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
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 20th century intellectuals, and I think that requires unpacking.
Yes, he was one of the most interesting and rare intellectuals of the 20th 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.”
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