch gears. This morning I was rereading the American Iconoclast, The Life and Times of Eric Hoffer, by Tom Shactman. A line about toughness jumped out at me. Shactman does not elaborate on it, but it jibes nicely with Peterson injunction that we be tough, act tough, and cultivate toughness or strength to deal with and surmount life's inevitable hurdles, challenges, setbacks, defeats and attacks upon our carefully laid plans. Peterson complains that the lies and propaganda about wokeness and most Americans are victims of the oppressive, white male patriarchy has infantilized and converted our young people into weak, scaredy-cat snowflakes not ready to grow up and deal with the real world.

But I digress: let me quote Shactman from Page 151 of his book, a direct quote from Hoffer: "I have a savage heart because I have never been gentled by school marms in grammar school. I think man is the toughest thing on earth."

Why does Hoffer have a savage heart? (I too have a savage heart, often writing that I could easily have been one of the butchers at My Lai. I have the killer instinct, but only the Good Spirits, love in my savage heart, luck, a fine wife and some modicum of self-control have kept me out of prison, and leading a quiet, normal life.)

Hoffer and all humans are born with a savage heart. We are beasts more than angels, and the law of the jungle, kill or be killed by tooth and fang, it how we roll. We are about as nasty as chimpanzees, our close cousins.

Let me now qualify that there are two kinds of savage hearts. Our basic savage, wicked heart, per person, is our natural propensity. As most people are reared and given moral training, and civilized habits, as their latent but innate conscience and empathic instincts are strengthened, until the child develops self-control, the social ability to act decent and sensible. The problem with this way of dealing with the savage heart is that 97% (my arbitrary percentage selection) of youngsters are trained morally by group-living, altruistic, collectivist, joiner parents. The civilized or broken child learns morality, but learns altruist morality. They are gentled to the conformist point of losing will, toughness, strength, individuality and spirit that would enlighten their souls to make them insist upon running their own affairs, to growing into individuating, anarchist supercitizens.

This individuating, anarchist supercitizen evinces a powerful will, heightened personal talent development, and a mental sharpness that constitute an ontological approach orientation to the reality that is commensurate with the second type of savage heart, shared by Hoffer, me and perhaps Jordan Peterson himself. That savage-hearted youth is broken or civilized enough to be morally decent and kind, but their toughness and will-to-power (power to develop the self and assert the right to keep and manage the allocation of natural power given each individuator by the Good Spirits, and each Unique and his property will be the possessor of this kind of savage heart, the one owned by and identified so personally by Eric Hoffer long ago) is typical of those rare few natural or fabricated great souls allowed to keep their savage, maverizing hearts when individual-living, honing their pursuits, and doing their own thing.

Mavellonialism is my philosophy suggesting that each child be broken enough to be morally kind and respectful, without making them so weak and beaten down that they are part of the living dead, that majorty of group-living, wimpy cliques of mediocre, selfless non-individuators, whose hearts are smashed and torn asunder.