To Heed Or Not

 

On Pager 105 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer shares three entries, which I quote and then comment on.

 

Hoffer: “          185

 

We are likely to have regard for the opinion of others only when there is a chance that the opinion might now and then be in our favor.”

 

My response: We have low self-esteem naturally, so we cannot stand too much negative input. Even, competent, self-confident individualists can only stomach so much negative feedback.

 

If we are individuating mavericks, then we are smart, creative, productive, and competent: we are the solid, real McCoy, so the opinions of others for or against us, will not matter to us too much. When the community speaks of us, if they are honest and impartial, their opinion should be favorable more than not.

 

Those among us that live as groupist mediocrities, that are dull, intellectually lazy, hedonic, underperforming non-producers, then the opinions of others, pro or con, based on truth or smears, matter to us much more than they should. If these opinions are unfavorable but honest more than honest but favorable, as underperformers and shirkers, public opinion about us should not be very supportive and positive, and that is what we deserve.

 

Hoffer: “The Negro who is convinced that public opinion will be against him, no matter how he acts, often behaves like a spoiled society lady who does not give a damn what people think of her.”

 

My response: Many regarded Hoffer as racist, but I think mostly he is not. He is an individualist and an egoist, and he rightly is highlighting that collectivist, tribal peoples from Africa or where ever, deemphasize individualism, egoist morality, and a standard of self-expectation that would by horrified and embarrassed about oneself when one is criminal, slacking, immoral or misbehaves. The individuators has too much positive pride to live below his own standards of behavior, so he judges himself by his own standards, and what the public thinks, though interesting, is not very relevant to how he regards and motivates himself.

 

Hoffer is suggesting that, as blacks individuate more, and live more as egoists, then they will less and less care about public opinion and will do what is right because that is how they insist each of them is to live and must live per their self-imposed standards.

 

 

 

Hoffer: “          186

 

It is impossible to think clearly in understatements. Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.”

 

My response: This epistemological stance, taken by Hoffer, may be one of his most trenchant insights, and is the key to understanding his philosophy and worldview. Hoffer is an epistemological moderate but often an exaggerator in his communicative style.

 

Hoffer instinctively—and plainly explicitly and self-consciously by the time he wrote this entry—realizes that the expression of opposites, clashing against each other, reinforcing and complementing each other, ultimately being rationally reconciled with each other in an uneasy, teeming harmony, these compared and contrasted opposites, dealt with as a rational and emotional process, get the intellectual juices flowing, enabling the thinker to think, to generate new ideas, to do original work.

 

He and I advocate radical openness of ideas offered, and almost pure free speech, allowing wild speculation, and outrageous opinions—even hate speech.

 

Hoffer talks outrageously but his exaggeration is to get the ideas flowing: there was something extroverted and social about his philosophical communicating. Once the range and depth of new ideas is bubbled to the surface as new thoughts, then the thinker can sift through his products and rank, categorize, and variously accept and reject what he produced.

 

Hoffer might seem tendentious, and he is a bit, but mostly he is fair and impartial. He is not for lying or narrow thinking, but he knows that communicative exaggeration might break loose some torrent of original ideas which could be beneficial to the thinker and for humanity.

 

Those that are too constipated and buttoned-down—mid-twenties century analytic philosophers not interested in metaphysics--in their communication style and in the content of their ideas: these understaters will not think well or deeply, know truth or think originally. Their addiction to understatement is actually anti-intellectual, so here is another Hofferian paradox revealed.

 

Note that both Hoffer and Ayn Rand used communicative overstatement and flamboyance, but he did not make the mistake of identifying overstatement with quality thinking, whereas, Rand the absolutist and near pure dogmatist was strident and unwavering in her thinking and in her expression of her thoughts, and this radicalism and extremism might have made her less truthful and accurate about reality and people than she was confident that she had attained, though she is an epistemological and moral giant, in my non-professional opinion.

 

Somehow Hoffer seems more in touch with reality and truth than Rand was.

 

 

 

Hffer: “            187

 

When we are engrossed in a struggle for sheer survival, the self occupies the center of the stage; it is as were our holy cause. Selflessness then is meaningless. The enthusiasm of self-surrender can rise only when we no longer have to strive for physical survival.”

 

 

My response: Hoffer seems to be arguing that self-interest as the primary motivator in humans occurs under two very different circumstances. First, the poor and the hungry struggling for sheer survival think of nothing but making it to the end of the day; their lives are filled with meaning—albeit much suffering and pain are felt—they have no time to worry about fleeing the self, or losing the self in a mass movement, serving a guru and a holy cause.

 

Second, the other type of individual engrossed by self-interest as her primary motive is the prosperous individuator.

 

I would argue that the poor and hungry motivated by self-interest, are actually, naturally groupists, clawing and fighting each day just to survive. Once their situation improves a bit, a lot, or a whole lot, then their self-awareness makes them deeply sensitive to their collectivist morality and group-identity as personal identity: at this point, their natural selflessness becomes apparent to them and a burden: in a successful social order, they will lead lives of quiet desperation and discontent; once their social order collapses, these prosperous, alienated groupists now feel frustrated, and their requirement for a holy cause to worship, serve and self-sacrifice to, now becomes paramount, and their self-surrender enthusiastically embraced by them is their sole preoccupation.