Eric Hoffer did not, I opine, lay out completely and unambiguously, his basic theory of who humans are and how they ought to live, at least not quite in the way that I will delineate below, but I think my version of his argument is implicit in his worldview.
Clearly, in The True Believer, Hoffer thinks that people, most people, are group-oriented, and lead quiet lives of despair and discontent with themselves and their lives. I argue (And I think Hoffer might agree.) that people will always be discontented, despairing and unhappy if they do not self-realize as living angels; this life mission is given to them by God to fulfill, and one will not know inner peace, self-esteem, contentment or ease as long as one fails to do the duty demanded of us all by God. We cannot escape our destiny, and fleeing from it, which is normal and popular, in no way relieves us of being guilty of neglecting our divinely mandated responsibility to become more and better.
We decline to live as we were intended to live as a return on Creators’ investment, that God gave us life and made us in De’s image, but we refuse to repay the favor of being born and created, declining to live and develop our talents in some small but emulative way, as individuals and individuators, as the Light Couple have done splendidly in Person. We neglect to do our duty, of our own free will, refusing to develop as great souls, per individual as the Great Spirits expect of us. Thus, our inner discontent and despair that is our postlapsarian burden is exacerbated by not self-realizing to transmute these dark, negative inner passions into solid, real pride, virtue, and accomplishment.
As long as unhappy, immoral, or slightly altruistically moral average people are embedded in a warm, compact social order that provides them with structure, meaning, doctrine and, above all, some cover inside their group from the glare of being aware of the exposed, naked self, an atom of fragility and loneness, out there facing a cold, indifferent universe, they remain discontented but not frustrated.
When their social order is shattered or blown to smithereens by change, invasion, digital technology, political upheaval, or novel holy causes now gaining social recognition, people are now left frustrated and unprotected, vulnerable, and agitated. They are experiencing the one thing that they cannot stand: direct perception of a self-standing alone. When out there alone and lonely, then one becomes profoundly, deeply, horrifying aware that one has personal identity, that one exists, that one has free will, a conscience (however stunted and primitive due to a lack of conditioning and exercise) through which seeps in whisperings from beyond, that wee, small divine voice calling us to serve our creators. The Great Spirits are reaching out to us to get going, to do and become someone special, a loving, dynamic, creative thinker, doer and constructor.
Once discontented, group-living, nonindividuating masses of people operating on the altruist-collectivist moral code are unwilling dislodged from their social order, their passionate state of frustration revs up; they regard their lives as irremediably spoiled, and they so detest themselves, that their only relief, they think, is to find shelter in a new social order to embed themselves in, and thus a passing holy cause is what they latch onto. They have an active phase mass movement to give them cover from the harsh sunlight of truth and reality; if that mass movement overthrows the existing dispensation, now they have a new social order to belong to, and remain selfless within. Its doctrine or metanarrative is their official cultural myth and story; they can now live by being asleep once more in the herd.
Then, after he wrote The True Believer, Hoffer lived another 32 years, and wrote many fine books. He settled down in San Francisco, worked on the docks and lived a normal, settled life as a recluse, bachelor, and scholar.
He thought long, hard, deeply and originally about how America and the life of Americans with their collectivist-individualist moral theory, growing out of their Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment backgrounds. Americans were the most individualistic people in the world. Their capitalist system which funded their middle-class democracy (a constitutional republic actually) was a land where prosperity, liberty, tolerance, peace, law and order and happiness were largely and readily available. America was not perfect, but it was pretty darn good compared to just about any other place on earth.
Hoffer likely concluded that Americans, naturally discontented, were the first people in the world that came close to escaping the false alternative of being discontented or frustrated; America offered its people a superior political, economic paradise whose Modernist, Judeo-Christian doctrine was a story Americans could rally around and live by. In America, for the first time, humans were offered a new, promising, uplifting mode of existing: to be somewhat contented as minimalist self-actualizers or materialistic individualists.
My new contribution is to offer that full contentment or earned self-esteem is achievable and accessible for all Americans, and anyone in any country. If we can retain our limited government, constitutional republic, and free market economics, and train the young (by inculcating in them to maverize under an egoist-altruistic moral code) to grow into anarchist-individuator, armed supercitizens, that live to serve one or several of the good deities, then these tens of millions of great souls will know contentment while still and ever becoming. Discontentment and frustration are no longer the only and morally awful options for people to live under and suffer through.
He feared that the rise of Leftist cultural Marxists and intellectuals, starting in the 50s and 60s, were replete with revolutionary schemes, which would lead to destroying this unique precious American paradise. A full-throated introduction of the replacement, Leninist totalitarianism as the political future for all Americans, would guarantee that what America offered people, modest contentment would be lost. All the neo-Bolsheviks could offer instead would be a return to discontentment, occasional frustration, altruism, unhappy group-living with human rights abuses, tyranny, terror, poverty, hunger, and mass murder.
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