Hitchhiker

 

 

On Pages 85 and 86 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer discusses how, once a discontented person morphs into existing as a full-blown true-believer, it is very difficult to return to living as a discontented—let alone mildly contented individual—private person, ever again. I took notes on what he wrote and then will comment on them. His sense of self likely is too depleted to ever be repaired again.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “It is doubtful whether the fanatic who deserts his holy cause or is suddenly left without one can ever adjust himself to an autonomous individual existence. He remains a homeless hitchhiker on the highways of the world thumbing a ride on any eternal cause that rolls by. An individual existence, even when purposeful, seems to him trivial, futile and sinful. To live without an ardent dedication is to be adrift and abandoned. He sees tolerance as a sign of weakness, frivolity and ignorance. He hungers for the deep assurance which comes with total surrender—with the wholehearted clinging to a creed and a cause. What matter is not the content of the cause but the total dedication and the communion with a congregation. He is even ready to join in a holy crusade against his former holy cause, but it must be a genuine crusade—uncompromising, intolerant, proclaiming the one and only truth.” 

 

My response: If one is contented, then one enjoys one’s individual existence, and is not interested in or willing to surrender the self to any cause, let alone, say one must serve in the army to defend one’s nation in a just war, surrender the self completely to the collective unit for the sake of that cause.

 

The individual can be passionate and strongly idealistic but uncompromising intolerance is likely not of interest for him.

 

H: “Thus the millions of ex-fanatics in defeated Germany and Japan are more responsive to the preaching of communism and militant Catholicism than to the teaching of the democratic way of life. The great success of Communist propaganda in this case is not due its superior technique but due to the peculiar bias of the once fanatical Germans and Japanese. The spokesmen of democracy offer no holy cause to cling to and no corporate whole to lose oneself in. Communist Russia can easily turn Japanese war prisoners into fanatical Communists, while no American propaganda, however subtle and perfect, can turn them into freedom-loving democrats.”

 

My response: Because altruism and excessive self-sacrifice and misdirected self-sacrifice (to serve a holy cause and not sacrifice the present day’s self-gratification, delayed by the integrated self as self-disciplinary measure, so that the self can grow, change, originate, create, gain knowledge, invent and construct as an active, engaged maverizer) are foolish and evil, and we are born depraved, or welcome the chance to be selfless, to be unhappy, to suffer more and to degrade ourselves, were we once true believers, we would respond favorably to proponets from a new, rival holy cause, offering us a new home, a corporate whole in which to lose ourselves.

 

Because self-love, egoism and moderate approach to life is alien to us, and we avoid it like the plague,  Americans and freedom-loving democrats, would not offer us the fanatics anything tempting, ennobling or uplifting enough to force our conversion to a new way of individual living and rational operating.