Second Hoffer-Day Interview

 

 

 

 

 

Second Hoffer-Day Interview

 

National Education Television in 1963 carried a series of videos, conversations of interviews with Eric Hoffer, it was referred to as Conversations with Eric Hoffer, and James Day interviewed Eric Hoffer, and this conversation was entitled: Eric Hoffer 2, The Role of the Intellectual.

 

I took notes on the 29-minute video and copy it out with some light editing, and then I comment where necessary.

 

Day (D after this): “Eric Hoffer, Philosopher and Longshoreman is interviewed by James Day, and the conversation is based on Hoffer’s book, The Ordeal of Change, published in March 1963 by Harper & Row.

 

Eric Hoffer is first a workingman and then a writer.”

 

My response: Note that Hoffer is a workingman first and then a writer. His very existence, his very orientation is mixed or moderate: he led two lives at once, and that set of dual roles and experiences made him who he was, a moral, political, and philosophical moderate. Lived moderation is where truth, wisdom and originality are most clear and expressible.

 

Intellectuals are usually isolated from the world, so their deepest views and opinions are extremist and out of balance, so it is not surprising, that, despite being well, formally educated, often smart, and sometime brilliant, their fanatical worldview renders their conclusions and propositions untrue, or largely false, unwise, and hackneyed party-line expressions of group think accepted opinion.

 

When the person lives in both worlds, the practical, the moneygrubbing world, and the rarefied, intellectual world of ivory castles existence in the monastery and campus ivory tower-dwelling, she is growing as an individuating anarchist, then she is living her version of what Hoffer did, thought and lived, being hybrid intellectual, a workingman and a writer. The mixing, clashing and pain of rationalizing these contesting worlds is the fountainhead of genuine originality, seminal thinking, and creative impulse rising into the agent’s consciousness.

 

 D: “His three books, The True Believer, The Passionate State of Mind, and The Ordeal of Change, are the products of a lifetime of omnivorous reading and an intimate association with the common man, as a longshoreman, a migrant laborer in the agricultural villages of California, and a miner in the Sierra Nevada’s Though he is a man with no formal education, he is considered one of the most original and powerful contemporary social thinkers and writers.

 

And while his trenchant writing have brought him national distinction, he takes greatest pride from the fact that he works with his hands four days a week on the San Francisco waterfront, something he has done since 1943.

 

Mr. Hoffer, in our last conversation we talked about change, the ordeal of change, the changes taking place in Asia and Africa. And these changes in these underdeveloped countries are largely led by intellectuals. Yet in your book, The Ordeal of Change, you said that Asian and African intellectuals fear Americans and Americanization.”

 

My response: Intellectuals in Europe, the Third World and in the West, fear and despise Americans and Americanization.  What makes us wonderful and unique is our freedom, our individualism, our practical reasoning, our temperateness, our capitalist (Ed says: Mixed actually is our capitalist economy, half run by the government.) economy. To go with this is the mass culture which roughly indicates—at least in 1963 more than today—the people run the country, not the elites or intellectuals, and that Americanization of these non-American countries was a threat to the monopoly on power wielded against the masses in their own countries by native intellectuals and the ruling elites: Mass culture would end their hold on power, and that is why the American Way needs to be culturally and legally exported to any nation that willingly absorbs it, or blends it with its native culture and political arrangement. If we add in individualism, the loved of reasoning, egoist ethics and the idea that each citizen is to grow into an individuating supercitizens, that about guarantees that intellectuals and other corrupt, ruling elites anywhere will be peacefully but permanently deposed.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “Mr. Day, before we start to talk about intellectuals, I ought to make a few remarks. First, of all, my knowledge of the intellectual is not based on first-hand experience. I have probably met a half dozen intellectuals all my life and I don’t know them. But I always said to myself, that Marx, who did not know nothing about the workingman, who never did a day’s work in his life, can write about the workingman, why the hell shouldn’t I be able to write about intellectuals?”

 

My response: Hoffer the truth-lover, the truth-amassing moderate, discovered the nature of the average American, his values and thoughts, and then he compares and contrasts that against intellectuals here and abroad, and his generalizations about intellectuals, whom he had never met or was barely acquainted with, were the conclusion of his thinking processes, making claims about what he did not know, an extension of what he did know.

 

H: “They, the next remark I make, about intellectuals is not about the American intellectual. There is a tremendous blurring of types in this country, Mr. Day, see.”

 

My response: I believe Hoffer is suggesting that American intellectuals are more connected to work and lives of the common person, perhaps having grown up on a farm, or with parents who owned a business in which the kids worked as teenagers before attending university.

 

H: “The masses are the ruling factor in this country.”

 

My response: We literally want the masses to be the ruling factor in every country, not as strict, unqualified majority rule, often degenerating mob rule: no, we want majority rule, with moral, practical, social, principled, and legal peaceful coexistence of minorities within this constitutional republic, where the average citizen is an individuating supercitizen, half-plumber and half a moderate expert on Plato and speaking ancient Greek fluently. Let the ruling global elitist intellectuals in each country fear cultural and political Americanization.

 

H: “I believe the American intellectual has absorbed an awful lot from the masses. Something funny happened this year. The longshoremen delegation was sent down to Latin America and came back and reported that many of the labor leaders in Latin America would believe they were bona fide longshoreman because they didn’t talk like longshoremen.

 

When I heard that I said to myself if American intellectuals went down to Latin America, nobody would believe they are intellectuals. They don’t act like it.”

 

J: “What distinguishes the actions and looks of a European intellectual versus American ones?”

 

H: “Well, in Europe, and in Asia too, see, this educated person actually believes he belongs to an elite to a class above the common herd.”

 

My response: So traditional American intellectuals did not much regard themselves as not part of the masses, and traditional American laborers did not seem illiterate enough or submissive enough to the Latin American intellectualized labor leaders, to have been actual laboring longshoremen.

 

Hoffer the permanent social misfit—like I am today—could never easily fit with workingmen (groupists and nonindividuators), nor with pure academically existing intellectuals (groupist and nonindividuators). He and I, ultimate social misfits both of us, are what all people must become to evolve into being living great souls. Hoffer and I are fit only to live as individuated loners, hybrid creatures part workingman and part intellectual. We will not fit into a group-pattern of daily living until contrived, civilized groups are associations of individuators and nonindividuators mingling and separating freely and with minimum friction, whereas as natural, more savage groupings are just a collection of nonindivudators with an occasional, natural individuators occurring (actively self-developing potentially great) in such unplanned, hereditary groups.

 

H: “And you’d be surprised, Mr. Day, at what contempt there is for the masses in European intellectuals. In my book there, I quote the finest of them. I quote Renan, who was tremendously humane. I quote Flaubert. I quote Heine. And in Heine already you can see a hostility towards United States. He called United States a prison of freedom. He was afraid of the tyranny of the masses, more than the tyranny of any dictator.

 

And this is the actual attitude of intellectuals. You know I have been trying to figure out intellectuals. I went all the way back to the invention of writing. Writing was originally invented for practical purposes: to keep books, for bookkeeping. Writing was not invented in a house of learning. It was invented in a warehouse, and the first scribe was a craftsman. The warehouses around the temple, around the royal palace, had all kinds of craftsman. There were potterers and weavers, brewers, and carpenters.

 

And there were also scribes who practiced the art of writing. But there was a distinction between the scribe and the other craftsman. While the other craftsman produced something tangible, the scribe did not produce anything that would prove his usefulness. All he could do was keep books. So, from the very beginning the scribe did not have a tangible, self-evident sense of usefulness.”

 

My response: Somehow every intellectual and every human being needs a deep, personal stock of experience and skills built in handling, shaping, working with the natural world, the everyday world, and this keeps us grounded and mentally and morally healthy. If he would but tinker with his car, buy his own groceries, change a diaper for his baby daughter—all of these mundane chores keep us humble, common, moral, and sane.

 

Blue-collar types make widgets, and this tangible proof of their worth is without substitution that satisfies and lasts. Somehow this actual, merited sense of worth ground the agent in what is moderate, objective, individualistic and realistic, and these trait results are ethically efficacious.

 

Where the intellectual does no craft with his hands, and has no work experience, satisfaction and competence gained and demonstrated as a craftsman, farmer, gardener, hobbyist or businessperson, or truck driver, the intangible substitutes which the intellectual must grasp at to provide him with his empty meretricious sense of worth, will so heighten his desperate, low self-esteeming, that this very unhappy, angry, resentful person will seek revenge on the world, and, if in power in a malevolent elite, will turn cruel towards the masses. He is now pure evil.

 

H: “And in another situation, the scribe is shown, through all the pictures that we have of those early periods, the scrive does not side with, does not identify himself with the people who did the world’s work.”

 

J: “So he was identified with power from the beginning.”

 

H: “He was identified with the ruling class, with the ruling class. He was identified by becoming a scribe, a way for normal people could join the elite. Before you had to become a nobleman or distinguish yourself in battle to be in the elite. But now, by learning to write, you join the elite. Of course, writing was terribly difficult. The hieroglyphs, the cuneiform, you have to spend a lifetime, you know, learning to write.

 

And as I bring out in my book, the intellectual did all he could to make the art of writing as difficult as he could so as to preserve his exclusiveness. The very word curriculum means obstacle race. You know, you had to run an obstacle race in order to reach the goal, and become a scribe.

 

Now in practically every civilization we know of, the scribe was part of the ruling elite. And even in Europe now, see, the scribe and the intellectual still feels himself a member of the elite. And it was the scribe, the priest and the King who actually fashioned all these civilizations we know of. They set the tone. The formulated all the ideals, the aspirations and so on and so forth.

 

But the scribe grew out of commerce.”

 

J: “He was a bookkeeper?”

 

H: “Absolutely,”

 

J: “In order to preserve his eliteness you say he made writing more complex, but there came a time when writing became fairly common.”

 

H: “But who did it? (Ed says: Who made writing fairly common?) Who did it? Who broke this monopoly of the scribe? The trader.”

 

J: “The trader?”

 

H: “The Phoenicians simplified the alphabet, they were the only ones, and again for the purpose of bookkeeping. Read the history of the development of writing. It is fantastic that such an exterior thing should have such a tremendous influence on history, see.

 

Now the trader—despite his trivial motive, after all, he is running after profits—he has played a tremendous role in the emergence of freedom. And the diffusion of literacy everywhere, even in Europe, if you study, if you try to trace the diffusion of literacy in Europe, you will see that it wasn’t the professors, it wasn’t the intellectuals, who promoted popular education.”

 

My response: The great irony is that the professors and the intellectuals were not motivated by trivial motives (running after profits) and so this made them anti-intellectual (I define being intellectual as the person who pushes human liberation to a maximum edge by educating the masses to self-realize as rational egoists and individuators. The individuator is motivated by a hierarchy of motives, trivial and worldly, and ideal, sublime, lofty, otherworldly ideals otherworldly.). It is the traders and capitalists that pushed mass education, universal literacy, and democratic freedom for the masses, not elites, including their insider intellectuals.

 

Hoffer is suggesting that traders accidentally and unintentionally liberated the masses by offering them literacy, mass education and democratic reform; intellectuals and elites offered the masses no hope but continual bondage, for the literate elites wanted the masses kept down.

 

H: “The industrialists and the general, the military: they needed literate soldiers to fight the war.

 

Of course, to me all through history there has been an antagonism between the trader and the intellectual, and in my mind I have it so each of them tried to break each other’s monopoly. The trader tried to break the monopoly of the scribe on writing, by simplifying writing.

 

 And the scribe tried to break the monopoly on riches by preach the division of riches. All movements for taking the wealth away from the wealthy were pioneered, see, by intellectuals.

 

Now as to the question why the intellectual in Asia and Africa was afraid of America, we just brought it out there. A real mass civilization (America is a miracle because it is a mass civilization—Ed says.). The only mass civilization that ever existed, see. And you know up to the end of the Middle Ages the scribe in Europe too was a member of an elite. Periodically all the people that could read belong to the clergy. See.

 

 I don’t know if you remember when there was the Tyler uprising there in England.”

 

My response: This was the Wat Tyler Rebellion, The Peasant Revolt, in 1381.

 

H: “It was against the clergy and the ruling class. And because anybody, anybody who could read, they hang them. Just being able to read was a mark that you belong to the clergy and the exploiting class. Now the inventing of paper and printing, see, broke the Church’s monopoly, the Catholic Church’s monopoly, on the education in Europe.

 

And you had a whole new class of people who could read and write. In other words, intellectuals who had no automatic sense of social usefulness and no sense of worth.”

 

My response: It was not that the intellectuals, whether they were part of a ruling elite, or left twisting in the wind, belonging neither to the ruling elite, or the oppressed, illiterate masses, had an objective personal sense of social usefulness and worth, merited by personal achievement which gives one a veridical sense of high self-esteem. This veridical, merited, earned sense of self-esteem or social usefulness and worth is to be fit, whether the world recognizes it or not, or whether or not the world rewards the individuators or individual so constituted, so accomplished, so self-regarding.

 

Intellectuals ordinarily, in the past and likely, mostly still so today, were groupist and nonindividuating, but their low self-esteem did not make them feel frustrated and discontented as long as they gained a socially recognized and socially rewarded meretricious sense of self-worth, because, as members of the ruling elite, society told them they were useful and fit, and they believed they were of social usefulness and social worth, so they remained relatively contented with their lot, and worked mightily to support the oppressive status quo, siding against the masses almost every time.

 

H: “Indeed, it was not belonging to a ruling elite; and it was this change, this diffusion of literacy that is at the base of the Reformation, that is at the base of the revolt against the Church. And the unattached intellectual, he is the one who has been in the vanguard of all the revolutions we know of, see.”

 

My response: The unattached intellectual is not a part of the ruling elite of the social dispensation running the given society; this unattachedness, of the dispossessed, maltreated, disrespected intellectual, motivates him to lead a revolt to overthrow the status quo, but he lies (He may even believe his lies.) as he claims his revolutionary ambitions stem from lofty motives such as compassion for the oppressed, and that is a seeker after justice, the rule of law, of treating all equally, and to ensure that all experience freedom and prosperity in their personal lives, not matter their rank in society.

 

His real and only actual motive is to acquire massive power to rule the masses, as part of the ruling elite, or as part of the revolutionaries that rile up the masses to serve as their army, their mass movement, to bring about the successful rebellion, and then the intellectual’s real motive, to be a ruler of the masses, will now be revealed and acted upon by the intellectual going forward.

 

The intellectual feigns that he is fighting for the masses, though he is promoting only himself as an altruistic leader of the pack: in fact, he has already been sickened by power lust, and he craves to feed this voracious addiction by acquiring and exercising naked power over and against the cowering masses.

 

J: “Why has he been in the vanguard?”

 

H: “Because he wanted to create a society in which he would be a member of the elite, and his social usefulness would be self-evident.

 

This is just what is happening just everywhere—in Russia, in China, and all the backward countries, see. You’ve heard an awful lot. You can go to the library and find half a dozen books on the revolt of the masses, the revolt of the masses.

 

I can see no revolt of the masses at all. What I can see is the revolt of the intellectual against the prevailing dispensation, against the prevailing order. And wanting to return to his Golden Age of the scrive when the scribe was at the side of the overseer, whip in hand, belonging to the elite.”

 

My response: One of my jobs as an interpreter of Hoffer is to state his unstated premises or presuppositions. Here I theorize that he denies that the masses in history, in totalitarian regimes of all descriptions, could revolt because they were groupist, altruistic, illiterate, in addition, they were born fatalistic, and had no self-confidence, sense of activism and promise, which might nudge them to begin changing things.  They did not start things very often: they cannot not think well and originally unless they are literate, thinking creatively and critically, with confidence in their own minds and their own intellectual independence from what authorities tell them to believe and accept—they were socially so collectivistic, so fatalistic, meek, obedient, masochistic and without hope that they usually would not agree that willing a rebellion would work: the decision to rebel because would not be their own idea: they required a dispossessed intellectual or intellectuals to lead them.

 

By contrast the modern masses and future masses are people who could well envision, populate and run a constitutional republic as individuating supercitizens, most capable of fomenting a revolution on their own with no support, suggestion or inspiration from anyone but themselves.

 

Since the kind of masses did not exist historically, these nonindividuating, groupist masses would not rebel unless fired up by a disgruntled, revolutionary intellectual.

 

H: “I said the masses never really had a chance to do anything on their own. You actually had to discover a new world for the masses to come over and get that chance there. And to me America is the only mass civilization to ever exist, see. It is something absolutely novel.”

 

My response: This is why America must be preserved: its political system, its history of rationality and individualism, its mass culture of individualists, its freedom and prosperity growing out of property rights, free market economics and constitutional republicanism are a miracle to be preserved and furiously protected against postmodernist Marxist revolutionaries that seek to smash America, the city on the hill.

 

Consider the revolutionary, Progressive intellectuals attacking America today: their power lust and their nihilistic intellectualism, are best thwarted by stalwart, armed, organized, millions of individuating supercitizens that insist upon preserving America, and insist upon going further: building on its contemporary political and cultural gains, ramping up here to erect a higher civilization growing out our current culture, while retaining what we inherited from our Founders.  As we neutralize and keep powerless the revolutionary intellectuals addicted to spreading their power of powerlessness over all the land, we will keep individuators anarchistically and yet federally in control of their own lives, uniting of the country with their power of powerfulness power model.

 

J: “But hasn’t the intellectual in his revolutionary bent always identified himself with the masses?”

 

H: “Hah?”

 

J: “And doesn’t he do it now.?”

 

H: “It’s a temporary alliance, it a temporary alliance, it is a temporary alliance.”

 

J: “It’s not a real alliance?”

 

H: “No, no. There is a tremendous antagonism between the intellectuals and the masses. The intellectual wants the masses as a huge mass, a huge rock behind him. He wants to lead. He resents the fact that the masses should do anything on their own. He resents a social order in which leadership is almost unnecessary.”

 

My response: We always need leaders but a society, and all its governmental, corporate, ecclesiastical, military, academic and civil organizations, when populated by, in the future, individuating anarchist supercitizen employees, are organizations where leadership is almost unnecessary.

 

“You know for me the test of an organization, the test of a nation, or even a union, is its ability to function without an exceptional leader. If you build something and it needs an exceptional leader to run it, then you haven’t built it right.

 

And by that test America is a very vigorous society especially when you consider during the Eisenhower Administration. You hardly need a leader there, see, and yet we functioned well. Of course, in the time of emergency, you need a leader.

 

But the intellectual thinks it is blasphemous for the masses to act on their own. Actually, he resents an affluent society, a society in which the masses are affluent. He thinks affluence corrupts the masses.”

 

My response: It is blasphemous for the masses not to act on their own, and any intellectual or elitist of any stripe, that resents affluent society populated by the affluent masses is a very disturbed person. He is evil and sickened by power-lust. Average people need affluence to feel good about living and themselves, and it gives them a secure material foundation from which to launch their life of maverizing. I assumed these people work, and, via their hard working, they have built a modest prosperity, so that they can also pursue more loft personal goals and achievements.

 

Affluence does not corrupt the masses: a reasonable per capita affluence uplifts the masses, for worldly or earned prosperity bolsters their basic sense of veridical self-esteem, and that is the gateway to traveling personally down the road to moral goodness as an egoistic maverizer. Affluence is their Maslowian springboard of satisfied basic needs met, so that they can continue to work, make money, raise their kids, run the government, and self-realize individually. These rational egoists are the most psychologically and morally, healthy group of people that will ever live.

 

Poverty, want and a lack of freedom are what corrupt the masses because they remain groupist, altruistic, nonindividuating and self-hating due to their veridical low self-esteeming, and their mendacious high self-esteeming. Of course, the moral law of moderation, dictates that each individuators not pursue great wealth for its own sake (There are moral exceptions to this of course, like any other moral proposition which one advances.). Too little wealth sickens and corrupts the individual almost entirely, and great, excessive wealth likely poisons and corrupts most of its holders, also.

 

Leftist and Fascist intellectuals, today, would arrange the social order once more so that only the elite like himself once again would know affluence. They openly argue, or at least secret believe that proud masses need to be deprived of their private wealth, their private power, their private lives, deprived of their private property, so they indeed will be humbled by the totalitarian state run by in-charge, envious intellectuals. The intellectuals anticipate that once the masses are broken, deprived and re-enslaved, then the world will be right with the humbled masses with their heads down, reflecting their backs whipped and bloody, at the hands of their intellectual overseers. Then the masses will know their place once more, as they are brought into line, under control, knowing their place and staying there, uppity no longer.

 

H: “Does affluence corrupt him? I don’t know. I don’t think he believes so. But the masses are corrupted by affluence according to him.”

 

J: “Why does he identify with them in his struggle for power?”

 

H: “Well, he needs an ally that he has identified with. If you read all through history there was an alliance between the intellectual and the businessmen when they fought the aristocracy. The intellectual allied himself with the aristocracy when he fought the Church, and he allied himself with the aristocracy to fight the middle class, and now he allies himself with the populations of backward countries, of ex-colonial countries. And his alliance with the masses was just one instance to need, to need an ally.

 

Of course, he cannot pursue power the way a businessman pursues power; or the way a general pursues power, or even an ordinary statesman pursues power, see. He has to justify his pursuit of power. He wants to rule but he has to feel in acquiring power, of obtaining power, he is actually in the service of a tremendous cause, of the fight for liberty, for redeeming the oppressed and so on.

 

And it has been seen again and again that there is a tremendous difference between the intellectual when he is battling and the intellectual when he has seized power. You can see him in Russia where intellectuals are in charge, you can see him.”

 

My response: Notice how the less educated and less smart general, businessman and ordinary statesman are wiser and more moral than the hypocritical intellectual who lies to himself and the world—and is often successful at deceiving himself and the masses that end up following his mass movement to their destruction—disguising his lust for pure power, the wicked kind of power, the power of powerlessness, behind ideal motives to help humanity.

 

The general, the businessman and the ordinary statesman are just selfish and greedy for power and position, and do not pretend to better than what they are not, and this limits the degree to which they are corruptible, to what extent they will chase after the power of powerlessness, because some residual individualism and conscience holds them back.

 

Luciferian pride and delusional arrogance is relatively downplayed in these worldly winners because they do not lie to themselves as much as does the purist, morally self-aggrandizing idealist/intellectual parading his proclaimed moral superiority. If lying is evil and extremist, and truth-telling is good and temperate, then the intellectual’s overweening self-assessment of moral superiority, while actually existing as a moral monster gathering as much power to himself to control the public as possible, then the virtual signaling of the ideologue signifies a most dangerous willingness to bind and hurt others. Once in power, this Stalin-like strongman will have no internal stops are doing and justifying whatever he wants to do and can get away with doing to millions of people. This is how totalitarian regimes, Left and Right, murdered 100 million civilians in the 20^th century.

 

But the revolutionary intellectual, once he is wrapped up lying to himself, to others and to the world about himself, others and the world, and is believed, at that point lying and doing will are purely connected and one; he has shed any remnant of individualism and self-esteem or conscience that may at one time have held him back a bit, like a little residual possession of conscience, holds back the jaded general, businessman or the ordinary statesman. The revolutionary, at this point he is wholly freed up to unleash wholesale killing, war and suffering upon humanity. Such a selfless, self-sacrificing monster remains idealistic, and there are no limits to his lust for revenge for being born, no limits to his nihilistic urge—now openly and fully indulged by him, to smash and even end humanity, and Being itself, if he were so powerful.

 

J: “In the Communist society?”

 

H: “In the Communist society, absolutely, absolutely. The intellectual you would say right away, hasn’t been persecuted in Communist Russia, haven’t been liquidated. Yes, but in Communist Russia the intellectual is an important person. Everything he says, everything he does is of utmost importance. And this is what the intellectual wants. He wants a society in which his importance is self-evident, see.

 

And sometimes you know I have an impression you take a backward country or even a country  like China or Russia, and it sems to me that what’s happening there is this. The school master grabbed a hold of the whole society. They turned it into a giant school room. They want to turn the whole population into pupils, se. And you know that in a class, whatever the teacher, the school master says, goes, and everybody hangs on his words.”

 

My response: The teacher, as intellectual or ruler of a totalitarian state, or of the mass movement before the totalitarian take-over is realized, holds supreme power over the masses, the deferential, submissive population. The teacher talks; they listen. His point of view is their point of view. He prescribes; they obey: end of story.

 

Notice that it is the purely selfless intellectual and ideologue that demands the masses listen to him lecture (Recall Fidel Castro and his two-hour-long speeches.) endlessly, without interruption or dissent. If the masses do not speak out and protest verbally and critically, then the guru’s or dictator point of view, a pure lie and outrageous exaggeration, that narrative, the official version of things, now become the locked-in truth of the realm, in effect, the law of the land—all because the masses remained silent, and were unwilling to pay by being tortured, imprisoned or losing their lives at the hands of the murderous secret police: the masses fearlessly must speak out against tyrants and bullies, and they must speak out loud and publicly the truth, forcing the guru dictator to hear them and eventually listen to them, to break his corrupt monopoly on speech and truth-shaping. For a society to be free and healthy, censorship and stifling of free speech must not be tolerated, at any personal cost, by the masses as growing, active individuating supercitizens.

 

H: “And this is the kind of society an intellectual really wants. He doesn’t want riches. He wants importance. He wants superior status. And he wants social usefulness.

 

The social usefulness of an intellectual in a Communist society is self-evident.  Everybody tells him so. Khrushchev is worried. The moment a poet starts to write a poem that doesn’t fit, he is worried to death.

 

Now in this country, Kennedy, or Congress, they are not worried about what a poet says because nobody really pays attention to what our intellectuals say. It is not an important factor in shaping our lives, certainly not in shaping our policy. Now you can see, Mr. Day, why the European intellectual and the intellectual in these underdeveloped countries look on the spread of Americanization as a threat, see. It is a threat not only to his influence, but to his very existence.

 

Look what happened in Peru. The Rebu (Rebu? Spelling? Inaudible, Ed says.) industry called on an American management company to work out, to improve the system of running the industry. You know the result was about 90% of the intellectuals employed in that industry were fire.

 

You see the intellectual can, needs a role of leadership, of supervision. This is the role that fits him. This is the work that he wants. And now when you compare the ratio between the supervisor and the working personnel in different societies you will have the surprise of your life.

 

The lowest, the number of supervisors, are lowest in United States. The highest number in a Communist country.”

 

My response: In capitalist, free America, where moderate individualism and moderate egoism as a moral system is tolerated, workers run things more, with fewer supervisors are hired than in a Communist country where each worker is heavily supervised: there the socialist, authoritarian governmental/economic dispensation finds room for intellectuals as supervisors, and the masses or workers are not left free to innovate, improvise and run their work affairs because strong altruist morality and groupist work arrangements are the order of the day.

 

H: “There you have half the population supervising the other half of the population. And everywhere a backward country has regained freedom, now I know about Indonesia and India, there see, there is a tremendous increase in the bureaucracy there, and it’s a matter of life and death there. If you don’t give jobs to the graduates of universities there, you will have revolution on your hands. If you want any social stability, you have to increase the bureaucracy to—”

 

J: “To employ the intellectuals?”

 

H: “Absolutely. All through history if you wanted to keep the intellectual satisfied, you have to associate him with the hierarchy, with the bureaucracy hierarchy, and of course this spells inefficiency if you have such a high proportion of the supervisory force in comparison to the productive force. But if social stability is absolutely necessary, you have to put up with these inefficiencies.”

 

J: “The intellectual is largely responsible for creativity in a society, yet you have argued that when the intellectual gains power that creativity is diminished.”

 

My response: There is some creativity on the part of intellectuals before they assume power, and after they assume power, but their groupist affiliating limits their ability to be as creative as they can be, and they vehemently deny that the masses are equally gifted and creative, so they deny the need to decentralize control over the fine arts out among the masses, so the latter can get at it, maverize, and regale the world with the splendor of their handiwork.

 

H: “Absolutely, you know there is a very common fact that Disraeli pointed out: here you have a university, say the University of California run by intellectuals of course, they have the trustees and so forth, but run by the intellectuals. Now would you say the greatest poets come out of these universities? No. The greatest musicians? No. The greatest painters? No.”

 

My response: Back 60 or 70 years ago in Hoffer’s time, when professors were relatively individualistic, pro-American and more politically diverse in viewpoints—and one could still receive a solid, classical liberal arts degree as I did. They still were hierarchical, educational bureaucrats, quite smart, quite formally educated, but still groupist, altruistic and nonindividuating so, even back then, they imposed these lack of standards upon their students, who surrendered very souls to professors, just to allowed to participate in higher education, to get that degree and later a fat paycheck. As professors have become woke, both they and their students have been dumbed-down, so college grows enthusiastic little social activists, and little intellectual greatness, originality or creative excellence can come out of stifling, conformist Academia.

 

By 2023, as Progressivism and cultural Marxism had utterly, ideologically captured Academia, as Chris Rufo detected, ideologized, fanaticized professors, now true-believing agents peddling cultural and perhaps violent revolution by means of their mass movement taking over America’s institutions, especially the campuses, all they could generally do was crank out  youngsters with mediocre educations, dull-witted, woke social justice warriors. There will be few or no great poets, painters or musicians coming out of Academia today. Intellectuals now rule campuses with an iron fist, and individualism and creativity are two of the most woeful victims of this repression and mind control.

 

H: “The only thing that really comes out of universities are scientists.”

 

J: “Scientists?”

 

H: “Scientists and engineers. But the conclusion is almost inescapable. The university is not a very ideal milieu for, see, creativity, for producing great books, great music, great painting, see.”

 

My response: I note once more how Hoffer uses paradox to shock the reader into reality and truth discovery. It seems intuitive that creativity should abound in citadels of higher learning, that who would be more apt at fostering creative performance among young people, than professors and intellectuals should be maximally effective at, but they are dismal failures at such.

 

Why so? Here the Hofferian, counterintuitive truth kicks in: intellectuals with PhDs run in packs and are ideologically true believers in their postmodernist holy cause. They are creatures that are embedded and entrenched in their tiny little hierarchical slot; they had to sell their souls to get there and stay there. Their milieu is a place of tyranny, vicious cliques, purges, spying on each other and ideological purity litmus testing:  everyone spying on everyone, and few dare nonconform, think freely, think originally, practice actual creative endeavor. If the professor is a Peter Boghossian, then his peers, the students and the Administration will exile him from Academia.

 

The Leftist mass movement which has captured higher educational institutions is the forerunner of the coming totalitarian system in the making to capture all of America, and these professorial monsters (convinced that they are superior to the masses, and are entitled to rule the masses) are the ones that we deliver our children too on a platter.

 

The gifted amateur, individuating, creative, original thinker and intuitive genius: as an egoist and individual-liver, as she develops and works hard to hone her craft, her gift, her creativity, will go off the charts. The intellectuals at university, if allowed access to her, could not wait to hammer these wondrous advantages out of her: once they have their clutches on her, she would be reduced to an obedient, shuffling, lifeless zombie, and social justice warrior--when they get through with her. Why are parents paying a fortune to allow these monsters to smash the life and creativity out of these young people? It is a cardinal sin of staggering proportions.

 

H: “And the reason is of course I am talking from experience. I don’t know how the University of California is run. I don’t know about that more than I know about the moon., see. But I do know one thing: that the creative person does not know how to grab power at all. He doesn’t know how to retain power.”

 

My response: Hoffer the genius and understated egoist is aligning being an institutional intellectual as a person who is not creative and individualistic—I add--not because he lacks talent, but because he chose to be lazy, groupist, nonindividuating and mediocre instead—but he is an expert at glomming onto and retaining power. This is corrupt power, the collectivist power over others, binding others to one’s will so they, the masses, will be ruled by oneself, the intellectual and member of the groupist elite, so both the ruler and rule live under a power model that is demonic, so neither will be individual or creative. This corrupt power identified correctly by Hoffer is the altruist-collectivist power of powerless which I talk about, and Hoffer knew it was its own distinct category, but he did not give it a technical name as I have.

 

When Hoffer refers to an amateur, self-styled intellectual, or even if she is a credentialed expert in her area of interest, as long as she individual-lives, individuates, is motivated by egoist values, and seeks to grow her abilities, this is her power and this is her increasing her positive power, the power of individualism and creativity, and it is a godly power, the power of powerfulness, where liberty in an anarchist federal constitutional republic is maximized. Hoffer knew that this noble form of power-owning, producing-increasing and power-wielding existed but he did not give it the technical name/phrase which I have coined as maverization.

 

H: “The administration of a university—I’ll bet every nickel I have that the least creative people do the managing.’

 

My response: I hate to keep carping on this but it is of tremendous importance to point that many perhaps most bureaucrats in college administration and in professorial positions that are noncreative hacks, are non-creative hacks, not because they are bereft of talent, but because they are animated by altruist-collectivist morality, so they having given up on ever becoming an individuated somebody, settle for that horrible substitute, becoming a true believer, a non-creative hack who is not powerful and popular, totally owned by the machine.

 

H: “And now you have to know something about people that want to be creative and can’t be, and know about their proclivities and so on.”

 

My response: Frustrated people that want to be creative are not people that can’t be creative--here I disagree with Hoffer and Jordan Peterson—frustrated people are people that cannot be creative because it does not come easily or automatically for some as much as others, but if any  of these stymied failures would refuse to give up, to refuse to believe she can be demonstrably creative, thus electing to maverize, no matter how poorly she does or how long it takes—eventually she will produce some original and impressive. If she would begin to pray and continue to pray to the Good Spirits to be blessed with actualized talent, gifts, creativity and even genius, if she imagines remarkably, works very hard, never ceasing to try and believe in herself all the while imploring the divinities for inspiration, sooner or later most people will be significantly and impressively creative. I am convinced of this. The Good Spirits have given me this impression.

 

H: “And one of their proclivities is to interfere with creativity. They have to have their finger in the pie; they want to interfere with them, and of course Stalin, Stalin, who considered himself an intellectual. And Stalin had a hatred for brilliance. And he actually imposed his style, Stalin’s style on Russian literature. He actually destroyed people who were brilliant except in science and technology.”

 

J: “Uh, huh.”

 

H: “Does this answer your question, Mr. Day?”

 

J: “Yes, and I would like to ask one more.”

 

H: “Okay.”

 

J: “And once again you have argued that they are not at home in a free society.”

 

My response: Most intellectuals, by nature want to rule, want to push the masses around as part of the ruling elite. To be able to subjugate, to oppress, to exploit and boss around the masses necessarily requires that the social dispensation is tyrannical, and that the few haves have a monopoly of power and money and prestige, and the masses are left with being poor, starved, abused, overworked, underpaid, powerless and hopeless.

 

This is the medieval ideal to which the intellectual seeks to return a free society of affluent, happy, individualized masses to. The intellectual is not at home in a free society because it is a relatively classless society, and he wants plenty of social stratifications with him being one of the rulers holding sway from their perches in the top rungs of the social ladder. Freedom was never what the intellectual wanted, because a free society is a society for the masses, a relatively classless society where power, freedom, prosperity and political say are wielded by the masses in the vast middle class.

 

The intellectual may preach revolution under the guise or pretense of being compassionate, morally superior, nobly motivated, idealistic, briming with a love of humanity, for the sake of the downtrodden and for the good of the people, but he just wants to wreck a free society, and reinstall a tyrannical arrangement with himself among the rulers. As a member of the ruling class reinstated, he will not be free, but he does not care about losing freedom because he never valued it when he had it, could not be adept at coping with it, and could not wait to be rid of it.

 

Once and when he is situated in the seat of power, as one of the rulers, he will not be free, but neither is anyone else free in this totalitarian society, from the strongman or junta presiding at the top, to the lowest untouchables in the basement of the hierarchy. For the intellectual the coin of the realm is power, and he is a slave to the system as is every other citizen, but at least he is fairly close to the top of the dispensation, so he can sadistically lord it over the beaten masses below him, while he must tolerate masochistically being snubbed, slapped and deprecated by the mistresses and masters above him that run the whole show.

 

 His power model is the diabolical power of universal human powerless in the collective; and for the state, all have selflessly self-sacrificed their independence and integrity just to settle for some measly slot in some level of stratification somewhere along that social ladder. This is what the Progressive intellectual offers the American masses, despite his objection and denials; he means you no good at all, and he works mightily and tirelessly to insert hell on earth. The masses as individuating supercitizens warned by Hoffer and me, will be on to them (the ambitious intellectuals) and urge citizens to fight the intellectuals and their devilish plans with all our freed-loving might.

 

H: “You know I quote it out of their own mouths. There was a delightful intellectual, a terrible intellectual named Lincoln Steffens. He was a man that was living off the fat of the land. He had it nice all his life and he was all for revolution, for Communist revolution, and so on. But he was at the same time an honest man, and he wrote an autobiography. And he said he found out that all he fought for was a struggle for freedom, see, but when freedom came, he didn’t take to it.

 

Now it’s very important that the intellectual should have freedom to fight for freedom.”

 

My response: It is my take that what Hoffer is referring to, when he insists that the intellectual maintains that he must be allowed the freedom to fight for freedom, he really wants the wiggle room, power and opportunity to remake society so that he is anointed a seat at the table of the ruling elite as one of them; he will support the status quo rigidly and faithfully if they grant him his wish and ‘due,” should they deny him he will lead to revolt to overturn the dispensation, and he will be part of the new dispensation as a member of that elite in charge. His sole and ignoble motive is power acquisition.

 

H: “This is the freedom they really need. He does not produce; he is not at his best in a society where he is absolutely free which means he is left to his own devices that he can do whatever he pleases. He does not want to be left alone. He wants to be suspect. He wants to be feared, to be adored. He wants society’s reverence, but what he would rather have if he had a choice between being utterly left alone and being persecuted, he would rather be persecuted.

 

You see the creative process, Mr. Day, is a difficult process, and an almost unnatural thing, see.”

 

My response: The intellectual is a joiner, a groupist, a nonindividuator and group-liver that fails to be a creative, egoistic individuator, so he settles for a cheap substitute, amassing social power.

 

His amassing social power is a natural process, but it is unnatural and very difficult to be a creative individual, so he quits trying and takes the easy way out. When he refuses to mind his own business, then minding everyone else’s business and undermining their God-commanded destiny to answer the divine call be living as a group-separated, creative individuators, this is how he binds people to him, and undermines God’s will.

 

H: “It’s when you can’t gain a sense of worth by other means, that you take to creativity.”

 

My response: Some wannabe joiners are excluded by selected groups, so occasionally the rejected applicant turns to and resorts to finding veridical self-esteem, a substantial sense of self-worth, and a genuine sense of social usefulness by maverizing; to their own amazement, they turn out to be good at being creative and original, and they come to like this new way of life that they have become accustomed to living, so they stay it and develop ever more, as long as they live.

 

H: “Give people a chance to act, to acquire riches, to run railroads, to open mines, and your creativity just fizzles out. Just look at what happened in this country, you had a flowering of New England, you remember that?”

 

My response: People can find their veridical sense of self-esteem through honest productive action, work, or wealth-acquisition as bourgeois citizens in a free, capitalist society, becoming lower level, less developed egoistic individuators. Or they can make a complete commitment and effort over a lifetime to live as a fully blossomed creative individual, so their self-esteem will be quite high, quite veridical, and consistent with being a higher level individuator, fully functional, fully operational at it. Personally, as an ethical moderate, I propose that people have their cake and eat it too: that they make money and live as creative individuals at the same time.

 

J: “Yes.”

 

H: “And then the West opened up, eh, and the sons of poets and philosophers went, and what did they become? Railroad men. They became millionaires and it was the end of New England. They went full out.”

 

J: “You mean action is inimical to creativity?”

 

H: “Absolutely. It is not only that the energy that would go into creativity is going into action, but the very creative impulse itself is the secretion of a frustration of the frustrating desire for improving action.

 

Look for an instance at Trotsky. When did Trotsky write? When did he produce his great books? When he couldn’t act, when they exiled him. And this you can see with all of them—Koestler, Kurster (Ed: spelling?), Ceilon (Ed: spelling?). They did their producing when they couldn’t act--by eliminating themselves from action or being forced out of action.

 

It’s all through history. Take Thucydides, the man who wrote The Peloponessian War. He was a general. He got fired. Humiliated, kept away so he wrote one of the most beautiful histories in the world. Take Machiavelli. Machiavelli would have given his very life if he was allowed to run around from one place to another as a diplomat, so they kicked him out, so he wrote The Prince and The Discourses.

 

And you go during the reign of Louis XIV in France, you see a tremendous phenomenon, the aristocrats, beginning  to write tremendous books, Le Rochefoucald and others. Why? Because Louis XIV took power away, action from the aristocracy.

 

In England, the aristocracy was kept in power and was running diplomacy and the whole state, and they haven’t produced anything at all. No writing at all. So , there is a ___ (Relationship, Ed says: a relationship between being active and non-creative, or being idle and turning to writing or creativity to build a veridical sense of self-worth.) between action and creativity.

 

But as I said, a society dominated by intellectuals is not an ideal milieu for the production of great art, for great literature.

 

I’ll bet something you know Khrushchev is now trying to supervise and dominate all the poets writing and artists in Russia. Suppose Khrushchev removed himself, if he left literature and art and the whole cultural field to a committee of writers in Russia. They would oppress the writers much more than would Khrushchev, you see that they would have to.”

 

J: “I’m going to have to continue this conversation with you at our next meeting. And at that time, I would like to pick up with you this point of the intellectual and carry it over to the counterpart, the masses, the weak and the workingman. Thank you.”