From his book The Ordeal of Change (written between 1952 and
1963), Eric Hoffer in Chapter 2 (The Awakening of Asia) writes about what
happens to sleepy peoples when drastic change startles them awake. I will quote
the entire essay, from Page 6 through 13, paragraph by paragraph, and then
comment on what he wrote.
Hoffer: “The tendency is to ascribe the present revolution
in Asia to Communist agitation, or see it as an upheaval against foreign
domination or misrule by corrupt native governments. Though there is a large
element of truth in these views they somehow fail to go to the heart of the
matter.”
My response: I have often commented elsewhere upon Hofferian
paradox, his knack for pointing out what the world claims is happening, versus
what is really going on, and what he ascribes as what is going on. His writer’s
resort to this device of paradox often comes across as counterintuitive to the
reader, but Hoffer is usually right.
In this particular essay, he is pointing out that, at the
heart of the matter, the awakened Asian peoples were upset, because much
disruptive change has occurred, and then revolt against the native status quo
arose, driven not so much by Communists, anti-colonial native resentment, or
native repulsion of corrupt native governments, but by the loss of traditional
values and culture, the shattering of being groupist in a warm, communal
existence.
Hoffer: “The nations of Asia have for uncounted centuries
submitted to one conqueror after another and been misruled, looted and bled by
both foreign and native oppressors without letting out a peep. If then the
masses are now rising in protest, it is not because domination and corrupt have
become unduly oppressive, but because the masses today are not what they were
in the past. Something has happened to change their temper. We are told, it is
true, that an awakening has taken place in Asia. But if this ‘awakening’ is to
be more than a metaphor, it must refer to specific changes in individual
attitudes, inclinations, and aspirations. We ought to know what these changes
are and how they were brought about.
My response: Hoffer often disagrees with standard
explanations.
Hoffer: “The same is true of Communist agitation: its
effectiveness is Asia is due less to the potency of the propaganda than to the
temper of the people it is trying to propagandize. When not backed by force,
Communist propaganda can persuade people only of what they want to believe, and
it can make headway only when it gives people something they desperately
desire. It seems obvious that we cannot began to speculate on the state of
affairs in Asia unless we have a fairly clear idea of the individual attitudes,
inclinations, and, above all, desires prevailing there at present. What is it
that the ill-fed, ill-clad, and ill-housed masses in China, India, and
Indonesia, etc., so desperately desire?
Economic theory can give only a dull and unconvincing
answer. One thinks of the shouting and marching, and the sea of upturned faces
one has seen in newsreels and photographs—grimacing, passionate faces, each
framing a gaping mouth. One wonders what is going on behind these faces and
what is it that the gaping mouths shout. Do they shout for bread, clothing, and
houses? Do they clamor for the good things of life? Do they call for freedom
and justice? No. The clamor that is rising all over the Orient is a clamor for
pride. The masses in Asia will sacrifice every economic benefit they have, and
their lives too, to satisfy their craving for pride. The sea of open mouths
roars defiance and not economic grievances and demands. As we shall see, this
clamoring for pride is a characteristic manifestation of the process of
awakening, and it is by probing the nature of this process that we are most
likely to reach the core of our problem.”
My response: Hoffer, the latent egoist moralist, is an
absolute expert on groups and their social and governmental living arrangements
and relationships. I believe he implicitly suggests that that all humans would
find sanity, goodness, the good life, and happiness, if they were
individuators.
Asian peoples, even more collectivistic than Westerners,
though in no way inferior, lived for thousands of years in very tight
collectivities, grounded in altruist-collectivist morality.
As long as their traditional way of life and their group
structures were intact, these peoples endured tyranny, want, suffering and
human rights abuses, without much radical outrage and revolt. When they were recently
awakened from their traditional collectivist slumbers, they were deprived of
their group pride in their traditional values, structures and social
dispensation. No people can live without pride, so this is why they were or seemed
ready to revolt by the 1950s; they were less angry about suffering injustice,
than they were about losing their communal culture and collectivities that so
long comforted them warmly and tribally kept any hint of individualism per
person at bay. I believe this is what Hoffer is leading up to—this
interpretation of Asian unrest.
If I am correct in suggesting that Hoffer is a moral egoist,
then he would likely accept that wholesome, realistic self-esteem is healthy
pride, positive pride. It is an earned state of self-consciousness, always
provisional, always based upon one’s moral character and accomplishments, never
granted for life. One must reinforce being proud of one’s character and
accomplishments by continual self-realizing anew each day for a lifetime.
If Asian peoples, as historically, radically groupist as
they are, when jolted awake by drastic, rapid change—as they were in the 19th
and 20th century—found their traditional collectivities and cultural
narratives shattered or crumbling, it is understandable that the kind of
collective self-esteem, or group/national/ tribal or racial pride that they
felt and paraded would be so diminished and reduced, that they might well be
motivated to grab onto substitute sources of collective self-esteem or tribal
pride in their country, in Communist agitation, in revolutionary ideology.
Neither individualist nor groupist can long endure life’s
uncertainties, struggling and suffering without a compensatory sense of pride,
and collective self-esteem is the eagerly required pride that these Asian
peoples sought after. I think this is what Hoffer is alluding to as the cause
of much of the upheaval and turmoil roiling Asia in the 50s when he wrote this
essay.
Hoffer: “To say that the impact of the West was a chief
factor in the awakening of Asia is not to say that it was oppression and
exploitation by the Western colonial powers that did it. For not only are
oppression and exploitation an old story in Asia, but the colonial regimes of
the British in India and of the Dutch in Indonesia were fairly beneficent—more
so perhaps than any regime those countries ever had or are likely to have for
some time. I am convinced that were the Western colonial powers a hundred times
more beneficent, and had they been animated from the very beginning by the
purest philanthropic motives, their impact on the Orient would still have had
the fateful consequences we are witnessing at present. For Western influence,
irrespective of its intentions, almost always brought a fateful change wherever
it penetrated, and it is this change that is at the root of the present
revolutionary unrest.”
My response: I concur: unsettling change that shattered the
group structures and memes did upend and dislodge millions upon millions of
Asians, so they sought mass movement like substituted collective pride, and a
place to hide from their spoiled, frustrated personal lives. Collectivized
peoples become explosive and passionate when encountering violent, prodigious
social upheaval.
Hoffer: The change I had in mind is of a specific nature—the
weakening and cracking of the communal framework. Everywhere in Asia before the
advent of Western influence the individual was integrated into a more or less
compact group—a patriarchal family, a clan or tribe, a cohesive rural or urban
unit, a compact religious or political body. From birth to death the individual
felt himself part of a continuous eternal whole. He never felt alone, never
felt lost, never saw himself as a speck of life floating in an eternity of
nothingness. By trade, legislation, education, industrialization, and by
example, it cracked and corroded the traditional way of life, and drained
existing communal structures of their prestige and effectiveness. The Western
colonial powers offered individual freedom. They tried to shake the Oriental
out of his lethargy, rid him of his ossified traditionalism, and infect him
with a craving for self-advancement. The result was not emancipation but
isolation and exposure. An immature individual was torn from the warmth and
security of a corporate existence and left orphaned and empty in a cold world. It
was this shock of abandonment and exposure which brought about the awakening of
Asia. The crumbling of the corporate body, with the abandonment of the
individual to his own devices, is always a critical phase in social
development. The newly emerging individual can attain some degree of stability
and eventually become inured to the burdens and strains of individual existence
only when he is offered abundant opportunities for self-assertion and
self-realization. He needs an environment in which achievement, acquisition,
sheer action, or the development of his capacities and talents seems within
easy reach. It is only thus that he can acquire the self-confidence and the
self-esteem that makes an individual existence bearable or even exhilarating.”
My response: I believe Hoffer is articulate and accurate in
describing how the mid-twentieth century awakening of Asia roused in those
awakened groupists a burning need for replacement ism, culture and social
collectivities to substitute for their traditional communal existence, now
threatened or severely altered; their replacement collectivist institutions
were sought by them to serve up to them on a platter, a substitute collective
pride in themselves and their way of life, to stand in for their lost group
pride in their traditional collectivities and cherished ways of life.
What a Mavellonialist like me can offer Asians and all
earthlings, is some basic training in living as an individuating supercitizen,
who learns to provide his own abundant opportunities for self-assertion and
self-realization. Concomitantly, he can substitute real pride or self-esteem
for fleeting group-pride or unearned pride in his groupist associations, and
their justifying stories.
Hoffer: “Where self-confidence and self-esteem seem
unattainable, the emerging individual becomes a highly explosive entity.”
My response: Here is where a culture and society of
individuators, politically free, living their egoist ethics as free marketers
in a law-abiding, peaceful society, would invent their own access to activities
that would offer them self-confidence and self-esteem. A nation of
individuating supercitizens would emerge and evolve as self-esteeming
maverizers. They would be change, welcome change, and do change at room
temperature, with little or no need to resort to political upheaval,
revolution, war, or violence to effect needed or unavoidable social change.
Supercitizens would not become frustrated, passionate, true believers
desperately seeking explosive change to construct a makeshift, collective home
to hide from themselves inside of.
Were the lifestyle of individuating to become popular and
accessible among the Asian masses, they would not only endure and survive
bracing change, but they would welcome it, flourish in its introduction
swirling around them. They would then do change without becoming scared,
confused, lost, angered or mass-movementized. They would embrace change, find,
and keep their individual pride and self-esteem; to accomplish these goals,
they would have to have abandoned their natural craving for herd-living as
nonindividuators, who justify their evil and mediocrity, resorting to a web of
lies which we can name collective-self-esteem. As maverizing supercitizens, their
basically conservative natures would absorb waves of change without change,
that historical march of time and action, without this ontological, invading
inevitability much hurting them.
Hoffer: “He tries to derive a sense of confidence and worth
by embracing some absolute truth and by identifying himself with the
spectacular doings of a leader or some collective body—be it a nation, a
congregation, a party, or a mass movement. He and his like become a breeding
ground of convulsions and upheavals that shake a society to its foundations. It
needs a rare constellation of circumstances if the transition from a communal
to an individual existence is to run its course without being diverted or reversed
by catastrophic complications”
My response: This remarkable man wrote this paragraph,
perhaps as early as 1952, perhaps as late as 1963. Hoffer the genius and kind
man long ago sensed that people were not born basically good and that
innate-per-person, self-loathing, or self-hatred, or lacking self-esteem is the
essence of being born evil. Selflessness, or group-orientedness, is the
natural, human affliction. As long as a people like the Asians lived within
their compact communal structures, with its collectivist culture and inherited
mythologies to comfort people personally, to allow them to live and die as
change and the history unfolds each day in their lives, they were able to
remain largely hidden from beckoning God, and the horrible responsibility to
run their own lives.
When drastic change and history smash that traditional, communal
cocoon, in which they reside and hide eagerly from themselves, the masses are
awakened, no longer able to feel proud of themselves with that false, shallow,
substitute, unfulfilling sense of collective pride or group-driven self-esteem,
they awaken, angry, bitter, confused, resentful, frightened, seeking radical
ideology and mass-movement allegiance to restore some semblance of their
collective pride.
The superior alternative,
when facing drastic change, is to come fully awake, to self-realize, to leave
the group and individual-live, that is the last thing that they resolve to do.
Who wants to stand on one’s own resources and efforts, in a lonely, cold
reality, and self-develop and go against the group, to be ostracized and
persecuted, just to maverize and then feel some merited sense of self-esteeming
or personal pride?
I would suggest that the Mavellonialist, emerging culture of
citizens as adult individuating supercitizens will offer the American Way as a
successful pathway for the people of the world to evolve out of communal
existence into a community of individual existing.
Hoffer: “Europe at the turn of the fifteenth century
witnessed a similar release of the individual from the corporate pattern of an
all-embracing Church. At the beginning, the release was accidental. A weakened
and discredited Church lost its hold on the minds and souls of the people of
Europe. There too, the emergence of the individual was less a deliberate
emancipation than an abandonment. But how different were the attending
circumstances then from what they are now in Asia. The emerging European
individual at the end of the Middle Ages faced breathtaking vistas of new
continents just discovered, new trade routes just opened up, the prospect of
fabulous empires yet to be stumbled upon, and new knowledge unlocked by the
introduction of paper and printing. The air was charged with great expectations
and there was a feeling abroad that by the exercise of his capacities and
talents and with the aid of good fortune the individual on his own was equal to
any undertaking at home or across the sea.”
My response: Hoffer turns to European history coming out of
the Middle Ages to make his case that the precedent for the rise of
individualism in Asia in the mid-20th century was undertaken by
Europeans over 400 years earlier. It seems as if the rise of individualism on
earth is largely a European and Western story and adventure, but it needs to
become the story of individuals that maverize among all peoples, of all races,
of all backgrounds, from every country on earth.
The emancipation of the individual as individuators, from
the shackles and chains of miserable slavery as individuals as groupists who
are nonindividuators, will be the adventure and opportunity of the rest of the
21st century, and this hopefully gentle revolution must be
consciously planned and put into practiced everywhere for all, Asians, and
non-Asians.
We are smart creatures—when we want to be-Dr. Stephen Hicks
is always reminding us: this indicates we can devise free, lawful, peaceful,
free-market economies and social structures which give each earthling the
fabulous opportunity to do her thing and become the best version of herself.
The challenge is there, but abundance, resources and wealth either are
available or we can fabricate them, to nudge all to find a means to leave
behind communal existence, embracing individual existence, and the needed
source of pride (genuine, earned self-esteem) is available to each maverizing
maverizer, as they endure daily change as we earthlings pass through time,
change and history, all metaphysical, unstoppable, realities.
Hoffer: “Thus by a fortuitous combination of circumstances,
the fateful change from a communal to an individual existence produced an
outburst of vitality that has since been characteristic of the Occident and
marks it off from any other civilization. Yet even so, the transition was not
altogether smooth. The convulsions of the Reformation and the
Counter-Reformation stemmed from the fears and passionate intensities of people
unequal to the burdens and strains of an individual existence.”
My response: We cannot imagine how our economy, knowledge,
talent, and high culture will almost unlimitedly grow in quantity and
surpassing excellence as the masses in all or any country pass from communal
existing to individual existing as individuators and supercitizens.
If we teach our young to be stoic, rational, and calm, no
matter how much chaos, catastrophe, war, and social upheaval surrounds them, to
maverize and think of ways to build a new way of peaceful, civilized, lawful,
free societal living, then these indviduator citizens will be able to find
self-esteem without joining ideology-driven mass movements. They will sustain
and enjoy the individual existence, without resorting to groupism and
meretricious group-driven, collectivist self-esteem.
Hoffer: “No such exceptional combination of circumstances
attended the crumbling of communal life in Asia. There the awakening of the
individual occurred in a landscape strewn with the litter and rubble of the
centuries. Instead of being stirred and lured by the breath-taking prospects
and undreamt-of opportunities, he finds himself mired in a life that is
stagnant, debilitated, and inordinately meager. It is a world where human life
is most plentiful and cheapest thing, and where millions of hungry hands grab
at the meanest prize and meagerest morsel. It is, moreover, an illiterate
world, where even rudimentary education confers distinction and lifts a man
above the common run of toiling humanity. The articulate minority is thus
prevented from acquiring a sense of usefulness and worth in the world’s work,
and is condemned to a life of chattering, posturing pseudo-intellectuals.”
My response: We no longer require a world with such huge,
intricate hierarchies and institutions, especially governmental ones, beyond a
lean, minimal set envisioned by Ayn Rand and America’s Founders, our
constitutional republic, and our capitalist economy.
Where each person is not minimally but is highly educated
and self-realizing (the majority of adults), then each maverizers can work in
private enterprise in some capacity, and feel useful and worthy and still
maverize, without elites running much of anything.
Hoffer: “The rabid extremist in present-day Asia is usually
a man of some education who has a horror of manual labor and who develops a
mortal hatred for a social order that denies him a position of command. Every
student, every minor clerk and officeholder, every petty member of the
professions feels himself one of the chosen.”
My response: It is human nature not to like ourselves, and
we are desperate to gain needed group pride, that fake, substitute groupist self-esteem (A lie
told by Satan, other group-members and by the self to the self, the lie that
living as a nonindivdiuator hiding in the herd is a basis for feeling the self
is worthy, where the self-sought pleasure and ease and never pushed the self-much
while alive. God is displeased.)
We can gain this negative, false group-pride by being part
of the ruling elite, or a popular, conformist insider with tangible social rank
and respect in the social hierarchy of one’s clique. When modestly educated
people are able to rise above the masses, to rule the masses and look down upon
them, this corrupting temptation is almost impossible for any of us to resist
succumbing to. This is how power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts
absolutely.
Hoffer: “It is these wordy, futile people who set the tone
in Asia. Living barren, useless lives, they are without self-confidence and
self-respect, and their craving is for the illusion of weight and importance,
and for the explosive substitutes of pride and faith.”
My response: The only workable, enduring defense, the masses
can resort to defeat and contain educated, nonindividuating, collectivized,
power-addicted, true-believing elitists and their mass movement addiction to
the explosive substitutes for positive individual pride, collective pride and
faith, is to unite and organize among themselves and raise themselves up by
their bootstraps as individuating supercitizens that rule and ordered about all
elites that used to run the country. This could work in any country on earth.
Hoffer: “It is chiefly to these pseudointellectuals that
Communist Russia directs its appeal. It brings them the promise of membership
in a ruling elite, the prospect of having a hand in the historical process, and,
by its doctrinaire double-talk, provides them with some sense of weight and
depth.
As to the illiterate masses, the appeal of Communist
preaching does not lie in its ‘truths,’ but in the vague impression it conveys
to them that they and Russia are partners in some tremendous, unprecedented
undertaking—the building of a proud future that will surpass and put to naught
all the ‘things that are.’”
My response: The awakened frustrated masses joined the
Communist mass movement because it offered them the best chance to find a new
ism and social order where their collective pride and cocoon to hide from the
self, could be reestablished—and the revolutionary story and new collectivities
seemed so appealing, modern, and up to date.
Hoffer: “The crucial fact about the awakening of Asia is
that it did not come from an accession of strength. It was not brought about by
a gradual or sudden increase of material, intellectual, or moral powers, but by
the shock of abandonment and exposure. It was an awakening brought about by a
poignant sense of weakness.”
My response: It does not matter if the awakening is brought
about by a poignant sense of weakness. The change occurred. History has spoken,
so we need to help peoples become individuating supercitizens with earned,
wholesome, justifiable self-esteem and personal pride. This is ideally what the
awakening of a people should lead to.
Hoffer: “And we must know something about the mentality and
potentialities of the weak if we are to understand the present temper of the
people in awakening Asia.
It is often said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps
equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the
few, while weakness corrupts the many.”
My response: The power of powerfulness does not corrupt, and
this power is the innate power given by the Divine Couple to each baby so she
can maverize and make the kingdom of God be expanded and maintained on earth
while she is alive on her watch. She, if she obeyed the Light Couple and becomes
willfully a maverizing supercitizen, then she will allow no other human, an
elite or a mob, to rob her of her share of power or entice her to rob other
individuators of their share of divine power allotted them to make something of
their lives.
The evil power of powerlessness is what Hoffer is referring
to above. That dark and cruel form of power corrupts the few, the elite, but
these putatively selfish users and monsters are selfless and other-interested
for the most part. They are groupist parasites and criminals, living off the
herd that they exploit, abuse and dictate to.
They are the sadists who have gathered all or most available
all the power and money for themselves, these rulers inflict the power of
powerlessness upon the masses who freely choose submit to them. Thusly the many
are corrupted by their weakness, their voluntary, masochistic willingness to be
abused slaves without power or resources; this stunted, miserable existence is
what they settle for and believe this is what they deserve. Their real motive
is to hide in the enslaved, nonindividuating group, just so they can avoid
individually awakening, confronting the Good Spirits, taking up their personal
burden and cross of individuating, to develop their talents and capacities to
help run and expand God’s kingdom on earth.
Hoffer: “Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and
suspicion are the fruits of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not
spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of their inadequacy
and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They
feel our generosity as oppression. St. Vincent de Paul cautioned his disciples
to deport themselves so the poor ‘will forgive you the bread you give them.’
But this requires, in both giver and receiver, a vivid awareness of God who is
the father of all, and a living mastery of the religious idiom which we of this
day do not, and perhaps cannot, have in full measure. Nor can we win the weak
by sharing our hope, pride, or even hatred with them. We are too far ahead
materially and too different in our historical experience to serve as an object
of identification. Our healing gift to the weak is the capacity for self-help.
We must learn how to impart to them the technical, social, and political skills
which would enable them to get bread, human dignity, freedom, and strength by
their own efforts.
My hunch is that in mastering the art or the technique of
helping the weak to help themselves we shall solve some of the critical
problems which confront us, not only in our foreign relations but also in our
domestic affairs.”
My response: My response: I believe Hoffer the atheist was a
wise and kind as well as a brilliant philosopher. When he points out above how
hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are fruits of weakness, he
is pointing out that evil thinking and evil behavior are crops planted in the
soil of the individual soul, in his selfless, altruistic, nonindividuating,
group-living role, where selflessness, group-orientedness and self-hatred that are
the spiritual core of his individual consciousness. His poignant awareness of
his shabby personhood necessarily causes the bubbling into his human, social
consciousness from the subconscious and unconscious of this suffering human,
such awful, antisocial attitudes, and behaviors.
The strong for Hoffer are those that are the ruling elites,
but he also seems to suggest that the strong are individual and individuators
without much social or institutional power beyond their slightly upper middle-class
position.
For Hoffer, the weak are the ruled, subjugated, suffering
masses, but the weak are also those that wield the power of powerlessness,
whether they are the ruling elite, or the subjugated masses, who all support
and put up with group-living and hierarchical strata and misallocation of
power, money, liberty, and resources.
Hoffer the wise wants peoples in the developed West, and
everywhere, to engage in self-help, so they can save themselves. Only they will
they feel real pride in their earned status and victories. If we could
encourage people to maverize, that would greatly assist them on the road to
self-helping.
