Benjamin Studebaker, the author of this article, which was published I believe on his blogsite, Politics. Studebaker is an American with a PhD in Politics and International Studies.
He wrote an article in 2020, called The True Believer, Eric Hoffer, and the Contemporary Left. I copied and pasted the entire article below and will comment on in where necessary.
Studebaker will be noted as S below and my input will be under my response.
S: “
The True Believer, Eric Hoffer, and the Contemporary Left
Benjamin Studebaker Politics April 1, 2020 6 Minutes
The main difference between small-c conservatism and Marxism is the level of optimism. Both conservatives and Marxists despise capitalism and the individualism it produces. But socialists believe there is light at the end of the tunnel, and that by going through the upheaval we can come to a better place. Old-fashioned conservatives think we are only going to fall ever further away from ancient virtue, and they fight to obstruct or delay that process in whatever ways they can. They defend the status quo not because they like capitalism, but because they think the future can only produce ever worse iterations of it. For this reason, I have always enjoyed reading old-fashioned conservatives and greatly prefer them to the libertarians who straightforwardly champion capitalism and relish in its intensification. In this vein, I find myself reading Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer.” “
My response: Most conservatives whom I know of that are American love capitalism and the individualism it produces. Studebaker seems like a Leftist. He seems to be referring to British members of the Conservative Party, Thatcherites were brought change and capitalism to the forefront. If the big-C British Conservative Party was pro-capitalism and pro-individualism, maybe small-c British conservatives were so traditional and anti-change, that they hate capitalism and individualism as much as the Marxists do, but I do not see how that applies to Americans and their conservative, political views.
Studebaker seems to prefer small-c conservatism rather than Thatcherites or libertarians who champion capitalism and individualism. I will try to keep an open mind as to how all of this is relevant to studying and applying Hoffer’s moderate conservatism (pro-capitalism, pro-individualism, pro-American constitutional republicanism). Hoffer likely had more in common with large-C British, modern conservatives than with small-c traditional conservatives.
S: “Originally published in 1951, The True Believer is mainly concerned with fanaticism. Like most Cold War authors writing in this genre, Hoffer finds that communism, fascism, and religious movements have things in common, but he is careful to avoid turning the book into a clear-cut iteration of horseshoe theory. He refuses to morally equate these movements to one another, acknowledging that mass movements can do good, and that some are better than others. He does, however, think that these movements all tend to appeal to the same types of people for the same types of reasons.”
My response: I had never heard of the Horseshoe Theory before. I think Studebaker flat rejects it. Hoffer did admit that some mass movements were beneficial, but he clearly warned that they needed to be started and run by principled reformed leaders or a leader, not addicted to power, not out to destroy his people and the culture, so he would shut down the mass movement, before too much damage could occur. Hitler, Mao, and Stalin would have none of that, and their murder and butchery cost 100 million lives in the 20th century, and many wars, and subjugation and suffering to over 1 billion people. Hoffer knew all of this and was in general no fan of mass movements because he understood them and their consequences so well—none better.
For a quick and dirty explanation of Horsehoe Political Theory, today (12/25/24) I will quote a paragraph on Horseshoe Theory from Wikepedia: “In popular discourse, the horseshoe theory asserts that advocates of the far-left and the far-right, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear continuum of the political spectrum, closely resemble each other, analogous to the way that the opposite ends of a horseshoe are close together.[1] The theory is attributed to the French philosopher and writer of fiction and poetry Jean-Pierre Faye in his 1972 book Théorie du récit: introduction aux langages totalitaires, in relation to Otto Strasser.[2]”
My quick take on this, and I think Hoffer and I alike in our political views, as moderate American political conservatives would generally believe that the Horseshoe theory works and generally applies. It could be that the far-Left and the far-Right do not resemble each other that much in their enumerated analyses of social problems, and, in their solutions for social problems, but they are both collectivist and totalitarian, and these deep similarities overshadow and make irrelevant all their stated surface differences.
They eagerly justify the use of force and terror to win converts and pressure governments. They both are radical altruists, that the masses need to live only for the state and to sacrifice their lives to the Fatherland and Big Brother running that totalitarian state. Individualism, liberty, egoist morality, private property, individual rights, private living, capitalism and any form of democracy or republicanism are replaced—when Fascists and Communists come to power--by huge government, oppressive and terrorizing, with no private lives, and no choices made that are not government approved.
It might not matter, the doctrinaire niceties of difference, that are obsessively pinpointed and fussed over by the hairsplitting intellectual purists on the extreme Right and the extreme Left, who insist on making these minor, superficial, or even major difference in policy, they make them seem wholly different from one another. Rather, what wicked, these violent radicals do, rather than when they idealistic proclaim in reality, is what drives their strong similarity, going deeper than their communicated differences. What unites these opposing camps of thugs is their brutal collectivism, their racism, their radical groupism, their easy willingness to violate all human rights and individual rights, and their violent altruism all render them more like each other than not. Therefore, Hoffer would conclude, and I conclude that the Horseshoe Theory of Politics approximately applies to the Far Left and to the Far Right, grounded in what they commonly do, rather than their strict insistence on niceties of doctrinal hairsplitting.
Both Communists and Fascists are at the same extreme end of the political spectrum, and the centrist, moderate, individualistic middle, whether slightly to the right or the left, is their real and hated opposite. The Horseshoe Theory of Politics seems to hold.
Both Hoffer and I define fanaticism as hateful and evil, and moderation as loving and good, so the political fringe positions at either end of the spectrum seem vastly different from one another, but ontologically, morally and politically, they are closely related, and both hate individualists and centrists in the middle, and seek to obliterate them. Their murderous attack on centrists indicates, that on some level, both fringe groups know and accept whom their real enemy is.
That is how Hoffer and I see the political world, and that is closer to Horseshoe Theory, than against Horseshoe Theory. The extreme Right and the extreme Left are not opposites along a political spectrum line with Communism on the far Left and Fascism on the far Right. They are Horseshoe ends of the horseshoe, or different sides of the same coin.
If there was a mass movement that rose up, it might seem and even have popular support, and would seem to be the masses and their idealistic leaders against the corrupt status quo, but, too often and more likely is the scenario that the masses have become passionate and ensnared by elitist revolutionary intellectuals, who really are using the masses as their army to install these outside revolutionaries as the new elite. Once in power, the empowered intellectuals once again, as they always do, will betray the masses, and then rule them as they, the people, have always been ruled.
The entrenched elite (be it of centrists or fascists) might seem worse than either the radical or reactionary idealist leading the revolt but again, these supposedly opposite-positioned and alternative value-holding revolutionaries from the Left or from the Right are really but opposite side of the same coin of replacement elitism and authoritarianism. What do they offer the masses that make it worth the masses even bother to participate in violent revolution?
Absolutist ideologues on the Left and on the Right will angrily refute any suggestion that they will usher in a worse dystopia than the current one. They ardently repudiate the accusation from Horseshoe theorists that they are in essence the same, just slightly different variations of one another, or that despite, their doctrinal differences, major or minor, they are both ice cream, just different flavors of mass movements when the revolution is active, and once victorious, their active mass movement will quickly cool down and harden into an ossified, halted mass movement. Once in power, once the revolutionaries are victorious, now the new totalitarian dispensation is unveiled and declared openly.
Hoffer, I trust much more than dogmatic intellectuals. Hoffer points out that true believers are the backbone of every mass movement. The stridently, loudly professed protestations about the significant differences between the Far Right and the Far Left, quarreling over fine doctrinal points, are far less important than if the guru or leaders of any stripe, who reveal their stunning alikeness in what they do: running this mass movement, passionately proclaiming that this holy cause is the one truth faith, which is completely certain and true, that its opponents are utterly in error and false, that the members of the mass movement are all-good, all-smart, all-perfect and all-justified. They denounce as devils to be wiped out, any that oppose them, and that the opponent’s causes and justifications are all-wicked, all intellectual nonsense, corrupt, mistaken, and damnable. These heretical opponents can be defeated by any means whatsoever, for all means justify the noble end, the spread of the favored holy cause everywhere.
The doctrinal differences, whether actually important or minor, are not what wins converts: what wins converts to the cause is the literal, delivered, effective promise from the cause’s operators to provide those seeking to flee from their private spoiled lives, a new home, a new dispensation in which they can disappear and cease to exist as a separate consciousness. The true believer soul -rapes himself, as do those already inside this sordid community, as all soul-rape his individuality and dignity as a separate being of importance, raped into oblivion, into blissful extinction inside the holy cause to forever leave behind an irremediably spoiled personal life and self, fleeing into the collective, where a memory of the self is but a blur; all the joiner needs to do is give up his personal will and power to the guru running things, becoming his pawn and object forever. The true believer is most eager to accept this devil’s bargain.
S: “The bit I’ve found most interesting thus far focuses on what distinguishes those who join mass movements from those who do not. For Hoffer, people join mass movements because they find their own lives disappointing. Initially, I was poised to read this argument as straightforwardly right-wing. It seemed as if Hoffer were simply arguing that successful people are conservative and failures join mass movements. But the position proved to be more sophisticated than this. Hoffer goes on to argue that people who are truly embedded in a family or community that gives meaning to their lives don’t view themselves as individually successful or unsuccessful, and that means they don’t have a self-esteem problem. In this way, Hoffer identifies three groups rather than just two.
Here, I’ll put it in a chart for you: . . ."
My response: NOTICE TO READER: I could not get Studebaker's fine chart to paste digitally on this blog site, so I will recreate it verbally but verbatim.
Studebaker at the top of his chart list: Three Groups Susceptible to Mass Movements.
The next level down he divides people into Individuals and Communitarians.
Another level down, on the left, he describes Successful Individuals Content w/Status Quo, and they on another line down DO NOT JOIN MASS MOVEMENTS.
The right hand of the Individuals chart, one level down from Individuals is Individuals who are Failures: Low self-esteem, Desperate To Escape the Self, Join Mass Movements.
Under the Communitarian category, one level down is Embedded in Meaningful Social Roles, and one level down from there, Do Not Join Mass Movements.
I would argue that Studebaker, on the very right hand of his chart, should have added the most critical group (and the group that provides the vast majority of commoners and elitists who join a new holy cause) to be susceptible to mass movements: Communitarians uprooted from being embedded in meaningful social roles, and these formerly discontented joiners of low self-esteem, once dis-embedded and dislodged from their communitarian and institutional bubbles of corporate warmth and comfort, become desperate, raging, passionate, unstable and frustrated seekers for a substitute community to flee into and disappear inside of
My response: Studebaker gets Hoffer about half-right up above. I read Hoffer to believe that he regards that all people are born basically evil, which means they are filled with hate and act hatefully towards themselves and others because they have little self-esteem. Thus, all people suffer at least initially as children with low self-esteem. People with low self-esteem favor a social dispensation which abuses them because like a woman beaten by her sadistic boyfriend, they feel mistreatment is what they deserve, as well as it is their lot in life. Hoffer defines these unhappy people, the typical joiner quietly getting by in an intact social order, as always discontented but not frustrated to the point that they are willing join a revolutionary or mass movement to overturn the status quo with its elite living off the suffering masses.
When the masses awaken because disaffected and homeless intellectuals that are outliers and not allowed to participate in ruling and abusing the masses as the entrenched elite, whip them into a frenzy so the masses are jolted awake to the harsh realization that the existing narrative is discredited and abandoned, then the masses join a contemporary mass movement, not to be find liberation or justice, but to find a refuge: to discover a soothing mass movement that will be the replacement status quo to abuse them and tell them what to think and how to live. That is what they masses want: to live entrenched in a corporate body, a corporate collective society in which they do not have to be individual or awaken, stay awake and face the burden of handling being alert and needing to succeed and be competent as a separate distinct person with no one to blame but oneself when one comes up short. In the pack or in the mass movement, no individual is forced to prove their worth anew each day, for their no longer exists that separated, segregate self-needing to prove anything.
The revolutionary intellectuals spearheading the new movement are not motivated by high ideals and compassion for the suffering masses as they repeatedly, resentfully insist: they just want the masses to follow them and aid them in supplanting the in-place cultural and political metanarrative with its in-power, rewarded intellectuals, with the new brand of order of oppression with themselves, the former outsider clerisy, now in charge. The reward for the masses is that nothing has changed, but now they can slumber in slavery once more under a new educated elite: the masses can go to back sleep as groupist, as obedient, whipped, exploited peasants.
These new mistresses and masters of the revolution, these intellectuals, in exchange for being invited into the new ruling class, will give up all of their personal liberty and private selves, to be gleefully absorbed into the new elite of joiners, groupists and nonindividuators that are neither free, happy or fulfilled, but they have more power of powerlessness than do the pour souls at the bottom of the heap. Their political, institutional, and social status and power do mean more to them than anything else.
Studebaker’s charts are interesting but off base. I agree that individualists or rare individuators, who are able to realize their talents, or at least make money enough or find satisfaction in their work—like the electrician of self-esteem because he knows he is skilled and competent so he does not feel misfitted in his present state and will not join a mass movement—these able winners will not join a mass movement.
As I said before, both Hoffer and I believe all people from birth suffer from low self-esteem and we cannot find love, high self-esteem meaning and contentment unless we work or maverize.
Yes, individualists who are failures are the most likely to join a mass movement to find a collective home to escape from their blemished selves.
But the vast majority of a population, the potential or actual bulk of a mass movement, are ex-moderate or highly successful communitarians who too are born with low self-esteem, as well as communitarians that are failures outright—both they and their community know they are failures. These groups of individuals, who are joiners, are susceptible to answer the Siren call to become a true believer.
All three categories of communitarians suffer from discontent because group-living and living in accordance with altruist-collectivist ethics, and living in an authoritarian and socialist political and economic structure all contribute to low self-esteem. These three groups of communitarians are unhappy and dissatisfied with their lives.
They are all discontented, but their discontentment is bearable, to varying degrees, because the metanarrative of their nation and community, as long as it is intact, viable and comfortingly corporate, these communitarians are able, within the standing social order, to escape from their being forced to embrace up front and fully in a mode of horrified consciousness, their own exposed imperfection. Their group-living, group-identity and collectivist metanarrative serve as insulators and layers of lies and illusions that prevent them from never or rarely fully encountering that naked, wretched individual’s self. This avoidance of the self—Accompanied by a fully intact, socially respected set of justifications reminding all, each other and themselves that it is normal and proper that all should live and die avoiding themselves--is the primary mission in their lives.
When change, drastic change occurs, and there are intellectuals, disenfranchised, discarded and unattached to the status quo, these smart malcontents, being joiners and nonindividuators without community belong, rank and recognition, seek or invent a replacement collective bubble and pack to burrow themselves inside of to avoid complete the wrenching experience, the forced need to meet face to face with and deal with their old, suppressed blemished selves. In addition, if these frustrated intellectuals can lead a mass movement which they created to victoriously overthrow the status, quo, then they will have power, rank, riches and esteem from the community and nation, as well as being able to suppress their individual conscience calling them to stand out, separate from the group and self-realize.
These revolutionary but dispossessed idealists, ideologues and intellectuals want to overthrow the status quo, its values, its culture, its metanarrative, and, to make this happen, they need to win over the communitarian masses (In any society, the joiners always greatly outnumber the individualists.). Once they have gaslighted and undercut the people’s belief in the old system, the old ways, the old myths, then the people aroused, disturbed and mob-like masses are ready to change, to update, to improve, but not to reach for liberty, justice and equality, but seek a new authoritarian corporate society to burrow inside of to escape from dreaded self-recognition and the existential burden of running one’s own life.
S: “See what’s so interesting about this? Hoffer thinks mass movements are made up of disappointed individualists. They aren’t getting their members from people strongly embedded in collectivist institutions, like the community or the family. If true, this would have crucial implications for left wing mass movements.”
My response: Not so fast, Dr. Studebaker. Mass movements get the majority of recruits exactly from collectivist institutions, but these previously entrenched masses were formerly relatively okay with the dispensation, but now are dis-embedded from that dispensation and its institutions, which they abandoned due to historical change and being convinced by outlier intellectuals to leave the old and join a mass movement, a holy cause meant to replace the abandoned dispensation. Most true believers formerly embedded in these warm, cozy but tyrannical, exploitative institutions were not individualists but were communitarians; the latter individuals are now even more collectivist and groupist than in their new mass movement existence.
Mass movements are not made up of disappointed individualists but are made up of disappointed, discontented individuals who are born groupist and live in groups. They are born collectivist, and born joiners and pack members whose weak natural property of personal individualism has been obliterated and emasculated by their immersion in group-living, group-identifying, group-belonging, group-pride and being hurt and crippled by living in accordance to group-ethics, altruism-collectivism.
The masses in a traditional, collectivized, authoritarian-socialist regime, are living remnants of a mass movement that is dead and cooled off, as its ancestral leaders overthrew the preceding status quo. These people will join the new mass movement once radicalized intellectuals work out how to give them “hope” that a new holy cause will arise for them to stampede inside into to provide for a total escape the loathed, feared self. Then they enthusiastically, without prudent hesitation, surrender their souls, power and dignity to the guru, the cause, the political party, as the price voluntarily paid for finding a new fantasy communitarian arrangement in which the awakened and rattled groupists escape, refusing to accept as their divine personal duty to maverize apart from the pack. They live and die in the collective, avoiding assiduously the one thing that God wants them to do, to go it alone, and grow in individual ability along lines approved of by God.
Sorry, Dr. Studebaker: any mass movement that is alive and revolutionary, or dead and is the new regime now in place, got their support from and get their support mostly from people embedded in collectivist institutions, like the community, or the family. This fact does have crucial implications for left wing mass movements—that socialism is always a wicked, bad idea that inevitably will not take the suffering and downtrodden to a classless utopia and New Jerusalem on the hill. How is the Communist revolution in Cuba working for the Cuban masses, in December, 2024 after about 65 years in power?
S: “Either:
- Capitalism produces an individualist self-understanding and then destroys the self-esteem of its subjects by denying them the ability to fulfil their ambitions, creating the conditions necessary for left-wing movements to arise. This would be an optimistic reading for the left.”
My response: Capitalism, especially in a free society, does provide the individual a chance to become a fulfilled individualist with meaning in his life but he has to go earn it for himself; if he would farther than this, as I promote under that he achieve under Mavellonialist training, he would make money, work and maverize too, He would be so versatile and creative about finding work and producing to money-making opportunities, that even during a depression he could be supportive of his democratic capitalist status quo and its narrative so there would arise no need for him ever to join left wing mass movements and or support actively, revolutionary pushes.
S:
“
- Capitalism generates widespread individualism, annihilating communities and the collectivist sentiments that spring from them. This ensures all opposition mass movements are comprised of individuals who do not know how to play a role in a community. Mass movements under capitalism therefore contain a fundamental contradiction–the people who join them are not the kind of people who can make them successful. This is the more pessimistic reading.”
My response: Actually, current half-baked capitalism has not generated widespread individualism, though full capitalism, and a democracy for individuators would promote widespread full-fledged, achieved individualism among the masses.
What passes for capitalism, current half-baked capitalism has generated widespread, hybrid adults—groupist-joiners/individualist-loners, far more the former than the latter. If their communities have been annihilated, along with the collectivist sentiments that spring from them are shattered, and these joiners that are now set free from comforting communal ties, these abandoned, riled, upset masses are now very frustrated, desperate, and seeking for answers, meaning, belonging and a sense of worth, earned or unearned: they ripe for conversion to being true believers within a mass movement. Cunning purveyors of holy causes and mass movement realize they will not absorb a majority of the masses until and unless they are separated from their communitarian haunts.
Disembedded, non-individualistic individuals, the majority in any society, are exactly the prototype, desirable mass movement recruit sought after by the intellectuals running the new, holy cause.
Genuine individualists do not know how to fit into a collectivist community which will not allow them in under any circumstances; these individualists should go all the way and individuate, forming and organizing their own, new artificial, humane, groups, friendships, communities, and society made of individualists and individuators who come and go as they please without being ostracized or downgraded in social status, power, and popularity. Contrived groups invented by individuals and individuals could become a new sociological construct, the new norm, a home finally for individualists, developed egoists and loners.
Pure
capitalism has never existed so the hybrid joiner-loners in a
socialist-capitalist democracy may be tempted to solve their problems, by surrendering
their dignity and independence so they join a mass movement, and this majority
surrender to living within the mass move might lead to making selected mass
movement successful but they will be betrayed and find no relief there. Mass
movements are sick, evil revolutionary communities, and they will set up
socialist totalitarian hells the grow suffering and malevolence exponentially
for all the citizens captured and held down in this new regime. That is not
successful.
S: “Which of these readings more neatly fits the contemporary left? Hoffer argues that people who are born poor are unlikely to blame themselves for their poverty and consequently unlikely to join mass movements. For Hoffer, mass movements are made up of people who are experiencing a significant amount of social mobility. Some are moving up–but not as quickly as they’d like to be. The progress they are making up the ladder makes them hungry for more, and they view established structures as obstacles to their further rise. Others are moving down and view established structures as the cause of their downfalls. Both those who climb and those who fall feel a sense of inadequacy, blaming themselves for their inability to get to the top or to remain there. Both want to escape this negative self-narrative, throwing themselves into the mass movement and using it as an alternative source of self-esteem.”
My response: The upward mobility of the new rich and the new middle class, or the downward loss of such classes can create a crisis of self-esteem for uprooted individuals, in which case, they opt to join a mass movement. The traditional poor in an ancient, settled status quo do not rebel because their long exploitation and slavey seems eternal unchanging and “customary”--and all of the local intellectuals are embedded in the ruling elite, so there are no leaders to foment a revolution; the people need a leader to rouse them front their slumber.
When these middle class and new rich reach out to a mass movement, it is because the predominant joiner part of their hybrid personality has suffered a crisis of self-esteem and these masses have answered yes to the invitation from disenchanted intellectuals running the local mass movement, who have offered an alternative metanarrative to the status quo, a competitive holy cause to rally around. Again, the new rich and the middle class seek not reform, justice, and equality—they seek a collectivist social order in which to insert themselves in so they can be free of their wrecked personal existence, and this is so no matter how much lipstick the idealists running the show put on the holy cause pig. It is still a pig.
S: “Who fits this description? The downwardly mobile professionals fit the bill–these are the people who went to college but ended up unemployed, under-employed, indebted, or in some other disappointing circumstance. The climbers are those who have recently become professional class–those who have managed to get college degrees and even managed to score the lucrative jobs that once routinely came alongside them, only to find that they are still taking orders from oligarchs. They are so close, but yet so far. The contemporary left is full of socially mobile professionals of both stripes.
These professionals feel inadequate, and the Left offers them an opportunity to find new meaning. But because these professionals are accustomed to operating in a heavily individuated, competitive environment, they bring this with them into the movement. Instead of competing for grades, internships, and jobs, the professionals compete to demonstrate their virtue, and they do this largely by signaling it through language games. Having played the first meritocratic game to an unsatisfying conclusion, the professionals embark upon a second meritocratic game, turning the movement into a competition for status.”
My response: Hoffer points out that people are not frustrated and seek a new cause or new government arrangement when they feel that they fit in and so are esteemed by the community and can esteem themselves, be that esteem based on their actual merit, or some socially popular assignation not connected to personal worth and accomplishment. If one belongs, one is praised and socially worthy; if one does not belong, one is blamable and socially downgraded whether one is competent or not.
When people are misfitted by change, that is when new mass movement appeals to them.
If people as individualists cannot succeed and compete satisfactorily at the meritocratic game in a free market economy, they may flee into the collective refuge offered by the backers of a holy cause or mass movement sadly to settle for competing to empty personal worth or status at the second, inferior, substitute kind of meritocratic excellence won socially, at its game of competing for rank and degree of popularity based on unearned merit, based on being well regarded at being social proficient and expert by social conformist standards.
S: “People who did not go to college cannot win these games. The left-wing status game is rigged against them by the professionals, who continuously import new, convoluted terminology from their college campuses, keeping blue collar workers perpetually behind the curve. The drive for status is so intense that the professionals will chase people out for refusing to play their language games or failing to play them well. Sometimes this manifests as overt ostracism, but often it occurs through ostensibly well-meaning condescension. The professionals’ efforts to “educate” the workers alienates them so thoroughly that they quit the movement of their own accord, without needing to be pushed out. Without workers, the movement is reduced to a form of self-care for the self-hating professional. Its political function becomes secondary.
What becomes of the disaffected worker who is pushed out by language games? For Hoffer, a person who finds one mass movement appealing can easily substitute one for another. If the left is no longer hospitable, it is an easy thing to hop over to right nationalism. Alternatively, disaffected workers can simply quit the political and stop turning up for things. This is what we end up getting from the professionalised left–low voter turnout and a bolstered nationalist movement.”
My response: Studebaker has a point here that globalists elites and college educated intellectuals have willingly or unintentionally pushed out blue collar workers, and there are all kinds of populist backlashes against such snobbery and arrogance.
I would like to see the masses, blue collar or college educated, grow into being wealth-producing, individuating supercitizens pushing a free market constitutional republic so they can be that proper hybrid, blue collar-burger capitalist/individuating supercitizen hyper-involved in running the country at all levels of government and civic participation.
S: “In the last decade, the left tried to create a division between the 1% and the 99%, between the billionaire class and everyone else. The left tried to create a broad coalition that included both white collar and blue collar workers, both college-educated professionals and ordinary folks. This coalition has fundamentally failed to materialise. The cultural differences between the professionals and the workers are too large, and the professionals are unable to put these differences to one side and accept the workers as they are because the professionals have been pushed into the movement by their own insecurities.
Insecure people have to make themselves feel better, and they do this by picking on others and talking down to folks. The professionals purport to seek solidarity with the workers, but instead use them as a means to their own self-esteem. The workers, instinctively recognising this, increasingly find the movement unbearable. They abandon it. They stay home or vote for Trump.
What happens when you tell an insecure person they have made a mistake? They get very upset. They interpret constructive criticism as a form of personal attack. The insecurity is aggravated, and it produces an acute emotional response. They counterattack, finding fault with you to make themselves feel better. They have to do this, because insecurity is a very painful thing.”
My response: I do not disagree with Studebaker here. Leftists intellectuals are fanatics and their ideological fervency renders them incapable of receiving constructive criticism. A true believer, educated or illiterate, is not a good person, and has no aptitude for receiving true input.These idealists genuinely accept that they are righteous, virtuous people, and no one is more impervious to moral criticism than wicked, deluded person convinced of his moral superiority.
S: “Capitalism makes people measure themselves against unattainable standards. It relentlessly manufactures insecurity. In doing so, it constantly generates critical mass movements, but it also fills those mass movements with broken people. The movements become release valves for discontent, wasting critical energy in non-threatening talking shops.”
My response: Capitalism makes people measure themselves against very high standards, but these free market benchmarks are not unattainable, if each or most members of the poor, blue collar, and middle classes elect to self-realize as individuating supercitizens. They will doubt themselves and feel insecurity, needing to grow each day, and keep growing and creating or a lifetime, the adventure of their lives as Jordan Peterson is wont to point out.
Again, it is not insecure individualists and individuators that join or promote mass movements: it is individuals that are joiners, whose group, community, and national metanarrative have been so discredited and gaslighted by malevolent revolutionary intellectuals, that these frustrated joiners flee into the welcoming arms of the guru and his lieutenants running the mass movement.
America is still such a decent fine country that we want these chattering joiner malcontents not to join mass movements but to work with capitalists and Mavellonialists like me to help them self-realize and embrace change, embrace the future in which they are newly skilled to cope with rapid change competently and skillfully with the merited self-confidence and self-esteemed enjoyed and earned by an individual no long primarily groupist that now is fit to be part of the new status quo that is part of the old status quo but the masses still run things here, not the global elites or the intellectuals.
S: “In 1951, mass movements seemed to truly threaten liberal capitalism. In the 50s, the communists had teeth and gave rich westerners nightmares. But today, most mass movements pose no real threat to the system.”
My response: Studemaker and I sure disagree here. Both Stephen Hicks and Christopher Rufo have written books laying out how postmodernist Marxism—America’s current popular and powerful mass movement, by 2021, has come dangerously close to capturing all American institutions—including government—installing a permanent single party socialist dictatorship like the one in Venezuela.
When the Marxists in the critical theory camp discovered after World War II and by 1960 that violent mass movements would not work in liberal capitalist countries like America, the professor would take over the campuses and then let Leftism capture all Americans institutions so we get our mass movement to overthrow American and Western governments, free economies and our cultures without firing a shot. Leftists are ideologues and true believers. Cultural Marxism is their holy cause, their religion, and this mas movement is very dangerous, and they were clever at disguising it and almost pulled it off, Cultural Marxism is the latest mass movement to pose a real existential threat to our system.
S: “Instead, liberal capitalism has found a way to endemically generate harmless mass movements that are built to fail. Of course, until the failure stares us in the face, we’re liable to be seduced. Even now, there are still those who think Bernie Sanders may yet win the primary. There are still those who think he has successors in the Democratic Party who will carry his work forward. But the truth is that this whole approach was flawed. Most of the left’s commentators and pundits cannot admit this, because most of them are insecure professionals who cannot admit mistakes. Many of them have jobs that depend on denying that any mistakes were made. Someone will have to be scapegoated, and then they will continue on as before.”
My response: Studebaker seems to be pointing out that revolutions in America fail, and I agree and thank God for that blessing. Peaceful, gentle, continuous revolutions are welcome of course, especially if conducted by the masses themselves as their originators and implementers as individuating supercitizens running things.
No comments:
Post a Comment