I will type out the entire Chapter 11, which runs from Page
91 through Page 95, and is entitled Brotherhood, of Eric Hoffer’s book, The
Ordeal of Change, and I will comment on it when appropriate.
Hoffer (H after this): “It is easier to love humanity as a
whole than to love one’s neighbor.”
My response: When one loves humanity but not one’s neighbor,
one is a collectivist, a groupist, an ideologue. To love is to be moral and
that occurs, like substantive moral agency, on an individual basis, not a group
basis.
To love a neighbor brings one closer to egoist morality; to
love humanity but not a neighbor is to make everything political or
governmental, not private, interpersonal, and individual.
It fools many thinkers to assume that the individual is
subjective and that the collective is objective, and, in a small way that is
so, but, more so, the individuating, egoistic individual is objective, and the
nonindividuating groupist, though part of the whole, is more subjective and
passionate.
H: “There may even be a certain antagonism between love of
humanity and love of neighbor; a low capacity for getting along with those near
us often goes hand in hand with a receptivity to the idea of the brotherhood of
man.”
My response: There is some truth to this: I am almost a
complete loner, and never got along with much of anyone, and if one hates
people, seeks revenge against people, and wants power over them to pay them
back for keeping one unpopular, then idealism and love of humanity are often disguising
rationales for seeking to gain collective power in order to hurt others hated
by one, others that have hurt one.
I do not deny that some of these psychological temptations
are mine, but I am close to God, and I have learned from the Light Couple that
we must be patient with people, and never seek to hurt them or dominate them,
nor matter how vengeful one feels. It is not a moral drive, nor permissible to
indulge.
H: “About a hundred years ago a Russian landowner by the
name of Petrashevsky recorded a remarkable conclusion: ‘Finding nothing worthy
of my attachment either among women or men, I have vowed myself to the service
of mankind.’ He became a follower of Fourier, and installed a phalanstery. The
end of the experiment was sad, but what one might perhaps have expected: the
peasants—Petrashevsky’s neighbors—burned the phalanstery.”
My response: Hoffer, the implicit moral egoist, is
suggesting that if one would be ethical, one should not be idealistic but
modest, humble, and practical, that one should reform the self, not others, not
humanity. If 80% of a community were accomplished, artistic adult maverizers,
then they could then unite with a political program to better society, as a
whole, but the first and primary moral impetus must be private and personal,
not political and public to arrange and correct others beyond the self, and
that collective ambition is hostile groupist, communal, tribal and national.
Whether one is a spurned loner, or an embittered groupist,
without a group home, when one gloms onto political power to rule others in the
name of compassion, service to humanity or some other such rubbish, one is
addicted to controlling humanity under an authoritarian scheme of some sort.
H: “Some of the worst tyrannies of our day genuinely are
‘vowed’ to the service of mankind yet can only function by pitting neighbor
against neighbor.”
My response: Neighbors get pitted against neighbors as rival
groups, gangs, tribes, and nations, war with neighbors to gain power and
victory via violence. This is altruist morality unveiled in its ugliest, most
bloody mutation.
H: “The all-seeing eye of a totalitarian regime is usually
the watchful eye of the next-door neighbor. In a Communist state love of
neighbor may be classified as counter-revolutionary.”
My response” Hoffer the egoist moralist is identifying love
of neighbor as most prevalent, flourishing, and functioning among rather
individualistic groups and communities, but under Communist totalitarianism,
each citizen is a passionate true-believer, and love of neighbor is replaced
with all often being willing to or actually spying upon, betraying and turning
their neighbors and family, to the state police out of a love for humanity.
H: “Mao-Tse-tung counts it a sin of the liberals that they
will not report the misdeeds of ‘acquaintances, relatives, schoolmates,
friends, loved ones.’ To promote solidarity among neighbors is as good a way as
any to block the diffusion of totalitarianism in a society.”
My response: Hoffer is indicating that love of neighbor
grows solidarity among neighbors, and thus can be a counter-revolutionary force
to keep totalitarianism from infiltrating the neighborhood.
H: “The capacity for getting along with our neighbor depends
to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves.”
My response: This seems equivalent to my optimistic yet
realistic contention that if we love ourselves as our primary moral duty, thus
veridically esteeming ourselves based on merit, and thus were able to get along
with ourselves, and if many of the adults in a community were such egoistic
individuators, then neighbors would generally get along with neighbors rather
well.
H: “The self-respecting individual will try to be as
tolerant of his neighbor’s shortcomings as he is of his own. Self-righteousness
is a manifestation of self-contempt. When we are conscious of our
worthlessness, we naturally expect others to be finer and better than we are.
We demand more of them than we do of ourselves, and it is as if we wish to be
disappointed in them. Rudeness luxuriates in the absence of self-respect.”
My response: When we feel worthless and we are because we
are not individuating (A winner individuates and is a loner, and a loser does
not individuate but is a popular groupist—pardon this overgeneralization, but
this is the rough lay of the land among people.), then our self-esteem is low,
and it should be. And a community of such self-loathing people will be rude to
themselves first and then to others and each other.
H: “Now, it is the tragedy of our time that the enormous
shrinkage in distance, both geographic and social, that has made neighbors of
all nations, races, and classes coincides with an enormous increase in the
difficulties encountered by an individual in maintaining his self-respect.”
My response: My historic hunch is that when technology and
smart computer technology, as has occurred today, which have led to a loss of
privacy and separateness for all individuals across the globe, put billions of
people electronically if not just physically in a cheek-by-jowl, close and intimate
proximity, it necessarily triggers a crisis for each person seeking to assert
his individuality, seeking to maintain his self-respect.
If humans are to have a future, we must solve this crisis of
the difficult of maintaining self-respect, but mass individuation is one way to
fight it effectively and reversibly.
H: “In the Communist part of the world, government policies
are designed not only to eliminate actual and potential opponents but to turn
the population into a plastic mass that can be molded at will. A Communist regime
cannot tolerate self-respecting individuals who will not transgress certain
bounds in dealing with their fellow man. Such individuals, even when few in
number, render a population uncontrollable. ‘Every despotism,’ wrote the
nine-tenth-century philosopher Amiel, ‘has a specially keen and hostile
instinct for whatever keeps up human dignity and independence.”
My response: When people are groupist and altruistic, it
entails that they insist upon and build social, religious economic,
educational, and governmental institutions that keep the people small, a
plastic mass that will be molded at will by the authoritarian elites, which the
masses allow to rule them, to abuse them, to profit off them and to enslave
them.
Citizens willing to live under such a corrupt, unjust,
malevolent dispensation are people without self-respect, and as prisoners of a
totalitarian setup like Communism, they have no self-respect left, and they
deserve not to: they have betrayed living independent, dignified lives as
individuators in favor of sipping the thin gruel served them by their gulag
mistress and jailkeeper masters.
H: “This hostility is particularly pronounced in a despotism
that is doctrinaire. Because of its professed faith in the irresistibility of
this doctrine that supposedly shapes its course, such a despotism cannot be
satisfied by mere obedience. It wants to obtain by coercion the type of consent
that is usually obtained only by the most effective persuasion. This requires a
population totally devoid of self-respect—individuals who will enthusiastically
hate what they love, and love what they hate. This, as Boris Pasternak told us,
is the one thing a Communist regime really wants.”
My response: Perhaps no one understands as thoroughly and
deeply how depraved and vicious Communism is, as does Eric Hoffer. He is
critical not just of Communism, but any radically ideological despotism, be it
a fascist variant, a theocracy, etc.
When altruistic idealists preach their holy cause as the way
or life to be inflicted upon all humanity by the hands holding the whip or the
sword, since religion worshiping a good deity is good, moderate, loving,
rational and individualistic, the demonic substitute religion which doctrinaire
idealists and preachers of brotherhood come with, is a sacred or secular
religion proposed by the idealists in their active, revolutionary, mass
movement phase of conquest, and that dark religion, is of demonic source and
connection, whether its practitioners admit it or know it or not.
Once the revolution is victorious, and the regime is now
overthrown by the revolutionaries, their holy cause is now the state
narrative/religion/cultural mythology beat into the bodies and psyches of the
masses until, devoid of self-respect, they hate what they love, and love what
they hate. The state’s creed are the doctrines of their satanic faith, and it
is bad, fanatical, extremist, hateful and hating, irrational and collectivist.
Hell on earth is the earthly reality of any nation where totalitarianism is
installed.
Hoffer: “Nor is it at present easy for the individual to
maintain his self-respect in the non-Communist part of the world. In the
underdeveloped nations the poignant awareness of backwardness keeps even the
exceptional individual from attaining the ‘unbought grace of life’ that is the
true expression of an unconscious and an unquestioned sense of worth.”
My response: I sense that this above paragraph is of utmost
importance for understanding Hoffer’s political theory. If I am correct, Hoffer
is employing the Edmund Burke phrase, likely repackaged in American political
thought by American, classical conservative, Russell Kirk, in his 1954 article,
The Unbought Grace of Life
It seems that, for Hoffer, he is laying out a technical
phrase here, enjoying the unbought grace of life, as that social and
psychological condition enjoyed by a mostly satisfied, content individual at
home with himself and at peace with himself, because he fits in, and finds
happiness, acceptance, fulfillment and advancement in the
social/political/traditional culture, economy, and institutional layout in
which he is born and belongs. He is a functioning individual in that matrix,
and his actual, socially confirmed sense of belonging, meaning, context and
enjoyment of living is an unbought grace of life that either the system and
life have granted one or not, and it cannot be purchased or stolen. It must be
freely granted by the society and its members, and be gratefully, willingly
accepted and received by the happy recipient.
This happy recipient, be he an exceptional individual, or an
average person in his generation, has been granted by the system the unbought
social grace of life, and he is a functioning individual within that society,
so his sense of self-worth is strong, real, unconscious, and unquestioned.
Neither black Americans, or foreign intellectuals, or people
that do not fit into the system, at least up to now, easily have that
unconscious feeling of enjoying the unbought social grace of life, so they are
more likely going to suffer a crisis of low self-worth and low self-esteem, and
are likely to act out to acquire inferior substitutes which will not satisfy
them or increase their self-worth, but if enough frustrated true believers
unite and work together, they may eventually topple society.
I apologize to the reader for not going into great research
and commentary of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk to better understand and
explain their employment of this most interesting and characterizing phrase, but
I shall quickly and briefly comment on Kirk’s excerpt below on his version of
what “the unbought grace of life” indicates.
What seems patent to me is that Hoffer is adopting this
phrase, ‘the unbought grace of life” as his technical definition for what it
means for an individual to live happily and contentedly in his generation in
his society where his sense of belonging and meaning gained from working, marrying,
parenting, working and being a citizen in that social circumstance
psychologically and metaphysically allows him as an individual to flourish, to be
competent, to fit in and to belong while still working and developing his
talents, and all of that is encouraged and rewards, and this is what allows him
to esteem himself based on personal effort, and because the system and others
really do approve of who he is, how he lives, how he thinks and how he comports
himself.
Hoffer is telling the audience that unless an individual is
socially blessed with this unbought social grace of life, he will not esteem
himself, no matter how accomplished he is, though I would mildly scold Hoffer,
that the more advanced and talented an individuators becomes, the less relevant
is social approval and reward, though still pleasant to receive and acknowledge.
In effect, the skilled, advanced individuator is so self-confident, that he
bestows upon himself the unbought grace of life so that it is near impossible
for a topsy-turvy world to unnerve him.
I am going to stop here and digress for a bit with an
article from The Imaginative Conservative (an online conservative magazine
which specializes in the political philosophy of American traditional
conservative, Russell Kirk. I want to see how he uses this cherished phrase to
see why it so appeals to Hoffer, who never as far as I know revealed that he
heard of it through Russell Kirk.
Here is this article from The Imaginative Conservative—not
all of it—but what I quote I did not change, and will comment on.
(The Magazine, called IMG after this): “
The Unbought Grace of Life
By Russell Kirk|November
26th, 2010|Categories: Bradley
J. Birzer, Conservatism,
RAK,
Russell
Kirk
Fifty-six years ago, Russell Kirk attempted to
define Edmund Burke’s idea of “the unbought grace of life” as applicable to the
American culture of the 1950s. As far as I know, this article was never
reprinted. It shows a youngish Kirk at his best, I believe. And, it seems
especially appropriate to publish these quotes on the Feast of St. Conrad.
[The following quotes all come from Russell Amos
Kirk, “The Unbought Grace of Life,” Northern Review 7 (October-November
1954): 9-22.]
One of the most ugly and alarming words in our
modern vocabulary, I think, is the noun ‘intellectual,’ which is employed not
merely as a term of contempt by the swinish multitude, but as a term of
self-condemnation by the presumptuous educated man, who implies by its use that
intellectuality is a kind of technique or guild-secret, naturally confined to a
dilettante circle of cognoscenti. When a society begins to talk of
‘intellectuals,’ we may be sure that the mind and heart of that society are
withering. [pg. 12]”
My response: Kirk sounds elitist: yes, the
masses—they are not the swinish multitude—dismiss often intellectuals as ivory
tower, out-of-touch eggheads, but it seems that Kirk is accusing intellectuals
of agreeing with those that condemn them, that they should be who they are
openly, loudly, defiantly and without apology.
I can agree with those sentiments, but I also
know that intellectuals usually side with the powerful to gain power and run
the masses into the ground.
IMG: “I mean by the phrase “the unbought grace of
life” those intricate and subtle and delicate elements in the culture of the
mind and in the constitution of society which are produced by a continuing
tradition of prescriptive establishments, reflective leisure, and political
order. I mean also the sense of duty, the feeling of honor, the concept of
ordination and subordination, and the adherence to the classical definition of
justice which grow out of the spirit of a gentleman. I mean all those super
added ideas furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination. I mean the wife
of imagination, harmony and generosity which sometimes flourishes in those
societies commonly called “aristocratic.” More than this, I can hardly express
lucidly, except by describing particular examples of this high grace, the
meaning of “the unbought grace of life.” I do not say that this complex of
sentiments and traditions, which Burke calls the spirit of a gentleman, is the
only pillar of civilization. As Burke himself declares, the spirit of religion
is the other great source and support of our social establishments and our
culture. But the spirit of religion still retains many able defenders, and the
spirit of a gentleman has few; therefore I am confining my remarks here to the
unbought grace of life, as distinguished from that elevation of spirit which is
the effect of religious belief. I do not think that the unbought grace of life,
or the spirit of a gentleman, could subsist indefinitely without the animating
power of religion; but, with Burke, I do not think that religious
establishments, as we have known them for 1000 years and more, could endure
along in a society which had discarded the last traces of the
unbought grace of life.… Wherever the unbought grace of life withers, the
church as a living force is much diminished, if not extirpated; and wherever
religious establishments are broken or derided, the spirit of the gentleman has
short shrift. [Page 12–13].”
My response: Kirk seems to identify two sources
for the establishment and maintenance of civilization. One is the gentlemanly
spirit and the spirit of religion which spiritually replenishes the souls and
psyches of aristocrats as well as the masses, the commoners. It seems that Kirk
suggests that both need and replenish each other, and that seems plausible.
How Hoffer the blue-collar worker and philosopher
can relate to some Burkean sensibility about gentlemanly spirit as the way that
a citizen feels at home is his given society, is not easily reconcilable in my
mind.
Rather I think Hoffer admired the phrase, and
modified its meaning slightly to be applicable to any citizen, any individual
that fits into his traditional social setup, and feels at home there, so, that
by how he lives, works and develops himself as an individual, he feels positive
self-regard based on merit, and based at belonging to an cultural of approving,
accepting others, and Hoffer suggests that this unbought social grace of life,
is critically needed to be present if the individual is to have self-worth and
that is now society is stabilized.
IMG: “One need not have been born to highest
state to apprehend the unbought grace of life, or to benefit from it. This
grace is not simply a glittering prize awarded to the clever and the
industrious, nor is it designed exclusively for the enjoyment of a few persons
in rich by the accident of birth. It is true that only a few men and women
participate in this grace of life at its fullest, and that not all of these
view are worthy of their good fortune. But in a diminished degree, the radiance
of this unbought grace shines over every order in society, so long as it
endures. Nor is the intensity of this grace necessarily proportionate to wealth
and station, though it is more easily attained were possessions and position
facilitate its enjoyment. A poor man, if he has dignity, honesty, the respect
of his neighbors, a realization of his duties, a love of the wisdom of his
ancestors, and possibly some taste for knowledge or beauty, is rich in the
unbought grace of life. Yet this man’s enjoyment of such intangible grace is
not simply the product of his own character: he is enabled to share in this
grace because he has before him examples, some of them contemporary, some of
them historical, of how a man ought to live with grace; and he is protected in
his standards and his tastes by the fact that society still recognizes an ideal
of life founded upon the principles and attainments of the masters of society
in an earlier time. This man of obscure station, in short, is a gentleman, in
some degree enjoying a gentleman’s prerogatives; but his tenure of this
condition is dependent upon the survival of the ideal of a gentleman, and,
ultimately, upon the survival of some grand gentleman to give an abstraction
reality.… Just such a general contempt and just such a popular infatuation are
at work in our society, at present, with titanic power. If the influence of the
gentleman is extinguished at the top of society, it will not long persist lower
down; if the great multitude breaks loose from all restraints upon will and appetite,
such a local arbiter of morality and taste will decline into a mere eccentric,
doubtful of his own rectitude, at first barely tolerated by his neighbors,
presently persecuted. [Pages 14–15]The fountains of the great deep seem to be
broken up in our time. Institutions that have endured for a millennium are
awash, and this early question before us is whether the whole fabric of
civilization can survive the present rate of economic and social alteration.
Material forces have had a large part in this transformation of life; but more
and more, I say, we are coming to understand that certain powerful tendencies
of the intellect have been quite as active in the destruction of the unbought
grace of life.” [Page 17]”
My response: Kirk is an elitist in that he notes
that intellectuals and aristocrats that exemplify and practice the unbought
grace of life set an example for even the poorest workingman who too exemplifies
the unbought grace of life if he lives morally, honorably, and legally in
support his system and the status quo.
Kirk is a marvelous writer. It seems to me that
my concept of each individual in society as an individuating supercitizen would,
in each citizen, blend the best of
aristocratic sophistication, learning and love of civilization, with plebian
participation in the work and business of the world, while self-realizing and
being very involved in running the government and then society, and thus
society could be traditional and stable, while steadily moving forward at the
same time.
IMG: “When the high sense of duty and leadership,
the recognition of superiority and intelligence, and all the decent draperies
of life are rudely thrust aside, is not merely the tone of society that
suffers: the material fabric of life, and the very physical face of things, are
corroded. [Page 18]
Among the causes of the disorder which has fallen
upon us, I think that a general contempt for the whole idea of the unbought
grace of life has been one of the most efficient. The modern mind has sneered
at all those distinctions between man and man which the word ‘order’ signifies,
and so has deprived itself of the leadership inspired by sensibility of
principle, and inflicted upon itself the ascendancy of cunning or of force. The
modern mind has forgotten that there exists an unbought grace more valuable than
any degree of material aggrandizement, and so has condemned itself to boredom.
The modern mind has denied the claims of true leisure, and so has threatened to
extirpate that speculative imagination which inspires any high civilization.
The modern mind has done its best to sweep aside those classes and that
education which apprehended the meaning of justice, and so is menaced by a
power of fraud and violence which no police force can arrest unaided. The
modern mind has made utility the basis of its politics, and so has left itself
defenseless against the self interest of the fierce egoist and the hard knot of
special interests. The modern mind has failed to understand Burke’s admonition
that for us to love our country, our country ought to be lovely, and so has
subjected us to the most hideous wave of architectural deformity and artistic
debasement that ever savage or civilized man has known. The modern mind has
thought of men as the flies of the summer, and so has deprived itself of the
wisdom of our ancestors, and that laid waste the portion of posterity. I think
that all these crimes and follies are closely bound up with the decay of
consciousness of what a reality the unbought grace of life has been among men,
and what a power for their betterment, though it cannot be waived or tabulated.
I do not mean to forget the part that industrialization, economic leveling,
democracy and secularism have had in this dissolution of our heritage. Nor do I
ignore the parts that these influences have had in the undoing of the un-bought
grace of life itself. We can scarcely overestimate, for instance, the rudeness
effects of inheritance taxes upon those classes which formerly were bred in the
place of estimation, and sustained this unbought grace as a matter of habit. Get
with all allowance is made for the material and political causes of our modern
discontents, in Western society, I think that a confusion about first
principles still must be accounted a direct and terrible cause of our
perplexities. [Pages 19–20]”
My response: Kirk seems like a high-cultural
British snob in some ways, but, he has a point: there are aristocratic virtues
and civilized practices and appreciations that are worth preserving, though
mass culture run by businesspeople and workers in a free market, constitutional
republic still is the best way to go. My individuating supercitizen can be intellectual
and high-brow but still be one of the masses who run mundane affairs
practically and without idealistic rigidity. My message to the late Mr. Kirk is
that we can have our cake and eat it too.
IMG: “A vague conviction that something is very
wrong with modern life now seems to be general among men of a reflective turn.
Vitality seems to have trickled away from our society; and the prospect before
us is sufficient to affright even a political liberal or radical. The idea of
progress is shattered. The men of the future, we are coming to fear, will be
something less than men. I think that one of the most insidious and pernicious
influences in this failure of social vitality has been the decay of the unbought
grace of life. While we stand irresolute, this devastation of the higher
culture continues with dismaying speed; but if we can come to some candid
understanding of our malady then possibly we may begin to carry the war into
the world. [Page 22] “
My response: Again, I do not know where or from
wat context Eric Hoffer extricated acquired an interest in this phrase, but it
appeals to him, though how he applies it may be quite different from how Kirk
uses it.
H: “Similarly, individual self-respect cannot
thrive in an atmosphere charged with racial or religious discrimination.”
My response: Here is Hoffer writing this in 1963
in chilling warning against the attacks on American and Western civilization in
2023 by the racialist and bigoted cultural Marxists, who put forth their holy
cause as ideal, all while spreading totalitarianism, hatred, conflict,
revolution, racism and unrest all across our nations, seeking to deprive every
Westerner of his contented, powerful, intact sense of individual self-respect
and contentment as he enjoys the unbought grace of life as a Westerner in his
particular nation and culture.
H: “Both the oppressor and the oppressed are
blemished. The oppressed are corroded by an inner agreement with the prevailing
prejudice against them, while the oppressors are infected with the fear that
they induce in others.”
My response: Both the oppressor and the oppressed
are blemished because they are self-loathing groupists stunted and injured by
living in accordance with the altruist morality which they inherited. The
masses masochistically accept the lies told about them, and the oppressor
induce fear, so they conspire to undercut that tranquil, peaceful, leisurely
unbought grace of life which the masses relatively felt in their traditional
society, so inducing fear in others, they also become afraid and undermine
their own self-esteem. None of these people are individualists who care not
what anyone else claims about them, and no are they interested in undercutting
anyone else, filling them with doubts, so they can swoop in with a replacement
set of lies and rationales, weapons of manipulation and enslavement.
H: “Finally, even in advanced and wholly
egalitarian societies millions of people are robbed of their sense of worth by
unemployment, and by the obsolescence of skills as the result of revolutionary
advances in technology.”
My response: My advice is to rear up children to
be individualists and egoist—daring, self-sufficient, confidence, versatile,
tough, and persevering. Their sense of self-worth, these individuators will learn,
must never be allowed to be damaged or to be eroded away by external
circumstances, gaslighters or naysayers. She loves herself and to this point,
she is so intellectually sharp, smart, and talented, that her accomplishments
teach her that her highs self-esteeming is real and realistic. Abrupt, painful,
even catastrophic changes outside of her mind are duly noted by her, cause her
great pain, but she will not relent in adapting, discovering ever anew how to
fit in, and she will allow no hit on her sense of self-worth to occur or be
accepted by her and she works to overcome all incoming challenges.
H: “Thus it seems that under the condition
current in the world at present, the nearer people get to each other, and the
more alike they become, the dimmer grows the awareness of the oneness of
mankind. The human image is clear to us when it is a silhouette against a
distant horizon. When we come close so that we can look into a fellow man’s
eyes, we find there mirrored an image of ourselves, and we do not like what we
see.”
My response: When we are in close proximity, we
see others more clearly, especially their unpleasant, unsavory qualities; unconsciously
we see ourselves in their eyes, and that is unbearable and painful We would do
better if we could imagine ourselves as individuators of veridical self-esteem,
and recognize and encourage the same development of potential in others as
remarkably able and talented persons, real differences in IQ and talent notwithstanding.
H: “The unattainability of self-respect has other
grave consequences. In man’s life the lack of an essential component usually leads
to the adoption of a substitute. The substitute is usually embraced with
vehemence an extremism, for we have to convince ourselves that what we took as
second choice is the best there ever was. Thus blind faith is to a considerable
extent for a lost faith in ourselves; insatiable desire a substitute for hope;
accumulation a substitute for growth; fervent hustling a substitute for
purposeful action; and pride a substitute for unattainable self-respect.”
My response: In the mire of despair and grievous
agony inflicted on the individual self upon that self, wherein self-respect is
not forthcoming, then the battered ego must latch onto vile, addictive, unsettling
substitutes, so that the self can feel somewhat good about itself, deceiving
itself that these substitutes give it reasons to esteem itself.
Hoffer is not only an egoist, but he is an
ontological, ethical moderate. Observe how the groupist, the self-loathing
nonindividuator, must attach himself to his prideful substitutes with vehemence
and extremism, so the hateful and hating groupist championing substitutes will
join a mass movement of other similar lost souls, to push forward his cause to
the detriment of all, and this plan comes not from the Good Spirits.
H: “The pride that at the present pervades the
world is the claim that one is a member of a chosen group—be it nation, race,
church, or party. No other attitude has so impaired the oneness of the human
species and contributed so much to the savage strife of our time.”
My response: This false pride, this cruel pride,
is group pride, pride in one’s associations rather than merited individual
pride in one’s earned accomplishments. Collective pride in groups is Luciferian
pride, and it is behind all wars, most quarrels, all authoritarian regimes.
H: “Good will and peace have their roots in the
conditions of the individual’s existence. But the terrible fact seems to be
that with our present standards of usefulness and worth, there is no certainty
that economic and social betterment can cure the individual’s private ills.”
My response: If we teach the young to maverize as
enlightened egoists, then they will possess the will and confidence to know
they are actively worthy, useful and agile and aggressive enough to retool
their skills and behaviors so that they are fit and fit into the changing culture, that good will,
liberty, prosperity and peace can become civil reality, because a majority of
the maverizers, the majority of the masses, insist that civilization and law and order are their due,
and it is their enforced, mandated will for the society as a whole.
H: “The new industrial revolution holds the
promise of an unprecedented abundance for all, and there is a chance that in
the free world the masses, though largely unemployed, will still get their
share of the good things in life. But unless there is a radical change in our
conception of what is useful, worthwhile and efficient, it is hard to see how
an economic millennium could possibly create optimal conditions for general
tolerance and benevolence.”
My response: If individuating American masses, as
inventive and quick as anticipated, run out of jobs, they will create more
businesses and jobs out of thing are, and those possibilities and potentials
are near infinite. This will provide most nonindividuating people with a sense
of usefulness, worth and fittedness, and able to enjoy the unbought grace of
life as a contributor, so they will not detract from social stability, general tolerance,
or benevolence.
Even individuators, with more jobs online, will
feel useful and fitting due to being employed, and further, will feel useful
and fitting, even if starving and unemployed, due to personal, satisfying
development.
Hoffer: “Under our scheme of values, affluence
and leisure, may well intensify the tendencies towards national and racial
exclusiveness. It is not the overworked and underpaid who make up the ranks of
the D.A.R., the Dixiecrats, and similar organizations here and elsewhere. In an
indolent population living off the fat of the land, the vital need for an unquestioned
sense of worth and usefulness is bound to find expression in an intensified
pursuit of explosive substitutes.”
My response: As Mavellonialism spreads, individuators
will create jobs and grow the economy and spend a lifetime personal developing
their talents, so there cumulatively should be little need or response for the
masses to seek explosive substitutes leading to upheaval or social displacement
of peoples.
H: “At bottom, a country’s efficiency must be
measured by the degree to which it realizes its human potentialities.”
My response: This national efficiency can only
measured as achieving its aim if a people increasingly, willingly as moral
agents, insist upon self-realizing in service to an individuated/individuating
good deity, as is implied by adopting egoist morality as our national moral
code, and future tradition.
H: “Industry, agriculture, and the exploitation
of natural resources cannot be deemed efficient if they do not serve as the
means for the realization of intellectual, artistic, and manipulative
capacities inherent in a population.
Now that the new industrial revolution is on the
way to solving the problems of means, and we can catch our breath, it behooves
us to remember that man’s only legitimate end in life is to finish God’s work—to
bring to full growth the capacities and talents implanted in us. A population
dedicated to this end will not necessarily overflow with the milk of human
kindness, but it will not try to prove its worth by proclaiming the superiority
and exclusiveness of its nation, race, or doctrine.”
