Retaliation

 

On Page 32 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer has one entry which I will quote and then comment on.

 

Hoffer: “Note also how perverse is the attitude of the weak towards their benefactors. They feel generosity as oppression; they want to retaliate. They say to their benefactors: ‘May the day come when you shall be weak and we will send bundles to America.’

 

You do not win the weak by sharing your wealth with them; it will but infect them with greed and resentment. You can win the weak only by sharing your pride, hope or hatred with them.”

 

My response: Temporary, short-term charity at home must be given (morally not legally required), but long-term charity is corrosive to the soul of the beneficiaries.

 

We do not like ourselves naturally: we hate ourselves, but we are addicted to hating ourselves and hurting ourselves, and, because we are innately group-oriented more than individual-oriented, we run in packs. All these collectivist groupings and games grow our self-hatred. Our addiction to self-hatred is our altruistic, genetic curse.

 

There is no easy, without-price way to remedy this ailment of the soul that afflicts all humans, but there is a solution. Below I present this solution, I will digress first, and translate what Hoffer is telling the reader in the above-quote.

 

Hoffer and I believe people naturally are not very individualistic, not very brave, strong, resourceful, or inclined to self-realize, to actualize their untapped but considerable God-given talent or potential, and it disappoints the Good Spirits when most people elect to drift through life as nonindividuating mediocrities.

 

Because people do not like themselves, they have no self-esteem based on their merited effort, so they have no honest, organic sense of worth based on their own efforts.

 

They cannot stand living if they do not have some kind of sense of worth, so they fake it, steal it, make it up, or conjure it out of thin air, and this collective sense of worth, which the ego-battered citizen adopts, is pride in one’s group, nation, religion, cause, family, material possessions, social status and so forth, all rather superficial affiliations with little relationship to the actual self, its personal growth, effort and earned gain.

 

The weak can be poor, conquered, a people behind economically, technologically or militarily, so they feel weak and dependent, so the usual sources of collective pride are taken from them, wittingly or unwittingly, by their richer, more powerful benefactors. The beneficiaries seek to retaliate because their benefactors have made them feel weak, inferior, and worthless, because they ‘require handouts’. Receiving charity, needed or not, willingly or not doled out by the rich and powerful to the poor and weak, always grates on the nerves of the recipients for they loathe themselves for needing charity in the first place.

 

Hoffer knows that if they were offered group pride from sources like benefactor pride, hope or joint hatred of a common enemy, then the conquered, the poorer and the weaker would rally with the conquering benefactor, rather than resenting them.

 

My better solution is to move away from group-pride altogether, disavowing interest in external causes, groups, or affiliations, built on sifting sand.

 

If people were taught to maverize, then they would gain in self-esteem, enough minimally to become reconciled with themselves, not any longer needing to worry about accumulating connections to objects yielding group-pride to give them each a fig-leaf covering, a tawdry but graspable sense of worth.

 

Once enough people maverize, among a people, then thousands of people in a community enjoying merited self-love or self-esteem. What this solid status would win form them is then they would feel, as a community, a modest, upbeat sort of communal self-esteem.

 

This would do much to reduce or make evaporate tribal warfare against neighboring tribes, because conflicting interests could not be allowed to be resolved peacefully, to the satisfaction of most involved.

 

If people would work hard, and develop themselves, then they would have a solid, substantial sense of self-worth and self-esteem, grounded in their worldly success as maverizers, workers, producers, as moral and spiritually good persons. When people do so succeed, their self-regard becomes self-interested and self-loving rather than just feeling other-centered and self-effacing or self-loathing.