The Narrative

 

Eric Hoffer, on Page 59 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, wrote two entries which I shall quote and then comment on.

 

Hoffer: “          97

 

Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for the plot and a pattern in the development of his life story—a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.

 

The turning of our lives into a story is also a means of rousing the interest of others in us and associating them with us.”

 

My response: People need meaning in their lives, and they utilize language and concepts to craft a narrative to give them values, purpose, and significance. If they have self-esteem, live as individualists and love truth, then the story they craft and then live out will be productive and interesting.

 

If they group-living and do not maverize, their low self-esteem will drive them to devise quite a different story, one filled with lies, half-truths, grievances, contradictions, excuses, fantasies, and some real statements.

 

The quality of stories that people self-generate in reference each to herself does predict how society will operate and fare going forward.

 

Hoffer: “          98

 

Action can give us the feeling of being useful, but only words can give us a sense of weight and purpose.”

 

My response: The happy and successful individuators requires work, action, to hold a job in the everyday world of commerce to feel alive, productive, substantial, and happy. As a brilliant intellectual, each individuating supercitizens will know that she carries weight and purpose, more or less second to none, with millions of brilliant, talented peers also able to think, write and articulate, so no men of words would be empowered to use words again to bewitch and get a grip on the masses, who formerly were anti-intellectual, non-intellectual, non-critically thinking, and non-independent thinking individuals.