Having Much

 

On Pages 28 and 29 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer refers to the people having much being more frustrated than those that have none and want some. This seems counterintuitive but it makes sense actually: those that have some, know that positive change is possible and have hope that tomorrow things can improve. Those that have never seen any improvement int their material condition has no confidence that things will ever improve, so they are much less likely to be frustrated and seek to get on board with the current, available mass movement.

 

Here is Hoffer (H after this): “                23

 

Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.

 

                                                              24

 

We dare more when striving for superfluities than for necessities. Often when we renounce superfluities we up lacking in necessities.”

 

My response: I don’t know why just yet, but this might be one of Hoffer’s most profound insights. If we seek superfluities, we might provoke change that installs more superfluities and more material benefits. If we give up on seeking after worthless but greatly desired superfluities, then there will be not material improvement that even yields more necessities people produced and accessible by average people. At least this is how I am interpreting this paragraph.

 

H: “                                                      25

 

There is a hope that acts as an explosive and a hope that disciplines and infuses patience. The difference is between the immediate hope and the distant hope.

 

A rising mass movement preaches immediate hope. It is intent on stirring its followers to action, and is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to act. Rising Christianity preached the immediate end of the world and the kingdom of heaven around the corner; Mohammed dangled loot before the faithful; the Jacobins promised immediate liberty and equality; the early Bolsheviki promised bread and land; Hitler promised an immediate end to Versailles bondage and work and action for all. Later, as movements come into possession of power, the emphasis is shifted to the distant hope—the dream and the vision. For an ‘arrived’ mass movement is preoccupied with preservation of the present, and it prizes obedience and patience above spontaneous action, and when we ‘hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.

 

Every established mass movement has its distant hope, its brand of dope to dull the impatience of the masses and reconcile them to their lot in life. Stalinism is as much an opium of the people as are established religion.”

 

My response: It seems when the frustrated seek escape from themselves and their spoiled lives, it is imperative that the leaders of the mass movement that they have rallied to, promise them immediate hope of escape or salvation, for them to join and make the mass movement victorious.”

 

H on Pages 29 and 30: “        The Free Poor

 

                                                           26

 

Slaves are poor; yet, where slavery is widespread and long-established, there is little likelihood for the rise of a mass movement. The absolute equality among the slaves, and the intimate communal life in slave quarters, preclude individual frustration. In a society with the institution of slavery the troublemakers are the newly enslaves and the freed slaves. In the case of the latter it is the burden of freedom which is at the root of their discontent.

 

Freedom aggravates as least as much as it alleviates frustration. Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual. And as freedom encourages a multiplicity of attempts, it unavoidably multiplies failure and frustration. Freedom alleviates frustration by making available the palliatives of action, movement, change and protest.

 

Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is the freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to avoid individual responsibility, or, in the words of an ardent young Nazi, ‘to be free from freedom.’ It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of the enormities they had committed. They felt themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement to be free from responsibility?

 

It would seem that the most fertile ground for the propagation of a mass movement is a society with considerable freedom but lacking the palliatives of frustration. It was precisely because the peasants of eighteenth century France, unlike the peasants of Germany and Austria, were no longer serfs and already owned the land that they were receptive to the appeal of the French Revolution. Nor perhaps would there have been a Bolshevik Revolution if the Russian peasant had not been free for a generation or more and had had a taste of private ownership of land.”

 

My response: Here is where Hoffer reveals some of his key ideas. Frustration is strongest with those who have seen improvements—not complete and total—in their circumstances. Where being enslaved and poor is equal and very communal, the poor remain stagnant and without the need to stir and agitate.

 

To suddenly be free is to be shaken free of collective, group intimacy, and now one is isolated, individual, atomistic, and alienated. Without the palliatives mentioned above to channel their newly felt frustration, the poor seek escape from freedom by fleeing into the mass movement, the new, artificial community offering them collective anonymity and freedom from pwer to un their own affairs.

 

Here is another true Hofferian paradox: the poor and enslaved will agitate and revolt, not because they seek justice and reform, but because the old collectivist tyranny has collapsed, and they are now no longer asleep and provided meaning and direction in a communal setting. They are kicked loose, on their own, to make things work without direction and preparation.

 

The masses seek new status quo and its narrative to nestle in with to escape frustration arising from their being forced out into the cold of individual living without the talent or training to adept deal with this new responsibility and opportunity. The masses want change, not for reasons of justice, but because the old order, for whatever reason, no longer provides them with sufficient collective warmth and direction to lose themselves into. They resent being exploited and oppressed much less than they resent their former masters no longer providing and culture and framework to give them meaning and structure in which to hide from themselves.

 

I would offer the newly awakened masses not just the palliatives against frustration that Hoffer mentions above, but they need migration and rich economic action to poor their energies into. Where a nation is poor or opportunity is meager, if the young poor were offered to self-realize, it would give them a creative outlet with which to sublimate their frustration, and this would blunt the appeal of an active, passing mass movement to lure them in.

 

H on Pages 30 and 31: “                 27

 

Even the mass movements which rise in the name of freedom against an oppressive order don not realize individual liberty once they start rolling. So long as a movement is engaged in a desperate struggle against the prevailing order or must defend itself against enemies within or without, its chief preoccupation will be with unity and self-sacrifice, which require the surrender of the individual’s will, judgment and advantage. According to Robespierre, the revolutionary government was ‘the despotism of liberty against tyranny.’

 

The important thing is that in forgetting or postponing individual liberty, the active mass movement does not run counter to the inclinations of a zealous following. Fanatics, says Renan, fear liberty more than they fear persecution. It is true that the adherents of a rising movement have a strong sense of liberation even though they live and breathe in an atmosphere of strict adherence to tenets and commands. This sense of liberation comes from having escaped the burdens, fears and hopelessness of an untenable individual existence. It is the escape which they feel as a deliverance and redemption. The experience of vast change, too, conveys a sense of freedom, even though the changes are executed in a frame of strict discipline. It is only when the movement has passed its active stage and solidified into a pattern of stable institutions that individual liberty has a change to emerge. The shorter the active phase, the more will it seem that the movement itself, rather than its termination, made possible the emergence of individual freedom. This impression will be the more pronounced the more tyrannical the dispensation which the mass movement overthrew and supplanted.”

 

My response: It seems that the arrival and arising of the liberated individual upon the political and cultural scene, can only take place if change is achieved without a mass movement in its active phase, or during the time that the mass movement is active, because the movement itself disallows any individual free will or free thought among its members and adherents. What is demanded and gotten is their total obedience, conformity, enthusiasm, group thinking and utter willingness to unite and sacrifice the self for the cause.

 

As the cause demands this personal denial of the individual self and an independent existence, the adherents seek this loss of self and independence, fear personal liberty far more than collective bondage and mind control.

 

It seems that Hoffer is on the side of individuals and free will and free thought; I suspect he allows that a spoiled, frustrated life is not an inevitability for anyone, for all have the strength, right, obligation talents and potential to lead a person life of individuation and completion, satisfying, solid and meaningful. None lacked the ability, but many give up on individual-living too soon and too willingly.

 

All the elements of my egoist morality are embedded implicitly here in Hoffer’s philosophy of mass movement: that humans are not basically good, and that self-love and self-esteem are what is good and self-loathing and a lack of self-esteem are what is evil; that truth and liberty are present and dominant in the thinking of an isolated individual with the resources or integrated set of values giving him the confidence and skill to build a life for himself; that collectivist living and morality are sinful and undesirable.

 

This is so whether the group-living, nonindividuating joiners in their hierarchies, their herds, their tribes, their class system, supporting and finding their personal escape from freedom in their popular, adored web of interactive lies, their political and social tyranny endured and lived, out of harmony and fanatical, whether groupist and asleep in settled society or as uprooted, busy zombies sleep-walking their way through history in their mass movements in their active phases.

 

H on Pages 31 and 32: “Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom.”

 

My response: This point requires much attention and amplification: those that are egoist and self-realizing love and can handle their freedom and managing their own affairs, for maximum legal and social personal liberty allowable must be the new social norm.

 

Those—none lack the talent or right to become in freedom--that do not possess the confidence and know-how to accept as their birthright that they have a right to self-realize as a living angel as their telos, these nonindividuators and joiners will hide in various collective agencies, group-living and group-identifying to hide from their God and conscience for rebelling against the divine call to maverize and be all that one can be.

 

These joiners, failing at living, will push equality and fraternity over liberty, and the maverizers will push liberty over fraternity and equality.

 

H: “If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.”

 

My response: Again, the inferiority is real, but it is not innate, but it is a consequence, a lack of effort or lack of merit, much more than it is an issue of talent or superior breeding.

 

H: “They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society. The oppressed, oppressed by their shortcomings, blame their failures on existing restraints. Actually their innermost desire is for an end to the ‘free for all.’ They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society.”

 

My response: We all have to man up and blame no one for our failure. We must and can do better and well enough to compete and flourish in a free society. We must not seek to eliminate liberty, but must rise up and embrace liberty and opportunity, making something of ourselves and our lives.

 

H: “                                                       29

 

Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.

 

Equality without freedom creates a more stable, social pattern than freedom without equality.”

 

My response: America has real, substantive equality, but freedom is the passion of a small minority, and we have to train our young to self-realize so that personal liberty is then their most emphasized and sought political property and demand. If a society of radically free supercitizens to emerge, yet they are rational, moderate, logical, and cooperative, they could get along and cooperate as political equals in our free market constitutional republic.

 

H on Pages 32 and 33: “                                     The Creative Poor

 

                                                        30

 

Poverty when coupled with creativeness is usually free of frustration. This is true of the poor artisan skilled in his trade and the poor writer, artist and scientist in the full possession of creative powers. Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves as the continuous ability to create; to see things grow up and develop under our hand, day in, day out. The decline of the handicrafts in modern times is perhaps one of the causes for the rise of frustration and the increased susceptibility of the individuals to mass movements.”

 

My response: Professors in packs in their hierarchies with nothing to make with their hands: this makes them fierce partisans, and rabid clique members, and they eagerly operate, run, and follow the postmodernist Marxist mass movement of today.

 

H: “It is impressive to observe how with a fading of the individual’s creative powers there appears a pronounced inclination towards joining a mass movement. Here the connection between the escape from an ineffectual self and the responsiveness to mass movements is very clear. The slipping author, artist, scientist—slipping because of a drying-up of the creative flow within—drifts sooner or later into the camps of ardent patriots, race mongers, uplift promoters and champions of holy causes. Perhaps the sexually impotent are subject to the same impulse.  (The role of the noncreative is the Nazi movement is discussed in Section 111.)”

 

H on Pages 33 and 34: “     The Unified Poor

 

                                                            31

 

The poor who are members of a compact group—a tribe, a closely knit family, a compact racial or religious group—are relatively free of frustration and hence are almost immune to the appeal of a proselytizing mass movement. The less a person sees himself as an autonomous individual capable of shaping his own course and is solely responsible for his station in life, the less likely he is to see his poverty as evidence of his own inferiority. A member of a compact group has a higher ‘revolting point’ than an autonomous individual. It requires more misery and personal humiliation to goad him to revolt. The cause of revolution in a totalitarian society is usually a weakening of the totalitarian framework rather than resentment against oppression and distress.”

 

My response: Both creative individuals and nonindividuals  in a very compact group are unlikely to succumb to the appeal and wiles of agents of a proselytizing mass movement.        When groupists or joiners are not creative enough to individuate, or not ensconced deeply enough in some sort of collective tribe or arrangement due to social change, they are susceptible to feel frustrated and seek to overthrow their current dispensation and metanarrative, seeking a mass movement whose holy cause will provide them with values, meaning and a metanarrative for them to blindly worship and adhere too, a vehicle for losing the self in the collective, and wiping out any memory of their spoiled, suffering existence as isolated individuals.

 

H: “The strong ties of the Chinese probably kept them for ages relatively immune to the appeal of mass movements. ‘The European who dies for his country’ has behaved in a manner that is unintelligible to a Chinaman (sic), because his family is not directly benefited—is indeed damaged by the loss of one of its members.’ On the other hand, he finds its understandable and honorable ‘when a Chinaman, in consideration of so much paid to his family, consents to be executed as a substitute for a condemned criminal.

 

It is obvious that a proselytizing mass movement must break down all existing group ties if it is to win a considerable following.  The ideal potential convert is the individual who stands alone, who has no collective body he can blend with and lose himself in and so mask the pettiness, meaninglessness and shabbiness of his individual existence. Where a mass movement finds the corporate pattern of family, tribe, country, etcetera, in a state of disruption and decay, it moves in and gathers the harvest. Where it finds the corporate pattern in good repair, it must attack and disrupt. On the other hand, when as in recent years in Russia we see the Bolshevik movement bolstering family solidarity and encouraging national, racial and religious cohesion, it is a sign that the movement has passed its dynamic phase, that it has already established its new pattern of life, and that its chief concern is to hold and preserve that which it has attained. In the rest of the world where communism is still a struggling movement, it does all it can to disrupt the family and discredit national, racial and religious ties.”

 

My response: If the individual standing alone is an anarchist individuators supercitizens, he will be least vulnerable to being converted by adherents of a mass movement, but such paragons of individualism are historically rare, but we through Mavellonialism should be able to provide the young with the wisdom and right values so they produce and support steady, moderate, constant change without mass movement, uprising and revolts being necessary or inevitable.