Provided For

 

On Page 29 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer has two entries, which I will quote and then comment on.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “             36

 

Give people pride and they’ll live on bread and water, bless their exploiters, and even die for them. Self-surrender is a transaction of barter: we surrender our sense of human dignity, our judgment, our moral and esthetic sense for pride. If there is pride in being free we are ready to die for liberty. If there is pride to be derived from an identification with a leader, we grovel in the dust before a Napoleon, a Hitler or Stalin and are ready to die for him. If there is a distinction in suffering, we search for martyrdom as for hidden treasure.”

 

My response: Because people are born altruistic and selfless, hating themselves and lacking in self-esteem, they can only gain a sense of worth through pride, aligning themselves with a cause, a leader or group external to themselves.

 

They did not listen to the Good Spirit’s beckoning them to go and serve God as maverizers, where self-esteem is accrued by the living angel with ease and repetition. So, to feel good about their rotten, drab, pathetic, boring, nonindividuating existence as second handers, they must gain pride to have any sense of worth at all, to even continue living. By renouncing themselves, they set themselves up to require feeling proud, and they must end up feeling proud because they have thoroughly left the self behind, fleeing into collective existing and dreaming.

 

Having rejected the self completely and finally, second handers can only live with themselves and keep existing if they can conjure up or be given cover, a reassuring sense of personal worth, based on lies and illusions. This is their bargain with the Devil and his worldly agents, the Evil Spirits. Some collectivity, be it a divinity, a cause, an ism, a guru, a demagogue or illustrious group, offers the discontented or frustrated group-liver a bargain which he dares not refuse, and is eager to accept: his total and permanent self-surrender to the owners of the collectivity in exchange for being admitted into the collectivity, and that belonging and membership will provide the joiner pride, his sought sense of worth.

 

H: “        37

 

Monotheism—the adherence to a one and only God, truth, cause, leader, nation and so on—is usually the end result of a search for pride. It was the craving to be the one and only people which impelled the ancient Hebrews to invent a one and only God whose one and only people they were to be.

 

Whenever we proclaim the uniqueness of a religion, a truth, a leader, a race, a party, or a holy cause, we are also proclaiming our own uniqueness.”

 

My response: Unlike Hoffer, I am a religious person. But, whether one worships the Father alone, or the Mother alone, or any good deity singularly or while also worshiping other good deities, if one perverts the loving and healthy relationship between the believer and the deity adored and contacted, by perverting one’s deep characterization of the deity/deities as separate divine persons to be perceived and treated as they are authentically are and so want to be encountered, one then as a true believing fanatic has disfigured that deity/deities into a monster, a fetishized abstraction that one can worship as a holy cause, and seeks to spread across the globe by the sword as the conquering mass movement actors, warriors and avengers.

 

One can be a monotheist without being a true believer, but perhaps the ancient Hebrews were moderate, loving believers in part, and, in part, true believers in Yahweh.

 

As fanatics, the monotheistic God, ism, or cause that is twisted into a holy cause, but the pride that the true believers evince is consistent with their cause being hyper special because they worship it, and they are hyper-special, very superior and extra worthy, because they worship and take pride in the best ism that ever came down the pike.