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?