Part Of The Ruling Class

 

From Pages 133 to 136 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer writes of how men of words are awfully quiet and acquiescent towards the elite running things, when they are invited to join that elite, with their divine right to ruler the masses affirmed and permitted. I quote him below and then comment on his content.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                             106

 

Whenever we find a dispensation enduring beyond its span of competence, there is either an absence of an educated class or an intimate alliance between those in power and the men of words. Where all learned men are clergymen, the church is unassailable. Where all learned men are bureaucrats or where education gives a man an acknowledged superior status, the prevailing order is likely to be free from movements of protest.”

 

My response: The wise Hoffer just triggered a thought in me: suppose we come up with a generation of individuating supercitizens in America, gun-owning and gun-toting capitalists working and creating wealth in this tolerant, free, prosperous constitutional republic.

 

Each supercitizen is a political hybrid—all in the same persons, the same individual: she is a complicated, sophisticated political creature. She is elite, a maverized woman of words, an intellectual and businesswoman, but she is also a common person: a wife, mother, and soccer mom. She is a political wonder: this anarchist-individuating supercitizen is one-half politician, and one-half common citizen, who is ruled by leaders that she votes for and who stay in office as long as they do what she and her millions of fellow supercitizens, pushing their agreed-upon national agenda, had set up for them to obey and do.

 

With over 100 million active, participating supercitizens, America could be the first country to practically solve those perennial political problems that grow out of citizens practicing altruist-collectivist ethics, allowing elites, hierarchies, and a class system to continue to operate. The ruling class runs in a pack of its own, and the majority of people run in a pack on frustrated, tyrannized commoners.

 

Where each supercitizen is a man of words, and a common citizen, the prevailing dispensation can be kept, preserved, not overthrown, but constantly, changing and upgrading within the status quo. This republican status quo, a system ever the same yet ever developing, through implementation on series of majority-agreed-upon, gentle, incremental mini-revolutions can be conducted quietly, peacefully by the controlling supercitizens, who preserve and reform at the same time, without collectivists or elites ruling and wrecking society.

 

H: “The Catholic Church sank to its lowest level in the tenth century, at the time of Pope John XII. It was then far more corrupt and ineffectual than at the time of the Reformation. But in the tenth century all learned men were priests, whereas in the fifteenth century, as a result of the introduction of printing and paper, learning had ceased to be the monopoly of the church. It was the nonclerical humanists who formed the vanguard of the Reformation. Those of the scholars affiliated with the church, or who, as in Italy, enjoyed the patronage of the Popes, ‘showed a tolerant spirit on the whole toward existing institutions, including the ecclesiastical abuses, and, in general, cared little how long the vulgar herd was left in superstitious darkness which befitted their state.”

 

My response: Elites are selfish, nasty, cruel, heartless predators, killers, oppressors and robbers, and men of words might be the worst of them. Only an well-educated, half-aristocratic society of individuating supercitizen commoners have the smarts, will, courage and assertiveness to work together to ban the class system to prevent the installation of a hierarchical society, a groupist, collectivist social and political arrangement, complete with oppressing elite, tyranny, socialism, feudalism, hierarchies, class stratification, and a huge majority of suffering commoners, poor, uneducated, hungry, superstitious, dirty, tyrannized and exploited. And most of the masses are willing to accept their lot because they hate themselves and masochistically love being abused and controlled and told what to do and think and how to live.

 

Only individuating supercitizens are moral enough, smart enough, powerful enough, and fiercely independent enough to end this sick historical system of a few haves oppressing a lot of hurting, helpless, oppressed have-nots.

 

H: “The stability of Imperial China, like that of ancient Egypt, was due to an intimate alliance between the bureaucracy and the literati. It is of interest that the Tai-ping rebellion, the only effective Chinese mass movement while the Empire was still a going concern, was started by a scholar who failed again and again in the state examination for the highest mandarin caste.

 

The long endurance of the Roman Empire was due in some degree to the wholehearted partnership between the Roman rulers and the Greek men of words. The conquered Greeks felt they gave laws and civilization to the conquerors. It is disconcerting to read how the deformed and depraved Nero, who was extravagant in his praise of Hellas, was welcomed hysterically by the Greeks on his visit in 67 A.D. They took him to their hearts as a fellow intellectual and artist. ‘To gratify him, all the games had been crowded into a single year. All the cities sent him the prizes of their contests. Committees were continually waiting on him, to beg him to go and sing at every place.’ And he in turn loaded them with privileges and proclaimed the freedom of Greece at the Isthmian games.

 

In A Study Of History, Professor A. J. Toynbee quotes the Latin hexameters which Claudian of Alexandria wrote in praise of Rome almost five hundred years after Caesar set foot on Egyptian soil, and he adds ruefully: ‘It would be easy to prove that the British Raj had in many respects been a more benevolent and also perhaps a more beneficent institution than the Roman Empire, but it would be hard to find a Claudian in any of the Alexandrias of Hindustan.’Now it is not altogether  farfetched to assume that, had the British in India instead of cultivating the Nizams, Maharajas, Nawabs, Gekawars, and so on made an effort to win the Indian intellectual; had they treated him as an equal, encouraged him in his work and always allowed him a share of the fleshpots, they could perhaps have maintained their rule their indefinitely. As it was, the British who ruled India were a type altogether lacking in the aptitude for getting along with intellectuals in any land, and least of all in India. They were men of action imbued with a faith in the innate superiority of the British. For the most part they scorned the Indian intellectual both as a man of words and an intellectual. They did not to any real extent encourage the Indians to become engineers, agronomists or technicians. The educational they established produced ‘impractical’ men of words; and it is an irony of fate that this system, instead of safeguarding British rule, hastened its end.”

 

My response: There is some fascinating points to emphasize, points that Hoffer exhibit how remarkable Hoffer is as a thinker. First, Hoffer through historian Toynbee contrasts the brutal Romans in Egypt with the much more humane—relatively speaking-British rulers in India. Toynbee is showing us a paradox—one which Hoffer appreciates and one which he likely would have thought of on his own—it would seem logically intuitive that the more brutal oppressor would, by the very nature of his brutality, be fiercely opposed by the natives: in Egypt, the people would rise up against the Romans, but that did not seem to happen.

 

In Indian, the much less brutal British were widely opposed and eventually thrown out of the country. Where the rebellion is occurring is where less harsh imperialism was practiced. It seems illogical, counterintuitive, and paradoxical that the less harshly infringed-upon Indians resented and rebelled against a fairly humane oppressor, while the thuggish Romans were not able to be so resented and countered by the conquered Egyptians. How to resolve this Hofferian-Toynbee paradox?

 

They both provide us with the answer: Claudian, the Egyptian poet, was a talented, educated, lionized Egyptian intellectual that was prized by the Roman conquerors. He ended up being a popular and wealthy court poet in Rome to its emperors. The emperors made this Egyptian poet a part of the regime.

 

There were few or no Claudians in Hindustan because the British refused to invite native Indians—intellectuals made by the British as they educated them in India or in the universities of the West—if a man of words is not invited in to be part of the status quo, he will become the man of words that provides the theory and argument (a revolutionary, nationalist or racial holy cause) that native men of action will contrive as a mass movement of rebellion to overthrow the foreign imperialists.

 

What Hoffer and Toynbee (Was Toynbee one of the older intellectuals that indirectly influenced or indirectly helped Hoffer formulate this theory of mass movements and their intellectual midwives? I do not know,.) remind us again is that intellectuals are not much motivated by justice, compassion, and noble, sympathetic concern for the poor, the exploited, the conquered, the oppressed—though they vehemently and angrily resent and punish those accusing them of denying their real, ulterior motive (always to serve as elite rulers of the masses).

 

Men of words that are part of the going dispensation are for the preserving the hegemony of the ruling class. Men of words that are without praise, rewards and insider access to and participation in the established ruling class’s policy of oppressing, tyrannizing, exploiting, hurting and enslaving the masses—these ignored, cast-aside, slighted men of words, on the outside looking in, will get their revenge upon the ruling class of the social order in charge, by writing and arguing, providing the rationale for the new movement that will replace the existing order with a new order, where the disaffected intellectuals, the darlings of the revolution, will now take their place in the new dispensation, as part of the ruling class that tyrannizes, exploits, oppresses and abuses the masses—perhaps more vicious and murderous that the intellectuals of the dispensation just tossed out.

 

Hoffer was obsessed with intellectuals all of his life, and warned that they should be praised, pampered and put on a pedestal, but never given the reins of power. His realistic fear was that their innate sense of superiority (a delusion of superiority based on superior class and superior education, not based in reality of merit, talent and individual effort), their self-loathing due to their inner emptiness that was compounded their worldly impracticability, by being frustrated by not doing something with their hands like tradesmen or running a business like a shrewd, worldly merchant, and their group-oriented addiction to the power of powerlessness as an integral element of every clique lording it over the mass herd, all sharing and hurt by their altruist-collectivist morality—that all of these character flaws would produce a groups of rulers that were corrupted entirely by concentrated power, and that they would make evil and unjust, any dispensation that they exemplify and control.

 

Second, Hoffer insists that the British made a major blunder in not reaching to the native Indian men of words to invite them into the colonial ruling elite. It mattered not to the Indian intellectuals that the British were much less harsh to them then the Romans were to the Egyptians in ancient times. It mattered not, deep down that the British were racist, imperialistic, colonialist Empire builders: what really irked the upstart Indian clerisy was that they were not invited to rule and oppress their own people, as part of the British colonial administration. This huge blunder committed by the Brits against the Indian men of words was an unforgivable slight, and the only recourse for this native clerisy was to light the fires of the locomotive of independence and drive the British out of the subcontinent.

 

Third, Hoffer goes to the core of human power relationships when he identified the British rulers as a type altogether lacking in the aptitude for getting along with intellectuals in any land, and least of all with Indians with their Brahmin tradition of native intellectual heritage going back hundreds of years, at least.

 

That Britain was the home of the Enlightenment, of the rise of individualism, modern monarchist monarchy, the birthplace of capitalism, commerce, industry and the abolition of slavery, is the set of reasons why they would not invite Indian men of words into the ruling class of colonial India. The British did not allow intellectuals at home to run their parliamentary democracy because they were too practical and decent, instinctively perhaps unconsciously detecting the cruelty, ferocity, and depravity that doctrinaire, unhinged intellectuals are capable of inflicting upon a people once they rule a people by totalitarian means and rules, as did the Jacobins in the French Revolution.

 

Third, the British would not work with the Hindu intellectuals because the British were men of action and they disliked, looked down upon, distrusted and had little use for men of words. The British felt superior to the Indian intellectuals in part because the British were racist, but, also, perhaps more so, because the British were justifiably proud of the natural superiority of their culture and way of life, being rationalist, democratic, capitalist, scientific, worldly, and industrial.

 

Fourth, the British should have pushed business, accounting, and technical education for the to-be-educated Indians rather than liberal arts degrees which made them impractical and disconnected from and antipathetic and averse to the world of business and secular affairs.

 

Now, I have a valued and valuable liberal arts degree, a major in English and a minor in history, from the University of North Dakota, back when public universities provided a great education for the price, a cheaper version of Hillsdale College, not the woke crap and DEI ignorance spoon-fed to brainwashed college youth today at Harvard and Columbia.

 

But it cannot be denied that a college degree often makes many people intellectual and elitist, and they think that authorizes them to rule the masses, and to control them.

 

The British in colonial India sided with the provincial royal families to keep order, when they should have won over the men of words that were kept out in the cold, and the price paid was that they lost their colony.

 

H: “Britain’s failure in Palestine was also due in part to the lack of rapport between the typical British colonial official and men of words. The majority of Palestinian Jews, though steeped in act, are by upbringing and tradition men of words, and thin-skinned to a fault. They smarted under the contemptuous attitude of the British official who looked on the Jews as a pack of unmanly and ungrateful quibblers—an easy prey for the warlike Arabs once Britain withdrew its protective hand. The Palestinian officials also resented the tutelage of mediocre officials, their inferiors in both experience and intelligence. Britons of the caliber of Julian Huxley, Harold Nicolson or Richard Crossman just possibly might have saved Palestine for the Empire.”

 

My response: Leftists: Listen up! Hoffer is not pro-Empire and anti-independence for native peoples in any colony around the world. He was merely pointing out, correctly, that the British inability to stomach or treat educated natives as equals, by inviting them into the ruling class of a colony, the local men of words that were native to that colony, was why they lost many of their colonies. The disappearance of monarchal, European-driven, global empires was destined to disappear anyway.

 

H: “In both the Bolshevik and Nazi regimes there is evident an acute awareness of the fateful relation between men of words and the state. In Russia, men of letters, artists and scholars share the privileges of the ruling group. They are all superior civil servants. And though made to toe the party line, they are but subject to the same discipline imposed on the rest of the elite. In the case of Hitler there was a diabolical realism in his plan to make all learning the monopoly of the elite which was to rule his envisioned world empire and keep the anonymous masses barely literate.”

 

My response: I think that Hoffer here again shares his uncanny if implicit inner logic of power relations as affiliated with men of words.

 

Note that the individualistic British, with their capitalist, moderate, liberal tolerance, democratic cultural and political outlook, feel a moral and visceral repugnance towards sharing power with intellectuals. It is as if the British, like Hoffer and me, sense that intellectuals like Robespierre are the most corruptible, cruel, wicked type of humans imaginable, absolutely demonic, when they control the reins of power without absolutely no limits: their idealism, their ideological stance, their altruist-collectivist ethics, their violence, their fanaticism, their groupism are traits that Satan and Lera are delighted to cultivate, for men of words bring hell on earth to all the pathetic peoples that they rule.

 

Note too how the Nazis and Bolsheviks, collectivist, totalitarian zealots, and ideologues, as murderous a lot of thugs to be found on earth, intuitively gravitate to men of words, as allies and brothers in crime, part of the Party in charge, the rulers of the herd.