National Education Television in 1963 recorded a 29 minute, 25 second interview between James Day, general manager of KQED in San Francisco, and longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer about Hoffer’s book, The Ordeal Of Change.
I took notes on this video and did some light editing.
James Day (J after this): “Eric Hoffer is a laborer. For more than 40 years he has supported himself with the strength of his hands and back as a longshoreman on the San Francisco waterfront, as an agricultural worker and as a miner.
He is also a writer. His 3 books and several essays have won him the highest praise of literary critics. They are the product of a self-educated man. He never finished grammar school. Born in the Bronx, the son of a German cabinet maker, Eric Hoffer was to lose his mother and his sight when he was 7, and his father when he was 18. After 8 years of blindness, he recovered his sight at 15, and this left him with an enormous appetite for the printed word. An appetite that has not diminished in the years since he moved to the West Coast to become a migrant laborer, a miner, and a dock worker.
In 1951 he published his first book, The True Believer, a study of the nature of mass movements. Two years later he was to publish 280 aphorisms under the title, The Passionate State of Mind. His most recent book, The Ordeal of Change, is a collection of essays that deal with a crisis of self-esteem each of us suffers when faced with the new and unknown.”
My response: Note how Eric Hoffer here and Ayn Rand elsewhere employ the same phrase, self-esteem, technically, as a phrase which explains a person’s self-image or current self-assessment.
J: “Mr. Hoffer, in the opening sentence of your book, The Ordeal Of Change, you say we are afraid of the new. Why is this.”
My response: I agree that humans naturally are profoundly conservative in some instinctual, reactive way to change. Change upsets us profoundly, perhaps in ways we cannot imagine.
Hoffer (H after this): “Well, you know, as an American, I shouldn’t have been interested at all the question of change.”
My response: Hoffer is pointing out that a people—like Americans have done--can learn to adopt to change favorably and with effective optimism, especially if there is liberty, egoist morality and economic opportunity for them to express themselves in action in a way that makes changing rewarding and profitable for them, as is the tradition which most Americans have enjoyed.
H: “After all, we are awfully familiar with change. We change our places, we change our jobs, we change husbands and wives, we change friends just like that. For us change is no problem at all. Now you know right after the war something has happened everywhere.: in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America. We were told there was an awakening, that backwards countries, underdeveloped countries begin to modernize themselves in a hurry to industrialize themselves.
I ask myself then these questions. What happens when an underdeveloped country, a backwards country wants to modernize itself. All he has to do is a few practical, sober, things. It has to build a few roads, a few factories, some hospitals, some schools. Now these are all practical things. Now why do they have to stage a madhouse in order to accomplish such sober, practical things?
In this country if you want to build a factory or build a town, all you have to do is pick up the phone, call a contractor, and the contractor will do all these things without hardly changing the rhythm of life around him. “
My response: Watch how Hoffer compares and contrasts how drastic change upends developing countries whereas constant change in America is ongoing and routine, with no American madhouse effect here, no or little social unrest.
Hoffer: “I just groped, turning things in my mind for a long time to find out what it is and finally I settled on that almost implausible thing, that the real problem is the problem of change. You take a population you subject it to drastic change. That means you turned that population into a population of misfits.”
My response: Misfit is Hoffer’s technical noun meant to describe and define how all individuals who has been exposed to and so shocked by fast, drastic change, that the world he knew is left behind, and the new world that he now knows, and experiences is a world which he no long fits into, nor is competent to cope in and operate in. His “misfittedness” triggers a crisis of personal identity, a colossal decline in his positive self-esteem, and that state of psychic pain and misery, common and widespread, may trigger explosive, madhouse reactions and behavior among the masses. This is Hoffer’s thesis.
H: “Now misfits live and breathe in an atmosphere of passion. And misfits, the misfit needs self-confidence (Ed says: self-confidence and self-regard are interchangeable phrases or synonyms employed by Hoffer to replace self-esteem.). He needs self-respect.”
My response: Hoffer teaches that no human can live for long without self-respect and pride: the individual will get it one way or another, even if he has to lie to himself about himself, fabricating a self-narrative, a phony, unearned self-respect and false pride.
Or, if the person in question is ethical, productive, and functioning well in the world, it is likely that she will esteem herself highly, or moderately well, and that her high self-regard will be authentic and earned. She will have established or restored her sense of worth by earning it the hard way, not by artificially assigning it to herself sans the hard work undertaken to make self-esteeming of herself based in her actual worth in reality. Being as it is genuine and true—this self-assessment, this self-image—this merited, personal, positive pride merited is how accomplished, competent, creative, functioning individualist feels about herself. She is now fit, has handled well her personal encounter with shocking change, and is fit to go forward into the new times.
H: “If he gets a chance to acquire those things by action by proving himself, fine. But if he doesn’t get a chance, an easy way, a relatively easy way to gain self-confidence and self-respect, then there is the devil to pay.”
My response: Hoffer the atheist does not countenance the notions that angels, demons or deities actually exist, so if there is the devil to pay, he means it indicates social upheaval and madhouse conditions, where passionate, frustrated adults act out.
I accept this view but add that there is also as a devil that exists, so when unleashed is social evil, unleashed at the same time into and against society is increased, aggressive spiritual evil: social evil and spiritual evil commingle and operate side by side in society.
If the individual enduring drastic change is granted freedom, opportunity, capitalist economics, egoist morality and a work ethic, then he can rely on his internal resources and talents, and is motivated to make his life better, to prove himself, versatile and capable to be reborn as a new man, with a reworked identity as a fit survivor meshing with the new order.
H: “He need substitutes for self-respect. He needs substitutes for self-confidence. And once you go in for substitutes you are in an atmosphere of passion. You have to stage a madhouse. The substitute for self-respect is faith.”
My response: When the individual is exposed to drastic change, and cannot find ways to prove himself to regain his lost fitness and self-respect now that he is in a new existential circumstance, he must find phony, empty, unfulfilling self-respect offered by collective pride, collective morality in something outside himself—his nation, his leader, his guru, his denomination, his holy cause, his tribe or race or family tree.
His assumed, substituted, fake, true-believing identity, as a passionate adherent for his substitute, new interest, is an identity that embraces this replacement self-identity as absolutely the best, most true, most noble and the finest, though it is the worst, the falsest, the most ignoble and degraded self-description that he could embrace.
When one’s feelings are temperate and guided by one equable, self-regulated thinking, then dispassionate feeling is healthy and positive. When one’s feelings are radicalized and made passionate, then one’s self-hatred will grow hatred, evil, discord and destruction in the world.
Hoffer the moderate conservative despises passion, because it grows wickedness in the individual’s consciousness, whereas cool reason and calmness lead to goodness emanating from the individual. To feel non-passionately is to feel reasonably, and reasonable feeling is close to godliness.
Self-esteem or self-confidence is the realistic, accurate, sane self-identifying of a civilized man who is successfully self-disciplined and restrains his natural inner manness, the savage core of each individual.
H: “Faith in what? Faith in a leader. Faith in a nation. Faith in a holy cause. And before you are through with that, before you acquire faith, and the substitute for self-respect is pride.”
My response: Self-respect, in oneself as a fit individual or individuator, who incorporates the new into his identity and life without much fuss or loss, is an earned success at coping with incessant, modern, even drastic change.
What Hoffer is referring to above as self-respect is what I refer to as positive or individual earned pride in the self. When the misfitted self of low self-esteem is battered and defeated by drastic change, she must grasp at substitutes to provide her with a bogus but acquired sense of worth, and this phony pride is collective pride or negative pride to cover the pain of no longer being able to stand a defeated sense of self, a colossal failure.
Hoffer the atheist does not see that religious faith can give people a positive pride and sense of hope because he does not believe in God. He only identifies faith with what is irrational and directed towards the individual worshiping false religions or substitutes like gurus or ideologies. This passionate or extreme emotionalism is groupist and reveals low personal self-esteem in the worshiper.
Hoffer roughly would agree with Ayn Rand and me that reason is morally superior to making decisions than those based on sentiment, but I the moderate do not dismiss the correct notion that feeling, especially as veridical intuition, can often be accurate, creative, and healthy.
H: “Before you acquire those things you have a heated atmosphere, you have the bedlam atmosphere. You have to stage a madhouse. And this was my first approach. I actually in this book, Mr. Day, if you notice it, in each chapter more or less I tried to approach the problem from a different angle. I am groping around.
And the more I turned that problem in my mind, the more complicated it became. I could see—I suddenly realized that change is against human nature. Now we as Americans are used to change, but we are novel. We are an unprecedented population. No population ever before has adjusted itself to change the way we have adjusted ourselves.
And this has happened only in the last 100 or 150 years. We are in a sense a new species that is adjusted to a world of practical, technological change. For all I know what is going on in Russia right now is to develop a new human mutation, a new type of man that is adjusted to change.”
My response: When we maverize, we are no longer afraid of change, because as rational, calm individuators we adapt well, and this mode of existing as an individuators is unnatural—we are now becoming angelic man, civilized man, adjusting to change, as opposed to how we are naturally and biologically, fearing and loathing change as the depraved, primitively conservative reactionaries that we are, with our low self-esteem, our inability to adapt being prominent in our thinking.
America was inventing a new type of human who adjusts well to change, but the true believer, to whom Hoffer above is alluding to, subjected and severely damaged by the totalitarian, socialist states, may have seemed progressive when faced with drastic change, but the Russians under Putin in 2024 seems to indicate the Soviet model did not work. Americans are easily fit and self-esteeming, but the Russians are painfully adapting the new, and their still loathe themselves as a groupist people.
H: “They do it in a different way. They just dehumanize people. They turn them into material, a plastic thing that you, you turn people into flexible objects that will be ready to love what they hate and hate what they love. They do not know the difference between the truth and a lie. In other words this is also a state that is creating a population that is highly adjusted to change.”
J: “Why do you refer to nation in change as a nation of misfits? Why must change bring about misfits?”
H: “Why this is obvious, Mr. Day. If you take for instance a nation that has been living for thousands of years in a certain mode of life and suddenly you change the way of life completely, they are misfits. They have to prepare themselves to a new mode of existence. Actually, as I told you as I just said, Mr. Day, I think change is against human nature. In all the millennia against man’s development on this planet there change was a very rare occurrence and a very brief occurrence.”
My response: Hoffer the atheist sees change almost as a metaphysical/natural trigger of unstoppable natural and social transformation ever unfolding in and upon the universe, and all beings and objects existing in space and time, an ahistorical and historical transformation force operating upon people, animals, flora and the world, and the social implication of this metaphysical force acting upon people does misfit all of them—at least initially--for adapting and surviving in a new world.
I would also regard change as a supernatural force working on people, stimulating a personal crisis of identity, self-regarding and fitness in the world as it now is.
H: “You go, even in this country, and open a book—I recently reread Henry Adam’s History of United States during the first Johnson Administration. Now the first sentence, the first page there shows that people in America at that time (Ed adds: before 1800) lived in the 8th century, even the way people live in 3000 B.C., or even prehistoric times.
Now when you look over the world right now, I seem to see people leaping, leaping all over, in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America. They are trying to leap from the Stone Age into the 20th century. Now that leaping business is a terrible thing. You can break your neck doing that. And in that first chapter there is a drastic change.
I tried to develop the idea that a revolution is a byproduct of change. It is a result of the irritations, the difficulties, the pain that is generated in the population by the process of change, and then comes the revolution.”
My response: People usually do not seek change or desire change because they have faith in and attachment to the old way of life.
J: “And the change must come first before the revolution?’
H: “Absolutely. The last sentence in that chapter says when things haven’t changed at all there is never a revolution. Change starts first. You see I say revolution is a byproduct of change, just as juvenile delinquency is a byproduct from the passage from childhood to manhood. Or like indigestion is a byproduct of digestion. That’s all there is too it, yeah. Revolution is an explosive thing. And change is an explosive process. Now—”
My response: Hoffer is correct here. The revolution cannot occur unless the masses will it to happen, and the masses only will it to happen, if they, the majority of them, have already embraced wholesale change; after that, they may be willing to follow or are unable to withstand the violent transformation, the revolution that the mass movement leaders in their country are pushing across the finish line.
J: “Are there other conditions under which change can take place without creating a madhouse?”
H: “Yes, yes. You take _____ (inaudible country named) right now. There they have also industrialized themselves in a hurry but there it is done in a sober atmosphere and why? Well, because they are supplied with skills. They are supplied with capital, means there. And the people there have a chance to acquire self-confidence and self-respect without the substitute. To me the chemistry of the soul—the substitute is a very explosive thing. If you can’t have the real thing, the real thing, self-confidence is always a moderate thing.”
My response: Hoffer the egoist moralist and proponent of ethical moderation captures his moral philosophy perfect in the one sentence stated by him above: “To me the chemistry of the soul—the substitute is a very explosive thing. If you can’t have the real thing, the real thing, self-confidence is always a moderate thing.”
The agent is morally good and moderately good, when he is an individual of veridical self-confidence or veridical self-esteem. He must act, interact and speaking in a modest fashion, so displaying his self-esteem in public is done quietly and politely, neither bragging, or falsely humbling himself by putting himself down.
Where he is selfless, a passionate joiner of low self-esteem who has no real self-esteem, he must fake it and identify with some external leader or cause. The substitute is explosive, and he will fanatically promote and enforce his holy cause in the public sphere, both bragging and self-flagellating along the way.
Hoffer is a moral moderate: reasonableness and moderation are ethical standards to seek and emulate for individuals. To be moderate is to be rational, sober, the good individual works hard and is competent and fit, and this is the Western ideal.
By contrast, the immoderate, passionate, enthusiastic bad individual in a totalitarian state is part of a frenzied collective entity, most definitely anti-Western.
H: “A sober thing. You are not absolutely confident in yourself. But you get along if you have certain confidence in yourself. The same is true of self-respect.”
My response: When one esteems oneself positively, one’s self-confidence is realistic and proportionate to one’s accomplishments and moral worth; there is no need to be haughty and boast, because one feels quietly secure, with little need to prove anything to anyone.
Absolute pride in oneself, and absolute certainty and utter confidence in one’s worth and superiority are the suspiciously theatrical, meretricious public display: downplay and distrust anyone that must brag and claim to be superior: he is not secure in himself at all, as his bragging is but the loud, militant side of being of low self-esteem, of little moral worth and merited accomplishment.
One reason I recognize the current mass movement undercutting America and the West, cultural Marxism, for what it is, is that their radical skepticism about the objective beauty, goodness, truth and fairness of Western values and culture. They pretend to claim that there are no true values or claims to be held in the West, but then they whip out their Marxist ideology, openly announcing what they actually believe, that nonsensical narrative explaining what they believe in absolutely is true, certain and noble, the best the world has ever seen.
The postmodernist, woke ideologue has no self-esteem, so his holy cause is what he has total faith in, and this true believer’s self-confidence is total and impregnable. His group pride is Luciferian pride in his ism, and he is the anointed knight and superman to spread it by the sword.
H: “But if you have to have faith in something it has to be absolute. Because you have to cling to something outside yourself (Ed says: You cannot rely upon pride in yourself and your own abilities to recover.). It has to serve as a substitute for your first choice. And you have to convince yourself that it is not so much a substitute as the real thing. After a faith in a leader is not really a substitute for self-confidence. It is not. You have to convince yourself that this is it. And this conviction needs self-delusion. It needs a madhouse again.”
My response: It occurs to me that Hoffer identifies passionate belief as enthusiastic faith in any religion, leader, abstraction, or holy cause as explosive and immoral, and he is correct. But this is not the whole story about faith: passionately held faith about a holy cause is demonic faith in a holy cause, which a variant of devil worship.
Good faith expresses calmly, lovingly, sincerely and with deep feeling quietly, whose conveyer is asserting that God exists, that spiritual goodness is real, so rational faith and temperate but deeply felt, deeply needed and deeply meaningful, non-hysterical, non-theatrical, non-bombastic, necessary, sentimental faith in God is possible, doable, and desirable.
Laudable emotional faith must be moderately lived, soberly expressed, moderately evangelized to the world (never by the sword, coercion or by conducting holy wars against other good faiths and other good deities).
J: “And you said pride is also a substitute for self-respect, that is also what can be extreme.”
My response: False group pride in a substitute for self-respect or true, respectable individual pride. To live and express the type kind of pride is to capture what is at stake here.
H: “Yes, pride is a substitute for self-respect. Whenever you come across a passionate pursuit you can almost say automatically this man is pursuing a substitute. He is pursuing something that is a substitute for something lost or unattainable. All the passionate pursuits are almost always are pursuits for substitutes.
You can see you all know the story about the man who lost at love, who was loved, he was loved and then it disappeared. And suddenly he becomes an industrialist, a scientist or something like that, and he is going like blazes. And again, he is looking for a substitute for something lost. Whether it is Paradise Lost or love or respect lost.”
J: “Why must these nations you are speaking of be so potentially explosive? Why must they seek substitutes? Why can’t they just seek self-respect?”
H: “ How do you get respect, Mr. Day? How? You mistake ____ (inaudible word, Ed says) a misfit there. Now the easiest way to self-confidence is action. I look at what happened in this country. You transferred in the last 100 years—you transferred millions of peasants from Europe to this country.”
My response: Action and self-realization are positive undertakings which help the self gain merited confidence by winning out there competently in the real world.
The self need no longer worry about passionately taking group pride in one’s empty substitutes; one is no longer narcissistic, subjective, self-obsessing, excessively, morbidly self-conscious in that sick way that Jordan Peterson warns against. Remember that selfishness and narcissism, and sick self-absorption paradoxically are psychological properties demonstrated ordinarily by the selfless groupist, the altruistic joiner, not the sensibly self-interested individualist and loner engaging in self-care as his primary ethical duty.
H: “And changed their lives almost overnight. Not only a new country but a new way of life. They came from sleepy little villages with warm communal ties, and suddenly they were dumped here on this continent—strangers in a cold world.
And yet you didn’t have any revolution here. You didn’t have a mass movement here. Why? Because they had tremendous opportunities for self-assertion. Tremendous opportunities for proving their worth. Tremendous opportunities for gaining self-confidence and self-respect.
Now you will see in most of the countries now in most of the underdeveloped countries, now countries that are modernizing themselves in a hurry. There are very meager chances for the individual to do something on his own so he can prove his worth and acquire his individual self-respect and individual self-confidence.
There they have to get it (Ed says: it here refers to self-respect/self-esteem.) with substitutes. But the question of change goes much deeper, Mr. Day. Change goes against human nature. When you change all of a sudden, a drastic change from one mode of life to another. You, you actually can’t take it. You have to convince yourself that you are now something altogether different from what you were yesterday. You have to acquire the illusion that you are born anew, that you have a new life now.”
My response: Because Hoffer worked in the world, his intellectual investigations and psychologizing were rock solid, truth-connected. Somehow this Jewish-American (illegal immigrant?) philosopher had wisdom though self-educated and amateurish. Jordan Peterson is a brilliant, well-credentialed expert in psychology, who psychologizing is less accurate and realistic than is Hoffer’s. Experts should advise us but never lead us, who, as individuating supercitizens, are to make up our own minds and run America, never allowing an elite of celebrities, billionaires, clerics, intellectuals, technocrats, and experts to hold again the reins of power. Experts and professional intellectuals are convinced that they have it figured out, but too often these arrogant fools cannot get it right.
Experts, bureaucrats, technocrats, and idealists like Rand and ivory tower professors evolve into elitist cocoon residents; inside these bubbles of lived fantasy, they are miserable, unhappy, and enraged. They become addicted to holding power over others to assuage their shattered inner egos.
They are now self-isolated and groupistly locked at the hip with their fellow privileged bubble-dwellers: these self-loathing monsters are so twisted, distorted, out of balance, immoderate and clique-bound. Still they cling to and defend the sick world in which they live, and seek to introduce their perverse way of living as to be mandatorily accepted and followed ardently by all humanity, and, to adopted the universe itself if they could. Their collective, false pride, conceit, and love of lies corrupts and undercuts even their expertise and brilliance: all that they are and promote makes them destructive liars and ineffectual in the world. When they impose their idealism on the world it causes totalitarian suffering untold killing, impoverishment, and starvation.
The masses, as individuating supercitizens, would be smart enough to become actual full experts on any subject, or smart enough to be conversant on any topic, so that the citizens would share these their impressions and opinions among themselves, until they worked out a consensus on how to move forward as popular public policy on each issue.
Only the amateurish, moderate, and dispersed individuated common people would possess common sense and judgment to make the proper, right decisions with expert advice invited in and heard and weighed. But the masses make the final decisions and are always the boss.
Where unsure, they can ask God for guidance and active input on how how to choose and proceed. When and where the supercitizens/rulers of each constitutional republic work together and compromise among themselves, they will arrive or will come up with wise, practical, moral courses of action for the nation to undertake.
Intellectual experts are too group oriented, too insular, too cut off from life so they tend to become strident, one-dimensional victimizers, victimizing the masses: all—including the elite oppressors—are victimized by their groupthink conformity and ideological purity, which they viciously enforce upon each other and their mass underlings, too cowardly, too timid to not knuckle under to group uniformity pressure.
H: “And you will see in every case where a drastic change is taking place there, there is the staging of a play. There is the staging of an illusion that something new is born, that something unprecedented is taking place. As I said, I started out with this in underdeveloped countries. Only later on did I realize that is what is now happening in the underdeveloped countries is actually what happened I the Occident too.”
My response: The marvelously wise Hoffer seems to be making the analogy that what happens to individuals in times of drastic change is quite similar to what happens to an entire population reacting to very painful, disruptive drastic change.
Whether it is the isolated individual, or the entire people, people individually and collectively stage a play, fabricate a story in which the individual assumes a new role, a new identity and spin a new narrative. This is all natural and perhaps inevitable.
If the story crafted is embedded in egoist morality, so that the frustrated individual through action, economic opportunity, political freedom and self-realization, is able to be born again with the identity of an individual or an individuator who has proved herself, now is able to function as a new person, in the just hatched new social reality, and has a viable sense of self-regard. She has handled the change internally in a well-adjusted, peaceful, healthy way.
Where individuals are embedded in altruist ethics, group-living, group-identifying, then the story they craft and the roles they play will be ones that bottom out whatever self-esteem they residually held as individuals and as a people. This will inevitably lead to social disintegration, revolution, mass movement, the rise of totalitarian federal polity, endless wars, and other tumultuous substitutes.
Note above too that Hoffer notes that people of color in the Third World react to drastic change exactly like white Europeans have done in the last 200 years or so. His unstated presupposition here is that people anywhere share the same human nature, so more or less, they are equally good or equally bad, equally smart, or equally stupid, equally successful, or equally unable to adjust well to drastic change.
This universal belief in human nature across cultural, historic, racial, and ethnic lines is definitely not the thinking of a man who is racist. He notes that people anywhere of any color cannot individually or collectively survive a single day without thinking well of themselves. If they are collectivist, nonindividuating and trapped, they will find self-esteem (phony, empty, fallacious self-esteem) by lying to themselves, by calling the cause or guru external to themselves good, beautiful, truthful, and superior, though the guru and his holy cause are wicked, ugly, mendacious, and inferior.
Hoffer wants blacks, or whom he refers to as Negroes, and everyone to live as individuals and individuators, egoistically motivated, and self-liberating free people. These smart, critically thinking versatile will embrace the drastic new, and align and integrate it with their traditional mores at room temperature, without losing an ounce of genuine, realistic self-esteem.
This interview has me comparing and contrasting Eric Hoffer with Ayn Rand. They were or likely were both Jewish immigrants from Europe to America. He was born in 1898 and she was born in 1905.
Rand is a fanatic, a purist, an absolutist, in her epistemic and ethical assertions; Hoffer is moderate in both. He is likely my kind of epistemic and ethical moderate who would insist that truth claims are mostly but not entirely true, that there are true contradiction that exist in objective morality, that both epistemic, ontological and moral assertions are true more than false, right more than wrong, but they are not often literally, precisely 50% one or the other. This is why I talk of primary and secondary apportioning of major worth and minor worth in all epistemic, ontological, and moral assertions made. Hoffer, likely, typically would have agreed with me here, but Rand, not at all.
Still Hoffer and Rand (she knew of him, but I do not know if he ever read her) both more or less, or absolutely or partially, believed in moral egoism, moral realism and promoting the certainty or near certainty in claims made by a thinker intellectually, epistemologically and metaphysically about objective reality.
Her fanaticism or absolutism smacks of an emotionally insecure genius that has to make absolutist claims to find self-esteem. Somehow, she seems too idealistic and cut off from the way the world works, though she made money and was out in the world a lot. Her fictional characters seem too ideal, cardboard characters really, too good to be true. Her sweeping proclamations seem purely theoretical not practical, not entirely realistic (Though she claims that she is all about objective reality as her epistemological standard): life is messy: people are walking contradictions: part demon or beast, and part angel and human with a smart brain.
People are not as rational as Rand claims (but they must strive to be more calm, intellectual, and rational), not as capable of being as logical as she thinks they are or can become. Though, as a developed, civilized individuator, each person can become more logical, more a clear thinker. Her totalist objectivist ontology by which she asserts she can know epistemically with certainty, and that there is no is-ought gap that applies, so she feels entitled to make absolutism claims which Leonard Peikoff and ARI subscribe to but David Kelley and Stephen Hicks are less absolutist about. Hoffer would side with the Atlas Society more than ARI, as would I.
Hoffer lived and worked in the world. Workers and business owners know traditional religion, traditional values, so then their experience in the world gives them the touch with reality that favors them reach moderate conclusions. These generalists are ethically and epistemically middle-of-the-roaders, so they know the truth more than do academics or ivory tower intellectuals like Rand. This is why members of the ruling class, be they experts, academics, PhDs, researchers, or theorists, know the truth about their subject matters less than do every-day, nonindividuating members of the public.
Once these citizens grow into being the enlightened masses, individuating supercitizens, whom reside, live, work and operate out there in the world all the time as businesspeople and workers, the educated, informed and critically thinking supercitizens, whose worldliness keeps people grounded and centered in reality, they will generate mostly wise public policy, for they are so down to earth, and directly accessible to discovery natural and divine truth without flinching, fleeing or denying how they are to conduct themselves and to run the country from the bottom up.
Academics so isolated so cut off from life that they are out of balance, end up hating themselves, low self-esteem, so they do not and cannot know truth; as misfitted as they are to live in reality, they must settle for and glom onto totalist claims of certainty which is intellectual and emotional lying. Rand suffers from some of this, and Hoffer definitely does not. His was out among the masses, and somehow she, the arch-capitalist but actually theoretician purely, was remote from them and cut off from them.
Human nature is dual: part of the world of spirit and part of the world of biology or living flesh, and both are real and ineradicable, irreplaceable, and they do interact and participate somehow thought it likely is and might remain a mystery as to how that operates.
H: “We too had a madhouse. We too had an explosion all over the place. Now you take for instance the growth of nationalism, of socialism, of communism, during modern times. During the last 100 years or so it was also a byproduct of the drastic change of transforming millions of peasants into mechanics, into industrial workers. Of course, these peasants acquired a new identity by crossing the ocean and becoming Americans. And this was indeed a new life. In order for drastic change to occur more or less smoothly, you need the people who are experiencing that drastic change must have a change to acquire a new identity.
They must have a chance to feel they are a new people that they are living a new life. Now the peasants that came over to this country were actually reborn. He had to learn a new language. He had to eat new food and dress differently. He had to change even his name and how you see something similar happening in Israel.”
My response: It will pay big dividends for private individuals, if we teach individuals encountering drastic change to believe in themselves, to live in accordance with egoist morality, to personally believe and put into practice the plant that ambition and willingness to work to improve the self through work, hustle, self-improve and self-realizing. In individuating, each person is building a new identity, and is being reborn, and this occurs more quietly and gradually in times of peace and tranquility, but he can double his efforts to turn the chaos in his life into cosmos and accomplishment in times of drastic change, and, correspondingly, his self-esteem will begin to recover and rise, and he will fit in, and be fit to operate well in the new order. Drastic change for him went from being a burden to a golden, irreplaceable opportunity.
H: “Over there you see something different. You have to take shopkeepers and intellectuals and turn them into soldiers and farmers. And there again there is a new life coming out. They are born to a new life. They have to learn a new language. And you will notice everybody has to take a new name. He changes his name and takes on a new identity.”
My response: The misfitted individual can be become fit, whole and veridically self-esteeming again in the midst of drastic change, if she is activistic, motivated by enlightened self-interest, and maverizes, assuming a new identity that is her old self, plus enough of a new, modified self that her newly minted or acquired identity makes her fit to live in the new world that is around her.
H: “Of course in Europe too there was an acquisition of a new identity. In Germany for instance where the change was so rapid because Germany had to catch up. Germany was a late arrival. You had a sudden feeling that you are a member of the new Reich, that you are a member of a nation of warriors. You see where you have drastic change you have these masquerades.”
My response: Where drastic change happens, all are misfitted overnight, and the per capital loss of self-esteem is enormous and can be calamitous. Most people, groupist, altruistic, selfless, group-identifying by nurture and nature already suffering reduced self-esteem, when drastic change smashes their cultural norms, they become frustrated and desperate, raw material for any holy cause, mass movement, or totalitarian solution that is offered them.
They have no training on how to make opportunity for themselves so they could go into action and prove their worth to themselves. Through Mavellonialist training and self-awareness, a generation of individuating supercitizens would be bright enough, confident, and competent enough, versatile, and resilient enough, to absorb drastic change after drastic change without upsetting the status quo. That is how we need to prepare people to change always without ever losing their tradition, wisely and blending both carefully in a unique, self-customized way to fit the individuating life of each special individual by that individuator herself.
H: “You have this acting, these roles to assume the role of a saint, a warrior, of a pioneer, see. And this is what has been bothering me, Mr. Day, that the terrific change that the Negro is aspiring for. Right now.”
J: “Yes.”
H: “Suppose the Negro gets all he asks for. Suppose he gets equality. Suppose he gets less segregation. Still the problem will be here.”
My response: I would argue that since the early 60s or earlier both blacks and Native Americans have gotten equality and opportunity, less segregation, trillions of dollars in federal and state assistance, but the problem is still there, that too many minority members are still poor, with broken families, with poverty, drug use and crime rampant in their communities, far beyond what it should have been if liberal solutions were the solution.
Native Americans, blacks and all Americans of any color need not much government interference or subsidy beyond equal opportunity and equal treatment under the law. Tribal living must cease or be downplayed. After that all Americans need egoist morality, individuator training, self-sufficiency, personal harm work, high self-esteem, individual-living and individual-identifying, and then, in this capitalist and free country, there would be no stopping blacks, Indians and other Americans from succeeding beyond the wildest dreams of their grandparents. Dennis Prager warns that bad values hold people back and down.
H: “Because of that which we said a drastic change really takes root, really becomes endurable only when it goes hand in hand with a rebirth, with an illusion, with a faith in a new life. See now this is what the Negro must do for himself.”
My response: Moral egoism is the code of values governing our choices and actions that suggest to each that that it is one’s duty and noble goal mostly to be motivated by and chase after enlightened self-interest, and mostly the beneficiary of that effort should be the self.
This being said, Hoffer, the moral egoist, is not racist or unsympathetic to the black plight in his generation. On the contrary, he believed and blacks—and everyone else for that matter—must improve his lot for himself, with little outside help or debilitating interference from do-gooders, whose meddling motivation to help blacks has contributed to their not learning to fend for themselves.
Moral egoism is the declaration for blacks—and by implicit extension all humans—no one can save you or help you very much. You have to save yourself by your own efforts.
Help from others cannot make you better or much improve your life, but their intercession can and will destroy you if they meddle deeply for a long period of time.
We cannot save others, but we can destroy others by meddling, by feeding their addiction to natural low self-esteeming, nonindiviudating and reliance on group support and aid.
H: “This Negro community has to perform something that wins the admiration of the whole world.”
My response: If blacks or Native Americans can invent some technology, or some new form of art, or a new version of mathematical inquiry, they will objectively have created something new, original, valuable and universally admirable; when a community so succeeds, it grounds its members to begin to maverize on their own because it has provided an exemplary model of how to succeed, dispelling any lie that people of that race or ethnicity cannot self-realize. Not having done so is no proof that they cannot do so: bad values and altruist-collectivist ethics hold them back and down. Brotherhood and tribal solidarity are primitive, stagnating cultural influences upon people so gripped by them.
H: “See, so every Negro can be proud of his Negro community, of its leaders, of its achievements.”
My response: This pride actually is veridical pride, individualistic or earned pride based upon behavior and achievement.
Where collectivist peoples and groups have no personal individuating going on among its members, they must provide themselves with fake, substitute, collectivist pride or group self-esteeming, to have a sense of personal worth, or false, collectivist pride, unearned pride in one’s people, nation, ancestry, class rank, etc.
J: “You have spoke of pride as a substitute for self-esteem. Would you suggest a substitute in this case?”
My response: This exchange is tricky to decipher. Hoffer does not define positive, veridical, individual pride as the pride justly held and felt about himself of the accomplishing doer and individuators.
Hoffer only identifies pride (very similar to my concept of false pride, unearned pride or collectivist pride held about himself by the nonindiviudator) in as that unwholesome substitute for self-esteem, and that substitute is an abstraction, an ism, a nation, a guru, a leader.
James Day is wondering what Hoffer is saying here, that for blacks, they must settle for a substitute because they cannot personally individuate to gain merited self-pride or high self-esteem, but I do not think that is what Hoffer intends, though he is ambiguous here, and should have made clear what he meant.
I suspect he the implicit egoist moralist would maintain that blacks, like all humans, if they work, make money, support themselves and their family or perhaps individuated, would be able to prove their worth to themselves through their own efforts, so they would come to enjoy properly high self-esteem.
He may be suggesting that the slave background of American blacks has so shattered their sense of self-worth, personally and communally, that they as a people need to do something impressive on their own, and then that would inspire individuals within that community to begin to maverize in their personal lives.
H: “Yeah, this is the plight of the Negro. It is a terrible plight. Especially, I can see, Mr. Day, the Negro individual in a white environment, probably in any white environment, probably not only in America, is always a Negro first, and only secondly an individual. See no matter how outstanding his achievements, he cannot savor the unbought grace of life.
See, without an identification with a proud Negro community, see. This is what Paul Robinson didn’t know, this is what most of the Negro intellectuals didn’t know. This is what the Negro middle class didn’t know, that they have to turn all of their intention on the Negro community.”
My response: Hoffer compares and contrasts better than anyone. As a Jew or likely Jew, he knew the Jewish community excels at making something of themselves on their own, and this inspires individuals within that community to super-achieve. Hoffer likely thought if it worked for the Jews, it would work for blacks of they as a community, made things better for all of their people.
H: “They have to change the life of their community. They have to create a new life.
Look, Mr. Day, you pick up the Old Testament and you read about Moses. Moses wanted to perform a simple thing. He wanted to take a tribe of slaves out of Egypt, and turn them into free men. Simple. All you have to do is take them out of Egypt and say, see, you are free. But, Moses, being a genuine leader, knew that this apparently simple thing is altogether not simple.
And the whole fabric, the whole mythological and theological fabric of the Old Testament, shows what of the five books of Moses, shows what Moses tried to do to enable those slaves to become genuinely free men. He had to invent a Jehovah, a one and only God, a one and only people, he had to invent a Promised Land. And out of all this he invented all this, he still doubted tribal slaves could really become free men.”
My response: Hoffer worries that ex-enslaved Americans blacks can become free men, just as Moses worried that former Hebrew slaves could become free men. This is why he and I think shattered peoples desperately need egoist morality taught by parents to their young people, so they get off on the right track from early on.
H: “He decided he had to wait for a new generation, so he took tribal slaves into the desert and waited 40 years for the generation to die so only a new generation, desert-born and desert-bred, were fit to go into the Promised Land and become a free people. So, you can see why I gave this book the title, The Ordeal of Change.”
J: “Yes.”
H: “To make change is the most explosive processs. And the funny part of it is only lately I realized there is only one drastic change going on in all communities no matter what stage of civilization they are, and this change is from childhood to manhood. We know it is an explosive process. Everybody knows this change from childhood to manhood is terribly explosive, and it has that most awful byproduct, juvenile delinquency.
To me nationalism, socialism, is the juvenile delinquency of nations going through the travail of change, through the ordeal of change.”
J: “What initiates the desire for change in Asia, for
example, Mr. Hoffer? Is it Communist agitation? Is it casting off of colonial
oppression? Or casting off corrupt governments?”
My response: It could be that people desire change or can learn to form a social habit of welcoming change, but not initially. It seems more like that history moves on, and thus change happens to a people, who then “want or desire” change.
H: “Well, you see the backwards countries during the War, has done something to all countries. You look at India. You look at Indonesia. You look at all these countries in Africa. The War has done something. The War has been a turning point. I mean up until the Second World War there were revolutions of course, but the colonial powers were not convinced that the end has come.
Nobody knows how to spell it. Cabot/Caleb (? I could not understand whom Hoffer named here—Ed says.) wrote: It is a time of change. It’s a time of an awakening. Yeah, something mysterious happened. I imagine what it took for England to suddenly lose faith in its own ability to rule the world.
Who knows what is going on inside a nation? After all, England came out as a conqueror. And yet it has happened. The powerful past, the colonial powers are pulling apart, each in its own way.
Of course, Russia played a part, a role too, see. Our competition with Russia, our vying for souls, was also made possible for the backward countries to come into their own. But the process is just beginning in every case.”
J: “What about the Soviet satellite countries? One of your chapters is entitled Popular Upheavals In Communist Countries. And here is an area where I suppose Americans have hoped for a change of some sort.”
H: “You know, when I wrote the True Believer, I actually wrote it in 48, the first draft and everything. I predicted that the unrest in the Communist countries will come when the Communist leadership will relax. When the Communist leadership tries to become liberalized, liberal, see. In other words, when the good life, the moment the people there will get a taste of the good life, then one can expect an explosion there, see.”
J: “So one would not expect an explosion?”
H: “When Stalin was in power, when they really had their nose in mud. In other words, when their situation is the worst is not the time.”
J: “It is not possible.”
H: “No, that’s it, see. It’s hope, the immutable hope, the feeling that you almost have it within your grasp. That is when the people become rebellious; then is when they become militant.
And then you could almost predict. You know revolts in eastern Germany, in Hungary and Poland, always came to us as a surprise.
No one expected it would happen in Communist regimes or would believe that the Communists had enormous power to crush souls and to subdue people there. And yet the theory was there. You could see many years before the death of Stalin you could almost predict the countries in which the revolution might break out, might break out. Some sort of revolution might break out. Of course, you could predict the future.”
J: “You did select eastern Germany as one of the places that was most likely to revolt, is that so?”
H: “Yes, because you see any time that I consider the question of revolution, I am always aware that the individual by himself cannot accomplish much. No matter what his powers are. The individual by himself is a transitory thing. He has such a short life. And when he is dead, he is finished. In order for the individual to get up on his hind legs and fight, he needs to identify himself with something outside himself, something eternal, something momentous, something impressive. And it seemed to me in Eastern Germany there is identification with something outside themselves that is tangible.”
My response: The individuator supercitizen, that heavily, privately armed civilian militia soldier, could better stand by himself because he identifies usually with God or a good deity outside of himself, and then he could fight alone no matter what.
Yet, he is mortal and fragile still, so he is more willing to rebel against tyranny if he has support from many others like him, a proud past culture or religion to lean on.
J: “This is Western Germany of course.”
H: “It was something else. It was Berlin. You could cross over into Berlin and see what you could identify yourself with. And I suggested also that these nations with proud, defiant ancestors are most likely to revolt, see. You know, the proud Poles, the proud Hungarian. The Czech not so much, not since their day has passed, they are too cautious. The Romanians not so much either. So in theory you had at that time to expect an explosion once Khrushchev and the successors started to relax their hold on the people.”
My response: If outsiders expect a people to revolt against a tyrannical government, it helps that they had a warrior tradition in the past. It helps if they have a strong church legacy to vie with the totalitarian government.
It would seem that rival institutions provide a tangible, appealing alternative to the regime, for subjugated masses. The values and approach advocated by the leaders of these rival institutions might give the downtrodden a source of hope that the future can be better and different from their current oppressed state.
Without hope, a people will not even consider revolt. They require a substitute tradition or cultural story to work towards bringing about, and they have to feel confident that they have a chance of winning, should they rise up.
The thugs running things are well aware of all of this and seek to convey to the people that the Party ruling is indomitable, powerful, competent and ruthless, that resistance is futile. The dictator’s secret police are busy censoring media and private free speech to shape and limit the information which the people receive.
The egoist pride of individuating supercitizens would render them as ideal fomenters of revolution against their tyrannical government; these fearless, free people live by the motto, give me liberty or death, and they are willing to take up arms to gain their way.
J: “What can these people identify with other than Western Germany or Berlin?”
H; “Well, of course—”
J: “America?”
H: “No, no. We are too far, we are too strange, we ain’t got no words. But it is a United Europe. You remember that I wrote that article—it was so many years ago, see, before they even started to think about it. But I could visualize what a tremendous object of identification of a United Europe would be for a captive population in Poland, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia—in every satellite, in every country just outside the national borders of Soviet Russia.
Really it is breathtaking when you consider what a United Europe would be. You could compare nothing with it, not even America. After all, because we are a just reason for European pride. America was created by the undesirables cast out of Europe, see. The undesirable element did that much there, and the Europeans can do a lot.”
J: “Mr. Hoffer, I would like to continue this conversation with you at our next meeting and ask you something about the role of the intellectuals in this process of change, because I know you have written, and you have a great many thoughts about the intellectuals. And we will pursue that and the role of the masses and the weak.”
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