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.
No comments:
Post a Comment