From the book, Eric Hoffer, The Syndicated News Articles, Page 196, from an article entitled Nature is Mankind's Real Enemy, Hoffer wrote this: "My unworshipful attitude toward nature is continuously getting me into trouble. My contention that the harmony between man and nature must be a harmony designed and dictated by man is angrily rejected by all sorts of people, but most vehemently by the educated. It is a mark of intellectual distinction nowadays to run down man and extol nature."
The Mother and the Father are creator deities and they love, steward and shape nature, but they also make a living off of the natural world, and De and their laws govern nature; the Divine Couple are in charge of nature. Nature is raw chaos and violent death and destruction, if ungoverned by lawful order and control governed from heaven.
We humans are made in the image and likeness of the Divine Couple, and we are to love, steward, shape and earn a living off of nature, without polluting, wiping out or mindlessly altering nature.
From the quote above, it is obvious that Hoffer is a conservative, as are capitalists and were Yahweh and the Hebrews in their attitude and approach towards nature.
Satan and Lera reside in nature, and the Mother and the Father reside in heaven, a celestial, supernatural and somehow artificial realm.
The Left and intellectuals are pro-nature and anti-human, and their hatred of humanity is a creeping, creepy oozing of their loathing for our people that they wish to eliminate from the face of the earth. The motives driving the Eco-terrorists and Enviro-Statists is anything but innocent and benevolent, and they must not be allowed to wipe out our human world and economy, and immerse us once more in a state of nature.
Nonetheless, moderate ethics is the proclamation that good people can have their cake and eat it too. We can make our living off of nature, without allowing nature to dominate us, and we can reclaim and nurture nature as best we can to restore her to her natural state as if we had not disturbed her. Restoring nature can be a way of growing the economy and creating jobs for people, all while caring for nature that shared her resources with us.
Conservatives like Hoffer and me think the world is tragic in many ways, we accept the doctrine of original sin (human depravity), we extol the advantages of Western values, we favor individualism, republicanism and capitalism, and we suggest that humans dominate nature, rather than the other way around.
From the same article, from Page 197, Hoffer applies his thesis that nature is humanity's real enemy to Africa and its native people: "As to Africa: We tend to forget that in Africa the battle that has to be won is not against colonialism but nature. The chatter of the African leaders about sovereignty, Negritude and African destiny is totally irrelevant to the central task which is the conquest of African nature, primeval, relentless, aggressive, that has enslaved and degraded man to an extent unknown anywhere else.
The enemies in Africa are the forest, the rivers, the deserts, disease and brutalization. Man may have originated in Africa, but he had to move away from the cruel anti-human continent to unfold his unique capacities."
Now let me quote from Tom Shactman, Page 11, of his biography on Eric Hoff, American Iconoclast. Shactman is writing about the 1967 Sevareid/CBS interview with Hoffer that made him famous: "Hoffer had much more to say on the subject of 'the Negro Revolution,' and some of it had been branded racist, so in this interview he did not elaborate."
I believe that Tom Shactman did agree with the 60s, Leftist charge that Hoffer was racist against blacks. My belief is that all of us are naturally racist or prejudiced against people from any rival identity group, but that we can learn to love, tolerate, and treat fairly people from any identity group should we accept that that is the moral and just orientation of an adult American, and that orientation is now accepted and successfully implemented in the personal lives of most Americans.
Hoffer never comes out, that I know of, and explicitly champions the superior value of living as an individuating individualist, as the preferred lifetime aim for all and any American, but his writing and thinking connote with such anticipated Mavellonialist concepts.
With this context realized, his remarks about Negroes or blacks indicate that he wanted blacks to self-improve on a personal basis, per member of that community. They needed the right values. The Left portrayed blacks then and now as helpless, ineffectual victims of injustice and racism, unable to better their lot. Hoffer rightly repudiated that set of Big Lies, emphatically. With a doctrine of hard work, optimism and self-discipline, American blacks could catch up too, and perhaps even out-perform white Americans, as American-Asians appear to be doing right now.
What is holding back American blacks are altruistic and collectivist bad values, With egoistic and capitalist values adopted and implemented, they will be unstoppable.
Shactman may be too much of a Leftist to comprehend the context out of which Hoffer preached, practiced, and lived. Hoffer wanted all Americans to bootstrap their way to success, regardless of their color or social suffering. I see no written evidence that Hoffer believed or lectured that blacks were any less capable of succeeding than whites are. Therefore, I offer that Hoffer was not a racist, or was not much of one. Deep down, he knew that blacks could make it as well as anyone else in America, and he wanted them to get after it. He dismissed Leftist pseudo-sympathy towards blacks as propaganda preventing these people from gaining ground.
Hoffer was a stern taskmaster: he expected excellence from himself, from fellow Americans and from blacks as fellow Americans. He made short work of excuses, and for this he was and apparently is outrageously demonized as a racist.
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