Favorable Milieu

 

Eric Hoffer has taught me that his insights are great and original, and relevant today (though he has been largely forgotten now), because his flair for discovering what is true, has tapped into the universal, the timeless.

 

The current, successful, dangerous mass movement sweeping America is cultural Marxism/Postmodernist neo-Marxism. The Left has been gaslighting the collective and individual psyches of American citizens for the last 75 years. They have done this by design and by clever hunch: By smashing and crushing all that Americans believed in, if the Americans could be weaned away from their love of, allegiance to, comfort in and meaning derived from dependence on traditional American values, myths, and culture, then the citizens would become frustrated, deprived of their reliance and belief in their traditional group associations.

 

People are altruistic (though Americans are about the most individualistic, individual-living people on the planet) and group-oriented; they require collectivist social arrangements to find meaning and remain fairly contented (or at least not motivated to revolt). If the radicals/revolutionaries can gaslight the populace to the point that they are now separated from the status quo, the people then are willing to stampede into a passing mass movement, to find a new home in the replacement, a chaotic but absolutely reassuring collectivist structure—with its totalistic, comforting doctrines—allowing people to escape from freedom as individuals, as individuals, who must think for themselves, who would then live as  atomistic individuals, and who then must rely on their own thinking and willing to create meaning in their personal lives.

 

We are now at the crossroads: perhaps a majority of Americans are now divorced from their traditions, now frustrated, now willing to get aboard the Progressive juggernaut, hurtling down the freeway of political destiny. Its final stop: the permanent erection of a Stalinist, totalitarian regime, to bind one and all, and rule us into perpetuity.

 

Here is what Eric Hoffer writes in his book, The True Believer, from Pages 40 through 44 (Hoffer will be H after this below when quoted): “

 

                                                             35

 

The milieu most favorable for the rise and propagation of mass movements is one in which a once compact corporate structure is, for one reason or another, in a state of distintegration.”

 

My response: For the current Progressive mass movement to completely overturn the American Way of life, and they are close to victory, they had to destroy the compact corporate structure that was America; now that it has been destroyed and disintegrated, they can swoop in and pick up the pieces, snapping up millions of shattered, frightened, bewildered, formerly sleepy citizens, now awake, now desperately seeking a replacement movement that they can flee quickly into, to evade thinking and living on their own. The Left have laid the groundwork for this near-victory, incrementally, slowly and carefully: victory is not far off.

 

H: “The age in which Christianity rose and spread ‘was one when large numbers of men were uprooted. The compact city states had been partly merged into one vast empire . . . and the old social and political groupings have weakened or dissolved.’ Christianity made its greatest headway in the large cities where lived ‘thousands of deracinated individuals, some of them slaves, some freedmen, and some merchants, who had been separated by force or voluntarily from their hereditary milieu.”

 

My response: Hoffer will often, in his later works, return to this point: that the forces of social and political change, attract more followers in the cities than in the rural areas. This tendency for city-dwellers to individually or collectively (in a mass movement) be predisposed to try new ideas, new technologies, new ways of living. Human change and human advancement were likely an urban phenomenon.

 

If we would seek to implement change here constantly, peacefully, without violent upheaval, yet preserving America as a laissez-faire constitutional republic, we need tens of millions of self-actualizing supercitizens working together united, and yet consciously apart, working rationally to implement gradual, useful change as millions of coordinated, united supercitizens, that work independently of centralized command and control to effect social change and stability by their coherently functioning individual movements, social, cultural and political.

 

The communities, most conducive to arrival of this this pattern on individual movements running the country well, would be suburban rather than too much rural or too urban like downtown Chicago or Philadelphia. The suburbs are the most individualistic setting for individuators, while cities are next, and rural villages or farms the least conducive to individualism and individual-living.

 

Rural people talk rugged individualism, and they live it to some degree, but there is a lot of conformity, social groupism rendering them exclusive, intolerant, and rigid, in an unappealing if conservative manner.

 

H: “In the countryside where the communal pattern was least disturbed, the new religion found the ground less favorable. The villagers (pagani) and the hearth-dwellers (heathen) clung longest to the ancient cults.”

 

My response: My Mavellonialist project, in part, is my attempt to alert people that they must wake up, stay awake, and run their own lives from now on. They must become extremely smart, wise, skilled, self-realized, self-aware, other-aware, and socially aware. Such a group of sharp, critically thinking supercitizens must be allowed to recognize that change and disruption are inevitable—always to some degree back in history, but swift and massive and bombarding, incoming is the swirling change arriving today—and that groupist, altruist-collectivist, group-living, nonindividuating citizens, when their existing corporate arrangements collapse, will stampede into destructive mass movements. To avoid that catastrophe, aided by malevolent, scheming revolutionaries, the citizens must transform and evolve into supercitizens, individualistic, egoist-individualist in morality, individual-living and individuating; these tens of millions of individuating supercitizens will coordinate their united but separate existence operations of individual movement, keeping the best of the past, and moving slowly, calmly, incrementally into the transformative future, at room temperature, without embracing revolution, terror, war or totalitarianism.

 

H: “A somewhat similar situation is to be observed in the rise of nationalist and socialist movements in the second half of the nineteenth century: ‘the extraordinary mobility and urbanization of population served to create during those decades an extraordinary number of  . . . persons uprooted from ancestral soil and local allegiance. Experiencing grave economic insecurity and psychological maladjustment, these were very susceptible to demagogic propaganda, socialist or nationalist or both.

 

The general rule seems to be that as one pattern of corporate cohesion, conditions become ripe for the rise of a mass movement and the eventual establishment of a new and more vigorous form of compact unity. When a church which was all-embracing relaxes its hold, new religious movements are likely to crystalize. H. G. Wells remarked that at the time of the Reformation people ‘objected not to the church’s power, but to its weakness . . . Their movements against the church, within it and without, were movements not for release from a religious control, but for a fuller and more abundant religious control.’”

 

My response: I wish to speculate: here is yet another example of a now familiar Hofferian pattern, a true paradox. It would seem to be conventional, intuitive wisdom that people abandon old pattern of cohesion for a younger, newer model that is more humane, more egalitarian, more permissive of personal thoughts, because its doctrines were elevated and progressive and reasonable.

 

In fact, they abandon the old after it has abandoned them by falling apart, and it is no longer cohesive, warm, and snug to live within. People will forgive oppression, exploitation, and enslavement from their ruling class without much complaint, but they will not forgive or long forbear if former warm feeling of belonging to a satisfying, collective entity, their pattern of corporate cohesion, is now lost.

 

The old cohesive pattern has failed them, so they desert in in favor of the nearby mass movement, and its proffered new pattern of cohesion, not because its doctrine is more true, coherent or sound, but because the new pattern delivers on its promise to provide a strong, tight group to live within.

 

I think that Hoffer is a metaphysical and moral moderate like I am, and his constant, repeated examples of counterintuitive, unexpected dielatheias, are philosophical evidence pointing to his philosophical moderation. Another proof that Hoffer is a moderate is his chosen lifestyle, living as a blue-collar intellectual.

 

H: “If the religious mood is undermined by enlightenment, the rising movements will be socialist, nationalist or racist. The French Revolution, which was also a nationalist movement, came as a reaction not against the vigorous tyranny of the Catholic Church and the ancient regime but against their weakness and ineffectuality. When people revolt in a totalitarian society, they rise not against the wicked of the regime but its weakness.”

 

My response: Here is another paradox: people revolt against a social arrangement, due to its weakness and declining group cohesiveness, not due to its wickedness and injustice.

 

This is another piece of evidence that people are not basically good, and that altruism is evil, and egoism is good. People revolt against what is ceasing to hurt them so much, because its growing weakness is a direct indication of its declining ability to provide them with feelings of warmth as it used to provide for them in its heyday, with its brutal but vigorous enforcement of group solidarity.

 

Once the system because decentralized, and more humane and more conducive to chance to free, self-reliant and to make something of the self, then that ancient regime is abandoned. The rationale for revolting against it is supposed idealistic hatred of unjust oppressors to cover the real reason why the masses overthrow the old social pattern, that it ceases to provide them with collective feeling of belonging, and that is unforgivable; being oppressed is a secondary justification for revolting.

 

H: “When the corporate pattern is strong, it is difficult for a mass movement to find a footing. The communal compactness of the Jews, both in Palestine and in the Diaspora, was probably one of the reasons that Christianity made little headway among them. The destruction of the temple, caused, if anything, a tightening of the communal bonds. The synagogue and the congregation received now much of the devotion which formerly flowed towards the temple and Jerusalem. Later, when the Church had the power to segregate Jews in ghettos, it gave their communal compactness an additional reinforcement, and thus, unintentionally, ensured the survival of Judaism intact through the ages. The coming of the ‘enlightenment’ undermined both orthodoxy and the ghetto walls. Suddenly, and perhaps for the first time since the days of Job and Ecclesiates, the Jew found himself an individual, terribly alone in a hostile world.”

 

My response: When the social pattern disintegrates, the individual emerges where the warm group has withered away, and individual finds it unbearable to be so terribly alone in a hostile world. Hoffer was no existentialist philosopher, but this sure seems like existentialist philosophy to me.

 

H: “There was no collective body he could blend with and lose himself in. The synagogue and the congregation had become shriveled, lifeless things, while the traditions and prejudices of two thousand years prevented his complete integration with the Gentile corporate bodies. Thus the modern Jew became the most autonomous of individuals, and inevitably too, the most frustrated. It is not surprising, therefore, that the mass movements of modern times often found in him a ready convert. The Jew also crowded the road leading to palliative frustration, such as hustling and migration. He also threw himself into a passionate effort to prove his individual worth by material achievements and creative word.”

 

My response: As modern people, become increasingly frustrated, like were the Jews 100 years ago or more, the ones described by Hoffer, the philosophy of maverization or self-realization is meant to provide these individual an opportunity to find themselves and fee fulfilled and not an longer frustrated as they lead lives making money, have something to do—meaningful work, and can be creative and intellectually thinking originally.

 

Such a creative, fulfilled population ironically will be more stable and less revolutionary, than dissatisfied modern masses, with no past collective patterns to belong to, so every shaky passing mass movement provides a potent if turbulent alternative.

 

H: “There was, it is true, one speck of corporateness he could create around himself by his own efforts, namely, the family—and he made the most of it. But in the case of the European Jew, Hitler chewed and scorched this only refuge in concentration camps and gas chambers. Thus now, more than ever, the Jew, particularly in Europe, is the ideal convert. And it seems also providential that Zionism should be on hand in the Jew’s darkest hour to enfold him in its corporate embrace and cure him of his individual isolation. Israel is indeed a rare refuge: it is home and family, synagogue and congregation, nation and revolutionary part all in one.”

 

My response: We do not want future, potential Mavellonialists, millions of supercitizens, to be cured of their individual isolation. We want them to be cured of their radical, excessive craving and dependency upon group cohesion, group-belonging, and group-identifying. To secure and uphold this social revolution, we must offer young maverizer supercitizens a chance to make lots of money, to wield substantial personal power, to encourage them to be egoists and individuators, to worship a benevolent deity, to base their living on love of Self, Others and God. And, what belonging their do in egalitarian, noncompetitive group associations should be shaped so that they feel comfort and belonging, without it turning competitive and fractious, or their old, basic desire to be selfless and to hide in the pack does not tempt them very much. Then they should have what they need.

 

H: “The recent history of Germany also furnishes an interesting example of the relation between between corporate compactness and a receptivity to the appeal of mass movements. There was no likelihood of a genuine revolutionary movement arising in Wilhelmian Germany. The Germans were satisfied with the centralized, authoritarian Kaiser regime, and even the defeat in the First World War did not impair their love for it. The revolution of 1918 was an artificial thing with little popular backing. The years of the Weimar Constitution which followed were for most Germans a time of irritation and frustration. Used as they were to commands from above and respect for authority, they found the loose, irreverent democratic order all confusion and chaos. They were shocked to realize ‘that they had to participate in government, choose a party, and pass judgment upon political matters.’ They longed for a new corporate whole, more monolithic, all-embracing and glorious to behold than even the Kaiser regime had been—and the Third Reich more than answered their prayer. Hitler’s totalitarian regime, once established, was never in danger of mass revolt. So long as the ruling Nazi hierarchy was willing to shoulder all responsibilities and make all decisions, there was not the least chance for any popular antagonism to arise. A danger point could have been reached had Nazi discipline and its totalitarian control been relaxed. What de Tocqueville says of a tyrannical government is true of all totalitarian orders—their moment of greatest danger is when they begin to reform, that is to say, when they begin to show liberal tendencies.”

 

My response: The altruist-collectivist morality and basic human nature guarantees that people will long suffer being abused, tyrannizes, enslaved, tortured, exploited, terrorized, and exploited if their in-place political system provides them with an indispensable sense of belonging to a corporate body in which the self can lose itself. How one is treated is a tertiary issue at best.

 

H: “Another and final illustration of the thesis that effective collective bodies are immune to the appeal of mass movements but that a crumbling collective pattern is the most favorable milieu for their rise is found in the relation between the collective body we know as an army and a mass movement. There is hardly an instance of an intact army giving rise to a religious, revolutionary or nationalist movement. On the other hand, a disintegrating army—whether by an orderly process of demobilization or by desertion due to demoralization—is fertile ground for a proselytizing movement. The man just out of the army is an ideal potential convert, and we find him among the early adherents of all contemporary mass movements. He feels alone and lost in the free-for-all of civilian life. The responsibilities and uncertainties of an autonomous existence weigh and prey on his mind. He longs for certitude, camaraderie, freedom from individual responsibility, and a vision of something altogether different from the competitive free society around him—and he finds all this in brotherhood and the revivalist atmosphere of a rising movement.”

 

My response: We are heading into a future where the time of the individual and living angel is at hand, and they are coming into their own. Citizens desperately, immediately, and critically require in-depth training on self-realizing and individual-living. In this way they can be isolated individuals with only themselves to lean on, and yet remain strong enough, self-assured enough to withstand living independently without fleeing into the social compact.

 

It sems as if group-living in rather stable groups in quiet times when people are not disaffected from their social order predisposes these same people to run for cover in a passing mass movement if their collective need for cover, reassurance and control is not available or existent.

 

If we can guide the masses to individually elect to self-realize and to individual-live in quiet times, then they will be strong enough in bad times when the social order is crashing down around their hands, to muddle through as individualists without rushing mindlessly into a mass movement to be controlled by a guru, demagogue, or dictator.