Tom Schactman wrote a biography on Eric Hoffer, labeled American Iconoclast. Here is what Schactman wrote on Page 16 of his book: “Another mystery is why Hoffer never attended school. He contended it was due to his blindness during his prime school years; but New York had schools for the blind, and tuition for poor students was underwritten by wealthy donors. In later life Hoffer attributed his ‘savage heart’ to never having been ‘gentled by the school marms.’ Lili Osborne also suggested that an important element in his personality derived from his lack of religious education or orientation; he was, she observed, as ‘free’ of religion as he was of formal education. The absence of schooling and religion combined to render him unsocialized in a society that stressed the ability to get along with, learn from, and have intimate relationships with other people.”
My response: Eric Hoffer was a brilliant, profoundly original philosopher and great soul that was what he was because he was without formal, institutional educational and religious indoctrination.
It was that he was not socialized that he became a great writer and thinker, because too often being socialized within educational and ecclesiastical hierarchies bleeds the spirit, talent, originality, and ambition to be great right out of children. They are over-socialized into demoralized, dull, lifeless, little conformist, nonindividuating joiners.
What make Hoffer remarkable was that he did not get socialized in the way that Lili desired for him.
What I see with Hoffer is that his heart remained savage because somehow, he escaped to adulthood without losing his independence and his ambition to self-realize. Indeed, I believe there is some evidence that, as an adult, he knew he needed to avoid clique-living and pack-ambition to end the independent self-realizing of a great soul like Hoffer, by pulling him down and back into the mediocre mob, broken and dead like everyone else.
Here for me are some proofs that Hoffer, as an adult, worked always to keep the pack, the community, from closing in on him, and ending his individuated independence. That he intentionally worked as a migrant, that he escaped from Helen’s controlling, loving clutches, that he rarely worked with the same partner on the docks, that he could enjoy the Osbornes but needed his privacy and space in his own little apartment to be himself and do his thinking and writing.
Children are born basically evil so they must be broken and civilized in the right way (by a mom and dad that love them, play no games with them, set goals and limits for them, teach them to work, and be considerate towards others, and self-restraining.) but never—as they almost always are--in the wrong way.
Kids need spiritual and moral training to become loving egoists that take care of themselves first, and then, being of such cheer, good will, and high self-esteem, that they usually and automatically are rather decent to others.
Kids should attend school until they are 8th graders, and perhaps Sunday school too.
The right way to socialize children is to teach them to be morally good kids, and they must, of their own free will, accept this responsibility at some point in their childhood, if they are to become ethical adults.
We want kids, most or all of them, if they choose to do so, to grow up and maverize, becoming living angels, anarchist-indiviudator supercitizens and great souls that individual-live more than group-live, that self-realized more than nonindividuated.
When kids are broken or over-broken by educational and ecclesiastical bureaucrats in educational hierarchies and ecclesiastical hierarchies, they become collectivized, little nonindividuating, spiritually dead, drab little joiners, groupthinking, pack-conforming, group-living little cookie-cutter clones of all the other conformists in their tight little clique.
If most children had some basic spiritual and moral training and some formal education, and then were kicked loose at 13 to navigate as they choose to advance their customized, personal education, we would experience naturally the arrival on the American scene of millions of Eric Hoffers in this country. This process could be reiterated across the planet.
We need more children raised like Hoffer was, not less.
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