To Lust After Power

 On Page 237 of The Syndicated News Articles by Eric Hoffer is some rich reading. There, this brilliant social psychologist points out how those craving power over others will find living in America rather unfulfilling :  "People who lust for power are not likely to be happy in America. Here neither money nor education equip a man for the attainment of power. The opportunities in America are for learning, experience, money, achievement, comfort, freedom, but not for power."

Hoffer fully realized that America was the leading constitutional republic in the world. Its people were and are individualistic, rational, self-made, industrious, and egalitarian, color-blind, middle class, free marketers, a classless society of common people with no desire to hold power over the lives of their neighbors and countryman.

It is not that they do not love power, but that is the good, positive power that they wield, in an act of self-development and making good, even individuating. Negative power is refusing to develop the self, to refuse self-controlling and to waste a lifetime conspiring to control other people.

Hoffer sensed intuitively that the addiction to power is a collective undertaking. America is likely the most individualistic people int he world, so addiction to negative power acquisition is not in the cards here.

Hoffer reached this conclusion based upon some undeclared assumptions. If stated, his argument would go approximately like this.

1. People are social creatures.

2. People are born depraved.

3. To be wicked is to loathe the self and to hide from this blemished, unloved, unlovable self by hiding in the herd, suppressing the knowledge that one is serving neither the interest of God, others, or oneself.

4. To group-live is to be addicted to negative power patterns, both seeking power over others, and expressing an eager willingness to serve others, higher than oneself, elites that rule stratified, hierarchical, traditional society. The elite rules the mob directly, but, indirectly, the mob, as a whole, rules its commanding rulers, and they are bound to each other in an unholy, unseemly way.

5. America, humanity's last best hope, is the nation where the pursuit of negative power is thwarted by people's rationality, their love of liberty, their self-love, their deploying their positive power of self-assertion as individuals and together united as a people. The elites, the Leftists, currently leading the postmodernist socialist mass movement, are so dangerous because they are revolting against the glorious American tradition, where we lust not after power over others. We crave only to run our own lives and be left alone.

Hoffer continues on Page 237: "One of the chief problems a modern society has to face is how to provide an outlet for the intellectual's restless energies yet deny him power. How to make and keep him a paper tiger."

There are only two successful, effedtive and robust responses that society can canalize the intellectual's restless energies while keeping him a paper tiger.

First, we need to raise our children with an admixture of traditional values and Mavellonialist influencing. This will result in a generation of individuator-anarchist supercitizens. Such a civilian population of elitist (elite in being very moral, very smart, very independent, and utterly refusing to be enslaved or enslave anyone, the negative description of what is the essence of positive power.) society of common people of similar class rank and egalitarian bent would not be content to waste the lives of themselves and their prospective victims by ruling anyone.

Second, an American upper middle class majority of individuator-anarchist supercitizens would be very skilled and devoted to exercising, extending and enjoying the display and expression of their own share do positive power in how they live their self-realized lives, and their powerful, coexisting and compatible living in communities mostly without stratification or elites running anything would serve to cancel out negative power ambitions still aspired to by a few maladjusted citizens in their midst.

If we teach our children to recognize what is positive power, and that as moral responsible adults, they must use it to administrate their personal affairs and the interests of the entire nation, then the danger from ambitious intellectuals and other would-be elitists will be well thwarted and minimized.