Rape

 

I was driving my truck around this morning to charge up a dead battery after boosting it, so I listened to Dennis Prager for a few minutes. This solid Jewish sage never fails to impress me. He was very upset that some event at Berkeley was shut down by campus security because protesters outside (some of whom were likely Muslim and others were young Leftists), banging on the glass doors to interrupt the event, swearing and casting racial slurs against the Jewish speaker.

 

Rather than arrest the vicious protesters violating the free speech rights of the speaker and audience of the event, campus security “solved” the problem by closing the event and escorting the audience out the back door. Prager was angry that the innocent attenders of the event and the speaker needed to be removed but not the protesters. I agree wholeheartedly.

 

Prager used the analogy that if some women were threatened with rape, the police reaction was to escort the women away, rather than arresting the criminal assailants threatening them.

 

Berkeley violated the rights of the victims, and indirectly rewards the anti-Semitic thugs that shut the campus event down, and they in essence are rewarded for Jew-hating and suppressisng one more campus free speech events.

 

Prager noted that countries that engage in anti-Semitic activity all disappear as a country. He may feel that is God’s punishment to any people that condone going after the Jews, God’s chosen people. I think Prager may be right.

 

Prager also defined rape as violation, of two types, sexual violation and in another Leftist kind of abuse, the rape of language by misusing deliberately words until the word is meaningless.   The anti-Semites accused Israelis of genocide when they are defending their rights to exist in Gaza against racist, Hamas killers and rapists did massacre on 10/7/23. The word genocide has been raped by the Left of meaning, and it is a word of moral importance, not to be cheapened, devalued, distorted, and used to cast aspersion against innocent parties.

 

Remember, that when Prager condemns Leftist evil and foolishness, Leftism is a holy cause, and its backers are true believers, and Prager’s criticism of and indignation against them analogously applies to any other holy cause operating or of the future, and yet unannounced. Therefore, any other guru or demagogue leading a mass movement would rape language too, and did the Communists and Nazi propagandists.

 

I have some additional examples of Leftists and other ideologues raping beyond sexual rape of women and men (Rape is a routine humiliation of dissidents by the Iranian secret police.) and language rape. Leftists also rape the truth, and they commit soul-rape routinely.

 

Soul-rape is the violation of a person’ soul, psyche, or consciousness. Soul-rape is done by the individual to themselves and to others and to each other. In any hierarchy or any institution or class system, the joiner agrees masochistically to—and enjoys--being soul-raped by someone up above him with more power, popularity and money, and, in each soul-raped victim, now turns victimizer, sadistically enjoys soul-raping those him upon those below him in power, rank and popularity.

 

The Good Spirits are individualists and individuators more than they are groupists and nonindividuators, but they are both. They love themselves and love others, so in this way the souls of each living person are treated by the Good Spirits with dignity, fairness, respect, kindness, equality, and courtesy.

 

If the young are well-treated in this way, their self-esteem and self-love will make them beautiful souls when still teenagers. Once they find a benevolent deity to worship and serve as individuators, then this telos will allow them to live as creative great souls for a lifetime.

Some Factors

 

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Hoffer C

 

Some Factors

 

From Pages 155 to 157 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer writes of some factors that prolong or shorten the life span of a mass movement in its active phase. I quote him and then comment on his content.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “ 

 

                        Some Factors Which Determine The Length Of The Active Phase

 

A mass movement with a concrete, limited objective is likely to have a shorter active phase than a movement with a nebulous, indefinite objective. The vague objective is perhaps indispensable for the development of chronic extremism. Said Oliver Cromwell: ‘A man never goes so far as when he does not know whether he is going.’”

 

My response: It seem that a particular, limited objective is a moderating influence on a fanatical, destructive mass movement. It seems that limited chaos, or disciplined liberty, or lawful personal liberty are really individual controls of unleashed chaos, whereby the individual creates cosmos by rationally and sentimentally managed the clash between his chaotic and structure-imposing predilections and urges.

 

The mass movement lasts longest, is the most destructive and demonically unleashed upon suffering humanity, when its handlers have no limiting objective to shut it down after reaching that objective. Pure chaos, which a prolonged mass movement is, is a collectivity of true believers and fanatic, pure altruists, is their objective, and burning down the world is their aim, and they will reach it if not prevented from carrying out this holocaust.

 

H: “When a mass movement is set in motion to free a nation from tyranny, either domestic or foreign, or to resist an aggressor, or to renovate a backward society, there is a natural point of termination once the struggle with the enemy is over or the process of reorganization is nearing completion. On the other hand, when the objective is an ideal society of perfect unity and selflessness—whether it be the City of God, a Communist heaven on earth, or Hitler’s warrior state—the active phase is without an automatic end. Where unity and self-sacrifice are indispensable for the normal functioning of society, everyday life is likely either to be religiofied (common tasks turn into holy causes) or militarized. In either case, the pattern developed by the active phase is likely to be fixed and perpetuated.”

 

My response: What Hoffer describes in the paragraph above sounds like what is going on in North Korea even today. Where the active phase of a mass movement is the dispensation of an established society, pure unity of all members of society into a mass movement is a socially, culturally, legally and institutionalized going and ongoing concern. Here is where self-sacrifice is purest, and the evil ethics of altruism-collectivism is exemplified at its totalitarian worst. The future of humanity is the North Koreanization of life across the globe should the Leftists or cultural Marxism establish their world government of global reach.

 

H: “Jacob Burckhardt and Ernest Renan were among the very few in the hopeful second half of the nineteenth century who sensed the ominous implications lurking in the coming millennium.”

 

My response: Jordan Peterson has repeatedly shown how prophetic Friedrich Nietzsche was too in anticipating the rise of totalitarianism, mass movements and world war in the 20^th century, now that he thought God was dead, and people would worship any deadly replacement, any empty but beguiling secular ideology or religious substitute that arose, because they need some ism to worship, to provide some kind of meaning for them.

 

H: “Burckhardt saw the militarized society: ‘I have a premonition that sounds like utter folly, and yet which positively will not leave me: the military state must become one great factory . . . What must logically come is a definite and supervised stint of misery, with promotions and n uniform, daily begun and ended to the sound of drums.’ Renan’s insight went deeper. He felt that socialism was the coming religion of the Occident, and that being a secular religion it would lead to a religiofication of politics and economics.”

 

My response: Dennis Prager has referred to Leftism or socialism as the most powerful, pervasive secular religion or creed of the last 100 years.

 

H: “He also feared a revival of Catholicism as a reaction against the new religion: ‘Let us tremble. At this very moment, perchance, the religion of the future is in the making; and we have no part in it! . . . Credulity has deep roots. Socialism may bring back by complicity of Catholicism a new Middle Age, with barbarians, churches, eclipses of liberty and individuality—in a word, of civilization.’”

 

My response: I suspect that Ernest Renan deeply influenced Hoffer’s interest in and deep comprehension of the fanatical state of mind that compels people to flee their despised private selves into the arms of awaiting demagogues and gurus pedaling a mass movement.

 

If I have time one day—I likely never will—it would be interesting and revealing to compare and contrast Hoffer with Renan, Gustave LeBon and other psychologists, thinkers and philosophers that study and reflect upon the competition between and among humans as individualists and as their being and living as joiners in various groups.

 

 

 

 

Interference

 

From Page 153 to 155 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer describes how the existence and operation of a mass movement in a society widely, deeply damages the creative process. I quote Hoffer and then comment on his content.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                            118

 

The interference of an active mass movement with the creative process is deep-reaching and manifold: 1) The fervor it generates drains the energies which would have flowed into creative work. Fervor has the same effect on creativeness as dissipation. 2) It subordinates creative work to the advancement of the movement. Literature, art and science must be propagandistic and they must be ‘practical’. The true-believing writer, artists or scientist does not create to express himself, or to save his soul or discover the true and the beautiful. His task, as he sees it, is to warn, to advise, to urge, to glorify, and to denounce. 3) Where a mass movement opens vast fields of action (war, colonization, industrialization), there is an additional drain of creative energy. 4) The fanatical state of mind by itself can stifle all forms of creative work. The fanatic’s disdain for the present blinds him to the complexity and uniqueness of life. The things which stir the creative worker seem to him either trivial or corrupt. ‘Our writers must march in serried ranks, and he who steps off the road to pick flowers is like a deserter.’ These words of Konstantine Simonov echo the thought and the very words of fanatics through the ages. Said Rabbi Jacob (first century, A.D): ‘He who walks in the way . . . and interrupts his study (of the Torah) saying: “How beautiful is this tree’ (or) ‘How beautiful is the ploughed field . . .  has made himself guilty against his own soul.’ St. Bernard of Clerveaux could walk all day by the lake of Geneva and never see the lake. In Refinement of the Arts David Hume tells of the monk ‘who, because the windows of his cell opened onto a noble prospect, made a covenant with his eyes never to turn that way.’ The blindness of a fanatic is a source of strength (he sees no obstacles), but it is the cause of intellectual sterility and emotional monotony.”

 

My response: Hoffer notes above how fervor and dissipation both drain off the energies that would flow into personal creative effort. Thus, passionate ardor and the life of hedonic self-indulgence are group-behaviors and drain off the will and capacity for personal striving and achieving.

 

Personal creative work is subordinated to service to the holy cause; the plentiful opportunity for mass action, pulls individuals away from private pursuit of creative work. The fanatical state of mind and his blind faith render him unable to think originally or with nuanced, sublime sentiment.

 

H: “The fanatic is also mentally cocky, and hence barren of new beginnings. At the root of his cockiness is the conviction that life and the universe conform to a simple formula, his formula. He is thus without fruitful intervals of groping, when the mind is as it were—ready for all manner of new reactions, new combinations and new beginnings.”

 

My response: When one has all the answers, one is cut off from the flashes of intuition, those delightful, suggestive whisperings that one’s personal muse, one’s psychic connection to the Good Spirits, sends to her that listens, and her receptiveness to such stimuli to her inner consciousness increases the quality and frequency of such incoming flashes of insight.

 

H: “                                                         119

 

When an active mass movement displays originality, it is usually an originality of application and scale. The principles, methods, techniques, et cetera which a mass movement applies and exploits are usually the product of a creativeness which was or still is active outside the sphere of the movement. All mass movements have that unabashed imitativeness which we have come to associate with the Japanese. Even in the field of propaganda the Nazis and Communists imitate more than they originate. They sell their brand of the holy cause the way the capitalist advertiser sells his brand of soap or cigarettes. Much that strikes us new in the methods of the Nazis and Communists stems from the fact that they are running (or trying to run) vast territorial empires the way a Ford or DuPont run his industrial empire. It is perhaps true that the success of the Communist experiment will always depend on the unfettered creativeness proceeding in the outside non-Communist world. The brazen men in the Kremlin think it is a magnanimous concession when they say that communism and capitalism can continue for long side by side. Actually, if there were no free societies outside the Communist orbit, they might have found it necessary to establish them by ukase.”

 

My response: Hoffer definitely reinforces his assertion here, the claim that the active mass movement is about destruction and sterile thinking. Where they show originality, it is usually an originality of application and scale, not the personal inventiveness and innovation of the lonely scientist working, hypothesizing, and experimenting in his lab. Hoffer also insists that mass movements imitate more than they originate because the lack of individualism and individual consciousness (the well-springs of creative work in a populace) insisted upon by the guru running the mass movement are conditions that kill creative work in the collective assembled, so by imitating outsiders, at least the true believers have some ideas to utilize.

 

Likely the leaders of a mass movement imitate and steal ideas, innovations, technologies and concepts from free peoples, but also are expert at espionage to get access to such creative work, not given up willingly by free people or free nations.

 

 

Good And Bad

 

On Pages 151 to 153 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer writes of good and bad mass movements. I quote him and then comment on his comment.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                             XVIII

 

                                      Good and Bad Mass Movements

 

                        The Unattractiveness and Stability of the Active Phase

 

                                                                117

 

This book concerns itself chiefly with the active phase of mass movements—the phase molded and dominated by the true believer. It is in this phase that mass movements of all types often manifest the common traits we have tried to outline. Now it seems true that no matter how noble the original purpose of a movement and however beneficent the end result, its active phase is bound to strike us as unpleasant if not evil. The fanatic who personifies this phase is usually an unattractive human type. He is ruthless, self-righteous, credulous, disputatious, petty and rude. He is often ready to sacrifice relatives and friends for his holy cause. The absolute unity and readiness for self-sacrifice which give an active movement its irresistible drive and enable it to undertake the impossible are usually achieved at a sacrifice of much that is pleasant and precious to the autonomous individual.”

 

My response: Ayn Rand is ridiculed for promoting human selfishness, and likely she does do some degree, but mostly I think what she refers to as selfishness is rationally egoistic or enlightened self-interest. She is little interested in or promoting petty, mean, personal selfishness.

 

People do condemn her too for referring to altruism as evil because it requires sacrifice one’s own interest and even one’s life in service to others and their interests.

 

What I do not hear the proponents of altruist-collectivist morality taking responsibility for admitting to the moral flaws of altruist theory: how can altruism be beneficent when a fanatic is willing to sacrifice his family and friends for his holy cause, and it is well known that this betrayal of family and friends for the sake of Communism and Father Joe did take place routinely in Stalinist Russia?

 

Mass-movementized true believers are capable of vicious acts, including giving their lives for a meretricious cause. This drastic self-sacrifice for the sake of a mediocre cause is ghastly. Why is there so little prominent altruist stinging condemnation of altruist excesses, sins and corruption, as instantiated among group-oriented members of society, in the active phase of a mass movement?

 

 

H: “No mass movement, however sublime its faith and worthy its purpose, can be good if its phase is overlong, and, particularly, if it is continued after the movement is in undisputed possession of power.”

 

My response: One thinks of Mao and his Cultural Revolution that he kicked loose in 1966 as an example of a terribly destructive mass movement revitalized long after Mao and Communism were dominant in China.

 

H: “Since mass movements as we consider more or less beneficent—the Reformation, the Puritan, French and American Revolution, and many of the nationalist movements of the past hundred years—had active phases that were relatively short, though while they lasted they bore, to a greater or lesser degree, the imprint of the fanatic. The mass movement leader who benefits his people and humanity knows not only how start a movement, but, like Gandhi, when to end its active phase.”

 

My response: Here seems to be historical and sociological proof that fanaticism, revolution, social order destruction, lawlessness and chaos—all introduced into society by a mass movement—are evil by nature, and turn cruelly, irrationally evil if the movement goes on to long.

 

This reminds us that moderation is generally good and that extremism is generally evil, and it also reveals that America and Hoffer are generally moderate, classical liberals, not liking fanaticism and revolution for its own sake, nor mass movements.

 

H: “Where a mass movement preserves for generations the pattern shaped by its active phase (as in the case of the militant church through the Middle Ages), or where by a successive accession of fanatical proselytes its orthodoxy is continually strengthened (as in the case of Islam), the result is an era of stagnation—a dark age. Whenever we find a period of genuine creativeness associated with a mass movement, it is almost always a period which either precedes or, more often, follows the active phase. Provided the active movement is not too long and does not involve excessive bloodletting and destruction, its termination when it is abrupt, often releases a burst of creativeness. This seems to be true both when the movement ends in triumph (as in the case of the Dutch Rebellion) or when it ends in defeat (as in the case of the Puritan Revolution). It is not the idealism and the fervor of the movement which are the cause of any cultural renascence which may follow it, but rather the abrupt relaxation of collective discipline and the liberation of the individual from the stifling atmosphere of blind faith and the disdain of his self and the present. Sometimes the craving to fill the void left by the lost and deserted holy cause becomes a creative impulse.”

 

My response: This paragraph is very rich in terms of validating the historical law of moderation. If the active phase of a mass movement is not too bloody, excessive, or prolonged, before and after it could be a time of creative renascence in a society: one cultural extreme (destruction) leads to cultural creativity.

 

 

Note that hyper-collectivism (the pure nonindiviudating and total group-living) is directly linked to mass movements and moral and cultural destruction; in other words, collectivism and excessive altruism are anti-individualistic, anti-love and is pure evil.

 

Here is another Hofferian paradox: Things get better and more creative as the active phase of the mass movement wanes; it is not idealism and fervor of the moment that leads to creative outburst, as one would intuitively presume and conclude; rather, the creative outburst is produced and is a direct product of the abrupt ending of mass movement frenzy and the societal-wide relaxation of collective discipline and mass lust for destruction, chaos, lawlessness, and violence; the individual is liberated from hyper-group living and utter nonindividuating, so the free, creative, rational, moderated individual can again gain in self-acceptance, independent thought and being reconciled to himself and his conscious agency in the present. This leads to creative outburst and love of self and love generally.

 

The loss of personal blind faith in the lost holy cause now requires the frustrated individual, left alone again, to be reconciled with the self, and create meaning in her life, to fill the value and myth void in her life and soul.

 

H: “The active phase itself is sterile. Trotsky knew that ‘Periods of high tension in social passions leave little room for contemplation and reflection. All the muses—even the plebian muse of journalism in spite of her sturdy hips—have hard sledding in the times of revolution.’”

 

My response: The active phase of a mass movement is intellectually and creatively sterile because individualism and personal consciousness, separate from collective, communal consciousness, has been eliminated. Individuals in society and society globally cannot be creative unless people are allowed to individuate apart from enforced conformity to self-forgetfulness, and self-sacrificing one’s own joys, pursuits, and projects for the sake of being one in voice, thought and spirit with the collective consciousness of the group, and its will.

 

Now activity, especially among capitalist individualists, merchants, professionals or blue collar workers, is one one kind and is not inconsistent with heading personally down the path of personal self-realization.

 

But mindless but intense, focused pack action, performed to obtain the goals of the holy cause, and the resultant, complete immersion of the self into the collective consciousness and its enforced will, especially in the active phase of a mass movement, leads to a deadening and stifling of personal muse.

 

Self-realization is more fecund, original, present, bursting, and potential if the individual seeking to maverize is a person that is an active capitalist that still spends three hours a day (every day) in quiet, uninterrupted, personally directed, open-ended contemplation and reflection. The maverizer, that living paradox of commercial action and intellectual and artistic endeavoring, will astound herself and the world with her creative production, God will be pleased that she is living as commanded by God to live.

 

H: “On the other hand, Napoleon and Hitler were mortified by the anemic quality of literature and art produced in their heroic age and clamored for masterpieces that would be worthy of the mighty deeds of the times. They had not an inkling that the atmosphere of an active movement cripples or stifles the creative spirit. Milton, who in 1640 was a poet of great promise, with a draft of Paradise Lost in his pocket, spent twenty sterile years of pamphlet writing while he was up to his neck in the ‘sea of noises and hoarse disputes’ which was the Puritan Revolution. With the Revolution dead and himself in disgrace, he produced Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.”

 

My response: The Napoleons and Hitlers of the world cannot have it both ways: they can run a mass movement, or lead a society that rewards maximal personal expression, so that maverizing free individuators can produce great art and great culture, a credit to a freed, individuating people.

 

If we want a time of peace, lawfulness, cooperation, prosperity and freedom, a society of supercitizen individuators would be a society of great moral and spiritual goodness, and powerful production of innovation and artistic excellence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Running The Revolution

 

From Page 148 to 151 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer describes how the man of action runs the revolution after it is victorious. I quote him and then comment on his content.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                               115

 

The chief preoccupation of a man of action when he takes over an ‘arrived’ movement is to fix and perpetuate its unity and readiness for self-sacrifice. His ideal is a compact, invincible whole that functions automatically. To achieve this he cannot rely on enthusiasm, for enthusiasm is ephemeral. He inclines, therefore, to rely mainly on drill and coercion. He finds the assertion that all men are cowards less debatable than all men are fools, and, in the words of Sir John Maynard, inclines to found the new order on the necks of people rather than in their hearts. The genuine man of action is not a man of faith but a man of law.

 

Still, he cannot help but be awed by the tremendous achievements of faith and spontaneity in the early days of the movement when a mighty instrument of power was conjured out of the void. The memory of it is still extremely vivid. He takes, therefore, great care to preserve in the new institutions an impressive façade of faith, and maintains an incessant flow of fervent propaganda, though he relies mainly of the persuasiveness of force. His orders are worded in pious vocabulary, and the old formulas and slogans are continually on his lips. The symbols of faith are carried high and given reverence. The men of words and fanatics of the early period are canonized. Though the steel fingers of coercion make themselves felt everywhere and great emphasis is placed on mechanical drill, the pious phrases and the fervent propaganda give to coercion a semblance of persuasion, and to habit a semblance of spontaneity. No effort is spared to present the new order as the glorious communication of the hopes and struggles of the early days.

 

The man of action is eclectic in the methods he uses to endow the new order with stability and permanence. He borrows from near and far and from friend and foe. He even goes back to the old order which preceded the movement and appropriates from it many techniques of stability, thus unintentionally establishing continuity with the past. The institution of an absolute dictator which is characteristic of this stage is as much a deliberate employment of a device as the manifestation of a sheer hunger for power. Byzantinism is likely to be conspicuous both at the birth and the decline of an organization. It is the expression of a desire for a stable pattern, and it can be used either to give shape to the as yet amorphous, or to hold together that which seems to be falling part. The infallibility of the bishop of Rome was propounded by Irenaeus (second century) in the earliest days of the papacy, and by Pius IX in 1870, when the papacy seemed to be on the brink of extinction.

 

Thus the order evolved by a man of action is a patchwork. Stalin’s Russia is a patchwork of bolshevism, czarism, nationalism, pan-Slavism, dictatorship and borrowings from Hitler, and monopolistic capitalism. Hitler’s Third Reich was a conglomerate of nationalism, racialism, Prussianism, dictatorship and the borrowings from fascism, bolshevism, Shintoism, Catholicism and the ancient Hebrews. Christianity, too, when after the conflicts and dissensions of the first centuries it crystallized into an authoritarian church, was a patchwork of old and new and of borrowings from friend and foe. It patterned its hierarchy after the bureaucracy of the Roman Empire, adopted portions of the antique ritual, developed the institution of an absolute leader, and used every means to absorb all elements of life and power.”

 

                                                              116

 

In the hands of a man of action the mass movement ceases to be a refuge from the agonies and burdens of an individual existence and becomes a means of self-realization for the ambitious. The irresistible attraction which the movement now exerts on those preoccupied with their own careers is a clear-cut indication of the drastic change in its character and of its reconciliation with the present. It is also clear that the influx of these career men accelerates the transformation of the movement into an enterprise. Hitler, who had a clear vision of the whole course of a movement even while he was nursing his infant National Socialism, warned that a movement retains its vigor only so long as it can offer nothing in the present—only ‘honor and fame in the eyes of posterity,’ and that when it is invaded by those who want to make the most of the present ‘the mission of such a movement is done for.’

 

The movement at this stage still concerns itself with the frustrated—not to harness their discontent in a deadly struggle with the present, but to reconcile them with it; to make them patient and meek. To them it offers the distant hope, the dream and the vision. Thus at the end of its vigorous span the movement is an instrument of power for the successful and an opiate for the frustrated.”

 

                       

Preserver

 

From Page 146 to 148 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer, describes how practical men of action are needed to take over the reins of government from fanatics to preserve the newly installed dispensation. I quote Hoffer and then comment on his content.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                             XVII

 

                                               The Practical Men of Action

 

A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated by men of action.”

 

My response: Noe that practical men of action is Hoffer’s technical phrase defining the politicians and administrators that consolidate and preserve the revolution once it is the new government and social order.

 

H: “It is usually an advantage to a movement, and perhaps prerequisite for its endurance, that these roles should be played by different men succeeding each other as conditions require. When the same person or persons (or the same type of person) leads a movement from its inception to maturity, it usually ends in disaster. The Fascist and Nazi movements were without a successive change in leadership, and both ended in disaster. It was Hitler’s fanaticism, his inability to settle down and play the role of a practical man of action, which brought ruin to his movement. Had Hitler died in the middle 1930s, there is little doubt that a man of action of the type of Goering would have succeeded to leadership and the movement would have survived. There is of course the possibility of a change in character. A man of words might change into a genuine fanatic or into a practical man of action. Yet the evidence points that such metamorphoses are temporary, and that sooner or later there is a reversion to the original type. Trotsky was essentially a man of words—vain, brilliant, and an individualist to the core. The cataclysmic collapse of an Empire and Lenin’s overpowering will brought him into the camp of the fanatics. In the civil war he displayed unequaled talents as an organizer and general. But the moment the strain relaxed at the end of the civil war, he was a man of words again, without ruthlessness and dark suspicions, putting his trust in words rather than in relentless force, and allowed himself to be pushed aside by the crafty fanatic Stalin.

 

Stalin himself is a combination of fanatic and man of action, with the fanatic tinge predominating. His disastrous blunders—the senseless liquidation of the kulaks and their offspring, the terror of the purges, the pact with Hitler, the clumsy meddling with the creative work of writers, artists and scientists—are the blunders of a fanatic. There is small chance that the Russians will taste the joys of the present while Stalin, the fanatic, is in power.

 

Hitler, too, was a fanatic, and his fanaticism vitiated his remarkable achievements as a man of action.

 

There are, of course, rare leaders such as Lincoln, Gandhi, even F.D.R., Churchill and Nehru. They do not hesitate to harness man’s hungers and fears to weld a following a make it zealous unto death in the service of a holy cause; but unlike a Hitler, a Stalin, or even a Luther or Calvin, they are not tempted to use the slime of frustrated souls as mortar to build a new world. The self-confidence of these rare leaders is derived from and blended with their faith in humanity, for they know that no one can be honorable unless he honors mankind.

 

                                                               114

 

The man of action saves the movement from the suicidal dissensions and the recklessness of fanatics. But his appearance usually marks the end of the dynamic phase of the movement. The war with the present is over. The genuine man of action is intent not on renovating the world but on possessing it. Whereas the life breath of the dynamic phase was protest and a desire for drastic change, the final phase is chiefly preoccupied with administering and perpetuating the power won.

 

With the appearance of the man of action the explosive vigor of the movement is embalmed and sealed in sanctified institutions. A religious movement crystallizes in a hierarchy and a ritual; a revolutionary movement, in organs of vigilance and administration; a nationalist movement, in governmental and patriotic institutions. The establishment of a church makes the end of the revivalist spirit; the organs of triumphant revolution liquidate the revolutionary mentality and technique; the governmental institutions of a new or revived nation put an end to chauvinistic belligerence. The institutions freeze a pattern of united action. The members of the institutionalized collective body are expected to act as one man, yet they must represent a loose aggregation rather than a spontaneous coalescence. They must be unified only through their unquestioning loyalty to the institutions. Spontaneity is suspect, and duty is prized above devotion.”

Restless

 

On Pages 145 and 146 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer discusses how dangerous it is to a mass movement if its fanatic-leader cannot settle down. I quote Hoffer and then comment on his content.

 

Hoffe (H after this): “                              112

 

The danger of the fanatic to the development of a movement is that he cannot settle down. Once victory has been won and the new order begins to crystallize, the fanatic becomes an element of strain and disruption. The taste for strong feeling drives him on to search for mysteries yet to be revealed and secret doors yet to be opened. He keeps groping for extremes. Thus on the morrow of victory most mass movements find themselves in the grips of dissension. The ardor which yesterday found an outlet in a life-and-death struggle with external enemies now vents itself in violent disputes and clash of factions. Hatred has become a habit. With no more outside enemies to destroy, the fanatics make enemies of one another. Hitler—himself a fanatic—could diagnose with precision the state of mind of the fanatics who plotted against him within the ranks of the National Socialist party. In his order to the newly appointed chief of the SA after the purge of Rohm in 1934 he speaks of those who will not settle down: ‘ . . . without realizing it, (they) have found in nihilism their ultimate confession of faith . . . their unrest and disquietude can find satisfaction only in some conspiratorial activity of the mind, in perpetually plotting the disintegration of whatever the set-up of the moment happens to be.’ As often was the case with Hitler, his accusations against antagonists (inside and outside the Reich) were a self-revelation. He, too, particularly in his last days, found in nihilism his ‘ultimate philosophy and valediction.’

 

If allowed to have their way, the fanatics may split a movement in schisms and heresies which threaten its existence. Even when the fanatics do not breed dissension, they can still wreck the movement by driving it to attempt the impossible. Only the entrance of a practical man of action can save the achievements of the movement.”

 

My response: Fanatics are addicted to nihilism, and they will destroy what they have built just for something to do, and for the joy of doing so.

His Origins

 

 

From Pages 143 to 145 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer writes of the origin of fanatics, the men of action that make a mass movement a going concern. I quote him and comment on his content.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                                  111

 

Whence come the fanatics? Mostly from the ranks of the noncreative men of words. The most significant division between men of words is between those who can find fulfillment in creative work and those who cannot. The creative man of words, no matter how bitterly he may criticize and deride the existing order, is actually attached to the present. His passion to reform and not destroy. When the mass movement remains wholly in his keeping, he turns it into a mild affair. The reforms he initiates are of the surface, and life flows on without a sudden break. But such a development is possible only when the anarchic action of the masses does not come into play, either because the old order abdicates without a struggle or because the man of words allies himself with strong men of action the moment chaos threatens to break loose. When the struggle with the old order is bitter and chaotic and victory can be won only by utmost unity and self-sacrifice, the creative man of words is usually shoved aside and the management of affairs falls into the hands of noncreative men of words—the eternal misfits and fanatical contemners of the present.”

 

My response: Hoffer has written elsewhere that the common people are lumpy with talent that they never develop as the individuals possessing it, let alone self-realizing as their final cause. I accept that all people are endlessly gifted and talented, some more than others, but all are remarkably talented. If humans are equal it is in their natural right to be treated equally under the law, and by God on Judgment Day; they are all equal in that they are equally, universally enjoying the blessing of natural talent, though some are more gifted than others, but the base line giftednness of the less talented is so open-ended, original and powerful, almost infinite, that people more or less are equal in talent.

 

That being said, I do not accept that noncreative men of words need to be fanatics, eternal misfits and fanatical contemners of the present. They never lacked creative talent: they just gave up on themselves too soon, or did not try hard enough, long enough (Be creative and self-realizing until your last day on earth—that is the life that the Good Spirits have commanded us to lead.).

 

Noncreative leaders of mass movements and the true-believing followers are all guilty of being noncreative, nonindividuating and non-individualistic. They all had a bottomless gift from God, if they just believed in God, believed in this command to self-realize from God, and faced their demons as autonomous, self-directing individuals and struggled upward for a lifetime to be as artistically, innovatively, intellectually, morally and spiritually talented as they could be if they had chosen to be living angels. There is nothing about noncreative men of words running mass movements with thousands or millions of nonindividuating groupists running from themselves into the communal shelter that is necessary or unavoidable. All chose such an immoral, stupid, wasteful, painful, malevolent, inferior lifestyle.

 

Once the noncreative nonindividuators are discontented, and their social order falls apart due to the carping, fault-finding men of words nagging to sever the attachment the masses have to their dispensation then we have this evil circus of men of action, demagogues and guru scoundrels, hatching their mass movements to smash civilization and bring totalitarian hell to their country. That the old dispensation was upheld by discontented nonindividuators, quietly fanatical and quietly destructive, but held back and asleep by their social order’s numbing effect on their inner discontent. That the old order was run by and for passive, quiet nonidividuators.For those people, constant needed, incremental form was prevented from occurring, and keeping the dispensation intact and conservative but still ever changing gently in the present to make  a mass movement unnecessary and avoidable.

 

 Any individual is a misfit because he refused to believe in himself and he settled for being a discontented mediocrity. Once he settled for being nothing, then his self-esteem can bottom out, and he feels like an unlucky victim and it is not his fault, and the world is to blame, perhaps God is against him. Now he has a grievance against the world, and he hates the world, people and cosmos, and his only fanatical, nihilist craving is to find a holy cause to disappear into to escape his legitimately guilty conscience. Once inside that movement run by a radical fanatic that wants to burn the world down, the true believer will work in complete unity with his brothers and sisters in the movement to see the leader’s destructive plan carried out, and he will sacrifice himself for a cause that is trash and not worth living for let alone dying for, though the lying true believer has convinced himself that it is the absolute truth, the noblest cause ever.

 

H: “The man who wants to write a great book, paint a great picture, create an architectural masterpiece, become a great scientist, and knows that never in all eternity will he be able to realize this, his innermost desire, can find no peace in a stable social order—old or new. He sees his life as irrevocably spoiled and the world perpetually out of joint. He feels at home only in a state of chaos. Even when he submits to or imposes iron discipline, he is but submitting to or shaping the indispensable instrument for attaining a state of eternal flux, eternal becoming. Only when engaged in change does he have a sense of freedom and the feeling that he is growing and developing. It is because he can never be reconciled with himself that he fears finality and a fixed order of things. Marat, Robespierre, Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler are outstanding examples of fanatics arising from the ranks of noncreative men of words. Peter Viereck points out that most of the Nazi bigwigs has artistic and literary ambitions which they could not realize. Hitler tried painting and architecture; Goebbels, drama, the novel and poetry; Rosenberg, architecture and philosophy; von Shirach, poetry; Funk, music; Streicher, painting. ‘Almost all were failures, not only by the usual vulgar criterion of success but by their own artistic criteria.’ Their artistic and literary ambitions ‘were originally far deeper than political ambitions: and were integral parts of their personalities.’”

 

My response: Let me repeat: fanatics gave up on themselves and quit too soon. If they lived by a morality of egoism-individualism rather than altruism-collectivism; if they individuated rather than wasting their days nonindividuating; if they thought of the Good Spirits as divine angels and individuators that love to guide humans to be creative living angels getting it done; if they did these things, in most instances, most people would know success and talented release and improvement so they would not have to conclude that their lives are irremediably  ruined, that there is for them not future, and they will never have a chance again.

 

None ever had to choose a life of self-denunciation, chaos, destruction.

 

H: “The creative men of words is ill at ease in the atmosphere of an active movement. He feels that its whirl and passion sap his creative energies. So long as he is conscious of the creative flow within him, he will find fulfillment in leading millions and winning victories. The result is that, once the movement starts rolling, he either retires voluntarily or is pushed aside. Moreover, since the genuine man of words can never wholeheartedly and for long suppress his critical faculty, he is inevitably cast in the role of the heretic. Thus unless the creative man of words stifles the newborn movement by allying himself with practical men of action or unless he dies at the right time, he is likely to end up a shunned recluse or in exile or facing a firing squad.”

 

My response: No mass movement has any room or tolerance for a creative individualist or heretic.

The Doer

 

On Pages 142 and 143 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer tells how a fanatic is the only one that bring a mass movement to life. I quote him there, and comment on his content.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                              XVI

 

                                                        The Fanatics

 

                                                              110

 

When the movement is ripe, only the fanatic can hatch a genuine mass movement. Without him the disaffection engendered by militant men of words remains undirected and can vent itself only in pointless and easily suppressed disorders. Without him, the initiated reforms, even when drastic, leave the old way of life unchanged, and any change in government usually amount to no more than a transfer of power from one set of men of action to another. Without him there can perhaps be no new beginning.

 

When the old order begins to fall apart, many of the vociferous men of words, who prayed so long for the day, are in a funk. The first glimpse of the face of anarchy frightens them out of their wits. They forget all they said about the ‘poor simple folk’ and run for help to strong men of action—princes, generals, administrators, bankers, landowners—who know how to deal with the rabble and how to stem the tide of chaos.

 

Not so the fanatic. Chaos is his element. When the old order begins to crack, he wades in with all his might and recklessness to blow the whole hated present to high heaven. He glories in the sight of a world coming to a sudden end. To hell with reforms! All that already exists is rubbish, and there is no sense in reforming rubbish. He justifies his will to anarchy with the plausible assertion that there can be no new beginning so long as the old clutters the landscape. He shoves aside the frightened men of words, if they are still around, though he continues to extol their doctrines and mouth their slogans. He alone knows the innermost craving of the masses in action: the craving for communion, for the mustering of the host, for the dissolution of cursed individuality in the majesty and grandeur of the mighty whole. Posterity is king; and woe to those, inside and outside the movement who hug and hang on to the present.”

 

My response: The fanatic that hatches the actual mass movement is a dangerous revolutionary and nihilist. To hell with the present, law and order, peace and quiet. Blow everything up, smash everything—let the revolution begin, with gun fire and blood flowing in the streets, with bombs thrown, riots unleashed, and looting and arson running wild.

 

There is something criminal and juvenile in the thinking of the fanatic. That fanaticism, violence, the rule of the armed street thug, the pure altruist-collectivist ethics of the true-believers unleashed upon society and the existing order are all different facets of raw evil pulsating in the actions of mobs on the march through the cities. In their mob frenzy, the true believer’s blood lust and cruelty are pure hell, and this is when altruism is exposed for what it is, a group living condition.

Fight Back

 

 

 

From Pages 138 through 141 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer goes into detail of the powerful impact that gaslighting men of words have at making the masses lose faith in the values and myths underpinning the established social arrangement. Once the men of words have done their irreparable damage, the mass movement can catch on and take down a country. I will quote Hoffer and then comment on his content. My plan would be to show how men of words operate, and then to recommend that supercitizens today fight back against true-believing Leftists by stealing their thunder, bringing their revolution into the just prevailing dispensation that is America, as a reform, trend, or modification, one that cleanses and updates our dispensation by does not overthrow our marvelous institutions and way of life.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                            108

 

It is easy to see how the faultfinding men of words, by persistent ridicule and denunciation, shakes prevailing beliefs and loyalties, and familiarizes the masses with the idea of change. What is not so obvious in the process by which the discrediting of existing beliefs and institutions make possible the rise of a new fanatical faith. For it is a remarkable fact that the militant man of words who ‘sounds the established order to its source to mark its want of authority and justice’ often prepares the ground not for a society of freethinking individualists but for a corporate society that cherishes utmost unity and blind faith. A wide diffusion of doubt and irreverence thus leads often to unexpected results. The irreverence of the Renaissance was a prelude to the new fanaticism of Reformation and Counter Reformation. The Frenchmen of the enlightenment who debunked the church and crown and preached reason and tolerance released a burst of revolutionary and national fanaticism which has not abated yet. Marx and his followers discredited religion, nationalism and the passionate pursuit of business, and brought into being the new fanaticism of socialism, communism, Stalinist nationalism and the passion for world dominion.”

 

My response: Hoffer is informing us that when faultfinding men of words tirelessly gaslight the values and culture of the existing social order, this discrediting does not prepare the ground for a society of freethinking individualists but awakens slumbering joiners that were discontented but generally functioning groupists in their social order; once awakened, shocked and deprived of the comfort of group structure and collective values and cultural leanings, these non-individualists are now isolated, naked loners without the training, skills and positive habits of self-reliance, optimistic outlook and self-developing to render them able to withstand the loss of social order without becoming frustrated, panicked and stampeding headlong into a mass movement which the men of words are working feverishly to bring about.

 

The arrival of the individuating supercitzens will bring about societies of strong, enduring, versatile individuators, both freethinking, tough, adaptable changing and yet contented. All the discrediting of their set of values and comforting social order will amount to nothing, because these resolute, imaginative free-thinkers keep the best of the old, and blend it a little with the new being touted by the radicals, and then the individuating supercitizens just keep on trucking, as a free, content people, unshakable, but willing to mediate by minor absorption any incoming social trend. This is how we blunt the reckless, revolutionary deconstruction which disaffected, outsider men of words hurl at the existing dispensation.

 

H: “When we debunk a fanatical faith or prejudice, we do not strike at the root of fanaticism. We merely prevent it leaking out at a certain point, with the likely result that it will leak out at some other point. Thus by denigrating prevailing beliefs and loyalties, the militant men of words unwittingly create in the disillusioned masses a hunger for faith. For the majority of people cannot endure the barrenness and futility of their lives unless they have some ardent dedication, or some passionate pursuit in which they can lose themselves. Thus, in spite of himself, the scoffing man of words becomes the precursor of a new faith.”

 

My response: As I note elsewhere, we do not understand Hoffer’s description of and analysis of mass movements and the true believers that make up such a movement, unless we recognize that people are born evil, live according to altruism-collectivism (an immoral ethical system) morality, run in packs, and refuse to self-realize as ordered by God to do. Because people are born evil, live lives of sin and unhappiness, even in good times when their values and social order is not falling apart or gone, they are already fanaticized but passive or quiescent in normal times.

 

 People are irrational, self-loathing and follow their emotional whims. There is an intricate connection between living one’s life and making choices based on feeling more than rational, common-sense choices, and these are reasonable, conscionable, moderating means of living and choosing. Where people have no self-esteem, hide from their true if disturbing self, herd-live and feel their way through life rather than makes choices based in practical wisdom, their whole worldview and personality is radicalized and fanaticized, an inner hotbed of unresolved dissatisfaction, agony, and passionate forlornness. This stormy internal state renders the discontented masses ripe for joining a mass movement should their social order fall apart, and they are then frustrated, adrift and hyper-fanaticized.

 

What Hoffer is alluding to above is when men of words have prevailed at robbing a population of its creeds, isms and stories that they have faith in (And these deconstructers break up the brotherhood of believers in which the people have immersed themselves, the one objective they most sought.), there is no longer a compact unit for them to hide inside of which their passionate belief in it allows them to cast off an unwanted self. The men of words have not gotten rid of each egoless, selfless insider’s personal if fanatical allegiance to their beliefs and values.

 

Rather, the deconstructers have ripped away the comforting values and stories that kept madness and darkness at bay; now the unstable, frightened, angered, injured egos of abandoned joiners are transformed into refugees seeking meaning and answers; the more drastic, fanatic and absolute are its extreme doctrines and reassurance, the more likely are the frightened, frustrated masses likely to stampede forth to take up the beckoning mass movement. The men of words do not get people to leave behind an ardent faith that provides them with answers, meaning, and a refuge of escape from themselves as individuals, by smashing that belief system into dust. The people find a more drastic, absolutist holy cause to believe in, to join up with and to find meaning through. A new faith will be found and embraced, and it will likely be a crazed, totalistic ideology.

 

People are complex creatures. They are born selfless, self-loathing, altruistic and group-oriented and in social settings they escape from discovering themselves. To discover themselves out there alone in the world where nature, Being and God can make contact with the self, that is where the layers of self-deception are slowly peeled back, and the inner essence comes to the fore. This requires that the self can confront the self, to heal the inner damage by reassembling its fractured consciousness, and integrating all its elements, a gestalt that is self-embracing and whole. If one prevails as an atomistic individual, one likely is good not evil, and one’s formerly disparate and warring elements are now assumed into the integrated personality.

 

If the self learns to stoically be alone with the self, and talks to the Good Spirits with openness, courage and optimism, then one can find the values, the narrative, and creed to worship (a creed that can be secular but preferably is sacred, the worship of a benevolent deity), then this interlocking set of relations between the sane, conscious, contented, together-self and nature, Being and God will allow the self to think and feel in worship with healthy sentiment balanced by moderate and moderating reasonableness of communication and reverence expressed for one’s faith choice. This self-styled inner victory, for the individuators, which could be ideal for any human. He finds meaning in deep, firmly, rationally, gently held and functioning faith that is without ideological grandstanding or grandiose claims. The self-comfortable individuators require none of these excessive proclamations to find meaning or fulfillment in ardent faith. Hyper-passionate believing seems barbaric to those practicing rational religion, a moderate affair. Men of words discrediting such practitioners of living by this quiet, peaceful faith would not much faze its adherents, because they would see such criticisms of their faith as revealing resolvable weaknesses for which they would find ad hoc justifications against the critics, to save the standing faith system, rather than casting it off entirely.

 

 

H: “The genuine man of words himself can get along without faith in absolutes. He values the search for truth as much as the truth itself. He delights in the clash of thought and in the give-and-take of controversy. If he formulates a philosophy and doctrine, they are more an exhibition of brilliance and an exercise in dialectics than a program of action and the tenets of a  faith, His vanity, it is true, often prompts him to defend his speculations with savagery and even venom; but his appeal to usually to reason and not to faith. The fanatics and faith-hungry masses, are likely to invest such speculations with the certitude of holy writ, and make them the fountainhead of a new faith. Jesus was not a Christian, and nor was Marx a Marxist.”

 

My response: I believe that the genuine man of words that get along without faith in absolutes is another technical term that Hoffer is just introducing, and that it is a term of huge importance, but it necessitates careful unpacking. The genuine man of words is an individualist, likely an individuator, very intellectual and intelligent, and very calm, confident and a person of high self-esteem and high self-sufficiency. He has a belief system, and it can be religious or secular. He will adhere to his faith passionately but not hysterically, logically but not in binary, absolutist distinctions concluded, that his system of belief is admirable but not the bromide for all human ills for today and for all time. His reasonableness, his temperateness, his restrained passion allow him to believe what he believes and promote it without becoming a true believer.

 

Now there are quite intelligent, even pioneering thinkers, who are fanatics, and their radical conclusions about their belief system does render them fanatical, true believers and this is their holy cause. But such a holy cause is not a true religion or sensible metaphysical take on the world, but is a false religion worshiped absolutely by him and his followers. If his followers and he became true believers and their holy cause’s mass movement then that grasped-for holy cause is but false religion for all loses themselves in it.

 

The genuine man of words will remain moderate, and will believe his creed be it sacred or secular, but his devotion to it is personal and involves just one person--himself, not a mass movement with thousands of screaming, chanting, swarming devotees. Rather, his creed, is his relationship with the Good Spirits: there he will find meaning and fulfilment. When this moderate rational but positively and limited believer comes to know God, it is a true and genuine faith because he does not lose the self in finding and worshiping God, but his soul is completed and enriched.

 

 This believer finds the self and seeks for his genuine self, not running away from the self, and that is a moderate individualistic faith versus a collectivistic, radicalized faith of the true believer where the self is shed and forgotten in corporate existence and unity. The fanatics run in packs called mass movements and their religiosity is too emotional, theatrical, enthusiastic, and dramatized, but the faith of the calm but wise individual believer of quiet but deep religious sentiment, this belief patten is very different than group faith, and much more appealing to God.

 

I would not think that the men of words that provide a new holy cause for frustrated masses in the form of a mass movement to join and hide from themselves in are the same as the genuine man of words, the intellectual moderate and loner that Hoffer refers to. The individuators has an honest, truthful, rational more than emotional but still a restrained, emotional faith in his belief system, sacred or secular. He worships his rational faith, but he worships it in a truthful mode, moderately as a separate person. By contrast, a true believer worships his holy cause enthusiastically as a fanatic and his belief is too pro-doctrine as the one truth faith. He worships his holy cause, and he does it as a self that is selfless, passionate, and demonic.

 

Now right below that paragraph Hoffer will mention that  the masses of frustrated people that require faith that they cannot live without, but I would say that both nonindividuators, true believers and rational believers cannot live without faith, but rational believers more rational less fanatical.

 

The men of words are ideologues enthusiastic and black-and-white thinkers, and there is a sardonic hysteria to their pronouncements; they are not genuine and their holy cause likely is hypocritical and unholy.

 

H: “To sum up, the militant man of words prepares the ground for the mass movement; 2) by indirectly creating a hunger for faith in the hearts of those that cannot live without it, so that when the new faith is preached it finds an eager response among the disillusioned masses; 3) by furnishing the doctrine and slogans of the new faith; 4) by undermining the convictions of the ‘better people’—those who can get along without faith—so that when the new fanaticism makes its appearance they are without capacity to resist it. They see no sense in dying for convictions ad principles, and yield to the new order without a fight.”

 

My response: It is not that the better people can get along without faith, but they can get along without a fanatical faith, for moderate, rational religion can meet their needs. They do not make the faith fanatical by believing in it too enthusiastically nor willing to use the sword to force others to believe it too and swear allegiance to it. They could die for their faith, but they prefer not too but want to live for their faith instead.

 

H: “Thus when the irreverent intellectual has done his work:

 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand,

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

 

The stage is now set for fanatics.

 

                                                                       109

 

The tragic figures in the history of a mass movement are often the intellectual precursors who live long enough to see the downfall of the old order by the action of the masses.

 

The impression that mass movement, and revolutions in particular, are born of the resolve of the masses to overthrow a corrupt and oppressive tyranny and win for themselves freedom of action, speech and conscience has its origin in the din of words let loose by the intellectual originators of the movement in their skirmishes with the prevailing order. The fact that mass movements as they arise often manifest less individual freedom that the order they supplant, is usually ascribed to the trickery of a power-hungry clique that kidnaps the movement at a critical stage and cheats the masses of the freedom about to dawn. Actually, the only people cheated in the process are the intellectual precursors. They rise against the established order, deride its irrationality and incompetence, denounce its illegitimacy and oppressiveness, and call for freedom of self-expression and self-realization. They take it for granted that the masses who respond to their call and range themselves behind them crave the same things. However, the freedom the masses crave is not freedom of self-expression and self-realization, but freedom from the intolerable burden of an autonomous existence. They want freedom from ‘the fearful burden of free choice,’ freedom from the arduous responsibility of realizing their ineffectual selves and shouldering the blame for a blemished product. They do not want freedom of conscience, but faith—blind, authoritarian faith. They sweep away the old order not to create a society of free and independent men, but to establish uniformity, individual anonymity and a new structure for perfect unity. It is not the wickedness of the old regime they rise against but its weakness; not its oppression, but its failure to hammer them together into one solid, mighty whole. The persuasiveness of the intellectual demagogue consists not so much in convincing people of the vileness of the established order as in demonstrating its helpless incompetence. The immediate result of a mass movement usually corresponds to what people want. They are not cheated in the process.”

 

My response: Here again Hoffer lays out a paradox: it is presupposed by Leftists and optimists about human nature, that the masses rebel and join mass movements to overturn their oppressors to win for themselves freedom of action, speech, and conscience. The truth actually is they are working to overthrow the prevailing order because it is not oppressive and corrupt enough, not corporate enough for the group-oriented mass to any longer find refuge and anonymity from an unwanted, spoiled self in the lenient existing, once compact unit.

 

Usually, the mass movement usher in a revolution that is totalitarian to overthrow a regime that was authoritarian or mildly oppressive at worst. Hoffer repudiates the claim that the new order is more corrupt and worse human rights violators because a cabal, the machinations of a power-hungry clique to shanghai and turn the revolution authoritarian at the last moment.

 

Actually, the power-hungry clique had ruled the mass movement from its inception, so the true believers have been without human rights and freedom for years; they want not the freedom of self-expression and self-realization but freedom from a despised autonomous existence, and the demagogue or guru leading the mass movement is willing to provide them with that grouped umbrella of anonymity in exchange for their blind obedience, their complete self-surrender to the leader’s holy cause, and their complete conformity to his every wish.

 

The people have no problem with the old order’s oppression, cruelty, and corruption: its ruler’s unforgivable sin was to become weak, no longer demanding pure self-surrender to the corporate political body.

 

Pay attention to Hoffer’s hint that a completely collectivized social compact is most corrupt and the most attractive to its altruistic citizens supporting it because it offers no room for individual self-reliance, independent thought, or an autonomous individual existence.

 

H: “The reason for the tragic fate which almost always overtakes the intellectual midwives of a mass movement is that, no matter how much they preach and glorify united effort, they remain essentially individualists. They believe in the possibility of individual happiness and the validity of individual opinion and initiative. But once a movement gets rolling, power falls into the hands of those who have neither the faith in, nor respect for, the individual. And the reason they prevail is not so much that their disregard for the individual gives them a capacity for ruthlessness, but that their attitude is in full accord with the ruling passion of the masses.”

 

My response: The men of words midwife the mass movement, but it is a human enterprise that is fanatical and collectivist to its core, from its guru leader and the willing fanatics that serve him—the mass movement is a hyper-group thing to its core; the individualistic men of words has no home there, though earlier they thought they did.