My introduction: Geoffrey James is an author, journalist and contributing editor on Inc.com, according to Wikipedia on 12/24/24.
He seems like a smart, accomplished man.
His article is not deep and I will respond to some of his 24 quotes from Eric Hoffer, but he refers to Hoffer and America’s Greatest Philosopher, and that is not an assignation that I have encountered before; I do not know if that is true or not, unless Hoffer’s decency, his originality, his special access to and love of truth, his promotion of liberty, equality, moderation, individualism and egoism are all hallmark characteristics of a very great philosopher, which he certainly was.
James below shall be presented by the letter J, and then I will respond where required.
J: “In 1951, America’s Greatest Philosopher Predicted Where We’d Be in 2019
Eric Hoffer saw exactly where the U.S. was headed and tried his best to warn us away from it.”
My response: Hoffer knew that America was remarkable because here the masses (relatively individualized as rational egoists) here ran things, and intellectuals were kept away from the seat of power.
Hoffer knew that through out history, intellectuals were part of the ruling elites everywhere, and that they must be kept from ruling here. And, in that vein of thought, he would, if he were alive today, have no trouble predicting that as tens of millions get college degrees here, that these academically brainwashed true-believing social justice warriors, would unsuspectingly fall under the spell and the lure of cultural Marxism and Leftism.
By the 2020s, he would have seen America very close to becoming the new Soviet Union. He has been forgotten and ignored but his warnings about how toxic and dangerous intellectuals are, if not precluded from ruling society, has by now resulted in Leftists intellectuals becoming deeply embedded in the American institutions—too the point of overthrowing them so this elite can rule America like the intellectuals in Europe rule those nations. I hope not.
What bothers me is conservative intellectuals like Chris Rufo and Jordan Peterson, both decent and brilliant thinkers, seem to have concluded that a conservative counter-elite should rally around President Trump to keep America on the right path, but I like Hoffer want no more elites ruling the masses, elites of any stripe or kind. To thwart their ambition, only my suggestion that each of the masses live as individuating supercitizens in our capitalist constitutional republic can permanently keep American run by the masses, and elites kept small, powerless and not relevant to running the country.
J: “
EXPERT OPINION BY GEOFFREY JAMES, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, INC.COM @SALES_SOURCE
OCT 29, 2019
The U.S. hasn’t generated many great philosophers, but former longshoreman Eric Hoffer was arguably the greatest of them. Born in 1898 and dying in 1983, Hoffer lived through two world wars and the depression, and saw technology evolve from the steam age to the computer age.
His observations about life, religion and politics (drawn mostly from his masterwork, “The True Believer”) seem more relevant and pointed today than when he originally wrote them in 1951. Here are 24 gems:
- “Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.” “
My response: Absolute faith is held by the fanatical, passionate true believer, and it corrupts him as completely as does absolute power, because absolute faith is the emotional feeling about and justification of this adherent’s unconditional promotion of his mass movement, his holy cause, and its leading guru to gain control over everybody alive, and that centralization of power is the demonic power of powerlessness at its most toxic extreme, corrupting all that wield this power, and corrupts all touched by it, and give in to being ruled by its promoters.
J: “
- “Add a few drops of venom to a half truth and you have an absolute truth.” “
My response: Almost any lie is a half-truth, but add malice and hatred to that half-truth, and then one tells and believes an absolute truth, which is an absolute lie, thereby allowing its wielder to be cruel with no restraint, and feel no remorse for misbehaving so badly. Once one’s lies are so powerful that one is convinced that one speaks the absolute truth, then one’s conscience is so compromised and rationalized, that there are no restraints on the self-regarding how inhumane one can act.
J: “
- “An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.”
- “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.” “
My response: Faith in ourselves in Hoffer’s technical phrase for merited, veridical self-esteem, perhaps not hyper-high self-esteem, but self-esteeming enough that one is comfortable with oneself and willing to stick with the self that God made one be, and try to make things work out based on efforts mediated through one’s native gifts and orientation.
Lost faith in ourselves is Hoffer’s technical phrase for merited low self-esteem, which will be accompanied by masochistic, mendacious low self-esteem in one’s depressed phase of existing, and also accompanied by mendacious high self-esteeming which is unearned group self-esteeming that is an expression of absolute faith and a whole rejection of the self to worship and adore a substitute, collective source of self-esteeming—the clique, the ideology, the cult, the guru to whom we altruistically are willing to sacrifice our very lives to.
J: “
- “Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.” “
My response: Hoffer the detector of truth might be reminding us that grasping what is true is revealed as we categorize, measure and define what we do and don’t know, but, if we know of, or operate as if we knew of the human tendency to enforce our personal confirmation bias into all epistemological searches, perhaps we each could open ourselves up to hear and learn from what irritates us to hear of and learn from.
- “For many people, an excuse is better than an achievement because an achievement, no matter how great, leaves you having to prove yourself again in the future; but an excuse can last for life.
- “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.”
- “It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.”
- “Naivete in grownups is often charming; but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity.”
- “Never forget that one of the most gifted, best educated nations in the world, of its own free will, surrendered its fate into the hands of a maniac.”
- “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.
- “Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.”
- “Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.”
- “Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.”
- “Rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.” “
J: “
- “Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.” “
My response: My guess here is that most peoples that have lived were groupist, and lived in some sort of tyrannical, socialist regime in which the few had everything, and the masses had little. There the masses would be altruistic-collectivistic, groupist and nonindividuating; such a population would suffer from low self-esteem, thus hating themselves and lying to themselves by being passionate and extreme, finding needed pride only in promoting one’s tribe, culture, religion or country against subjugated foreign masses who were chauvinistic about their tribe, culture, religion or country, for they had to find pride in something and these substitutes were all that they could find to cling to.
The American masses, Hoffer proclaimed and realized, were historically very unique and special. They were an individualistic, egoist people—at least partially, though still groupist and altruistic mostly—with a land offering them fabulous opportunity, prosperity, and liberty, and that is rare, such a relative heaven on earth ruled by the masses for the masses; they had not reason to hate foreigners, because they were relatively content with what they had.
J: “
- “The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity.”
- “The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.”
- “The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”
- “To know a person’s religion, we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.” “
J: “
- “We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.” “
My response: Hoffer the epistemological moderate and mild sceptic knew that the more one knows, and the smarter one becomes, the more dispassionate one becomes, realizing that truth is often not binary nor lacking in complexity, grayness, and exceptions. One realizes how little that one actually knows.
These realizations make the knower and thinker humble and realistic about his intellectual limitations, and so self-assessing also allows him to accept that his self-esteeming is high and realistic at the same time, as he confidently proclaims what he knows, and freely admits to himself and others his ignorance, his mistakes and his shortcomings. He knows he has a right to be proud of his intellectual honesty, and modest pride in his accomplishments, while knowing full well how much farther he has to go, and that he will never get there.
Were he instead to vehemently spout absolutely certain black and white convictions, his militant assertions reveal much about his inner insecurity and self-uneasiness, and not much about the verisimilitude of his convictions and propositions.
J: “
- “We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.”
- “You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.”
- “You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy.” “
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