Lawrence Reed On Hoffer Part II

 

Lawrence Reed was the president of Foundation for Economic Education for some years, and his is a scholar and perhaps a professor, and he is an admirer of Eric Hoffer. He wrote this article in 2018 which I copied and pasted here and will comment on.

 

Lawerence W. Reed (L after this): “Wednesday, July 18, 2018

The Wisdom of Eric Hoffer, Part II

Hoffer was more than a little skeptical of power and the lust for it. I think I see it the same way he did.

“

 

My response: Hoffer, well-read and out in the world all of his life, was never naive about human nature: nor did he grow to resent them or expect too much of them. He knew they were born corrupt and weak, and that being loving, noble and above temptation were admirable traits difficult for any individual to master at the best of times. He knew that each human heart was corruptible, and that each person naturally is tempted to gather negative power (the power of powerlessness) unto himself.

 

Hoffer wisely feared how the universal lust for power could ruin the lives of its user and his victims alike, and he fought the temptation to acquire it even in himself. He was fully cognizant of the perilous temptation to gather power to oneself, and this lust corrupts all people, but intellectuals most of all. Hoffer knew that negative power—the power to tyrannize others--(misused elites and mobs) corrupted the strong, and, at the same time, it corrupted the weak, the masses, who make tyranny respectable and universally accepted or at least tolerated in society as the people or the masses are only too willing to allow, even invite, the acquisitive elites to gain power over them, to tyrannize and rule them.

 

Hoffer did not talk or write much about positive power, but he knew that America’s constitutional republic, the only freest free society that the world had ever known, was run by the masses for the masses, and elites here and power-coveting intellectuals were kept in check.

 

Yes, he was skeptical of power and the lust to gather it unto oneself, and he knew the aristocratic instinct that permeates the being of the intellectual, would render him helpless to being ruined once he yielded to his temptation to gather power to himself.

 

It could be that Hoffer’s psychological analysis and of the fanatic and of the intellectual became one once the intellectual acquired vast powers over the masses, so he warned the American masses to be especially on guard against intellectuals.

 

This warning was Hoffer’s effort to introduce the masses to his collective moral standard for the society as a whole (political morality), and was also his individual moral standard (moderate, conservative egoism), an individual moral standard (personal morality) for the free citizen. In this way Hoffer shared his moral and political codes with the world.

 

L: “

 

 

 

Lawrence W. Reed

---

The first of this two-part article summarized philosopher Eric Hoffer’s unusual background and excerpted from his most popular work, The True Believer. He himself regarded The Ordeal of Change to be his best book.”

My response: The True Believer is a wonderful book, but The Ordeal of Change may have been his best book, for Hoffer is reaching for a metaphysical, natural force operating upon humans in every generation, in every society. And this force was change, and as history unfolded, people had to readjust and become fit to live in the changed world, and this transition, often not easily or readily managed well by most individuals, damaged their already frail, low sense of self-esteem, and the tumultuous, violent earthquakes that shook many societies to their very core, were socio-political efforts, often bungled and bloody, by people to make that adjustment to the dreaded new, to fit in once more, and make sense of one’s life and purpose for living.

 L: “He wrote eight others, all chockful of insights and simultaneously accessible to a lay audience. Agree with him or not, Eric Hoffer was a non-stop thought provoker (and for me, an endless source of quotable quotes for Facebook posts over the years).

He caught the attention of the powerful and the influential. President Eisenhower distributed copies of The True Believer to friends. Indeed, Hoffer was known as “Ike’s Favorite Author.” Eric Sevareid of NBC News brought Hoffer into the homes of millions of Americans with a 1967 television interview. President Reagan bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on him shortly before the longshoreman philosopher’s death in 1983.

Readers of Part I might wonder where Hoffer would place himself on the political spectrum. I myself am not sure, but as a libertarian interested in the intersection of liberty and personal character, I find little in Hoffer with which I disagree. He defended the individual against collectivism in any form. He despised the Nazi and Communist regimes of his day. His analysis of the anti-individualist fanaticism in statist-oriented mass movements strikes me as dead-on accurate, and applicable today to such phenomena as Antifa and Islamic fundamentalism. He celebrated wealth-creators and abjured the pomposity of state-worshiping intellectuals. He nailed power and power-seekers for the toxic influences they are.”

My response: Reed seems to understand Hoffer and what he was trying to convey.

L: “Having quoted extensively from The True Believer in Part I, let’s take a look now at some Hoffer aphorisms from his other books as well as from his interview with Sevareid. We’ll focus on his observations about power, followed by his thoughts on freedom:

It’s disconcerting to realize that businessmen, generals, soldiers, men of action are less corrupted by power than intellectuals…You take a conventional man of action, and he’s satisfied if you obey. But not the intellectual. He doesn’t want you just to obey. He wants you to get down on your knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love. In other words, whenever the intellectuals are in power, there’s soul-raping going on.

Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.

Some of the worst tyrannies of our day genuinely are “vowed” to the service of mankind, yet can function only by pitting neighbor against neighbor. The all-seeing eye of a totalitarian regime is usually the watchful eye of the next-door neighbor.

The intellectual craves a social order in which uncommon people perform uncommon tasks every day. He wants a society throbbing with dedication, reverence, and worship. He sees it as scandalous that the discoveries of science and the feats of heroes should have as their denouement the comfort and affluence of common folk.

The corruption inherent in absolute power derives from the fact that such power is never free from the tendency to turn man into a thing, and press him back into the matrix of nature from which he has risen. For the impulse of power is to turn every variable into a constant, and give to commands the inexorableness and relentlessness of laws of nature. Hence absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.

The significant point is that people unfit for freedom—who cannot do much with it—are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a “have” type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a “have-not” type of self. If Hitler had had the talents and the temperament of a genuine artist, if Stalin had had the capacity to become a first-rate theoretician, if Napoleon had had the makings of a great poet or philosopher they would hardly have developed the all-consuming lust for absolute power.

The best education will not immunize a person against corruption by power. The best education does not automatically make people compassionate. We know this more clearly than any preceding generation. Our time has seen the best-educated society, situated in the heart of the most civilized part of the world, give birth to the most murderously vengeful government in history. Forty years ago the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead thought it self-evident that you would get a good government if you took power out of the hands of the acquisitive and gave it to the learned and the cultivated. At present, a child in kindergarten knows better than that.

No matter how noble the objectives of a government, if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion—it is an evil government.”

Hoffer was more than a little skeptical of power and the lust for it. I think I see it the same way he did. As I wrote in an article about the role of power lust in the decline of ancient Rome, it is “the most corrosive influence in the affairs of humankind. It’s a mental poison that twists and warps even the best of men and women if they allow it to take root in their souls.” It’s an unhealthy desire to exercise control over others and “simply the pursuit of it, whether one ultimately attains it or not, is itself an intoxicant.”

One who repudiates the lust for power should be a defender of human freedom. On that score, Hoffer doesn’t disappoint:

A fateful process is set in motion when the individual is released to the freedom of his own impotence and left to justify his existence by his own efforts. The autonomous individual, striving to realize himself and prove his worth, has created all that is great in literature, art, music, science and technology. The autonomous individual, also, when he can neither realize himself nor justify his existence by his own efforts, is a breeding call of frustration, and the seed of the convulsions which shake our world to its foundations.

The real “haves” are they who can acquire freedom, self-confidence, and even riches without depriving others of them. They acquire all of these by developing and applying their potentialities. On the other hand, the real “have nots” are they who cannot have aught except by depriving others of it. They can feel free only by diminishing the freedom of others, self-confident by spreading fear and dependence among others, and rich by making others poor.

Freedom gives us a chance to realize our human and individual uniqueness. Absolute power can also bestow uniqueness: to have absolute power is to have the power to reduce all the people around us to puppets, robots, toys, or animals, and be the only man in sight. Absolute power achieves uniqueness by dehumanizing others. To sum up: Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power.

The history of this country was made largely by people who wanted to be left alone. Those who could not thrive when left to themselves never felt at ease in America.

The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind.

“If anybody asks me what I have accomplished,” Eric Hoffer once said, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.” Obviously, he could be a master of understatement when he wanted to be.

Eric Hoffer bequeathed future generations a wealth of sagacity and discernment. Almost entirely self-taught, he was the consummate home schooler, a keen observer who carved himself from the rock of commonality but never lost the common touch. Perhaps that makes it especially fitting to close with something he wrote about education in his 1973 book, Reflections on the Human Condition:

The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together. In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”

 

 

 

Lawrence Reed On Hoffer Part I

 

 

Lawerence W. Reed used to be president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), scholar and teacher, perhaps a professor. He wrote of Eric Hoffer in 2018 and I copied this article on Hoffer by Reed and pasted it below and will comment on it,

 

 

L stands for Lawrence Reed: “Tuesday, July 17, 2018

The Wisdom of Eric Hoffer—Part I

Eric Hoffer was fascinated by the fanatic.

---

”

 

My response: Each intellectual that writes of Hoffer has a slightly different interpretation of him, and Reed notices that Hoffer was fascinated by fanatics. Fanatics are radical, rabid joiners of intense enthusiasm. Hoffer was an ontological moderate (He was actually a natural fanatic as I am.), and a staunch individualist and loner, so he may have seen the fanatic as pepper to his being salt.

 

 

L: “ “There is not an idea that cannot be expressed in 200 words. But the writer must know precisely what he wants to say. If you have nothing to say and want badly to say it, then all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice.”

The quote you just read, written by Eric Hoffer in 1977, is a perfect example of both clarity and economy. It makes an unambiguous point with all the verbiage necessary to make it, and not a syllable more. It’s vintage Eric Hoffer, who expressed a new idea (or burnished an old one) about every 200 words or so. For decades, he’s been my personal favorite among philosophers.

So, you might ask, where did he get his PhD? At which university was he granted academic tenure? Philosophers, after all, are about as ivory tower as it gets, right?

No “earned” PhD ever adorned his name. In fact, he spent almost no time in formal schooling—at any level. Two universities bestowed honorary doctorates upon him but he was not of academia. If anything, he transcended it as a 20^th Century genius in the body of a common laborer. He was, to borrow from the title of Tom Shactman’s biography of him, an “American Iconoclast.”

It’s likely, moreover, that Hoffer would have spurned anything that smacked of tenure just as he disdained the officious snobbery of many academic scribblers. He didn’t need a protected perch from which to pontificate; just a simple chair on a dock would do, or even a spot on the ground under the shade of a tree. In the best of several biographies of him, Tom Bethell (Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher ) writes,

“Hoffer was above all an original thinker and an outstanding writer. It is a precious combination. He subscribed to many journals and he followed current events. But he never followed any intellectual fashion.

He was free of the practical pressures that steer so many people of an intellectual disposition into conventional channels of thought. He lay beyond the peer pressure, grant-hunting, and cultural intimidation that stultify much of the academic world today.”

It’s not my purpose in this two-part article to offer you a mini-biography of Hoffer. Rather, I plan to share enough of his wisdom in his own words to prompt you to want to read one or more of his ten books. They’re all winners, and not the least bit tedious or verbose. First, a little background on the man might help you appreciate him all the more.

The son of poor German immigrants, Eric Hoffer was born in the Bronx in 1898. At about age 7, he and his mother fell down a flight of stairs—an accident which led to her death a year later. Another consequence of the fall was that Eric lost his sight in both eyes. With remarkable suddenness, his vision returned when he was 15. Those eight sightless years kept him out of school but he more than made up for it as a voracious reader later. By age 20, he left New York for California an intensely self-educated young man. In those four years, he devoured more books than many people will read in a lifetime. It wasn’t the ivory tower that beckoned him west, however; he preferred to work with his hands alongside others who did the same.

On the face of it, it seems ironic that a supremely intellectual man, Eric Hoffer, would also make this statement: “Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk.” It’s fully understandable when you realize that the intellectuals he was referring to were the practitioners of the prevailing orthodoxy of both his day and ours, namely, the “progressive” elites who fancy themselves as the potter and the rest of us as their clay.

Hoffer spent ten years on Skid Row in Los Angeles, working at odd jobs by day and reading in public libraries by night. From there he moved on to labor for eight years as a field worker and door-to-door orange salesman in California’s Central Valley. Then not long after Pearl Harbor, he settled in San Francisco, where he embraced the profession he is most remembered for today, that of longshoreman. It was during his years working the docks that Hoffer’s prodigious reading, exceptional powers of observation and work-a-day experience combined to produce an impressive outpouring of philosophical and social commentary, the most famous of which was his 1951 book on the psychological nature and origins of fanaticism. It was titled The True Believer.

Hoffer was fascinated by the fanatic—the sort of person who often abandons reason for a cause—and he sought to explain where that mentality comes from. A few years before, the world endured a Holocaust at the hands of fanatical Nazis. Communism, a religion of fanatics, was on the march around the world. In Argentina, as I recently noted in “Still Crying for Argentina”, the egomaniac Eva Perón had just declared, “Without fanaticism, we cannot accomplish anything.” These malcontented zealots (or “true believers” as Hoffer described them), and the mass movements they spawned, cried out for an examination.

To the hardscrabble longshoreman, the phenomenon of fanaticism was rooted in a crisis of confidence in one’s self, a kind of “self-renunciation.” The “true believer” believes that sinister forces, not any shortcomings of his own, are the cause of his victimhood—the remedy for which is to replace his helpless individuality with the power of a collective juggernaut (especially if he can lead the parade himself). There being no shortage of fanaticism in the news today, it should go without saying that Hoffer’s observations are as relevant as ever. Now, let’s read a sample of them in Hoffer’s own words, excerpted from The True Believer:

“A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.”

“Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, ‘to be free from freedom.’ It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?”

“Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.”

“Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.”

“People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident. To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief of the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility.”

“Collective unity is not the result of the brotherly love of the faithful for each other. The loyalty of the true believer is to the whole—the church, party, nation—and not to his fellow true believer. True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society.”

“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.”

“The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.”

“The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.”

“The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement.”

“The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.”

“A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.”

“Self-contempt, however vague, sharpens our eyes for the imperfections of others. We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves.”

“The frustrated, oppressed by their shortcomings, blame their failure on existing restraints. Actually, their innermost desire is for an end to the ‘free for all.’ They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society.”

Food for thought? Yes indeed. By the bushels. Tomorrow, in The Wisdom of Eric Hoffer—Part II, we’ll take a look at some Hoffer gems from amongst his other books.”

My response: This whole article was a salute to Eric Hoffer.

Coalition Building

 

 

I start the day by taking a quick look at the online news with Breitbart News and Townhall. If I seek an occasional article that intrigues me, then I may do a blog entry about it.

 

Yesterday—12/24/24—I came across an editorial by Kurt Schlichter. I pasted and copied the entire article below and will comment on it where necessary.

 

Kurt: “

Based Tech Bros and MAGA Learn About Coalition Politics The Hard Way “

 

My response: I am an old fossil, out of touch, and I have never heard of Based Tech Bros. It turns out that these data engineers are the computer programmers and tech wizards based in Silicon Valley and they called, or perhaps self-refer to themselves as Tech Bros. or brothers ruling the tech world.

 

I will have more to say about them, good and bad below, but for the sake of starting my review of Schlicter’s editorial, it seems as if this huge controversy and angry fight between Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and the Tech Bros who are quarreling bitterly with American nativists like Charlie Kirk and Americans in the MAGA movement to  reduce or eliminate H-1B visas, which bring in thousands of foreign software engineers and other skilled workers, because nativists argue that those jobs should go to America, and we need to limit or eliminate H-1B visa driven immigration from India, China and elsewhere to be fair and consistent with greatly reducing immigration of poor and unskilled, illegal immigrants from rest of the world.

I think Kirk and crowd have a point and the way Musk was ranting and cursing, his counter-argument seems over the top.

 

Kurt: “Kurt Schlichter  |  Dec 30, 2024

So, the America First coalition celebrated Kwanzaa – a communist nonsense pseudo-holiday recognized only by Kamala Harris and her fellow oaky Chardonnay-soaked lonely middle-aged cat women who typically teach in public schools – with a giant dust-up about foreign worker visas. Welcome to our new coalition! We’re going to have growing pains. We’ve got different factions with different views. We’re going to have to work a lot of things out. And we should do it without ritually disemboweling each other.”

My response: Kurt seems honest, reasonable, and conciliatory here. He likely captures the problem and solution in the few sentences listed above.

The new MAGA coalition of nativists, blue collar workers and populists are enraged that the Tech Bros do not want a restriction of foreign worker visas along with other immigrants, and many of the Tech Bros, from India and elsewhere, furiously accuse white Americans of being racist against Indians.

We all need to calm down and quit hurling baseless accusations. We are a coalition with new growing pains, and we must work things out without disemboweling each other, and derailing the Trumpian agenda.

 

K: “It turns out that the tech bro contingent of the coalition that elected Donald Trump has very different ideas about importing foreign labor to work in Silicon Valley. Their pro arguments rely largely on the hoary old cliché about how there’s a giant labor shortage and we can’t find Americans to do the work and blah blah blah blah blah. But they also ignore the life experience of millions of MAGA Americans who noticed that not only is our educational system garbage, but there seems to be systemic prejudice against regular Americans, particularly white males, both in the colleges that operate as a gateway to employment and with the HR departments of the big tech companies. Whether it’s true or not remains to be seen – and I don’t know how much either side is being accurate rather than self-serving – but there are a lot of lived experience stories of regular Americans who just can’t seem to catch a break and claim to have been replaced by clannish foreigners who seem to hold them in contempt.”

My response: The tech bro contingent of the coalition complains that there are not enough skilled Americans to do the high-tech jobs, and white males with the requisite skills are not be hired, and there are clannish foreigners that treat them with contempt.

Note that whites likely now are being discriminated against by an industry that seems to favor East Asians (the highest per capita income earners in America right now, as an ethnic groups, are Indians from India). If that is so, that is of course not right but it is also very interesting, and here is where my unique take on racism, its core problem and its only workable solution, could be suggested.

First all people, from anywhere across the globe, are created more or less equal. Second, all are smart enough with hard work, original, creative thinking and the principle of self-realization applied by her to herself as she practices it in her life, that anyone from anywhere should be able to compete in Silicon Valley and do as well as anyone else.

Third all people everywhere are born evil, self-hating, groupist and non-individuating. This makes all us racist, prejudiced and discriminatory from birth (Those from our group are genetically superior to people from any other group, so it is morally right that those belonging to our race and our group are preferred and treated better than we treat outsiders and individualists.), and by individuating and living as individuals, we can learn to discriminate against none, tolerate discrimination from none, and this will end discrimination, racism and prejudice.

Let Tech Bros jobs be filled by individuals from all backgrounds, but we still need to limit severely for now immigration, illegal or legal—including most foreign skilled worker visas—from other countries into America, and that is what Republican Congress and Trump must sell to the American people for the next four years.

Kurt: “American Sucks seems an odd flex for America First, though that’s a simplistic distillation of the Vivek argument. Still, that’s how many people read Vivek’s take, ironically set forth on fellow tech bro Elon Musk’s former Twitter, America’s true free marketplace of ideas. Vivek echoes some old critiques of American workers, calling them lazy and entitled, and let’s face it – a significant number of our countrymen, countrywomen, and countrynon-binaries are lazy and entitled.”

 

My response: Vivek Ramaswamy ignited this controversy by claiming America needs these skilled foreign workers because tech bros employers cannot find skilled or diligent American workers.

His criticism of Americans, that they are lazy, entitled and mediocre, is more true than it should be, and more true of today’s young people than it was of American youth in 1952.

Still, if we teach these kids to maverize, and nudge their parents to motivate the kids to work hard, study hard and plan to achieve, then we will have the kind of workers Vivek wants to hire. He justifies tech giants hiring foreign engineers over American engineers because the foreign engineers are smarter and work harder. That may be so but most of those jobs should go to Americans, and our Amiercan-born engineers, if hired first over foreigners, need to have their feet held to fire, and fired if not smart enough and not working hard enough. They do not lack the motivation, only schooling and stick-to-itiveness.

Vivek denounces America’s lousy culture and its inferior values taught to the young, a society that rewards mediocrity over excellence, that we favor jocks over math whiz kids and nerds. In one article online Vivek excoriated the normalcy, our domestic cult of average performing or mediocrity, of American laziness and mediocrity, that we are raising children ill-equipped to compete with elite talents, engineers and technicians that win in the marketplace, the factory, the university and in manufacturing, productive and skilled enough to compete against anyone globally.

I think he is largely right, but the way to solve this problem is to teach all American youth to self-realize, and that will give them the cultural and ethical motivation and standards upon which they can grow, develop and be the high quality STEM field worker of the future good enough to work here or anyplace in the world.

Still, we must reduce but not wipe out the amount of foreign skilled workers allowed in because we must limit immigration for elites as well as for unskilled, uneducated people pouring across our borders. That is only fair, and we must close the border, and we must give those jobs to people at home that might need some company-provided tutoring to bring them up to speed, or Trump and Congress could perhaps offer grants or tax breaks for high tech companies to grow their own high-tech employees at home.

If each child was taught to maverize then world-class excellence of skill, competence, industriousness and ambition in the average American worker by 2035 could be the new American normalcy.

Vivek’s tough-love criticism of lax, low standards in education, work ethic and skilled worker mastery of content in his specific specialty hurts but is bracing. He emphasizes achievement, worker superiority in knowledge, skill and surpassing performance, a love of learning and gaining skill over just-get-by low performing and industriousness over goldbricking. I cannot find fault with his criticisms of American education, educators, employees, and parents with low expectations for their children.

Kurt: “ He was criticized for drawing on some cultural references about how we prioritize jocks over nerds. However, the jocks versus nerds thing was played out before the first Revenge of the Nerds sequel. He seems to argue that every American should be a party-free grind overseen by a domineering dragon mom focused on nothing but achieving high SATs and admission into the prestigious University of College. This, of course, is a terrible idea. We already suffer from a foreign policy run by people who’ve never been in a fistfight. The last thing we need is a culture dominated by people who’ve never kissed a girl, never chugged a Coors, and can’t drive a stick.”

My response: I think I will contradict myself and then try to resolve the inconsistency. Vivek’s denunciation of American culture for preferring and rearing up a generation of mediocre jocks overs hyper-excelling nerds that do so well as data engineers is put down rightly by Kurt that nerds are incomplete persons, cut off from life and normal popular teenage enjoyments and real-world interaction; to allow insecure, low self-esteeming nerds then assume they should be the educated elite that rule society and tell the masses how to run their lives? I think not.

Both men have a point. My envisioned high school superachiever of the future, who could develop into an individuating supercitizen who can compete with or even surpass just about any nerd out there; for now at age 17, he works as an auto-parts deliverer or lawn-mower after school and during the summer, who has kissed a girl, drinks an occasional Coors and can drive a stick shift.

Young people like him, idealistic, accomplished, and on fire, could be that Renaissance boy or girl in high school that is a skilled technical worker able to work for the tech bros (or run his or her own startup competing business from one’s garage like Steve Jobs did) while being a normal teenager with real-world friends and is able to function among the masses as one of the masses.

Nerdish tech workers and engineers without that common touch among the masses will end up being part of the intellectual elite that Hoffer warns about that live off of and direct the masses tyrannically, and Vivek comes from a society with old-fashioned strict caste classes, and we do not need nerds, as part of the global elite, running America like a caste society.

Kurt below anticipates that we cannot have society ruled by nerds, jocks, or anyone, that we should rule none and be ruled by none (let the indivduating supercitizens run society to keep it free and roughly equal).

 

Kurt: “Unspoken is the assumption that these people should rule over us, presumably instead of the jocks ruling over us. Now, anyone who has ever watched The Simpsons remembers when the local nerds took power and became hideous tyrants. The idea that nerds are some sort of self-sacrificing moral paragons immune from the flaws of human nature is silly. I don’t want to be ruled over by nerds. I don’t want to be ruled over by jocks, either. Frankly, I don’t want to be ruled over by anybody.

The fact is everybody can’t be a nerd, and everybody can’t be a jock, and we don’t want everybody to be a nerd or a jock. In fact, we don’t want anybody to be just nerds or just jocks. You can be multiple things. You can be a jock who can read, and you can be a nerd who can do a push-up. The idea that we should engineer society into utter conformity is ridiculous. We shouldn’t be engineering society at all.”

My response: I am all about moderate young maverizers, part-jock, part-nerd, but all individuators doing multiple things, and one or two things very well.

Kurt: “We also shouldn’t be destroying American opportunity by importing Third World foreigners for indentured servitude at sub-market wages. Look, the real reasons that tech companies want foreign workers are 1) our educational system largely sucks, producing halfwits; 2) colleges and tech’s own HR departments discriminate against white male workers, which creates shortages; and 3) the tech overlords don’t want to pay what it costs to get Americans to do the work they want done. They seek minions to toil for long hours in total obedience. You can have that if you have the whip of potential deportation to crack, but you can’t talk an American into it. He’s not going to take that guff, at least without a huge paycheck. So, they seek to overcome that obstacle via government intervention. And when we recoiled at it, they got a little upset.”

My response: In the paragraph above Kurt lays out the controversy fully if baldly. We do need skilled technical workers, but we should grow them at home mostly, and we should pay them well, hire white males and others, and not work them to death like some foreign serf underpaid, overworked, and threatened with deportation. We need to find middle ground here while limiting all types of immigration, even reducing H-1B visas numbers allotted.

 

Kurt: “Now, we’re going to work this all out somehow. We’re going to come to some compromise that at least attempts to address the legitimate needs of Silicon Valley and the legitimate concerns of Americans who feel excluded from opportunity. Sure, there will be some ham-handed attempt to slide in some giant visa giveaway into some omnibus bill, but here’s the new reality – one made possible by Elon Musk himself. We’re going to catch it. We can’t be fooled anymore. Hordes of hypervigilant autists with Twitter bullhorns are a game changer.”

My response: I like Kurt’s happy prediction that it will all work out somehow (By 12/25/24, Elon Musk is starting to sound conciliatory, and this promising.), and MAGA factions will internally reunite for their own good, and for the well-being of the country.

Note that Kurt is celebrating how hordes of hypervigilant autists with Twitter bullhorns being a public interest gamechanger and will spread the alarm once the Swamp-Dwellers in Washington conspire to slide some giant visa giveaway into some Congressional omnibus bill.

Let me create a scenario for making 340 million Americans into totally engaged, politically active, astute individuating supercitizens with about 3,000 paid or appreciated hypervigilant autists pouring over every federal and state document to see what the bureaucrats and legislators are up to and scheming, and then alerting the entire smart-phone carrying public with hourly Twitter updates as to what elites are doing or plotting.

If the supercitizens have a majority of consensus among themselves on an agenda for the country to run on and by, and then they watch what their government and elected officials are up to, they can respond quickly and firmly to get corrupt, slippery, plotting bureaucrats, federal agencies and legislators back on track, obeying the people, doing only what the people order, or being voted out the next election go-around. This citizen-run constitutional republic could stay what the Founders grew it to be, with its free markets, and smart, principled, empowered masses calling the shots, making money in our capitalist bastion.

 

Kurt: “The beauty of X is that it acts as a giant spotlight. Senator Joni Ernst found that out when she decided to posture for her own advantage against Pete Hegseth. People looked deeper at her positions and figured out that she was a giant squish. Then they publicized, it not in the regime media, which loves narcissist/maverick Republicans like Joni Ernst, but on X where the truth couldn’t be gatekept. That spotlight got her to change into a MAGA avenger but quick.

The same thing happened with the visa imbroglio. It came to our attention and thousands of folks on the spectrum immediately started researching visas and what they found was that the clichés were all baloney. These weren’t super-genius prodigies that we were bringing over, but mostly entry-level timeservers. And it wasn’t just in the tech industry. Did you know we have to bring in McKinsey consultants? Apparently there’s a shortage of eager Buttigieg clones that we must address by importing Third World peasants. How about accountants? No Americans can count? And did you know that giant law firms are somehow short of attorneys willing to work for a quarter million dollars a year? Hey, if America has any problem, it’s too few lawyers and too many unicorns.”

My response: It was the users of X that discovered that there was much abuse in this H-1B visas program.

Kurt: “The radical transparency made possible by X is going to change everything. No longer can secrets be kept or issues obscured by regime media, whose main job appears to be curating the debate by hiding inconvenient truths and promoting convenient lies. Of course, the media is trying to take advantage of these disputes within the America First coalition by pushing this as some giant schism. But you don’t need to be a historian – I’m sure there’s some visa listing for those to come in and do history for five dollars an hour – to understand how coalitions develop. Coalition partners work out their issues. That’s what’s going to happen here. The tech bros can’t really go to the Democrats who hate them with a passion. America Firsters can’t win without tech money and savvy. We need each other. We’ve got to make this work. And we will.”

My response: Kurt is calling for the tech bros and the American Firsters to quit yelling at each other and work together to make and keep the MAGA coalition strong: they do need each other. Sage advice from Schlichter.

Kurt: “But one thing we need to do when we are debating is to understand that it’s a debate. It’s not personal unless you make it personal. You may feel strongly that Vivek's critique was wrong or even insulting. Get over it and grow up. We’ve been taught that disagreement must be a bloodsport, but that’s not true. Save the vitriol for the real enemy, the communists. You can have people tell you things that you think are wrong and survive. You don’t always have to go for their throat. Try going for their argument instead. And to their credit, many, if not most, of those of us within the America First coalition did just that. If you were on social media last week, you saw a bunch of facts and arguments used to respond to Vivek’s arguments. Yes, there were insults, and there was some emotion, and there was some critiques that crossed the line into ugly bigotry against Indians, but those were not the primary response. The primary responses were facts and arguments. That’s how we win. Not by becoming leftists. Not by trying to stamp out any hint of non-conformity but by confronting arguments, debating them, and figuring out a solution. We’re going to do that. And that’s why we’re going to win.”

My response: We must not allow cultural or political opinions, public stated, that run counter to our own, to trigger us into attacking or seeking to silence our critics. We speak frankly but courteously in sharing our disagreements, and come together where we can, and agree to disagree peacefully and civilly when we cannot. We are still all one people, and all are welcome and have a voice and a say that will be neither silenced nor crushed.

Alberto Mingardi On Hoffer

 

My introduction: Italian professor and Director General of the Italian free-market think tank Istituto Bruni Leoni, Alberto Mingardi wrote an article on Eric Hoffer which was published on the blog site, EconLog, a blog that carries articles by economists and guests. I copied and pasted this Internet article, in full below and will comment on it. The article by Mingardi is entitled Work Hard and Read Hoffer, and was written or posted on 7/15/22.

 

Mingardi (M after this): “

 

 

ECONLOG POST

Jul 15 2022

Work Hard and Read Hoffer

Alberto Mingardi

Eric Hoffer was born 120 years today. Or 124: as Tom Bethell argued in his biography of Hoffer, the latter’s youth was kind of a mystery. He was parsimonious with information and often self-contradictory. He famously maintained that he was blind for a number of years and that later such blindness went away, as suddenly as it came.

 

But what it is clear a from Hoffer’s biography is that he was a most interesting and rare case among 20th century intellectuals.”

 

My response: One of the reasons that I am reviewing and commenting on all these articles on Eric Hoffer (I seek to be one of the foremost experts on Hoffer, and so I want to see what other thinkers write about him.) to see what I am missing about Hoffer. There is likely little in this article below by Mingardi of rare insight, or of earth-shattering importance, but above, already written by Mingardi in the first paragraph, Mingardi added a characterization of Hoffer that increases one understanding of this genius and great political, social, and moral philosopher. Mingardi describes Hoffer as one of the most interesting and rare cases among 20^th century intellectuals, and I think that requires unpacking.

 

Yes, he was one of the most interesting and rare intellectuals of the 20^th century. Why and how? The why can best be answered by pointing out that in the middle there is truth and originality, and Hoffer, the staunch moderate and genius, occupied and mined that metaphysical middle ground and it paid off philosophically. As a self-educated thinker, seeing the world and its puzzles and problems from the moderation fountainhead, he was able to grow into being a great soul, creative, original, and amazingly linked to what is true and real. 

 

I trust Hoffer’s conclusions more than those of most thinkers and writers because of his rational and intuitive, keen affinity to what is real and true. That is a priceless gift to the reader, and it is tragic that he is now largely ignored and forgotten, and the masses suffer because he is not studied by them. He was the living incarnation of the untutored thinker, not wrecked or stifled by groupists, by brainwashing, power-hungry, intolerant teachers and academics who break and brainwash youths into conformist, listless zombies who mouth the party line and remain mediocre, lazy, unmotivated, and anti-intellectual because that is what their professional intellectual masters and mistresses demand of them. Conformity and nonindividuation are highly prized in young scholars by the bureaucrats that break and mold them.

 

There was a third trait or way of life that Hoffer exemplified—beyond his knack for uncovering the true, the good, and the beautiful and his concentrating on the Hofferian Middle Way, and it is his lived demonstration of what an individual can accomplish should he elect to self-realize.

 

Only the intellectual that is a loner and individual-liver, that self-actualizes as an egoist and anarchist, can break through the epistemic limits that each group-living, conformist nonindividuating places upon her own consciousness.

 

Hoffer broke through this epistemic barrier wholesale and his remarkable and original intellectual production was the harvest that he reaped. He knew or suspected that anyone of those male or female, white or black, gay or straight, fruit-pickers or dockworkers, his work associates, could individuate if they were brave enough to do so, and lived their ambition to self-realize despite peer-pressure to back down, go back to sleep, and remain a mediocrity like everyone else. 

 

He knew that he did what anyone else could do and should do, they but refused to do. He was no better or worse than they were; and he was not that much smarter or more gifted than they were, not enough to hold back any woman with an IQ of 94. Only God knows the upper limits of her creative potential, in one of the creative modes which she could develop, and IQ is but one of those sources of creativity—ARE YOU LISTENING, JORDAN PETERSON?

 

How did he do it—think originally? Hoffer the moderate and loner was the independent thinker incarnate, demonstrated personally how any other individualist or individuator can break out of the stultifying, educational institutions with their narrow zone of intellectualizing; he worked outside the intellectual mob, and thus was able think new thoughts and build up his fantastic arguments.

 

He self-realized in accordance with egoist moral principle which entails self-realizing at the higher, suggested level of ultimate personal goal to meet and surpass.

 

The altruist morality which holds people down and back is responsible for human suffering and human barbarism. The Dark Couple chuckle every day to observe how billions of people still live by their moral code.

 

M: “He had little formal education, if any. He was always a manual worker and, after trying unsuccessfully to join the Army after Pearl Harbour, he landed a job as a longshoreman in San Francisco. He loved to read and one day picked up in a library Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. As many before and after him, he was enchanted by the beauty of Montaigne’s prose and by his ability to look into himself. That planted the seed which would blossom in his own determination to become a writer. Such a determination was pursued casually, until he sent a long letter to the magazine Common Ground. The piece was rejected, but Margaret Anderson encouraged his talent and forwarded his essay to an editor at Harper Brothers. Ultimately they published his great book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the nature of Mass Movements.

 

Dwight Eisenhower allegedly considered The True Believer  his favourite. The book also prompted Lyndon Johnson to call Hoffer to the White House. Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It caused quite a sensation  and was favourably commented upon by many of the heavyweights of the time. It is a great book which digs into the “demand side” of political mass movements. Hoffer quoted Hitler saying “the petit bourgeois social-democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist will.” He looked at great, all-embracing mass movements as sources of meaning for the individuals who became “true believers.” It is one of the Hofferian themes: “blind faith is no substitute for lost faith in ourselves.” “

 

My response: Take notice that Hoffer quoted Hitler saying the petit bourgeois social-democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but a Communist will. What Hitler and Hoffer recognized is that the petit bourgeois burgher of rather centrist ideological bent was not frustrated, was not drowning nor desperate to be free of a hated self because their self-esteem had not bottomed out. They were not ready to become National Socialists because they felt no urge to, nor were willing to become a true believer, to join a mass movement, to surrender their consciousness, will, power and soul, lock, stock and barrel to the Nazi Party in exchange for complete and permanent escape from living an independent life as a conscious individual responsible for every decision he needed to make, then needing to take responsibility and suffer the consequences for every decision he made.

 

This petty burger and the trade-union boss are still individuals, discontented but not frustrated and nor rendered so desperate with self-loathing that they are eager to shed their lives in exchange for immersing themselves in the Nazi holy cause. But the Communist has already sold his soul to the Communist holy cause, gleeful to become a passionate, fanatical, selfless self-sacrificing, true-believer in Marxism. The Nazi Party or the SS can easily torture and convert this Left-wing fanatic into becoming a Right-wing ultraist because he is already, largely identical to the members of the Nazi Party.

 

The centrist, individualistic, moderate petite burger and trade-union bosses are still individualistic enough, and still equipped with sufficiently high self-esteem and contentment with themselves, their lot in life and their fitness in the world, that joining any mass movement is a most repugnant alternative for them to choose. This is what Hoffer and Hitler above are pointing out.

 

Note too that Hoffer is correct when he writes that blind faith (in a holy cause) is no substitute for lost faith in ourselves, but it is the best option that the frustrated, passionate misfit to latch onto and announce his whole-hearted allegiance to find some way to cope going forward, to annihilate his spoiled life and painful self-conscious consciousness, by disappearing as a separate consciousness once he is accepted as a true-believer inside his adopted holy cause, as one of the soldier-grunts pushing the mass movement forward. 

 

M: “The True Believer is still a very famous book and pops up routinely, when a new political movement needs to be scrutinised and its followers became a subject of interest to the press. It has been mentioned in connection with Jihadism and with populism. Google “Eric Hoffer and Donald Trump” and you’ll stumble upon very different ways to use Hoffer to read Trumpism.”

 

My response: It amuses me that Trumpian populism is regarded by doomsdayer intellectuals and Leftists as current American Nazism about to break loose and wreck America in 2025.

 

M: “I am relatively new to Hoffer, but tremendously impressed by him. His other works, beginning with his aphorisms and with The Ordeal of Change deserve to be better known. The latter is a truly thought-provoking read.

A few years ago, Thomas Sowell wrote this beautiful appreciation of Hoffer. Now, Sowell on Hoffer: that’s the Dictionary definition of self-recommending. Sowell reminds us of a key point in Hoffer’s thought:

Hoffer’s strongest words were for the intellectuals — or rather, against the intellectuals. “Intellectuals,” he said, “cannot operate at room temperature.” Hype, moral melodrama, and sweeping visions were the way that intellectuals approached the problems of the world.

But that was not the way progress was usually achieved in America. “Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve the momentous in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words.” “

 

My response: Hoffer promotes moral egoism and self-realization for each of the masses, the moderated, personal hybrid-person, half hardware store owner, and half violin-based composer, but he never states this moral theory overtly, as far as I know.

 

I also think Hoffer was much more obvious and explicit about his moral theory of moderation, his other ethical presupposition, or perhaps metaethical axiom.

 

Though intellectuals were alleged to be thinkers and rational, and they could be, they really, mostly were grandiose, extreme, theatrical, flamboyant, intemperate, passionate, enthusiastic (the negative and evil emotions), and were not thoroughly and consistently intellectual.

 

 An genuine intellectual—usually a loner and self-sufficient--is someone who is radically open to and curious about diversity of ideas and opinions and recognizes that usually only individualists as maverizers are able to think deep, new thoughts to bring to the marketplace of ideas for other genuine, independent intellectuals—who also are maverizers--to examine, test, react against and then provide feedback to the discover of the new insights.

 

This individualistic type of intellectual cannot participate in, engender, lead, or sell a mass movement and holy cause to dupe and waylay the masses with. He is repulsed by extremists, an ideological purist, absolutist and fanatic guilty of binary thinking.

 

The rabid, groupist pseudo-intellectual--his intellectual outlook is an elaborate web of cruel lies and rationalizations, and ranting, emotionalist outbursts. He willing to use force, violence, torture, and terror to force upon his neighbors a totalitarian environment of no free speech tolerated, no intellectual diversity thought, no disobedience to the Party Line. He loves showing off and partaking of glitzy public displays of Party pageantry. He cannot operate at room temperature as practical, rational individuals in American business and construction do every day without fanfare or noise. Each work shift, they can get momentous things done quietly, smoothly, routinely without much upsetting the social landscape, and that outcome is very desirable for the good of each individual and of society as a whole.

 

I do not know that practical affairs need to be launched and carried out without words, but getting out of the way of doers that are quiet, dedicated, energetic and competent is advisable.

 

Words and analysis can come later to communicate tests and evidence for how the doers did, and what tweaks and adjustments need to be added.

 

M: “Since the American economy and society advanced with little or no role for the intelligentsia, it is hardly surprising that anti-Americanism flourishes among intellectuals. “Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America,” Eric Hoffer said.” “

 

My response: Groupist, elitist, nonindividuating intellectuals in America, that seek to gain tyrannical power over the masses, hate their victims, and seek revenge upon American burghers, farmers, manufacturers and the working masses, laborers, and small business owners, because they run their affairs well and profitably without elite guidance and control.

 

 The American business elite has long kept intellectuals from running the government, though under postmodernist Marxism by 2020 Leftist and elitist nonindividuating intellectuals, as leaders of this holy cause, had educated enough young people with woke college degrees to complete their ideological capture of almost all American institutions: as noted by Chris Rufo—and government, businesses, the churches, the legacy media, the military, the colleges and public schools were all run by ideologues, and these pernicious influences made it so we are on the precipice of a Leftist one-party socialist dictatorship changing America for the worst forever. 

 

Hoffer foresaw this horrible possibility almost before anyone else, and he knew how corrupt cruel and addicted to absolute, centralized power (the demonic power of powerlessness) which elites and intellectuals of all stripes are, and that they are capable of utter viciousness in their attack and pay-back extracted from the resisting masses, for having spurned these hate-driven, miserable, unhappy malcontents, desperate to spread their ideological control and poison all over the world. World domination was only their sole aim, though they hid it well behind claims of being for people of color, those of alternative sexual orientations, for women, the poor, the non-Western.

 

M: “Hoffer’s insights on the hubris of professional intellectuals is as profound as his reading of mass movements. Actually, the two are connected. “Mass movements do not usually rise until the prevailing order has been discredited. The discrediting is not an automatic result of the blunders and abuses of those in power, but the deliberate work of men of words with a grievance.” “

 

My response: Yes, professional intellectuals and the mass movements are inextricably linked as they work together to take down the discredited prevailing order and install a totalitarian, socialist regime in its place.

 

M: “This impatience for wordsmiths went together with a profound appreciation of the common person and of that society built by “unheroic” people that Hoffer understood the America of his years to be. “What is the uppermost problem which confronts the leadership in a Communist regime?”, he asked himself. His answer was: “how to make people work.” Communism wasn’t capable of nurturing that “readiness to work” and that “practical sense” that, for Hoffer, came naturally being in the American capitalist society. This was at least in part due to a wrong reading of people’s motivations and desires:

I remember how scornful I felt when I first Marx’s description of the worker’s attitude toward work in a capitalist society. The worker, he said, feels physically and orally debated by his work. He is like an exile in his place of work and feels at home only when away from is job. Marx never did a day’s work in his life, and never took the trouble to find out how a worker really feels when on the job. He naturally assumed that works were a lesser breed of intellectuals.

 

Having a job, being a productive part of society, wasn’t “the meaning of life” for Hoffer, but he believed it gave people “a sense of usefulness and worth”. If people need “certificates of value”, it is way better if a society awards such certificates to them for things they make, rather than for slaughtering enemies. In Hoffer, you find enlightening pages on the trade; “trading is a form of self-assertion congenial to common people – a sort of subversive activity; undoctrinaire, unheroic and uncoordinated, yet ceaselessly undermining and frustrating totalitarian domination”. You also find surprising and thought-provoking observations: “the business atmosphere of the workshop is more favourable for the awakening and unfolding of the creative talents of the masses than the precious atmosphere of artistic cliques”. “

 

My response: I will not reanalyze the above-listed three paragraphs and how Mingardi describes them but he understands Hoffer well, and his characterization of Hoffer is what it should be, and he realizes how Hoffer should be read in the modern world, and that give me great hope, that finally this good and brilliant thinker should be understood, heeded, and that his wise or implied policies should be voluntarily implemented by the masses as individuating supercitizens running the show forever.

 

M: “I wish I read Hoffer earlier; I look forward to reading and pondering his works as much as I can.”