Copycat

 

On Pages 99 to 101 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer, talks about how people copycatting each other, or conforming seamlessly to group norms or expectations, imitate each other, and that further cements them together as one compact whole. I quote from him and then comment on his content.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                         Imitation

 

                                                                 78

 

Imitation is an essential unifying agent. The development of a close-knit group is inconceivable without a diffusion of uniformity. The one-mindedness and Gleichschaltung prized by every mass movement are achieved as much by imitation as obedience. Obedience itself consists as much in the imitation of an example as in the following of a precept.”

 

My response: The Good Spirits are individuators, and our mentors, if we will let them in. They prize liberty, independence, reasoning, and self-discovery as personal character traits. One can and should freely learn from others—while openly, gratefully acknowledging one’s debt to the originators of a trend or insight. This open emulating others is nothing like imitating others, the  mindless obedience of superiors, or imitation of peers for the sake of belonging, and shedding an unwanted self. The latter is immoral but very typical and common.

 

It staggers one’s imagination to realize how group-oriented people are, how eager they are to fit in and be uniform, not stick out, no veer from the official point of view. Groupthink is personal think in everyday society, and only exacerbated in the mass movement context of submissive, uniform existing.

 

H: “Though the imitative capacity is present in all people, it can be stronger in some than in others. The question is whether the frustrated, who, as suggested in Section 43, not only have a propensity for united action but are also equipped with a mechanism for its realization, are particularly imitative. Is there a connection between frustration and the readiness to imitate? Is imitation in some manner a means of escape from the ills that beset the frustrated?”

 

My response: The answer to the two questions asked by Hoffer just above is a resounding yes. The frustrated are particularly imitative, and imitation is a means of achieving self-forgetfulness from a self, regarded as worthless by the self. My point is that the self is never worthless. The self is only worthless if the self believes that it is and the self ceases to struggle to improve and get better. Being personally worthless is a self-inflicted state and destiny.

 

H: “The chief burden of the frustrated is the consciousness of a blemished, ineffectual self, and their chief desire is to slough off the unwanted self and began a new life. They try to realize this desire by finding a new identity or by blurring and camouflaging their individual distinctness; and both ends are reached by imitation.”

 

My response: To be reborn and take on a new identity can be beautiful and meaningful, or  horrible, a living personal death. To be reborn as an individuators is to assume the identity of a great soul in the making and that is wonderful. To be reborn as a zombie clone or zealot immerse in a mass movement is to assume an identity that is the death of the conscious individual self, and that is not a happy place to exist at.

 

H: “The less satisfaction we derive from being ourselves, the greater is our desire to be like others. We are therefore more ready to imitate those who are different from us than those that are nearly like us, and those we admire than those we despise. The imitativeness of the oppressed (Negroes and Jews) is notable.

 

As to the blurring and camouflaging of the self, it is achieved solely by imitation—by becoming as like others as possible. The desire to belong is partly a desire to lose oneself.

 

Finally, the lack of self-confidence characteristic of the frustrated also stimulates their imitativeness. The more we mistrust our judgment and our luck, the more we are ready to follow the example of others.

 

                                                                79

 

Mere rejection of the self, even when not accompanied by a search for a new identity, can lead to increased imitativeness. The rejected self ceases to assert its claim to distinctness, and there is nothing to resist the propensity to copy. The situation is not unlike that observed in children and undifferentiated adults where the lack of a distinct individuality leaves the mind without guards against the intrusion of influences from without.

 

                                                                80

 

A feeling of superiority counteractions imitation. Had the millions of immigrants who came to this country been superior people—the cream of the countries they came from—there would not have been one U.S.A. but a mosaic of lingual and cultural groups. It was due to the fact that the majority of immigrants were of the lowest, poorest, the despised and the rejected, that the heterogeneous millions blended so rapidly and thoroughly. They came here with the ardent desire to shed their old world identity and to be reborn to a new life, and they were automatically equipped with an unbounded capacity to imitate and adapt the new. The strangeness of the new country attracted rather than repelled them. They craved a new identity and a new life—and the stranger the new world the more it suited their inclination. Perhaps, to the non-Anglo-Saxons, the strangeness of the language was an added attraction. To have to learn to speak enhanced the illusion of being born anew.”

 

My response: It seems as if Hoffer labels the European immigrants to America, from the 1860s until the 1940s as frustrated true believers who migrated and then felt lost and looking for a new movement, a new cause to be reborn into. The alien but bracing American country, English language and culture gave them what they needed. Because Americans back then were so jingoistic, patriotic, and sure about the superiority of their country and way of life, so uncompromisingly insisting that new arrivals assimilate or go home, that the awed and overwhelmed immigrants just acquiesced.

 

 Americans at that time just expected that immigrants would quickly accept the new language and culture, becoming loyal, patriotic Americans. They just knew what they demanded of immigrants was the superior way to conduct themselves. Though Americans were chauvinistic, that does not alter the fact that America and its way of life is still the best or close to it, that the world has ever seen, so if people wish to immigrate here, they should be awed, grateful, loyal and assimilate without question or hesitancy.

 

We must close our borders, send the illegal aliens home, limit legal immigration, make America great again, and insist that our current, legal immigrants join the melting pot, assimilate and stand when the national anthem is played.

 

What has changed is that new American immigrants are discontented by likely not frustrated because they cling to their old country, language, and culture, though they come here. Because the Left and Postmodernist Marxists have convinced at least half of our country that American and whites are corrupt and rotten to the core, that our way of life, our Christian faith, our institutions, and language, are nothing special, it is acceptable, even encouraged, that new arrivals to this country can remain multiculturalists, that they can be ignore or discard some, most or all of America’s tradition with impunity. If immigrants coming here, live within their own urban ghetto or enclave, populated by their unassimilated fellow countryman from whatever country, and this patten predominates and is replicated in cities across America, America will as divided as the old Yugoslavian republic was. The old, marvelous melting pot America has ceased to exist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                81

 

H: “Imitation is often a shortcut to a solution. We copy when we lack the inclination, the ability or the time to work out an independent solution. People in a hurry will imitate more readily than people at leisure. Hustling then tends to produce uniformity. And in the deliberate fusing of individuals into a compact group, incessant action will play a considerable role.”

 

My response: If the government or mass movement guru can panic people to give up their private lives, wealth, and lives for the sake of the holy cause, they will rush headlong into activity towards goals that would not be their goals if they reflected about things, and they would reject goals that were not internally decided.

 

People in a hurry do not have time to think. Alternatively, as perspicacious, individuating supercitizens, we constantly should be checking to see where we are going, how we are getting there, and should we get there in the way that we are, and if we should go there at all. If we do go there, we as a stubborn but knowing, united organized people, so go because we run things and most of us agree how to go forward, and how we will run the country, never allowing gurus, demagogues, the legacy media, Academia, Hollywood, the pulpit or the government to dictate where we go or howl.