The Refuge

 

When people do not like themselves—none of us naturally do—it is tempting to be weak and accept that core self-assumption as one’s identity for life, immutable and insurmountable.

 

The moral agent is hampered by altruist ethics because it teaches her that self-esteem and doing what makes her happy and creative is selfish, illogical, and immoral.

 

This destructive moral theory gives people the cover they require to continue to indulge themselves, by never growing, never much loving, never taking on much. People are instinctively self-destructive, so, if they can hide in groups, enjoying their corrosive, rather empty lives as nonindividuating, nonentities, they can avoid being reminded by God, reality, and their own stunted conscience that they were to get going, leave the collective, man up and grow their talents and gifts, gifts that are manna from heaven.

 

This cunning if destructive plan to hide inside the group to avoid having to refute and act to love one’s self, to amount to something, to aid the self, others and God, is a practical plan that works. Then the group enforces and perpetuates lies that members tell themselves and each other until they believe their pathetic, mediocre boring, uninspiring lives are how common folk should and must live, and that is all they can hope for. Living these lies is to shed and to lose out on having lived a personal life, replete with potential and fantastic opportunities for person growth and significance.

 

When times become unsettled and these social patterns are smashed or disrupted sufficiently, the masses can become frustrated and join a passing cause as part of its mass movement. They are attracted to join the holy cause not due to merit or appeal of its doctrines, but rather for the perfect refuge offered, to flee into collective anonymity from a spoiled personal life, and shattered self.

 

This is what Eric Hoffer is offering on Pages 39 and 40 0f his book, The True Believer.

 

Here is Hoffer (H after this): “A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves—and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.”

 

My response: Hoffer is illustrating how the shattered individual “resolves” his inner crisis, a feeling of total revulsion and unpleasantness about the self, not by facing the self, by self-realizing by morally disciplining himself to take up his duties, by growing in love and confidence, which would then allow him to integrate all these cumulative, self-improvements so that his identity, over time would reflect a realistic, positive, earned pride in himself based upon his freely willed and freely executed plan to grow himself, and his self-esteem grows with his becoming.

 

No, the shattered self, “resolves” his identity crisis by making it a total mess, by hiding in the collective herd, utterly effacing the self, selfishly indulging his own worst instincts and preferences along the way.

 

Note how Hoffer attributes accurately that the true believer knows and spouts the absolute truths that his holy causes is alleged to grasp and represent, and this sociological fact reveals how lies and fanaticism are shown to correspond collectivist living, and are organically, inextricably linked to and productive of a life of complete human immersion in the corporate whole.

 

More moderate truth is akin and grows organically out of individual-living and self-actualized living. The emotional state of the temperate thinker is not passionate but a self-metered expression of and enjoyment of feeling without suppressing it, or displaying it with theatrical excess as an exhibitionist emoting in public.

 

Hoffer also reminds us that the holy cause, its guru, and the movement itself do offer a claim to possessing absolute truths to live by, and the joiner accepts that, but the primary motive is not the attraction of the truths, but the promise that escaping from freedom into the movement offers the frustrated initiates fleeing a lost self.

 

H: “It is obvious, therefore, that, in order to succeed, a mass movement must develop at the earliest moment a compact corporate organization and a capacity to absorb and integrate all comers. It is futile to judge the viability of a new movement by the truth of its doctrine and the feasibility of its promises. What has to be judged is its corporate organization for quick and total absorption of the frustrated. Where new creeds vie with each other for the allegiance of the populace, the one that comes with the most perfected collective framework wins.”

 

My response: Here again is a Hofferian paradox at work: one would, as an intellectual conclude intuitively that the advertising creed’s proponents would win converts, based on their superior offerings: doctrinal truth, superior logic, factual competence, evidenced-based and compelling, the appeal and workability of its future prospects. Rather, the counterintuitive reality is quite different, the opposite and unexpected: the creed, ism or cause that offers the frustrated the most radical, fanatical, perfected collective framework that emotionally and ontologically most fulfills the escapist’s desperate need to hide from the self—that creed is the one attracting the most converts, and that creed will be the most vicious and evil in its felt consequences experienced by its members and the world. Attraction to the accepted creed’s truths proposed and its vision of the future are afterthoughts for the novices coming aboard.

 

In short, the more fanatically groupist a structure that a movement offers its public, the more likely are the masses are to select the most corporate or most evil movement around. People, when not self-reforming, usually choose the evil option over the available good one, and when they are utterly self-effacing they select the most compact, cruel mass movement on the market.

 

H: “Of all the cults and philosophies which competed in the Graeco-Roman world, Christianity alone developed from its inception a compact organization. ‘No one of its rivals possessed so powerful and coherent a structure as did the church. No other gave it adherents quite the same feeling of coming into a closely knit community.’ The Bolshevik movement outdistanced all other Marxist movements in the race for power because of its tight collective organization. The National Socialist movement, too, won over all other folkish movements which pullulated in the 1920s, because of Hitler’s early recognition that a rising mass movement can never go too far in advocating and promoting collective cohesion. He knew that the chief passion of the frustrated is ‘to belong,’ and there cannot be too much cementing and binding to satisfy this passion.”

 

My response: I note again how a holy cause is imbued with the following properties that are the fuel its burns as consuming fire of evil devours all of society: fanaticism, lying, self-deception, collectivism, collective delusional narratives and myths, evil, self-hatred, absolutist but false claims to possessing perfect truth, nobility, beauty and correctness of opinion, tyranny and propensity to violence and conflict all cohere and revitalize each other as exemplified in its adherents, inside the mass movement.

 

Note that a noble cause and lovely religion like Christianity, gained worldly following and preeminence by the same immoral vehicle, of superior power of best offering the frustrated a compact ism for them to disappear into, as was so effectively fielded by the brutal, vicious, secular or pagan, totalitarian movements of the 20^th century.

 

Both the noble mass movement and the cruel mass movements gained the upper hand in the societies where they vied for power, popularity, and ultimate dominance, by the same evil, cementing technique of offering the frustrated ultra-groupist refuge accessible at that time, as the most centralized mass movement.

 

Something holy and loving—likely the guidance of the Holy Spirit--in Christianity allowed it to pull back from the brink of holocaust and destruction, unlike how the Bolsheviks and Nazis burned down the world in their day.

 

What this reminds me of today is that as a Mavellonialist offering people a frightening, bleak—also fantastic exhilarating—chance to self-realize and live as lonely, isolated Individuators, a smaller, weaker, less mentally powerful version of the Individuating Good Spirits, people still need their group contacts and enjoyment to feel emotionally rewarded and comforted.

 

This provides people with a sense of community, belonging and meaning so critical to their well-being. It is good for each individual to be along, but not healthy to be too much alone.