Complex Hoffer

 

Tom Schactman wrote a biography of Eric Hoffer, American Iconoclast, The Life and Times of Eric Hoffer.

 

On Page 8 Schactman writes this about Hoffer: “Hoffer’s tone was colloquial, and at a seeming distance from that of the writer whose thoughts were often described is icily precise and pessimistic. And Hoffer was a man continually at odds with himself, caught between what he said was the ‘terrible gloom . . . oozing out’ of his notebooks, and his joyous, celebratory sentiments about America and the common man, which emerged more in the interviews than in his writing.  Sevareid, perplexed and intrigued by this split, tried to approach it by characterizing The True Believer to Hoffer as ‘cold.’

 

Mu response: I think the gloom that Hoffer expressed was an exemplification of his honest approach to life, discovering that humans are weak and fallen, and that they can do just about anything against anyone or themselves.

 

Still, in America, where personal virtue, Christianity, the constitutional republic and the free  market system were constructed, here a cultural condition grew up that was ideal for fostering personal liberty and happiness. The individual self-control and the culture of optimism and can-do improvement of society and life here allows moral pessimists like Hoffer and me to be pleasantly surprised at how good people are and how kind. But we knew what made this occur here was that the people received instruction in the right values under God. Then they became good (earned goodness). They became morally good, and that allowed them to be kind and orderly, nd encountering such virtuous people is a pleasure