Superficial

 

 

On Page 114 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer has two entries which I quote and then comment on.

 

 

Hoffer: “          201

 

The reason that man is so fantastic a creature is that he is so superficial.”

 

My response: First, I deeply trust Hoffer view of things, for he is a truth-magnet. If he suggests that humans are superficial, they likely are.

 

Second, Hoffer is deeply skeptical, even cynical at time, over the way that people present themselves to the world; people, individually and collectively even more so, live lives of self-deception and pretense. Hoffer knowing this, takes people self-assessments with a grain of salt, and then he writes what they really think, who they really are, and what they are actually up to. When he makes people aware of who and what they really are, that can be startling, disturbing, even annoying to the vain and pretentious espousing popular tropes.

 

Third, Hoffer is not denying that there are great depths of subterranean layer after layer of meaning and drives embedded in the human consciousness. What he is denying is that humans live and make ethical, life-altering and life-defeating levels on the surface of things.

 

We are best able to be smart, ethical, productive, wholesome, and loving by dealing with our problems and responsibilities by making liable, sensible decisions on maverizing and self-improvement on the surface level of living and being. We are capable of fantastic adjustments and assuming positive new roles to play, on the surface of life, that then like-muscle memory, these adopted surface roles over time, as habituated, become our personality, who we actually are and can be proud of becoming.

 

Most of us do not require years of Freudian psychoanalysis to discover who we are, and how we are to live. Hoffer advises us to quit worrying about being so superficial, but to accept who and what we are and work on self-improvement, based upon what nature gave us to work with.

 

Hoffer is also brilliantly warning ethicists and people of good will to avoid heeding pseudointellectuals, idealists, and never-do-wells, that seek complex, authoritarian, prescriptive, involuntary, collective, global revolutions to seek deep lasting reform via upending the whole system. They usually make things worse and destroy what is working well. They have no idea how to make things better, but they know how to tear things down. They are most effective when they do nothing, and no one gives them any say in running things.

 

It is more effective for reform to be personal, practical, small-scale, implemented by the nonexpert individual, practice on himself imperfectly, clumsily, with slow gains achieved effectively over time: self-change put upon the self by the self, on the surface of existence, that self-reform, will over time, go deep into his whole being.

 

Change

 

We do self-talk on the surface of our personalities, and the conscious and unconscious self will get behind this new role and the self can be healed this way.

 

Hoffer: “His nobleness, and vileness, loves and dedications are all on the surface.”

 

My response: It occurs to me too that we mostly are group creatures, and any group has a group personality and conforming joiners eagerly, quickly, frantically and repeatedly, do their damnedest to mimic and parrot the personality, view and reasoning of that official, adopted, group personality, that, to the degree that the group has deprived each member of his own individual personality, that group personality is the personality of each conforming joiner, popular and in good standing.

 

This denial of personal and private personality and identity, inflicted by the group upon each conforming joiner, claiming to be happy and fulfilled as a nonindividuating groupist, exacerbates the natural human tendency to not be self-aware, to be shallow, to deceive the self, to sin (which is living in a bubble of lies). The adoption of the group personality guarantees that most people, conforming joiners, live on the surface and may make jolting reversals in their plans, based upon what the group orders each member to think, do and what role to assume.

 

Hoffer: “The sudden drastic transformations of which he is capable are due to the fact that his complex differentiation and the tensions which shape his attitudes are wholly surface phenomena.

 

 

 

Hoffer: “          202

 

We probably a greater love for those we support than for those that support us. Our vanity carries more weight than our self-interest.”

 

 

My response: There are times when I struggle to understand what he is really saying, and that is true with this entry. It could be that we feel that we lose faith and can’t helping feeling inferior to and resentful towards the ones that support us and shows us charity. We hate them for being seemingly or actually superior to us.

 

We gain face and feel superior when we support others; and we are the benefactor and they are the recipient. We love them because we are in the superior position for a change and that makes us feel better about ourselves.

 

It would be in our self-interest to receive support and aid when we need it, but our vanity is hurt because we feel inferior to the giver of charity.