Chronic Condition

 

On Page 21 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer has one entry which I will quote and then comment on.

 

Hoffer: “The independent individual constitutes a chronically unbalanced entity. The confidence and self-esteem which alone can keep him on an even keel are extremely perishable, and must be generated anew each day. An achievement today is but a challenge for tomorrow. When standing at a stay however high he is prey to nagging fears.

 

The soul of an autonomous individual has the aspect of a volcanic landscape. There is a seismic line running through it—the line of separation from the self. All our enthusiasms, passionate pursuits, dreams, aspirations and outstanding achievements have their origin along this line of cleavage. The strivings of such a soul are either to heal the cleavage by a reconciliation with the self through achievement, or camouflage it by self-forgetting, or eliminate it by self-rejection.”

 

My response: When an individual individual-lives, individual-identifies, practices egoist morality and maverization, and promotes individual rights, he has maximized his vulnerability, the pressure on his psyche, his maximally tested capacity to tolerate loneliness and aloneness.

 

If he is reconciled with himself, he will achieve, often impressively, magnificently, perhaps immortally. But he must prove himself against each day for the rest of his life to fill the emptiness that is his consciousness with God, meaning and purpose, lest the emptiness and silence drive him to madness, corruption, falsehood, suicide, or murder.

 

As an artist, a creator, an inventor, he reconciles himself to himself and he is not long sporting a consciousness disintegrated and divorced from himself.

 

He need not forget himself, or kill the self by self-rejection and fleeing into collectivity nothingness as poor solutions to heal the divide between the self as consciousness and the self as sufficient to keep awake, alive, functioning and planning towards the future.

 

This is, I believe, one of Hoffer’s most brilliant quotations.