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.