Discontent

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Hoffer B

 

Discontent

 

I am rereading Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer. I am typing it out paragraph by paragraph and commenting as I go, and here is what he wrote about discontent on Pages 7 and 8: “Discontent by itself does not invariably create a desire for change. Other facts have to be present before discontent turns into disaffection. One of these is a sense of power.

 

Those who are awed by their surroundings do not think of change, no matter how miserable their condition. When our mode of life is so precarious as to make it patent that we cannot control the circumstances of our existence, we tend to stick to the proven and the familiar. We counteract a deep feeling of insecurity by making our existence a fixed routine. We hereby acquire the illusion that we have tamed the unpredictable. Fisherfolk, nomads and farmers who have to contend with the willful elements, the creative worker who depends on inspiration, the savage awed by his surroundings—they all fear change. They face the world as they would an all-powerful jury. The abjectly poor, too, stand in awe of the world around them and are not hospitable to change. It is a dangerous life we live when hunger and cold are at our heels. There is thus a conservatism of the destitute as profound as the conservatism of the privileged, and the former is as much a factor in the perpetuation of a social order as the latter.”

 

My response: Hoffer is pointed out that the discontented do not become the disaffected, with a burning desire to overturn the social order, unless they know or sense that they are powerful enough to succeed at changing the world around them. The abjectly poor, the farmer, the nomad and the creative worker do not see it in the cards for them to effect change.

 

I accept this reading of these groups and add that another set of circumstances make these groups of people so conservative, though they are discontented perpetually. These groups of people—save for the creative worker, though he may run in packs too—are group-oriented, and group-living persons do not change what is; they have not the excited imagination or will. Finally, most of us, are naturally more fatalistic than activistic, so this biological propensity to live with our lot, however unfair or insufferable, is usually what we settle for, as if it was an iron law of existence, never to be challenged or adjusted by personal will or action. They do not feel empowered.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “The men who rush into undertakings of vast change usually feel they are in possession of some irresistible power. The generation that made the French Revolution had an extravagant conception of the omnipotence of man’s reason and the boundless range of his intelligence. Never, says de Tocqueville, had man felt prouder of itself nor had it ever so much faith in its own omnipotence. And joined with this exaggerated self-confidence, was a universal taste for change which came unbidden to every mind. Lenin and the Bolsheviks who plunged recklessly into the chaos of creation of a new world had a blind faith in the omnipotence of Marxist doctrine. The Nazis had nothing as potent as that doctrine, but they had faith in an infallible leader and also faith in a new technique. For it is doubtful whether National Socialism would have made such rapid progress if it had not been for the electrifying conviction that the new techniques of blitzkrieg and propaganda made the Germans irresistible.

 

Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith—faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by men who set out to build ‘a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven’ and who believed that ‘nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.’”

 

My response: Hoffer regards humans as those that run in packs and move as a group, based on group sense of prospective action. When the group feels that it lacks the power to effect change, then it remains fatalistic, and does not agitate to change things. When the group feels powerful and confident, that they can make a difference, they then assume, as a group, that they make act and that they will succeed at effecting change now that they are powerful.

 

Whether the initiation for mass movement or the electrifying awakening of a slumbering population was originated in a cultural ideal (the French), the Marxist holy cause (the Russians), or a blinding reverence for an infallible leader and his machine (the Germans), these peoples and their nations were energized to act, as a group, because they felt empowered and able to change things. If they did not believe they could change things, they would not have tried to.

 

This characterization of the correlation between powerfulness and activism versus feeling fatalistic or powerless is groupthink and their orientation, and the regular state of communal existence is static and unchanging. It is also a sign that the fatalistic are not individuals that sense that they can take command and change things to suit themselves. Still the dynamism of the masses in a mass movement is the only way for the collective-living people to become confident, powerful, and active. These are normally the regular psychological features of outlook of an individual in a laissez-faire economy, or a democratic society.

 

H on Pages 8 & 9: “                                                                   4

 

Offhand one would expect that the mere possession of power would automatically result in a cocky attitude toward the world and a receptivity to change. But it is not always so. The powerful can be as timid as the weak. What seems to count more than possession of instruments of power is faith in the future. Where power is not joined with faith in the future, it is used mainly to ward off the new and preserve the status quo. On the other hand, extravagant hope, even when backed by actual power, is likely to generate a most reckless daring. For the hopeful can draw strength from the most ridiculous sources of power—a slogan, a word, a button. No faith is potent unless it is a faith in the future; unless it has a millennial component. So, too, an effective doctrine: as well as being a source of power, it must also claim to be a key to the book of the future.

 

Those who transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding and captaining discontent or by demonstrating the reasonableness and desirability of the intended changes or by coercing people into a new way of life. They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope. It matters not whether it be hope of a heavenly kingdom, or heaven on earth, of plunder and untold riches, of fabulous achievement or world dominion. If the Communists win Europe and a large part of the world, it will not be because they know how to stir up discontent or how to infect people with hatred, but because they know how to preach hope.”

 

My response: At first it seems that Hoffer is contradicting himself that the discontented or passive, submissive people will be transformed into roused, agitating masses if they feel empowered, but then he writes that the mere possession of power will not automatically result in a cocky attitude and a receptivity to change. But his paradox is quickly answered as he qualifies that extravagant hope, coupled with a sense of group empowerment, may incite the group into action to agitate for change. Without this new sense of hope, the fatalistic masses will not have faith in the future, thus transitioning from being discontented to disaffected and on the march to force change.

 

When a slogan, word or button incentivizes and electrifies the inert masses into headlong rushing towards the future, this is not a rational, sober, careful, deliberate adjustment, but is the epitome of an excited, irrational, passionate mob brought to life as a mass movement chasing after the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, exemplified in the word or slogan, indicative of their fetishized holy cause.

 

In summary, Hoffer is suggesting that we all, from birth, naturally suffer a sense of tragedy and inner inadequacy, feeling inevitably disappointed, frustrated, and discontented with who we are, what we are, and what are our prospects. It would seem intuitive that we run in packs because we suffer low self-esteem, that the self by itself is unworthy of consideration and effort, that, only as part of the collective, is there a chance that we pathetic individuals can make a difference, and that our drab, short lives might be meaningful.

Radicals, idealists and change agents fight an uphill battle, but, occasionally, if they find a slogan or ideal that can fire the imagination of the discontented masses with a sense of empowerment and hope in the future, then the awakened, riled, disaffected masses may rally to force the nation to undergo change, substantive change.