Exodus 19:9

 

In Exodus on Mount Sinai, Yahweh was to appear before the Israelites in a dense cloud. Jordan Peterson likely would have an explanation for this veiled appearance, but it could be that people could not deal with seeing God face to face, revealed as De was in Deself.

 

We cannot tolerate pure, intimate, direct exposure to God for we are not strong enough, durable enough or conditioned to such divine revelation in person.

 

Here is that line from The New American Bible: “The Lord also told him, ‘I am coming to you in a dense cloud, so that when the people hear me speaking to you, they may also have faith in you also.”

 

My response: The people are to have faith in Moses that he is God’s representative or prophet, not to have faith in Moses as a deity to be worship like Yahweh the almighty deity is to be worshiped and to be had faith in.

 

Here is that line from the Holy Bible (KJV): “And the Lord said unto Moses, Lo, I come unto thee in a thick cloud, that the people may hear when I speak with thee, and believe thee for ever . . .”

Exodus 19:3-8

 

It seems that the Jews always had a special relationship with God, which is why, Satan and Lera, hating God, hate especially his chosen people, and ever through antisemitism, even genocide, attacking the Jews generation after generation through their agents on earth, the children of darkness.

 

It could be that the peoples of earth may know that they are still distant from God or the benevolent deities as long as they persecute and seek to murder Jews.

 

Here is the story of the covenant in The New American Bible: “While Israel was encamped here in front of the mountain, Moses went up the mountain to God. Then the Lord called to him and said, ‘Thus shall you say to the house of Jacob; tell the Israelites: You have seen for yourselves how I treated the Egyptians and how I bore you up on eagle wings and brought you here to myself. Therefore, if you hearken to my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my special possession, dearer to me than all other people, though all the earth is mine. You shall be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation. That is what you must tell the Israelites. So Moses went and summoned the elders of the people. When he set before them all that the Lord had ordered him to tell them, the people all answered together, ‘Everything the Lord has said, we will do.’ Then Moses brought back to the Lord the response of the people.”

 

My response: Yahweh offers this covenant to the Hebrews: they were to worship Him and obey his commandments, and in exchange He would protect them and bless them. This was a contract.

 

Let us look at those same verses from the Holy Bible (KJV): “And Moses went up unto God, and the Lord called unto him out of the mountain, saying Thou shalt say to the house of Jacob, and tell the children of Israel; you have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagle’s wings, and brought you unto myself.

 

Now, therefore, if ye will obey m voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all the people: for all the earth is mine.

 

And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel.

 

And Moses called for the elders of the people, and laid before their faces all these words which the Lord had commanded him. And all the people answered together, and said, All that the Lord has spoken we will do. And Moses returned the words of the people unto the Lord.”

 

My response: The different translations allow me to see God’s word from different vantage points. Notice that God was dwelling in the mountain and spoke to Moses up out of the mountain, so God could exist inside nature, at least sometimes, or on holy ground.

 

Second, the Hebrews were special, but all the peoples of the world belong to God, for all the earth was His, so God is also a God to all people.

 

Third, Yahweh knew what that the Hebrews agreed to honor their covenant with God even before Moses returned to Yahweh to share that message, but the message needed to be formally and openly related to Yahweh, nonetheless.

 

 

 

 

One Size

 

On Page 7 of the 11/15/23, The Cavalier Chronicle, was published the weekly homily entitled One Size Fits All from the 1992 Revised Common Lectionary: “When life seems to crash down upon us, Believers have protection. Our hope is like a protective helmet. Our hope of salvation gets us through all of life’s difficulties. Try on your hope helmet this week in church. . . . for a helmet the hope of salvation. 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11.”

 

My response: If one has faith or hope that one has a chance for salvation, that is about the best news that one can hope for.

Celebrating

 

On Page 7 of The Cavalier Chronicle was posted a homily entitled Celebrating Victory. This homily was posted on 12/13/23 for Sunday, 12/13/23, and the homily is from the 1992 Revised Common Lectionary: “Our world loves come from behind victories. The greatest victory? Jesus’ rebuild of the bridge between Holy God and sin-filled us. Before, we suffered the results of our sin. Now, when we repent, and our sins are erased. Celebrate that victory this week in church. . . . come home with shouts of joy. Psalm 126.

 

My response: Jesus has given all humans access to heaven if we just ask forgiveness for our sins, and accept God’s grace for us to do well after death.

 

Great Deeds

 

I am quoting in full a short homily from The Cavalier Chronicle, from Page 7, printed on 12/20/23, entitled God Has Done Great Things. This homily is for December 24, 2023, and is from the 1992 Revised Common Lectionary: “The Virgin Mary knew what God did for her. Little did she know what God would do for the rest of us. God sent Jesus, His Son, to save us from what we deserve. We can choose everlasting life. This week, in church, choose life. . . . for the Mighty One has done great things for me. Luke 1:47-55.”

 

My response: We have free will and many of us deserve death, but, if we choose, we can gain everlasting life by accepting Jesus and other good deities into our lives.

 

God has done great things for us, so we must try to be worthy of such largesse. If we maverize, perhaps we can do fairly great things, and that is a way of thanking God.

Undesirables

 

From Pages 21 to 24, Eric Hoffer, in his book The True Believer, writes about how a nation’s undesirable citizens are always potential converts for a mass movement.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                   PART TWO ----------THE Potential Converts

 

                                                            IV  ----The Role of the Undesirables in Human Affairs

 

There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation or any distinct group by its least worthy members. Though manifestly unfair, this tendency has some justification. For the character and destiny of a group are often determined by its inferior elements.”

 

My response: This seems intuitively true to me, and he is not stereotyping the misfits and malcontents in any ethnic, racial, or socioeconomic category. This Hofferian generalization applies to all for we are all equally human, roughly equal in talent and ability, and all equally flawed from birth.

 

How I interpret this paragraph is that people live in tyranny, group-live and do not individuate, so the least worthy members will live lives of crime, laziness, poverty, powerlessness, mental illness, and fatalism. These asocial behaviors are going to doom a certain percentage of people that are by class or race at the bottom of society, or by lacking individual merit in a country of fabulous opportunity open to all, but each has to work hard and stay it to achieve.

 

If the young of any class, gender or race were taught to maverize, then there would be a hard time finding any group of a race or nation that were any longer poor performers, so their lifting themselves up by their own boot straps would empower all of society so an observer characterizing a people or nation, would not need so much to be characterize it by its least worthy members.

 

H: “The inert mass of a nation, for instance, is in its middle section. The decent, average people who do the nation’s work in cities and on the land are worked upon and shaped by minorities at both ends—the best and the worst.”

 

My response: My vision of an American upper middle class citizen majority of anarchist-inividuator supercitizens, would not allow the best or the worst to shape them so much as they would shape the best and the worst by turning the tables on them.

 

H on Pages 23 and 24: “The superior individual, whether in politics, literature, science, commerce or industry, plays a larger role in shaping the nation, but so do individuals at the other extreme—the failures, misfits, outcasts, criminals and all those who have lost their footing, or never had one, in the ranks of respectable humanity. The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

 

The reason that the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that they are wholly without reverence for the present. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both: hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy. They also crave to dissolve their spoiled, meaningless selves in some soul-stirring spectacular communal undertaking. Thus they are among the early recruits of revolutions, mass migrations and of religious, racial and chauvinist movements, and they imprint their mark upon these upheavals and movements which shape a nation’s character and history.”

 

My response: Again, we are born discontented, unhappy and self-loathing, so we need Mavellonialist positive values so that we need not recklessly abandon and work to destroy our traditional society and the present; we need to preserve our capitalist democracy, but ever change so people adjust and grow, but feel rather satisfied and okay with their lives and themselves in the present, here and now.

 

H: “The discarded and rejected are often raw material of a nation’s future. The stone the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone of a new world. A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, decent, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come. It was not the irony of history that the undesired in the countries of Europe should have crossed an ocean to build a new world on this continent. Only they could do it.

 

Though the disaffected are found in all walks of life, they are most frequent in the following categories: (a) the poor, (b) misfits, (c) outcasts, (d) minorities, (e) adolescent youth, (f) the ambitious (whether facing insurmountable obstacles or unlimited opportunities, (g) those in the grip of some vice or obsession, (h) the impotent (in body or mind), (i) the inordinately selfish, (j) the bored, (k) the sinners.

 

Sections 20-42 deal with some of these types.”

 

My response: I like what he writes about these categories of the disaffected types.

 

 It seems to me that the ambitious would become disaffected and frustrated if they were ambitious but never able to win and succeed, or if there were opportunities so rich, they just were overwhelmed. If we teach the young to maverize as their telos for existing, we must remind them as Jordan Peterson does that small improvements in manageable increments leads to real success over time. This means that most anyone can improve their lives and know real success.

 

As an egoist, I like that he identifies the inordinately selfish as so filled with self-loathing, and an overwhelming sense of self-disgust with their damaged selves and their heightened, unbearable  existence in the present, that they are most willing to chuck it all and disappear into a mass movement in a mode of delirious self-renunciation.

 

I regard the egoist as self-disciplining and self-realizing, sacrificing short-term gratification of hedonic pleasure for the sake of a developing self-realizing its potential over the years of life. This positive selfishness or enlightened self-interest would find the appeal of being inordinately selfish as repugnant.

 

It is joiners and group-livers that are inordinately selfish and inordinately selfless (willing to immerse the self in a collectivist mass movement), so I think Hoffer and I are leaning towards egoist ethics, though he never writes of such, as far as I can remember.

Emigration

 

Eric Hoffer, on Pages 19 and 20 of his book, The True Believer, points out that emigration can offer the frustrated an alternative to joining a mass movement, and that may serve as a safety valve for the society in question: “Emigration offers some of the things the frustrated hope to find when they join a mass movement, namely, change and a chance for a new beginning. The same types who swell the ranks of a rising mass movement are also likely to avail themselves to a chance to emigrate. Thus migration can serve as a substitute for a mass movement, It is plausible, for instance, that had the United States and the British Empire welcomed mass migration after the First World War, there might have been neither a Fascist or Nazi revolution. In this country, free and easy migration over a vast continent contributed to our social stability.”

My response: Hoffer is so original and brilliant; I was wondering if we seek to provide people with change, adventure, and opportunity, without compromising social stability, ending up with mass movements, without losing our democracy and prosperity.

One reason we become frustrated and seek to run away from a spoiled life and a very unhappy self, is that we are born wicked; sinfulness is our natural state, more than being virtuous, though we have the later tendency too, though it is recessive and needs conditioning and training. We are born wicked, and we travel in packs, and do not self-realize because Mavellonialism is new, and people have not been taught to love the self, raise the self-esteem but developing the self in terms of self-love and other-love, in terms of conversing with a good deity, and by improving the self through self-sacrifice, delaying hedonic gratification today for the sake of an iteratively improved self over time, that develops morally, spiritually, intellectually, artistically and becomes more skilled, competent, learned and wise.

Were the young trained in good values, to maverize in their unique way, their lives would be meaningful and fulfilling, so it would be rare to see people as adults so discontented, then frustrated, then en masses fleeing into a mass movement, desperately seeking escape from a hated self. We can have our cake and eat it too: namely people changing as individuals and as organized groups, but without social upheaval and wrecking the civil society.

Hoffer (H after this): “However, because of the quality of their human material, mass migrations are fertile ground for the rise of genuine mass movements. It is sometimes difficult to tell where a mass movement ends and a mass migration begins—and which came first. The migration of the Hebrews from Egypt developed into a religious and nationalist movement. The migrations of the barbarians in the declining days of the Roman Empire were more than mere shifts of population. The indications were that the barbarians were fairly few in number, but, once they invaded a country, they were joined by the oppressed and dissatisfied in all walks of life: ‘it was a social revolution started and masked by a superficial foreign conquest.’

Every mass movement is in a sense a migration—a movement toward a promised land; and, when feasible and expedient, an actual migration takes place. This happened in the case of the Puritans, Anabaptists, Mormons, Dukhobors and Zionists. Migration, in the mass, strengthens the spirit and unity of a movement; and whether in the form of a foreign conquest, crusade, pilgrimage or settlement of a new land it is practiced by most active mass movements.”

 

My response: I have equated Leftism or Postmodernist Marxism in the West and in America as an active mass movement. This is pure speculation, but some have remarked how there has arisen in many developed countries a ruling elite of college and technically educated people who no longer are loyal to their nation of birth but are globalists. These people are Leftists or Marxists, the kind of people that the masses in Britain with Brexit and the labor unions voting for Trump in America, were in reaction against.

Could it be that these intellectuals and professional elitists, willing and often living in foreign nations all around the world, far from their native land, have emigrated so that makes them more readily susceptible to having joined the neo-Marxist movement so prominent and active today?

 

 

 

 

Study Them

 

Breitbart News reporter Alana Mastrangelo and Matt Perdie report today on an interview (12/29/2023) with Dennis Prager was in recently in which Prager is quoted as observing that corporate media are afraid that one PragerU video will undo all the Leftism of years of public school.

 

I will quote from most of the Breitbart article—in full paragraphs when selected--as written and then comment on it:

“PragerU founder Dennis Prager told Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow that the corporate media fear that “one five-minute PragerU video will undo all the leftism” taught in years of public school.

“Since Tennessee, Oklahoma, New Hampshire, Florida, and Texas have considered allowing teachers to use PragerU videos, every major media outlet in the United States — NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post — have just attacked us,” Prager told Marlow at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, Arizona.

“Our videos are five minutes. They fear that one five-minute Prager U video will undo all the leftism of eight years of elementary school and four years of high school,” Prager added.

The PragerU founder went on to say that the corporate media also fear that if conservative speakers “show up for 90 minutes on a college campus, we will undo four years of their left-wing indoctrination.”

“They’re right,” he added. “It’s a legitimate fear. It is like the fear of a ship: one hole can sink a battleship.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Marlow noted that one of the criticisms leveled against PragerU “is that you only provide one perspective in the videos,” which Marlow said he did not accept as a premise, given that the corporate media and institutions of higher learning also only offer one perspective.

“It’s so ironic coming from NBC News, which, of course, offers only one perspective,” Marlow said, adding that “the American university system” also offers one perspective, pointing to an economics course he took while in college.”

 

My response: Prager does only offer the conservative perspective, but he does not pretend to be objective; he presents his views and does not pretend to be ‘balanced and objective and content neutral’. Leftists do only offer their slanted, true-believer version of truth, most lies and half-truths, but they have only their subjective perspective, while posturing about how impartial and non-partisan they are.

 

Still, as a moderate on arriving at truth, discovering it, living by it, we need to study deeply oppositional perspectives, lay them out not as red herrings or straw men, but as they are presented by their practitioners and advocates. Then we need to offer the reader or audience a middle position and then our position. Only then may we argue for our position so that the public gets a rounded, impartial view of what we have laid out, and then we can offer our reasons for why our perspective is right—that would be honest journalism and philosophizing.

Breitbart: “The whole course was a simple Keynesian model,” Marlow said. “There was no Adam Smith, there was no Thomas Sowell, there was no Milton Friedman. It was just Keynesian economics, that’s it, taken as gospel. It was just one perspective.”

Prager reacted by saying, “I don’t know if one percent of American liberals heard of Thomas Sowell.”

“The man is one of the giants of 20-21st century thought, and they don’t even know who he is,” he added. “We know all their ‘giants,’ but they don’t know one of ours. And the fact that he’s black makes him even more undesirable to be known.”

Marlow responded by telling Prager, “On your recommendation, I consistently still read the New York Times, and this is one of the things that I know you do to keep sharp. We do this on the right.”

“We know what they know. They don’t know what we know,” Prager affirmed. “We read what they read. They don’t read what we read.” . . . “

My response: The Right in America studies the Left and knows their giants, their positions, and their rationales, but most of the Leftists are intellectually lazy ideologues and Marxist true believers. They do not know and have not studied our positions and leaders, because they think it is all inferior, racist, unjust lies and gibberish, and they do not want the young or the public exposed to an alternative point of view at all. If they deny that dissenting views exist, and eliminate all public and free thought, freedom of speech, and public, open debate, then they have a monopoly on shaping opinion for the masses.

As a criticism to conservatives, I would warn them that we study the Left while they do not study us, less out of a pure love of objective truth and being passionate about all points of view on any and all subjects, than because cultural conservatism is in danger of being defeated by total victory and domination everywhere in America as cultural/postmodern neo-Marxism is the new replacement culture, a mass movement laying siege to America.

 

We have to study them because we are being defeated. We likely will defeat them, but once we have intellectual and cultural supremacy and hegemony, we must teach, as moderate ethicists and moderate lovers of truth, our young to be anarchist-individuator supercitizens who need full access to every point of view, before making up their minds. We must trust in their eventual, united consensus of good judgment and common sense concluding that the American Way, with Mavellonialist touches added, warts and all, is still about the best cultural system that humans can devise, so we will not lose the next generation, by instructing them to be intellectually and study all points of view before deciding where to land on the issues. This fearless, strong mental approach will make these self-realizers so intellectually smart and wise, that they usually will adopt our program conservative moderation. Letting them free to have access to all information, and then empower them to make up their own minds of their own free will—this does more than anything (We adults give up the control of access to information to the next generation, and our voluntary loss of information monopoly will allow free thinkers to choose to side with us of their own free will, and that love of our Western, American tradition is the most virtuous and effective means of saving our way of life.)  to protect our way of life; it is better than suppressing Marxist, atheist, postmodernist and progressive criticism of our American way.

 

The Sovereign Individual

 

On 12/26/2023 I came across a YouTube video clip, 5-minutes, and 31 seconds long. It was some guy unnamed from Returning Lobster interviewing Jordan Peterson, it was captioned: Jordan Peterson explains his Big Difference with Ayn Rand.

 

Interviewer: “How does collectivism annihilate all human particularity economically or familialy. It seems to me that what is going on in collectivist thinking is the enemy of human particularity and freedom itself.”

 

My response: This interviewer got me thinking new thoughts, inspiring me to realize the organic, spiritual, moral, metaphysical, social, and mutual connection between collectivism, malice, slavery and tyranny on the one hand, and individualism, love, goodness, liberty, freedom, democracy, free market economics and republicanism on the other hand.

 

Collectivism is the enemy of freedom itself and of human particularity, the individual. Collectivism is all about the human identity being the group, the larger and the more centralized the better, and tyranny flows from collectivism as freedom is integral to the individual.

 

Jordan Peterson (J after this): “Collectivism is the enemy of the sovereign individual, the central idea of the West. That is manifested in the underlying religious structure. You think about Christianity for example, psychologically: If you strip it of its metaphysics, you can see the emergence of the divine individual as part of divinity itself. That is part of the Trinitarian idea.”

 

My response: I elsewhere already concluded that the divine individual emerges from the good deities, that are Individuals and Individuators, whose ethics are more egoistic than altruistic, but are both, but Peterson has not gone to these conclusions as I have.

 

Still, he does credit Judeo-Christian theologies and morality as being altruistic but also sympathetic to the individual as divinely inspired and appreciated each for his own intrinsic worth as an independent soul, a spark of human particularity.

 

The three persons in One God (The Father, The Son, and the Holy Spirit) seems to Jordan to remind him of the divine individual concept or reality affiliated with God in Christianity.

 

J: “This is part of divinity itself. That divinity to me is the capacity of individual consciousness to generate order from potential.”

 

My response: If the divine in the human individual is the capacity for that individual consciousness or soul to generate order or cosmos from potential (chaos), why does not Jordan advocate for the self-realized and becoming individual, the living angel developing his talents to the utmost while alive?

 

Jordan seems to see the individual as sovereign, but she can only self-realize as a moral giant, taking on almost Christ-like responsibility for the sins of the world, sacrificing herself for the good of the collective humanity, and perhaps for reality’s benefit itself.

 

Why does he not see the divine potential in each person, not only as spiritual and ethical perfecting or becoming as an individual that is a s selfless sufferer serving the common good, but as each person developing her personal gifts, her brains, her artistic inclinations to their maximum potential, for her own sake?

 

I speculate or answer my own question with two possible answers. First, he is a fringe Christian of some kind (I too am a fringe Christian, but Jordan is an altruist, but I am an egoist.). He is an altruist like traditional Jews and Christians that define the individual as evil, poisoned by original sin which is sick, excessive, narcissistic, malevolent self-love or selfishness.

 

 The only way the fallen individual can redeem himself, Jordan maintains, is to, as an individualist more than as a collectivist or group-liver, though still communally oriented, take on maximal moral responsibility to serve the common good, and that is how is individualism is purely divine or instantiated in the flesh on earth while still existing.

 

Second, Jordan is a professor and a genius, wise, brilliant, original, and subtle. He may not realize it, but I have never forgotten Eric Hoffer leeriness of professors and brilliant people, part of intelligentsia and the ruling class over every regime for the last few thousand years.

 

Intellectuals self-identify as aristocrats, destined to rule the inferior, naughty, child-like masses who need controlling not much liberty or say at all about running their lives. I do not know that Peterson thinks this way, but he is on record in many videos asserting that the talented few rises to the top of every hierarchy, and that is a biological and social fact, and he is largely right about that.

 

Could it be that he sincerely believes that divinely triggered self-realization intellectually, artistically or mathematically or technically is only available to few super talented people like himself, while the masses, inferior in talent, intelligence and ability, can only become divinely inspired individualists as moral giants, while the few geniuses like Peterson himself will express the divine in themselves as moral and intellectual/artistic individuals, self-realizing their personhood in both arenas?

 

These two explanations of mind might explain why Jordan rejects Ayn Rand’s egoist morality as something that could be applied to the individual of any intelligence and talent level, gender, class or race.

Under Mavellonialism I assume that each soul is required by the good deities to self-realize her talents morally, spiritually, intellectually, socially, artistically, and technically. Some like Peterson may be smarter or more talented, but those less smart and less talented, are still capable of miraculous, wondrous, original contributions to growing God’s kingdom on earth.

 

Tolkien the genius knew that Saruman was naturally smarter and more powerful than Gandalf, but Gandalf knew the truth and goodness better than did Saruman, and withstood evil better than did the more skilled Saruman, but Gandalf the wiser and nobler eventually surpassed Saruman that sold out to Sauron.

 

Tolkien is reminding us that God works in mysterious ways, and who could predict that little Frodo and Bilbo could withstand the Ring far more than strutting, Prom-King, muscle-bound Boromir?

 

J: “People see my philosophy—it is not mine—as a variant of Ayn Rand’s philosophy—the centrality of the individual above all.

 

That is not the issue.”

 

My response: She is a pure egoist, fully turning the individual lose to do his thing and develop his talents in a way that he enjoys. Peterson limits the social, religious, legal, and institutional freedom allotted each child, the sovereign individual, born evil and selfish, that is to grow morally, personally as a person whose goodness is socially beneficial and expressible only as a mini-Christ-like martyr, giving up his life, his own interests, sacrificing himself for the benefit of the collective, humanity itself, or God.

 

J: “It is a conceptual issue. What category is to be primary? For me the individual is to be primary. There are a variety of reasons for that. First, the individual is the locus for suffering and the individual is the locus for responsibility.

 

Those are the two reasons that the individual has to be made primary. The divinity element of the individual is deeply encoded in our stories, in Genesis. What humans confront in their lives is akin to what God confronted at the beginning of time. It is easy for us to believe we are deterministic creatures and that the past drives us forward in a determinist manner into the future.

 

I don’t believe that is the case. There is no evidence that that is the case. Humans are really complex creatures. You can’t predict them except in very constrained circumstances. Determinism is a hypothesis but not a very good one, though it has utility.”

 

My response: I am a compatibilist and likely Jordan is too, but we do have free will and we are too complex to predict.

 

J: “What seems to me to be the case is how people conceptualize themselves and act towards themselves, towards others. How the social and political structures are constituted is that humans are constantly confronting a landscape of possibilities. It is potential itself.

 

We believe in the idea of potential. We believe that things could be. It is a very strange conception of reality because things that could be are not measurable in any sense.

 

We actually act as if they exist, and we all treat each other as if one of our fundamental ethical responsibilities is to confront that potentiality properly. We are to live up to our responsibilities.

 

You have these gifts and talents and possibilities that have been granted to you, and if you fail to make use of them, of your talent say, that is a sin of sorts, and that is a religious way of thinking about it.”

 

My response: God calls us to be living angels on earth while alive self-realizing as we go along.

 

J: “It doesn’t matter as that is how people treat each other (We assume implicitly that all of us have free will and moral duties to fulfill—Ed Note.).

 

If a child, your spouse, your brother could be doing more with themselves, you are deeply disappointed (Ed Note: By their mediocre performing.) because there is a call to us, an existential call to face that potential that is everywhere, in every direction, and to transform it into the most functional, habitable order possible.

 

To do it properly with truth and all of those ideas that are integral to the substrata of all the Judeo-Christian Western ideas and fundamentals.

 

If you put the group before the individual, that individual disappears.

 

When you are debating with the radical Left Postmodernist types, about free speech, the argument is not about free speech. They don’t believe in free speech—it is not part of their conceptual universe.

 

For speech to be free and valuable, the people conducting the conversation must be sovereign individuals capable of generating independent thought, independent of their canonical group identity, reach a consensus through dialogue.

 

None of that exists among the Postmodernists. They dismiss all such preconceptions as attributable to something like the Eurocentric colonialists, something like that.

 

Worth Living For

 

We mind our own affairs if our affairs are worth minding, and that is the ethics of egoism. The ethics of altruism turns negative when it is descriptive of and prescriptive for large groups of people intruding upon neighbors and family members, and vice versa, everyone being told what to do, how to live, and what to expect. Hear what Eric Hoffer, on Pages 15 and 16 of his classic book, The True Believer, has to say about meddling in the affairs of others.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                           13

 

When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need of something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives. Hence the embracing of a substitute will necessarily be passionate and extreme. We can have qualified confidence in ourselves, but the faith we have in our nation, religion, race or holy cause must be extravagant and uncompromising.”

 

My response: The Good Spirits are good, loving, and creative, and these originators are individuals and individualists. We are made in their image and likeness, so we are to emulate what they do and how they live. Their enlightened self-interest is the main way that their enterprises and existences are socially beneficent, largely fulfilling their altruistic duty to serve the general good. How this plays out is that their projects, interests and life quest provide them with identity, work, purpose and healthy meaning; not only are they not supposed to find worth and meaning in running their neighbors’ affairs, but they are not inclined to hold down and back another.

 

Humans, born groupist, altruistic, self-loathing and group-living, see no advantage to finding worth and meaning in their own lives, but only in fiddling around in other people’s affairs. Their extreme, passionate, extravagant, and uncompromising devotion to their holy cause informs us not at all about that cause and why it should be approached, but this group fleeing from personally spoiled lives is what is underwriting the exodus from self-care to other-care and group-living.

 

Our self-confidence may be qualified and moderate, but it will be substantive and realistic if limited. The true believer’s group confidence is hubris and chauvinism expressed militantly by its adherents.

 

H: “A substitute embraced in moderation cannot supplant and efface the self we want to forget. We cannot be sure that we have something worth living for unless we are ready to die for it. This readiness to die is evidence to ourselves and others that what we had to take as a substitute for an irrevocably missed or spoiled first choice is indeed the best that ever was.”

 

My response: I have not picked up this book for 35 years, and what I always intuitively suspected is being powerfully confirmed, namely that Eric Hoffer was the first Mavellonialist, and that he is my intellectual and spiritual grandfather. He never quite finished what he started likely because intellectually he had gone as far as he could go, as any of us do come to the outer limits of what we can conceive within the consciousness of the age and generation within which we live.

 

I also have long felt that Hoffer, though recognized as an individualist, a brilliant thinker and pro-American conservative, was someone that other philosophers and intellectuals never quite knew what to do with. I think that his pre-Mavellonialist hunches were upsetting and confusing them and him, but no one knew what it all meant, what were its ramifications, and what they were to do about it, so he and they died, and it passed into American cultural history without much further ado or notice.

 

I am an egoist-individualist and moderate I insist that individuating and individual-living is virtuous and that going by the morality of altruism-collectivism hurts people, that nonindividuating and group-living keeps them discontented, frustrated and, if disaffected, they could well join a mass movement promoting a holy cause that is not holy, important or a genuine cause, but is a poor substitute not worth living for, let alone being willing to die for. The spoiled second choice, the empty substitute, is touted as superior, and the first choice, to maverize into great-souled adulthood as a living angel pushing the cause of all by perfecting one’s personal cause, project or interest is what people can do, and all are capable of doing if they do not give up and quit too early before succeeding.

 

 

H: “  III  The Interchangeability of Mass Movements

 

                                                            14

 

When people are ripe for a mass movement, they are usually ripe for any effective movement, and not solely for one with a particular doctrine or program. In pre-Hitlerian Germany it was often a tossup whether a restless youth would join the Communists or Nazis. In the overcrowded pale of Czarist Russia the simmering Jewish population was ripe both for revolution and Zionism. In the same family, one family would join the revolutionaries and the other the Zionists. Dr. Chaim Weizmann quotes a saying of his mother in those days: ‘Whatever happens, I shall be well off. If Shemuel (the revolutionary son) is right, we shall all be happy in Russia; and if Chaim (the Zionist) is right, then I shall go to live in Palestine.’”

 

My response: Hoffer is pointing out that once one is frustrated and willing to escape from a spoiled life and a loathed self, one could join interchangeably one of several competing holy causes and the mass movement carrying them forward.

 

I think Hoffer thoroughly and originally grasped what mass movements populated by true believers pushing a holy cause to force change in the world; I also think he was warning us as to how dangerous they were. We need to help people everywhere live like Americans going forward should live, as anarchist-individuating supercitizens running, living in, and participating in this free market constitutional republic.

 

With that type of adjustment in the average citizen, change can be realized as desired without such fanatical, violent, disruptive, ruthless movement to upend society, paying a huge price for some if any gain.

 

H: on Paged 16 and 17: “The receptivity of all movements does not always cease even after the potential true believer has become the ardent convert of a specific movement. Where mass movements are in violent competition with each other, there are not infrequent instances of converts—even the most zealous—shifting their allegiance from one to the other. A Saul turning into a Paul is neither a rarity nor a miracle. In our day, each proselytizing mass movement seems to regard the zealous adherents of its antagonists as potential converts. Hitler looked on the German Communists as potential National Socialists. ‘The petit bourgeois Social Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will.’ Captain Rohn boasted that he could turn the reddest Communist into a glowing nationalist in four weeks. On the other hand, Karl Radek looked on the Nazi Brown Shirts (S.A.) as a reserve for future Communist recruits.

 

Since all mass movements draw their adherents from the same types of humanity, and appeal to the same types of mind, it follows: (a) all mass movements are competitive, and the gain of one in adherents is the loss of all the others; (b) all mass movements are interchangeable. One mass movement readily transforms itself into another. A religious movement may develop into a social revolution or national movement; a social revolution into militant nationalism or a religious movement; a nationalist movement into a social revolution or a religious movement.”

 

 

My response: I agree that mass movements are interchangeable. It was revealing that Hitler agreed with Hoffer without knowing of him. Hitler knew he could convert the fanatical Communist, a true believer, but not a petit bourgeois social democrat, a liberal and individualist, by comparison.

 

If individualism and moderation are morally superior to collectivism and radical commitment to one’s holy cause, then we must reward citizens for being the former and not the latter.

 

H on Pages 17 and 18: “It is rare for a mass movement to be only of one character. Usually it displays some facets of other types of movement, and sometimes it is two or three movements in one. The exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt was a slave revolt, a religious movement and a nationalist movement. The militant nationalism of the Japanese is essentially religious. The French Revolution was a new religion. It had ‘its dogmas, the sacred principles of the Revolution—Liberte’ et sainte e’galite’. It had its form of worship, an adaptation of Catholic ceremonial, which was elaborated in connection with civic fetes. It had its saints, the heroes and martyrs of liberty. At the same time, the French Revolution was also a nationalist movement. The legislative assembly decreed in 1792 that altars should be raised everywhere bearing the inscription: ‘the citizen is born, lives and dies for la Patrie.’

 

The religious movements of the Reformation had a revolutionary aspect which expressed itself in peasant uprisings, and were also nationalist movements. Said Luther: ‘In the eyes of the Italians we Germans are merely low Teutonic swine. They exploit us like charlatans and such the country to the marrow. Wake up Germany!

 

The religious character of the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions is generally recognized. The hammer and sickle and the swastika are in a class with the cross. The ceremonial of their parades is as the ceremonial of a religious procession. They have articles of faith, saints, martyrs and holy sepulchers. The Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions are also full-blown nationalist movements. The Nazi revolution had been so from the beginning, while the nationalism of the Bolsheviks was a late development.

 

Zionism is a nationalist movement and a social revolution. To the orthodox Jew it is also a religious movement. Irish nationalism has a deeply religious tinge. The present mass movements in Asia are both nationalist and revolutionary.”

 

My response: Hoffer the genius recognizes that the various mass movements often have several, maybe all the aspects as their properties-being religious, nationalist, social and revolutionary at the same time.

 

What also impresses is that Hoffer is able to study history and many nations and detect what is a mass movement at work in what country in what generation, and what are its salient aspects.

 

H on Page 18 and 19: “                              16

 

The problem of stopping a mass movement is often a matter of substituting one movement for another. A social revolution can be stopped by promoting a religious or nationalist movement. Thus in countries where Catholicism has recaptured its mass movement spirit, it counteracts the spread of communism. In Japan it was nationalism that canalized all movements of social protest. In our South, the movement of racial solidarity acts as a preventive of social upheaval. A similar situation may be observed among the French in Canada and among the Boers in South Africa.

 

This method of stopping one movement by substituting another for it is not always without danger, and it does not usually come cheap. It is well for those who hug to the present and want to preserve it as it is not to play with mass movements. For it always fares ill with the present when a genuine mass movement is on the march. In prewar Italy and Germany practical businessmen acted in an entirely ‘logical’ manner when they encouraged a Fascist and Nazi movement in order to stop communism. But in doing so, these practical and logical people promoted their own liquidation.

 

There are other safer substitutes for a mass movement. In general, any arrangement which either discourages atomistic individualism or facilitates self-forgetting or offers chances for action and new beginnings tends to counteract the rise and spread of mass movements. These subjects are dealt with in later chapters. Here we shall touch upon one curious substitute for mass movements, mainly migration.”

 

My response: Once the masses in a nation are on the march, riled up, fomenting or change or reform as they are wont to define it, they may be impossible to stop, short of brutal slaughter by totalitarian, governmental counterforces.

 

Hoffer suggests that offering a substitute movement might stop it, or redirect the energies of the awakened, roused masses, or it might steer them into an even more radical mass movement.

 

There may be safe substitutes, but the best solution is to provide people with personal self-worth, prosperous and free opportunity for self-fulfillment and positive religious experience, all included with gentle, peaceful constant rates of change, built upon traditional core values, so the need for drastic resort to a mass movement is made rare. We want to absorb the new slogan, the new trends before the people get agitated and are storming for the triumph of a replacement narrative.

How We Talk

 

When you are a groupist or joiner, and you talk to another groupist, one on one, it is less a private, personal interchange between two isolated talkers, than it is the conversation of one groupist conversing with another groupist, so self-identified and publicly characterized.

 

If you are an individualist or loner, and you talk to another loner, one of one, the talk is more genuine, more original, without being filter through group dynamics, roles played, rank established, and conformity demonstrated to group values and tropes.

 

If you are a loner and you are conversing with a groupist, one on one, the interchange is not really or only one on one—you are talking to every member of that group for everything that groupist says, does and feels is mediated through the lens of what the group expects him to think and say.

 

When a joiner talks to a loner, she sees the loner as one groupist would see another joiner, so she really does not understand how he sees the world, or if she does, she will be repelled by his stance on interpersonal relations, and they will conflict.

 

These are some of the group and individual dynamics and undercurrents coming to the surface of human conversations, flickering through with clarity and pause; it is no wonder that human inter-communication is fraught with confusion, unhappiness, a lack of clarity, misunderstanding and often conflict.

Just Right

 

Let me start off by admitting that taking a desirable, suggested, moderate, moral stance between extremes, be they contraries or contradictories, is never a precise quantity or formula; it is almost always variable depending on circumstances, the participants and their personal needs and desires configured. Good luck figuring out what just right means for you, but you should be able to establish that state after some readjusting, and further readjusting.

 

Our relationship with a benevolent deity that we worship requires that the relationships be just right: we do not want to be arrogant, insulting, rebellious and hostile, out to undermine the deity and her preferences. We do not want to be too dependent, too submissive, to deferential, never able to converse with her as a friend, though she is our boss.

 

We do not want to pray to her too often, say every 3 minutes, all of our waking hours. Nor do we want to go 5 months and not attend a service in her honor or pray at night on bended knee for her protection, guidance and forgiveness.

 

Benevolent deities are individualists so we do not want to approach them as we would our peers especially if group-living and group-identity relations are our prime interests.

 

Benevolent deities are individualists, so we do not want to smother them, by getting too close to them, or be cold and remote, like living in a galaxy apart from them about 5 million miles away.

Exodus 16:4-8

 

I am still shocked that the Israelites were so quickly and unreasonably ungrateful against Yahweh and his prophets so soon after God freed them from bondage in Egypt, but it occurred to me that we, as parents, can give our children not enough as sustenance or gifts, or we can give them too much, beyond what they need and deserve, as sustenance and as generous gifts.

 

Spoiled children that are given too much, too early, more than they deserve, more than they can handle, end up grumbling the most without cause, being the least appreciative of what they have received, feeling entitled to ever more and more unearned, unmerited rewards, gifts and bribes if they are to like parents in return just a little, in exchange for such over-the-top attempts to buy their love.

 

If kids receive too little, they may not have a fighting chance to survive, let alone thrive. If they receive too much from their parents, they may end up as spoiled, lazy, hedonic, jaded, unpleasant parasites and goldbrickers quite willing to sponge off their parents.

 

Parents, like Yahweh, need to give their children more than less, but not too much, and never as a bribe, and the children must be taught to work hard every day, so they become producers and contributors not mere moochers, sluggards, consumers, and takers.

 

It was not that Yahweh did so much for them, or did too much for them, or gave them more than they could handle, but that Yahweh gave them such miraculous assistance as He worked very hard to  extract His chosen people from historical oblivion and disappearance, in slavery, and to return them to the Holy Land, their homeland as the indigenous people of that land of milk and honey.

 

Here are those lines from The New American Bible: “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘I will rain down bread from heaven for you. Each day the people are to go out and gather their daily portion; thus I will test them, to see whether they follow my instructions or not. On the sixth day, however, when they prepare what they bring in, let it be twice as much as they gather on the other days.’ So Moses and Aaron told all the Israelites, ‘At evening you will know that it was the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt; and in the morning you will see the glory of the Lord, as he heeds your grumbling against him. But what are we that you should grumble against us? When the Lord gives you flesh to eat in the evening,’ continued Moses, ‘and in the morning your fill of bread, as he heeds the grumbling you utter against him, what then are we? Your grumbling is not against us, but against the Lord.’”

 

My response: Note how rich these ancient lines are: they are to gather up twice as much before the Sabbath to keep holy the Sabbath as we are instructed to do today.

 

That the people, however ungrateful, go to their prophets and God to seek bread and water to that they may live, we today need save water and grow crops to feed ourselves, while asking God to provide for us with sufficient food and water to feed the populaces of the earth. These fundamental needs to survive have not changed a bit.

 

Note too that Yahweh informed the people that he was aware of their grumbling and ingratitude, and that He would still provide for them, but he did not appreciate their poor attitudes and response to divine largesse.

 

Note too how Moses and Aaron did not seem to back God; they were resentful against the grumblers and complained that they were unjustly picked on by the masses, and that it was God’s fault, not the prophets fault that the people were hungry, and that they should take it up with God. It is a wonder that Yahweh did not dump the whole group and take off.

 

We must be careful that we seek to lessen our ingratitude and our disrespectful treatment of the good deities.

 

Here are these same passages from the Holy Bible (KJV): “Then the Lord said unto Moses, Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day, that I may prove them, whether they walk in my law, or no.”

 

My response: Yahweh and God created the universe or cosmos out of nothing or unorganized pre-universal stuff, and God’s supernatural and natural laws operate these domains of supernature and nature.

 

If the people are good, they walk in line with God’s law; if they sin and rebel, they stray off the chosen path of righteous living, and sin and move away from God and God’s law. It is perilous for humans not to walk in God’s law.

 

Here is the rest of that Holy Bible quote: “And it shall come to pass, that on the sixth day they shall prepare that which they bring in; and it shall be twice as much as they bring in daily.

 

And Moses and Aaron said unto all the children of Israel, At even, you shall know that the Lord hath brought you out from the land of Egypt:

 

And in the morning, then ye shall see the glory of the Lord; for that he heareth your murmurings against the Lord: and what are we, that ye murmur against us?

 

And then Moses said, This shall be, when the Lord shall give you in the evening flesh to eat, and in the morning bread to the full; for that the Lord heareth your murmuring which you murmur against him: and what are we? Your murmurings are not against us, but against the Lord.”

 

It occurred to me that moving, say 300,000 to 500,000 religious and political refugees through desert wilderness, without guaranteed food or what, would be a logistical nightmare of the first rank. That stressful situation would exacerbate the peoples’ grumbling and seeming ingratitude, and perhaps the Lord saw it for what it was, apparent ungrateful grumbling that really was expressing legitimate worry about surviving the ordeal.

 

A people in transition must forage off the land during their migration, or be fed and refreshed with water by direct, divine intervention.

 

When people were settled in the Promised Land, farming, raising sheep, fishing, and bartering, then the free people of Yahweh could resume feeding and supporting themselves, once established and secure, but the migration was a more risky, vulnerable time for the Hebrews.

 

Another thought just occurred to me: the Hebrews leaving bondage in Israel and being led by Yahweh and Moses to the Promised Land, would be an ancient mass movement. Humans in a mass movement are taken from an emotional state of stable inner misery and discontent, and then they feel disaffected, dislodged, upset, and frustrated to an agonizing degree; people that upset are going to have no self-esteem, and all of their nasty, petulant, irascible, ungrateful, petty, scapegoating behaviors will be on public display, taking down the morale and optimism of all involved.

 

No wonder they were unpleasant, murmuring and grumbling.

 

And the presence of almighty God would you think, bring out the best in people, but we could not imagine the stress of learning to relate to, converse with and behave politely if the divinity lived in a house across the street from oneself.

 

There were a lot of powerful stressors working on these ancient Hebrews.

Exodus 16:2-3

 

I am astonished at how ungrateful the Hebrews were so soon after being liberated from Egyptian bondage by Yahweh, and how quickly as a whole people they grumbled against God and his prophets. This scene is to remind us not only of the need to be grateful each day for God’s blessings upon us, it also reminds us how short are our memories and how quick we are to feel entitled to more, better, faster divine handouts.

 

Rather than blame God, perhaps we should get up and care for ourselves. It is also to remember that God or Yahweh is reminding us that the Hebrews did not grumble because Hebrews and Jews are especially ungrateful for favor done them, every demanding more: no we are being instructed by God that both the chosen people and other children of God are equally ungrateful for life and blessings granted them from on high, and that we need to cut out the grumbling and complaining.

 

Here are those lines from The New American Bible: “Here in the desert the whole Israelite community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said to them, ‘Would that we had died at the Lord’s hand in the land of Egypt, as we sat by our fleshpots ate our fill of bread. But you had to lead us into this desert to make the whole community die of famine.”

 

Yeah, we had it so great in the good old days as Pharaoh’s slaves, where available to us were all forms and quantity of bonbons, luxuries, comforts, fleshpots, and bread were available to the luckiest slaves ever to walk the earth.

 

Heads up: the good old days were not so good. This record of human ingratitude reveals how thin and tenuous is human loyalty to and serious dedication to thinking the best of their benevolent creators. Faith in God is commensurate to how grateful we fill, and how enduring is our good feelings towards God in tough times, when we feel neglected and forgotten. We are not going to be near as grateful or saintly as insanely persecuted and afflicted Job—nor does the Divine Couple or Jesus expect us to be such paragons—but we need not be so needlessly and quickly forgetful of how good that had it, as were the ancient Hebrews that were seeing God in a cloud, seeing plagues hitting Pharaoh to liberate them, and seeing Pharaoh and his army drowned to make their escape a lasting reality.

 

Not only were they lucky that God did not strike them dead for being so unreasonably and quickly ungrateful, but they spurned God without cause, largely to De’s face. I am the best human ever by a long stretch of imagination, but I am realistic, and do not want to so insult God by being callously ungrateful, rebellious and militantly sinful, as to invite divine wrath down upon my head. I am cautious, and urge people to leave God alone, not provoking such powerful deities to angers.

 

The Hebrews were hungry and in need, fine, but to carry on as they did, that is near to be unforgivable and outrageous misbehavior.

 

Here are those same passages from the Holy Bible: “And the whole congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness: And the children of Israel said unto them, Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

 

My response: If they did not believe that God existed, perhaps their quick, unreasonable ingratitude could have been excused somewhat because disbelief and ingratitude might be linked; they, however, knew God had delivered them from Egypt, but they were so lacking in faith, that they did not think God would provide for them in the wilderness, despite Yahweh’s impressive, strong track record of providing for them in stellar fashion just previously. Why would Yahweh not continue to provide, and handsomely at that?

 

Jordan Peterson has hinted that this passage is to remind us that we romanticize about the bad, self-destructive situation that we are in as better than the devil we do not know, that is, taking the leap of faith into freedom, prosperity, and adventure, heading headlong out into the wilderness to build new, better lives.

 

It could also be that Yahweh yanked them free from bondage before they were totally ready to be free or liberated—they were looking back when they should have been looking forward.

Substitutes

 

Eric Hoffer in his book, The True Believer, Pages 12 and 13, addresses what occurs when people in a mass movement are seeking substitutes. I will record his paragraphs and then comment on them.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “ II     The Desire for Substitutes

 

                                                            7

 

There is a fundamental difference between the appeal of a mass movement and the appeal of a practical organization. The practical organization offers opportunities for self-advancement and its appeal is mainly to self-interest. On the other hand, a mass movement, particularly in its active, revivalist phase, appeals not to those intent of bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.”

 

 

My response: People are attracted to what appeals to them, and people motivated by self-esteem, self-interest, and self-advancement, they will join practical organizations to make money, find meaning for their lives and to change what needs to be changed in their lives, and for the community, the government, and the country. When most people believe in the metanarrative and culture that their stable society holds, their self-esteem generally is intact, and they operate at room temperature.

 

When people, naturally discontented, no longer share or believe in the culture, the traditions, the mores, the metanarrative promulgated by their community or country, they take refuge in a replacement metanarrative and new way of life, which the mass movement personifies, or at least is a promising vehicle that will carry the frustrated masses to their destination, a better, rewarding future.

 

The masses, lacking self-esteem under the discredited, abandoned status quo, seek to escape from freedom and their utterly blemished selves, to leave these unwanted, nauseating selves behind by scurrying into and hiding from the accusatory selves, ensconced in the oblivion of the collective, the mass movement. The mass movement appeals to the masses because self-renunciation they are fleeing their miserable personal existences.

 

If one is an egoist like I am, one equates the collective with evil, and the individual with goodness; in this light, masses of people seeking self-renunciation by escaping into a passing mass movement is scary and destructive, and it does not make me feel warm and fuzzy about mass movements and its hordes on the march making history their way.

 

H: “People who see their lives as irremediably spoiled cannot find a worth-while purpose in self-advancement. The prospect of an individual career cannot stir them to a mighty effort, nor can it invoke in them faith and a single-minded dedication. They look on self-interest as something tainted and evil; something unclean and unlucky. Anything undertaken under the auspices of the self seems to them foredoomed. Nothing that has its roots and reasons in the self can be good and noble. Their innermost craving is for a new life—a rebirth—or, failing this, a chance to acquire some new elements of pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by identification with a holy cause. An active mass movement offers them opportunities for both. If they join the movement as full converts they are born to a new life in its close-knit collective body, or if attracted as sympathizers they find elements of pride, confidence and purpose by identifying themselves with the efforts, achievements and prospects of the movements.

 

To the frustrated a mass movement offers substitutes either for the whole self or for the elements that make life bearable and which they cannot evoke out of their individual resources.”

 

My response: Hoffer is not an egoist in moral theory, but he anticipates egoism-individualism that I espouse. He is a cultural believer in Judeo-Christian morality, but he is for egoism enough to appreciate that self-interest and individualism are important to happy, well-functioning adulthood.

 

The frustrated cannot find meaning and satisfaction through self-advancement. Their single-minded dedication to and faith in their holy cause, and the mass movement that carries it forth, is their substitute for self-interested living as a separate individual. They substitute membership in the mass movement for a fulfilling life as an individual, so their ethical system is hyper-altruistic and collectivist.

 

I wish to assure any reader that no one is without talent or the potential to lead a rich, full, satisfying, loving, happy life as an accomplished individual, especially if she self-actualizes. She never lacked the talent and possibility of leading a fulfilling personal life, but, she made poor choices often enough, that she gave up on herself, and quit trying to grow and excel on her own, so she concluded that renouncing the self, and running off to live as an acolyte of the mass movement selected was her only option. It never was her only option, but she believes that it is and times of historical upheaval and uncertainty, can make many like her seek escape from the self and from freedom by hiding in the nearby mass movement.

 

Her substitute life, her being reborn as a group myrmidon, are the ambitions of a shattered personality, broken, incompetent to cope on her own, feeling helpless and worthless.

 

H: “It is true that among the early adherents of a mass movement there are also adventurers who join in hope that the movement will give a spin to their wheel of fortune and whirl them to fame and power. On the other hand, a degree of selfless dedication is sometimes displayed by those that join corporations, orthodox political parties and other practical organizations. Still the fact remains that a practical concern cannot endure unless it can appeal to and satisfy self-interest, while the vigor and growth depends on its capacity to evoke and satisfy the passion for self-renunciation. When a mass movement begins to attract people who are interested in their individual careers, it is a sign that it has passed its vigorous stage; that it is no longer engaged in molding a new world but in possessing and preserving the present. It ceases then to be a movement and becomes an enterprise. According to Hitler, the more ‘posts and offices a movement has to hand out, the more inferior stuff it will attract, and in the end these political hangers-on overwhelm a successful party in such number that the honest fighter of former days no longer recognizes the old movement . . . . When this happens, the ‘mission’ of such a movement is done for.”

 

My response: Hoffer’s research and insights can teach us about human nature. Practical concerns are more peaceful, less violent, not fanatical, whose members are driven by self-interest and rational desire, not fervency, passion, radicalism, and idealism. The practical members are moderates, interested in the present and are reconciled to the present and themselves; the true believers have renounced the present, renounced themselves for total self-sacrifice to bring about a wonderful future visionary society which might well be a disappointing hell. Once a movement is taken over by careerists, it is run for the sake of present gain, not future sacrifice.

 

H on Pages 13 and 14: “The nature of the complete substitute offered by conversion is discussed in the chapters of self-sacrifice and united action in Part III. Here we shall deal with partial substitutes.”

 

                                                            8

 

H: “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the loss of faith in ourselves.”

 

My response: We can remain individualists and even individuators and still be heroic and self-sacrificing in service of a cause or humanity, but it cannot be the fanatical, passionate, idolatrous worship of a cause, now a god-substitute made holy; the individualist can follow his ideals and values, but he must not renounce his own dignity and personhood, subsuming his independence and very identity to the festishized abstraction that is now the devotees identity and reason for living.

 

Faith in a holy cause is an altruistic self-renunciation and self-immolation, and the self is a sacrificial offering to the religious substitute, the leader or holy cause that one is idolizing.

 

One can and must retain one’s self-love and faith in oneself while worshiping God and this is a healthy relationship and is egoistically motivational on the part of the worshiping human. When one worships an abstraction as a substitute for lost faith in oneself, one’s motivation is altruistic, and it is a sick side of altruism on display here.

 

H:  “                                                     9

 

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race, his holy cause.”

 

My response: Why Hoffer did not come out as an avowed egoist, I will never know, but he nailed it when indicating that the incompetent, bumbling, insecure and self-doubting man has given up on himself, then he will selflessly devote himself to advancing his religious substitute beyond his flawed self, and his service to this holy cause is a religious substitute, to compensate for the absence of a strong, healthy, binding and mutual relationship between the believer and some benevolent deity.

 

H: “                                                      10

 

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.

 

This minding of other people’s business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor’s shoulder or fly at his throat.”

 

My response: The altruist can be motivated by kindness, compassion, and a passion for justice for all under the law, but much of altruism is meddling in other people’s affairs. I believe the benevolent deities are Individualists and Individuators, and that loving ourselves, them and others is best expressed and exemplified by a lifetime of self-realization. That requires no more evil altruism, meddling in the affairs of others, no more bossing them around, no more holding them down and back in group-living and non-individuation.

 

H: “                                                      11

 

The burning conviction that we have a holy duty towards others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.”

 

My response: If we love others, we let them go so they can run their own lives, to think, create, invent and build, as creators building the cosmos and dedicating the good deities, thereby growing the size of the divine kingdom. That is the human mission on earth.

 

If all did this, there would be no puny or meaningless lives lived, and, for God, it matters not how far one gets, but that one is consistently working to grow and develop the self—this is key.

 

The fanatic is completely selfless and his vanity, gargantuan self-esteem as one of the Elect is not genuine self-esteem of a maverizer. The ego and self-esteem of the individuators is strong and confident but contained and modest. He does not take himself too seriously and can laugh at himself.

 

H on Page 13 and 14: “                         12

 

One of the most potent attractions of a mass movement is its offering of a substitute for individual hope. This attraction is particularly effective in a society imbued with the idea of progress. For in the conception of progress, ‘tomorrow’ looms large, and the frustration resulting from having nothing to look forward to is the more poignant, Hermann Rauschning says of pre-Hitlerian Germany that ‘The feeling of having come to the end of all things was one of the worst troubles we endured after that lost war.’ In a modern society a people can live without hope only when kept dazed and out of breath when kept hustling. The despair brought by unemployment comes not only from the threat of destitution, but from the sudden view of a vast nothingness ahead. The unemployed are more likely to follow the peddlers of hope than the handers-out of relief.

 

Mass movements are usually accused of doping their followers with hope of the future while cheating them of the enjoyment of the present. Yet to the frustrated the present is irremediably spoiled. Comforts and pleasures cannot make it whole. No real content or comfort can ever arise in their minds but from hope.”

 

My response: There is much going on in these two powerful paragraphs. People are attracted to mass movements if they lose hope, individual hope. If they can be offered the hope of a system of good values, healthy religion, or the ethos of self-realization, then they will not lose hope in themselves now or in the future, with no incentive to join a mass movement to find some sense of a better tomorrow being forthcoming.

 

The postmodernists and Leftists instinctively recognize that, by endlessly deconstructing and gaslighting the American and Western way of life and its culture, if they can divorce the people from the traditional metanarrative, they will have made them disaffected, anxious and frustrated enough to be attractive to the peculiar hope of a coming socialist utopia just around the bend.

 

There is also a hint here that people in Western or industrialized societies, used to progress and change, bereft of individual hope, will be tempted to seek substitute, negative, unfulfilling hope in a mass movement.