Too Much

 

On Page 48 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer wrote of how too many choices or too many opportunities can overwhelm this kind of misfit: “      

 

                                                                VIII

 

The Ambitious Facing Unlimited Opportunities

 

Unlimited opportunities can be as potent a cause of frustration a paucity or lack of opportunities. When opportunities are apparently unlimited, there is an inevitable deprecation of the present. The attitude is:  ‘All that I am doing or possibly can do is chicken feed compared to what is left undone.’  Such is the frustration that broods over gold camps and haunts taut minds in boon times. Hence the remarkable fact that, when joined with ruthless seeking which seems to be the mainspring of gold-hunters, land-grabbers, and other get-rich-quick enthusiasts, there is an excessive readiness for self-sacrifice and united action. Patriotism, racial solidarity, and even the preaching of revolution find a more ready response among the people who see limitless opportunities spread out before them than among those who move within the fixed limits of a familiar, orderly and predictable pattern of existence.”

 

Hoffer is brilliant at spotting misfits that are frustrated, and read to abandon the self, and flee into the collective nest. It could be that both those faced with no or little opportunity or with fantastic opportunity, sense that they are misfits, not part of regular, settled middle class society that live smoothly within, fitting in nicely within the existing order, very much content in the present, here and now.

 

The misfits mentioned above cannot mesh with the present, have given up with being part of the status quo, so they want to shed their egos, their lives, burn it all down, and climb aboard a passing mass movement, granting them the sweet port of forgetfulness, and they disappear as very unhappy persons, swallowed up into the bosom of the holy cause.