Stripped

 

 

On Pages 61 and 62 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer writes of factors promoting self-sacrifice. I will quote him and then comment on his content.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                         XIII

 

                                      Factors Promoting Self-Sacrifice

 

                                    Identifying With A Collective Whole

 

                                                            44

 

To ripen a person for self-sacrifice he must be stripped of his individual identity and distinctness. He must cease to be George, Hans, Ivan, or Tadao—a human atom with an existence bounded by birth and death. The most drastic way to achieve this end is by the complete assimilation of the individual into the collective body. The fully assimilated individual does not see himself and others as human beings. When asked who he is, his automatic response is that he is a German, a Russian, a Japanese, a Christian, a Moslem, a member of a certain tribe or family. He has no purpose, worth or destiny apart from his collective body; and as long as that body lives he cannot die.”

 

My response: A fanatic or true believer is an individual that has been stripped of his individual distinctness and identity. He no longer exists as a self but is a tiny spark of muted consciousness that is one collective huge ego, the movement/the cause/the collective, blended consciousness that is that huge ego. His identity is collective; his morality is altruistic; the rights of his group, tribe, ism, religion, or nation are the only rights to be upheld and held tightly by all everywhere. His living style is group-living of complete immersion of the self in the compact whole.

 

It is interesting to compare Hoffer with Ayn Rand in several respects, but I will only offer one similarity here. They both explicitly (Rand explicitly, and Hoffer implicitly) regard self-sacrifice—especially excessive, unlimited, passionate self-sacrifice--as an evil behavior to engage in. Hoffer is an individualist in terms of ethics but the collective good interests him too. Rand is an egoist like me, but she disallows that any individual has the right to rob another citizen of her individualism or her property, and that is a negative statement of the golden rule, which is a weak version of altruist morality, but Rand and I held that belief, I think, and so she is altruistic mildly, but consistent with her fierce egoism.

 

H: “To a man utterly without a sense of belonging, mere life is all that matters. It is the only reality in an eternity of nothingness, and he clings to it with shameless despair. Dostoyevsky gave words to this state of mind in Crime and Punishment (Part II, Chapter 4). The student Raskolnikov wanders about the streets of St. Petersburg in a delirious state. He had several days ago murdered two old women with an ax. He feels cut off from all mankind. As he passes through the red-light district near Hay Market he muses: ‘if one had to live on some high rock on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live. Life whatever it may be,’”

 

My response: Whether a man is a living demon, a killer like Raskolnikov, or a true believer, sensing the sheer meaninglessness and nothingness when one embrace naked, revealed Being, it is tempting to flee into the collective, leading a degraded, humiliating life of servitude, but one is still alive, and even a cornered rat clings to life as best he can, as long as he can.

 

H: “The effacement of individual separateness must be thorough. In every act, however trivial, the individual must by some ritual associate himself with the congregation, the tribe, the party, etcetera. His joys and sorrows, his pride and confidence must spring from the fortunes and capacities of the group rather than his individual prospects and abilities. Above all, he must never feel alone. Though stranded on a desert island, he must still feel that he is under the eyes of the group. To be cast out of the group should be equivalent to being cut off from life.

 

This is undoubtedly a primitive state of being, and its most perfect examples are found among primitive tribes. Mass movements strive to approximate this primitive perfection, and we are not imagining things when the anti-individualist bias of contemporary mass movements strikes us as a throwback to the primitive.”

 

My response: Self-sacrifice is not complete if the acolyte is not 100% close to, and enmeshed in the group operation, be the physical or psychological binding one of close propinquity or one is living 50 miles away. His entire focus and interest are the group’s focus and interest; he lives if it prospers, and he dies spiritually f the cause dies or he is excommunicated from it.

 

I agree with Hoffer that the life of the true believer in a mass movement is a primitive state of being. I think primitive for Hoffer is not only meant to mean ancient, simpler, or backwards in some sense, but that such corporate existence is morally inferior, and that a pro-individualistic, modern way of living in the West is more sophisticated, more advanced, but that it is more desirable, morally superior. I think he implies that egoism and individual-living are preferential to altruism and group-living, though he only hints at such.