Motivation

 

On Page 45 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer writes two entries which I will quote and then comment on.

 

Hoffer: “            66

 

There are people who need the sanction—or rather the incantation—of an idea in order to be able to act. They want to command, manage and conquer; but they must feel that in satisfying these passions and hungers they do not cater to the despised self but are engaged in the solemn ritual of making the word become flesh. Usually, such people are without the capacity to originate ideas. Their special talent lies rather in the deintellectualization of ideas—the turning of ideas into slogans and battle cries which beget action.”

 

My response: The true believer, inside his mass movement, can act only if the abstraction he worships, his holy cause, so excites him to warlike aggression that he spreads his cause across the globe, conquering and smashing all in his path. When the name of his holy cause is his battle cry, this army of fanatics are near unstoppable in their march of ism conquest and expansion.

 

Hoffer: “            67

 

Quite often in history action has been the echo of words. An era of talk was followed by an era of events.

 

The new barbarism of the twentieth century is the echo of words

bandied about by brilliant speakers and writers in the second half of the nineteenth.”

 

My response: Lest the postmodernist Progressive double-talk of the last 60 years become American cultural and politics in the 2030s and 2040s, let us MAGA by introducing Mavellonialist ethical, cultural and political theory, for our grandchildren to put into practice.