Eric Hoffer On Mass Movements

 For decades I have read and reread Eric Hoffer, and I keep discovering deeper layers of meaning. It is only now, after 49 years of reading him, that I feel like I am getting at what his main points were--perhaps even Hoffer himself was not conscious of some of them, though I believe he was deliberate and conscious of his ideational  thrust, most of the time, as he wrote and spoke. Let me elaborate below. 

Calving Tomkins in his biography, Eric Hoffer, on Page 26 writes this: " . . .Well, I stayed with them, and they were the kindest people in the world. I never ate one dinner alone. I was passed on from one family to another, eating their homemade sausages, drinking their homemade wine. They even picked out a fairly good-looking widow that they wanted me to marry. And when the job in Miller's dry yard wound up, they lined up another job for me in the winery. I could have stayed there the rest of my life. And yet--look what would have happened if they had broken me. So it went; I saw it everywhere. These people are absolutely kind, but you've got to watch out. There is a kind of malice that is like a distant murmur in all of us--I've got a lot of aphorisms on that. This is probably what is meant by original sin, and the people who are involved with governing man should recognize that it is a fact of life, a fact of existence. But a distant murmur--that's important. Of course, at certain times and under certain conditions it becomes very loud, and then you get the mass movements."

My response: Hoffer recounts how he, a fruit tramp, misfit, outsider, great-soul and individual-living loner, was adopted by an entire community. Their kindness towards him was unstinting and genuine. Local people--joiners, ordinary people, group-oriented and group-living--occasionally come across an outsider that they seek to bring into their community as a permanent insider. This community offered that clearly to Hoffer, and he apparently was invited to become a local groupist many times, but always he declined. 

Why? He needed to watch out, to be wary of their kindness for it was underwritten by a murmuring malice, and what is the malice aiming at? Many times in his life, people tried to civilize Hoffer, to get him to join their group, to break him so that he conformed, did not achieve to mightily or do philosophy as he did.

He relished his freedom for he travels fastest who travels alone. His freedom, his isolation, his loneliness were the prices he was willing to endure for the sake of his self-actualizing as a thinker, writer and philosopher.  It was the price that he willingly paid to keep his independence.

People are called from birth, by God, to answer De's summoning to self-actualize, to be the pack, to embrace liberty and endless hard work to grow into an exceptionally able person. No longer can the individual hide in his pack or clique, unnoticed and excepted from being called out to leave the pack, anonymity, and mediocrity behind, to maverize for the rest of his life.

Hoffer had answered that divine call, and knew he must avoid group entanglements, its members pretending kindness, seeking to lure him into group-living once more where bland results and corruption propagate and fester. To hold another back, and to entice him to join or rejoin a pack is a malicious motive to wreck his life as are the wrecked lives of all the clique's joiners--that is malicious and cruel.

Hoffer labels this malice as a distant murmur, and that that is what original sin, this herding instinct to run in and hide in packs, the altruistic motive to avoid God and meeting De's expectations.

When the moment is ripe that herding instinct becomes a dull roar, a mass movement. Government officials need to be aware of such human potential.

What I learned from this and other passages like it was that Hoffer was an expert on mass movements but he was no proponent of mass movements or passionate behavior. He was an expert on both of these human phenomena, but he endorsed neither--rather he was warning us against them. He instead was pro-reason and pro-individual, and that is critical to remember about him.