Paradox

 

On Pages 79 and 80 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer describes the nature of doctrines. I quote him and then comment on what he wrote.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                           57

 

The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. No doctrine however profound and sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth. It must be the one word from which all things are and all things speak. Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense and sublime truths are all equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth.”

 

My response: here is another Hofferian paradox. An effective doctrine would be one that gains a lot of followers, so it seems intuitive that an effective doctrine that is popular or widely adopted would meaningful, well-argued, truthful, profound, and sublime. Hoffer denies that is not how humans work—at least egoless, traditional people, that when frustrated, could be enticed to run away, and go hide in passing mass movement.

 

They have been dislodged from their established compact social order, and, they are now isolated atoms, and the doctrines or stories told and sold to them as gospel under the old system, no longer comfort them, or offer them a veil of justification to keep reality, individual existence, and individual self-consciousness at a safe distance.

 

Any replacement mass movement and holy cause (be its doctrines crude, nonsensical or sublime) will do, as long as the guru or demagogue peddling it, offer a parallel doctrine that makes them feel supremely confident, fully able to sleep with their eyes open, since that doctrine is the one true faith, eternally convincing, perpetually correct, and constantly reassuring that these zombie zealots will suffer no cognitive dissidence due to conflicting internal, competing views.

 

H: “It is obvious, therefore, that in order to be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but it has to be believed in. We can be absolutely certain about things we do not understand.”

 

My response: To understand is to be intellectually moderate and conditional, to seek out and seek to find a way to live with complexity, contradictions to the stories we tell and live by, the exception that refutes the rule we live by. As moderates morally, spiritually, intellectually and ontologically, we realize how multifaceted is reality, and how little we know, the deeper we study and the more we understand.

 

As sophisticated, mature, awake intellectual moderates we will still believe, but there is always a spark of doubt, a smidgeon of agnosticism, a hesitancy to make grand generalization, sweeping, authoritative, final, and all-encompassing.

 

The true believer may or may not understand the doctrine of his holy cause, but it matters not. He is irrevocably convinced and believes wholly, that his fanatical, collectivist existence as a pure nonentity and egoless follower inside the tent of his holy cause, is the only way to live because his absolutely correct doctrine completely reassures him, due to their certitude of being right.

 

H: “A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength.”

 

My response: A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength because it has been demystified by being studied, pondered, and believed to be justified. That requires individual thought and study, and that awakens the sleepy and sleeping true believer, and to be awake as an atomistic individual is the one thing he wishes to avoid at all costs.

 

The doctrines must be the last word, must be unassailable and passionately believed by the true believer. There is nothing more to say, and the discussion is over.

 

H: “Once we understand a thing, it is as if it had originated with us.”

 

My response: To my recollection, Hoffer never talks about epistemology, but this sentence seems to be of great epistemological significance, I think. Hoffer seems to be saying that the once a citizen that understands a thing or doctrine, he reveals that he is (or is now awake, an ex-zombie worshiping a holy cause) is a thinking individual, independent from and differentiated from true-believer-ship as an egoless joiner and participant, deeply infiltrating a mass movement.

 

To understand a doctrine is to be rationally conscious, articulate, and able to describe who and what one is in relation to the world, others, and oneself. To think is to be a self-reliant, independent thinking individual. To understand a doctrine is grasp the ideas comprising it as if they were our original ideas (they are not), but he could be suggesting—perhaps not consciously—that if the independent, self-generating, self-controlling individual should be self-realizing, transforming and developing the self into great-souled consciousness, then that advanced, deep thinker will evaluate all doctrines and received information in a unique, singular manner.

 

 It matters not if the doctrine was devised by him or not, his innovative and original reaction ideationally to what he has received, will spur conversations and dialogue that grow his awareness and learning, and grow the awareness and learning of the originator of the doctrine, and human knowledge will be widened, deepened and advanced by the input from this original thinker, that does not accept that his life is spoiled, or that he needs to hide inside a movement or group to use that as a buffer or bulwark preventing God from reaching him, giving him orders to self-realize, and be kind as his life mission.

 

The true believer accepts wholeheartedly—hook, line, and sinker--a prepackaged doctrine or argument invented or polished by the demagogue or guru. That the doctrine did not originate from the mind of the true believer, so it is so that he does not have thoughtfully to receive and react originally to someone’s else’s doctrine.

 

It is his conscious, deliberate plan to eviscerate himself intellectually: That his intellectual, epistemological surrender of his personal power to think for himself, his relished abandonment  of his right to think critically for himself,  and his abject submission to the doctrinal product of another’s thinking are all proudly displayed by him as tangible, credible proof that he is now selfless, that he is no longer a separate consciousness from the collective consciousness of the people in his mass movement, and the doctrines touted by his guru are universal truths applicable to everyone, everywhere, forever.

 

H: “And, clearly, those who are asked to renounce the self and sacrifice it cannot see eternal certitude in anything which originates in the self. The fact that they understand a think fully impairs its validity and certainty in their eyes.

 

The devout are always urged to seek the absolute truth with their hearts and not their minds.”

 

My response: The fanatic, the zealot, can be devout as a religious believer or in some religious substitute, some secular holy cause. If a cause, religious or secular, is to be a non-mass movement, even if popular with millions of followers, their devotion must or near always moderated by accepting the cause’s doctrines with their heads as well as with their hearts.

 

There is likely absolute truth out there to be apprehended, but it is not easy for a human to discover it, let alone be able to know if it is genuine, or how to translate it into human words that anyone can understand. It would seem to me that believing a doctrine with one’s head and with one’s heart would allow one to seek for, discover and be able to explain near-absolute truth, and that suffices for us, and keeps us good, careful, and not out of balance with harmony required by us under natural law.

 

H: “’It is the heart which is conscious of God, not the reason.’ Rudolph Hess, when swearing in the entire Nazi party in 1934, exhorted his hearers: ‘Do not seek Adolph Hitler with your brains; all of you will find him with the strength of your hearts.’ When a movement begins to rationalize its doctrine and make it intelligible, it is a sign that its dynamic span is over; that it is primarily interested in stability. For, as will be shown later (Section 106), the stability of a regime requires the allegiance of the intellectuals, and it is to win them rather than to foster self-sacrifice in the masses that a doctrine is made intelligible.

 

If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable.”

 

My response: Notice how the guru and demagogue used radicalized intellectuals to gaslight and undercut to the doctrine, story, and ethos of the former, now overthrown social order; the masses were taught to hate and shred the old doctrine, a decision that was heart-felt and heart-willed, not rationally sponsored or rationally willed. The unthinking masses were taught self-sacrifice so that their mass movement and its leaders could harness their numbers and power to overthrow the old order, bring about the new order, and the masses would be asleep inside and supportive of the new compact dispensation.

 

Once the formerly active mass movement is now the new regime, its elite now think of stabilizing itself, so it needs to make its doctrine intelligible for the intelligentsia to understand it and support (heretics and rebels will be ruthlessly tortured, imprisoned or shot) the new order. It will not do to have intellectuals not buy into official doctrine.

 

H: “One has to get to heaven or the distant future to determine the truth of an effective doctrine. When some part of the doctrine is relatively simple, there is a tendency among the faithful to complicate it and obscure it. Simple words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer. He seems to use words as if he were ignorant of their true meaning. Hence, too, his taste for quibbling, hairsplitting and scholastic torturousness.”

 

My response: In this last, very rich paragraph, Hoffer’s epistemological moderation shows. Many--maybe most--linguistic philosophers and semantic professional thinkers endorse, by means of being clear and concise, we require rigorous definitions of terms and concepts from which one will present one’s argument or claim. These professional  do us a favor for we want to use clear, concise language to make our points.

 

On the other hand, that professors, smart and highly, specialized, will often break up into schismatic, factional rivals, with their quibbling, hairsplitting and scholastic torurousness unapologetically on full bitter display. The viciousness, the group-verus-group power struggling, the purges and censorship of heretical views—this shows that hierarchies of learning have bled out all of the individualism and humanity out of ideology-obsessed professors pushing their holy cause against professors down the hall pushing some counter doctrine.

 

In hierarchies, where the new compact order is entrenched, many broken, angry, resentful, enslaved professors act like true believers. They are utterly group oriented, sucking up to those above, and crushing students and graduate students below, depriving them of all independent thought or will, so they become clones to whatever is the locally hegemonic holy cause is that the dons are pushing.

 

Words are never 100% precise and intelligible, but that can be mostly precise and intelligible enough sufficient for doing intellectually productive work, if commonly agree-upon meanings of words and concepts, are used by a learned, articulate, well-meaning speaker or writer, so all hearing or reading it know with 95% accuracy and comprehension what he is saying and advocating.

 

 Epistemological and intellectual moderation mandates that those with slightly different wording or takes, admit that they understand and where they agree with the thinker studied on what he writes and says in good faith. All admit they know what he is saying, show where they agree and disagree, and that hairsplitting must stop. That is intellectual and moral moderation and heretics and dissidents need not be driven out any longer.

 

Often the intellectuals and professors (we saw this with CRT and DEI pushers) take some part of their doctrine that is relatively simple, and make it complicated, vague, and obscure: the aim is to impress the public, silence critics and gain support and power for one’s doctrine. Too, their aim is to reinforce to the masses that only intellectual elites can understand doctrine and these self-appointed high priests are needed to teach the masses what the word on high is and what it imports.

 

They use big and technical words to seem smart and superior so they can get and keep power, but often the content of their ideas is nonsense or harmful, not the last word on anything and not helpful to running society. When they retool simple words which are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message, they are doing this because they like to fight, and to use word manipulation to gain power over rivals, the masses, and critics.