I will quote from American Iconoclast by Tom Shactman, a biographer of Eric Hoffer; On Pages 18 & 19, 20 and 21, Schactman writes: "Another Hoffer tale told of being picked up as a hitchhiker by a German-speaking driver who quoted a Goethe adage about a mental quality that, if lost meant doom. The driver cited it as hoffen--as hope--but Hoffer. researching it in the Anaheim library, found that Goethe had used the word mut--courage. The morals of Hoffer's story, which he told repeatedly, were that hope was an illusion, and that courage rather than hope was the essential quality.
That, too, was the lesson he took from his blindness, which, in a complex way, had prepared him for a life as a day laborer and migrant worker, tough existences in which self-reliance and courage were vital in helping him to maintain his dignity, identity, and curiosity about the world."
My response: "Despite the generational differences and wildly different life experiences, Eric Hoffer and Jordan Peterson are fellow conservatives that share similar world views: Hoffer believed that one could live without hope, but not without courage. Peterson argues, largely correctly, that life for the average human is suffering tainted by malevolence, internal and external.
Both men are insightful, but I do not quite share their bleak views. Being, showing and living courage may be more important for resilience of the tried and tired individual's soul, but love, God, happiness, and hope are vital additional components to living a full and as happy life as possible. I would like to not demean that life is hard, and suffering is inescapable, but there is hope and happiness to be had, at least as a wholesome side effect, from loving, maverizing, bringing God into one's life, and striving to build beauty, peace and goodness as best that one can. Less do I disagree with these two great, wise, brilliant and good men, but I do qualify a bit their views here.
Shactman continues: "In Los Angeles, when Hoffer had exhausted the money he had brought with him, along with that obtained from selling his books and clothes, he went hungry. Starving, he discovered he was able to push hunger's pangs out of consciousness as he became fascinated with pigeons mating and courting in a pet-store window. Emboldened by this evidence that ideas could trump physical sensations, he walked into an eatery, offered to wash dishes in exchange for a meal, and began a hand-to-mouth existence as a day laborer. His encounters with starvation and homelessness birthed what he recalled as his first insight: 'Men are truly alive only when they suffer.' . . . 'It is through our bleeding wounds that we grow into the tree of life.' . . . The statement seemed to have contained no trace of suffering or self-pity . . . Once he understood how to find enough day-labor work to survive, and how to deal with bouts of privation, he wrote, he was able to configure a life dependent on no one other than himself for his livelihood, and in which he had no obligation to care for others or even better his own lot, and, therefore, was more able to subsume his existence to reading, learning and thinking."
My response: Hoffer learned from his life. It is applied existentialism. It is not that he was lacking in imagination or learning (he was one of the best-read Americans ever--of vast learning, but his rich personal life gave him the experience from which to extrapolate, generalize and aphorize.
Both Hoffer and Peterson seem to be influenced by or naturally are existentialist thinkers--at least in part.
Both men advised, taught and lived what they lived or are living--we will be tainted by suffering, privation and malevolence but meaning is found in taking responsibility for the self and rising up out of suffering and building a life, more for Hoffer than Peterson, a life of personal self-actualization, though they may not have counseled this solution for the masses as I do.
Both philosophers would remind social justice warriors and race-baiters that all this noise about discrimination, racism and classes of victimizers and oppressors lording it over the victimized and oppressed that framing personal or societal problems in such terms keeps the solution and subject-matter about one human group versus another human group.
The liberating story is what each suffering, victimized individual is going to do with her life. She needs to blame herself for her ills, and then man up, and bootstrap herself upwards, outwards, and onwards, transcending her miserable past.
Hoffer offered this solution to black Americans and the Left denounced his as a racist. Peterson champions the cause of the sovereign individual as the Western ideal for personal living and aim, and he too is decried as a cheerleader and sold-out defender of the capitalist patriarchy.
We would do well to heed the advice of the two prophets of self-perfecting.
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