Eric Hoffer, in his book, The Ordeal of Change, wrote his
last chapter of the book, Chapter 16 (The Role of the Undesirables). This
chapter runs from Page 137 to Page 150: I will type out the whole chapter and then
respond to it where appropriate. Here is the Chapter 16:
Hoffer (H after this): “THE ROLE OF THE UNDESIRABLES
In the winter of 1934, I spent several weeks in a federal
transient camp in California. These camps were originally established by
Governor Rolph in the early days of the Depression to care for single homeless
unemployed of the state. In 1934 the federal government took charge of the
camps for a time and it was the that I first heard of them.
How I happened to get into one of the camps is soon told.
Like thousands of migrant agricultural workers in California I then followed
the crops from one part of the state to the other. Early in 1934 I arrived in
the town of El Centro, in the Imperial Valley. I had been given a free ride on
a truck from San Diego, and it was midnight when the truck driver dropped me on
the outskirts of El Centro. I spread my bedroll by the side of the road and
went to sleep. I had hardly dozed off when the rattle of a motorcycle drilled
itself into my head and a policeman was bending over me saying, ‘Roll up,
mister.’ It looked as if I was in for something; it happens now and then that
the police got overzealous and rounded up the freight trains. But this time the
cop had no such thought. He said, ‘Better go over to the federal shelter and
get yourself a bed and maybe some breakfast.’ He directed me to the place.
I found a large hall, obviously a former garage, dimly lit,
and packed with cots. A concert of heavy breathing shook the thick air. In a
small office near the door, I was registered by a middle-aged clerk. He
informed me that this was the ‘receiving shelter’ where I would get one night’s
lodging and breakfast. The meal was served in the camp nearby. Those who wished
to stay on, he said, had to enroll in the camp. He then gave me three blankets
and excused himself for not having a vacant cot. I spread the blankets on the
cement floor and went to sleep.
I awoke with dawn amid a chorus of coughing, throat
clearing, the sound of running water, and the intermittent flushing of toilets
in the back of the hall. There were about fifty of us, of all colors and ages,
all of us more or less ragged and soiled. The clerk handed out tickets for
breakfast, and we filed out to the camp located several blocks away, near the
railroad tracks.
From the outside the camp looked like a cross between a
factory and a prison. A high fence of wire enclosed it, and inside there were
three large sheds and a huge boiler topped by a pillar of black smoke. Men in
blue shirts and dungarees were strolling across the sandy yard. A ship’s bell
in front of one of the buildings announced breakfast. The regular camp
members—there was a long line of them—ate first. Then we filed in through the
gate, handing our tickets to the guard.
It was a good, plentiful meal. After breakfast our crowd
dispersed. I heard some say the camps in the northern part of the state were
better, that they were going to catch a northbound freight. I decided to try
this camp in El Centro.
My motives for enrolling were not crystal clear. I wanted to
clean up. There were shower baths in the camp and wash tubs and plenty of soap.
Of course I could have bathed and washed my clothes in one of the irrigation
ditches, but here in the camp I had a chance to rest, get the wrinkles out of
my belly, and clean up at leisure. In short, it was the easiest way out.
A brief interview at the camp office and a physical
examination were all the formalities for enrollment. There were some two
hundred men in the camp. They were the kind I had worked and traveled with for
years. I even saw familiar faces—men I had worked with in the orchards and
fields. Yet my predominant feeling was one of strangeness. It was my first
experience of life in intimate contact with a crowd. For it is one thing to
work and travel with a gang, and quite another to eat, sleep, and spend the greater
part of each day cheek by jowl with two hundred men.”
My response: This Chapter reminds of his apparent
photographic memory: the rich detail and nuance of living with other men in a
dormitory perhaps 20 years before he put pen to paper to retell this
experience.
Note, that Hoffer, the great-soul and utter loner, felt
strange living in intimate contact with a crowd. This was quite atypical for
him, and others like him.
H: “I found myself speculating on a variety of subjects: the
reason for their chronic belly-aching and beefing—it was more a ritual than the
expression of a grievance; the amazing orderliness of the men; the comic
seriousness with which they took their game of dominoes; the weird manner of
reasoning one overheard now and then. Why, I kept wondering, were these men
within the enclosure of a federal transient camp? Were they people temporarily
hard up? Would jobs solve all their difficulties? Were we indeed like the
people outside?
Up to then I was not aware of being one of a specific
species of humanity. I had considered myself simply a human being—not
particularly good or bad, and on the whole harmless. The people I worked with
and traveled with I knew as Americans and Mexicans, Whites and Negroes,
Northerners and Southerners, etc. It did occur to me that we were a group
possessed of peculiar traits, and that there was something—innate or
acquired—in our make-up which made us adopt a particular mode of existence.
It was a slight thing that started me on a new track.
I got talking to a mild-looking, elderly fellow. I liked his
soft speech and pleasant manner. We swapped trivial experiences. Then he
suggested a game of checkers. As we started to arrange the pieces on the board
I was startled by the sight of his crippled right hand. I had not noticed it
before. Half of it was chopped off lengthwise, so that the horny stump with its
three fingers looked like a hen’s leg. I was mortified that I had not noticed
the hand until he dangled it, so to speak, before my eyes. It was, perhaps, to
bolster my shaken confidence in my powers of observation that I now began
paying close attention to the hands of the people around me. The result was
astounding. It seemed as if every other man had been mangled in some way. There
was a man with one arm. One young, good-looking fellow had a wooden leg. It was
as though the majority of the men had escaped the snapping teeth of a machine
and left part of themselves behind.
It was, I knew, an exaggerated impression. But I began
counting the cripples as men lined up in the yard at mealtime. I found thirty
(out of two hundred) crippled either in arms or legs. I immediately sensed
where the counting would land me. The simile preceded the statistical
deduction: we in the camp were a human junk pile.”
My response: Hoffer does not mince words: the fruit tramps
and drifters seem in some way to undesirable, losers, a human junk pile. I do
not accept any of that. All people are God’s children, and, with proper
education and egoist moral training, and a personal willingness to maverize,
almost any human being can live a fine, grand life of artistry, intellectual
originality, and might accomplishments.
H: “I began evaluating my fellow tramps as human material,
and for the first time in my life I became face-conscious. Several of the
middle-aged and old looked healthy and well-preserved. But the damaged and
decayed faces were in the majority. I saw faces that were wrinkled, or bloated,
or as raw as the surface of a peeled plum. Some of the noses were purple and
swollen, some broken, some pitted with enlarged pores. There were many
toothless mouths (I counted seventy-eight). I noticed eyes that were blurred,
faded, opaque, or bloodshot. I was struck by the fact that the old men, even
the very old, showed their age mainly in the face. Their bodies were still
slender and erect. One little man over sixty years of age looked a mere boy
when seen from behind. The shriveled face joined to a boyish body made a
startling sight.
My diffidence had now vanished. I was getting to know
everybody in the camp. They were a friendly and talkative lot. Before many
weeks I knew some essential fact about practically everyone.
And I was continually counting. Of the two hundred men in
the camp there were approximately as follows:
Cripples . . . . . . 30
Confirmed Drunkards . . . . . . 60
Old men (55 and older) . . . . . . 50
Youths under twenty . . . . . . 10
Men with chronic diseases, heart, asthma, TB . . . . . . 12
Mildly insane . . . . . . 4
Constitutionally lazy . . . . . . 6
Fugitives from justice . . . . . . 4
Apparently normal . . . . . . 70
(The numbers do not tally up to two hundred since some of
the men were counted twice or even thrice—as cripples and old, or as old and
confirmed drunks, etc.)
In other words, less than half of the camp inmates (seventy
normal, plus ten youths) were unemployed workers whose difficulties would end
once jobs were available. The rest (60 percent) had handicaps in addition to
unemployment.
I also counted fifty war veterans, and eighty skilled
workers representing sixteen trades. All the men (including those with chronic
diseases) were able to work. The one-armed man was a wizard with a shovel.
I did not attempt any definite measurement of character and
intelligence. But it seemed to me that the intelligence of the men in the camp
was certainly not below average. And as
for character, I found much forbearance and genuine good humor. I never came
across one instance of real viciousness. Yet, on the whole, one would hardly
say that these men were possessed of strong characters. Resistance, whether to
one’s appetites or to the ways of the world, is a chief factor in the shaping
of character; and the average tramp is, more or less, a slave to his few
appetites. He generally takes the easiest way out.”
My response: Hoffer the realist neither glorifies tramps nor
looks down upon them with contempt, as a middle-class banker might, or an
intellectual, prosperous, snug, complacent in their tight, little berths.
The truth is: tramps, of any race or sex, are on average not
much smarter or dumber, nor innately more moral or less moral than the
respected banker, or highly credentialed egghead.
The difference is if one is an ambitious (ambitious more to
be good and to individuate than to amass a huge amount of worldly
riches—accumulating enough to get by with some surplus for superfluities is
handy) individualist, grounded in individuating
and egoist morality, then one likely would not lack the self-discipline,
the perseverance and the ability to stay at something for a lifetime, which
likely are the deficiencies of a tramp.
The maverizer would be more like the steady banker, but an
occasion enjoyment of the wander lust life of a bohemian, or intellectual
prowess gained by specializing like a professor—while running a bank—might
allow the banker to close to all that he can become.
H: “The connection between our make-up and our mode of
existence as migrant workers presented itself now with some clarity.
The majority of us were incapable of holding onto a steady
job. We lacked self-discipline and the ability to endure monotonous, leaden
hours. We were probably misfits from the very beginning.”
My response: Whether one is an innate misfit, or
circumstances, mental illness, alcoholism, drug abuse or unemployed status
trigger this way of living among the misfitted tramps, there are solutions.
First, one can discipline oneself to work twenty hours a week, permanently.
Second, one can become clean and sober, and discipline the self-enough to get a
job, to show up on time, to work hard and not to rebel against the boss all the
time, resulting in termination.
As the society moves towards a society of individuating
anarchists, then we will be used to everyone or near everyone be individualists
and individuators, and it will not much matter if people are misfits, or seamlessly
fit into the neighborhood or workplace--or not: the eccentrics will be welcome if
they are moral, respectful, and nonviolent.
Businesses, in other words, will be welcoming places of
misfits and tramps, and the tramps realizing they can fit in for a while or
permanently, will be more inclined to discipline themselves so that they can
fit in—for a while at least, or at least fit in somewhat.
If most or all individuate then one can work do art and
write symphonies in the evening while working for money during the day, fitting
in or misfitting to whatever degree one can and it should be beneficial for
all.
Nonindividuating misfits, wandering the country and fitting
in nowhere, are a potential mob with no or little self-esteem: they are natural
candidates to start or join a mass movement, and then can destabilize and
overthrow society. We want to make room for misfits and teach them how to find
a way to fit in, to change and allow eccentricity without overthrowing society
while allow useful needed change to evolve.
H: “Our contact with a steady job was like a collision. Some
of us were maimed, some got frightened and ran away, and some took to drink. We
inevitably drifted in the direction of least resistance—the open road. The life
of a migrant worker is varied and demands a minimum of self-discipline. We were
now in one of the drainage ditches of ordered society. We could not keep a
footing in the ranks of respectability and were washed into the slough of our
present existence.
Yet, I mused, there must be in this world a task with an
appeal to strong that were we to have a taste of it we would hold on and be rid
for good of our restlessness.”
My response: Perhaps the misfits, quite restless and
discontented, need not settle for drifting over into frustration accompanied
too often by the desperate seeking after ideological release in a mass
movement, a home to escape from the unwanted self.
Perhaps, in a Mavellonialist society, whether one fits
easily and smoothly into the culture or not, individuating as a way of life, the
elders would give each individuators the tools to redirect and rejuvenate the
self, so that one fits into the existing world, by innovatively but gently
working to alter that world to receive and modify itself to accommodate the
misfit’s unique perspective, contribution, and suggestions. We could give
tramps the gift of choosing to maverize rather than elect the life of a slave
in a mass movement.
H: “My stay at the camp lasted about four weeks. Then I
found a haying job not far from town, and finally, in April, when the hot winds
begin blowing, I shouldered my bedroll and took the highway to San Bernadino.
It was the next morning, after I got a lift to Indio by
truck, that a new idea began to take hold of me. The highway out of Indio leads
through waving date groves, fragrant grapefruit orchards, and lush alfalfa
fields; then, abruptly passes into a desert of white sand. The sharp line
between the garden and desert is very striking. The turning of the white sand
into garden seemed to me an act of magic. This, I thought, was a job one would
jump at—even the men in the transient camps. They had the skill and ability of
the average American. But their energies, I felt, could be quickened only by a
task that was spectacular, that had in it something of the miraculous. The
pioneering task of making the desert flower would certainly fill the bill.”
My response: This brilliant, original philosopher/fruit
tramp and hobo had this flash of insight in 1934 that undesirable transient
bums, misfitted or self-excluded from bourgeois society as someone punching the
time clock at the same job for decade after decade, could serve a needed and
useful historical and societal role as pioneers in a mass movement, one that
would help them disappear into the collective cause, would help them field
inspired and motivated to work once more; the weak, the misfit, the
undesirables of history often serve as change agents, and the mass movements
they served are not always as benign as turning the California desert into a
garden.
H: “Tramps as pioneers? It seemed absurd. Every man and
woman in California knows that the pioneers had been giants, men of boundless
courage and indomitable spirit. However, as I strode across on the white sand,
I kept mulling over the idea.”
My response: Hoffer is at it again: setting up a teachable
moment for the reader, paradoxically—and intentionally once again shocking the
reader into reality, inviting her to abandon her misconceptions: The California
myth is that the pioneer were giants, heroic, larger-than-life, near-perfect
paragons of boundless energy and indomitable spirit. Hoffer denies that this
myth is reality. Rather, he is advising that the (California pioneers or
pioneers anywhere for that matter) pioneers were not the strong, the popular, the
respectable and established, the prosperous, those functioning and regularly
employed, fitting smoothly into their communal lifestyle. Rather, the majority
if pioneers, he is speculating, were the weak, the misfit outcasts, the undesirables,
running towards the new to escape their loser status and feelings of inadequacy
in their old life and setting.
Once again, whether someone is fitting in and desirable, or
not fitting in and undesirable, these are how people turn out for whatever
causal impetuses, but these personal, differing results are not final, unless
any person elects and will to make them so. All can individuate and will to
improve the self.
H: “Who were the pioneer? Who were the men who left their
homes and went into the wilderness? A man rarely leaves a soft spot and goes
deliberately in search of hardship and privation. People become attached to the
places they live in; they drive roots. A change of habit is a painful act of
uprooting. A man who has made good and has standing in his community stays put.
The successful businessmen, farmers, and workers usually stayed where they
were. Who then left for the wilderness and the unknown? Obviously those that
had not made good: men who went broke or never amounted to much; men who though
possessed of abilities were to impulsive to stand the daily grind; men who were
slaves of their appetites—drunkards, gamblers, woman chasers;
outcasts—fugitives from justice and ex-jailbirds. There were no doubt some who
went in search of health—some were suffering TB, asthma, heart trouble. Finally
there was a sprinkling of young and middle-aged in search of adventure.
All these people craved change, some probably actuated by
the naïve belief that a change in place brings with it a change luck. Many
wanted go to a place where they were not known and there make a new beginning. Certainly they did not go
out deliberately in search of hare work and suffering. If in the end they
shouldered enormous tasks, endured unspeakable hardships, and accomplished the
impossible, it was because they had to. They became men of action on the run.
They acquired strength and skill in the inescapable struggle for existence. It
was a question of do or die. And once they tasted the joy of achievement, they
craved for more.
Clearly the same types of people which now swelled the ranks
of migratory workers and tramps had probably in former times made up the bulk
of pioneers.”
My response: I would
classify Hoffer and myself as essentialists regarding human nature, if I could
define essential human nature as being those identifiable, verbally
expressivle, hereditary or spiritual features shared by all people everywhere,
which make us more or less created equal, with all bursting with an amazing
array and depth of talents to be mined and demonstrated to the world with
dazzling effect. Any tramp could be a banker, and every banker could be a
tramp.
My message is ultimately optimistic, that people anywhere
can thrive and even be brilliant if they apply themselves and actualize their
individual potential.
H: “As a group the pioneers were probably as unlike the
present-day ‘native sons’—their descendants—as one could well imagine. Indeed,
were there to be today an new influx of typical pioneers, twin brothers of the
forty-niners, only in modern garb, the citizens of California would consider it
a menace to health, wealth, and morals. Exiles and convicts settled Siberia.
With few exceptions, this seems to be the case in the
settlement of all new countries. Ex-convicts were the vanguard in the settling
of Australia. Exiles and convicts settled Siberia. In this country, a large
portion of our earlier and later. In this country, a large portion of our
earlier and later settlers were failures, fugitives, and felons. The exceptions
seemed to be those who were motivated by religious fervor, such as the Pilgrim
Fathers and the Mormons.
Although quite logical, the train of thought seemed to me
then a wonderful joke. In my exhilaration I was eating up the road in long
strides, and I reached the oasis in Elim in what seemed almost no time. A
passing empty truck picked me up just then and we thundered through Banning and
Beaumont, all the way to Riverside. From there I walked the seven miles to San
Bernadino.
Somehow, this discovery of a family likeness between tramps
and pioneers took a firm hold in my mind. For years afterward it kept
intertwining itself with a mass of observations which on the face of them had
no relation to either tramps or pioneers. And it moved me to speculate on
subjects in which, up to then, I had had no real interest, and of which I knew
very little.
I talked with several old-timers—one of them over eighty and
a native son—in Sacramento, Placerville, Auburn, and Fresno. It was not easy,
at first, to obtain the information I was after. I could not make my questions
specific enough. ‘What kind of people were the early settlers and miners?” I
asked. They were a hard-working, tough lot I was told. They drank, fought,
gambled, and wenched. They wallowed in luxury, or lived on next to nothing with
equal ease. They were the salt of the earth.
Still it was not clear what manner of people they were.
If I asked what they looked like, I was told of whiskers,
broad-brimmed hats, high boots, shirts of many colors, sun-tanned faces, horny
hands. Finally I asked: ‘What group of people in present-day California most
closely resembles the pioneers?’ The answer, after some hesitation, was
invariably the same: ‘The Okies and the fruit tramps.’
I tried to evaluate the tramps as potential pioneers by
watching them in action. I saw them fell timber, clear firebreaks, build rock
walls, put up barracks, build dams and roads, handle steam shovels, bulldozers,
tractors, and concrete mixers. I saw them put in a hard day’s work after a
night of steady drinking. They sweated and growled, but they did the work. I
saw tramps elevated to positions of authority as foremen and superintendents.
Then I could notice a remarkable physical transformation: a seamed face
gradually smoothed out and the skin showed a healthy hue; an indifferent mouth
became firm and expressive; dulls eyes cleared and brightened; voices actually
changed; there was even an apparent increase in stature. In almost no time
these promoted tramps looked as if they had been on top all their lives. Yet
sooner or later I would meet up with them again in a railroad yard, on some
skid row, or in the fields—tramps again. It was usually the same story; they
would get drunk or lost their temper and were fired, or they got fed up with a
steady job and quit. Usually, when a tramp becomes a foreman he is careful in
his treatment of the tramps under him; he knows the day of reckoning is never
far off.”
My response: It is a heartwarming confirmation of my theory
that anyone can make good if they apply themselves, but, the tramps went from
rags to riches and back again, often in less of a five year period, for reasons
of bad habits, addiction, or an inability to follow rules, or put up with the
daily grind, and these results are character-driven, not a statement of
differing ability between the desired and desirable haves and the undesired and
undesirable tramps, or have-nots.
H: “In short it was not difficult to visualize the tramps as
pioneers. I reflected that if they were to find themselves in a single-handed
life-and-death struggle with nature, they would undoubtedly display
persistence. For the pressure of responsibility and the heat of battle steel a
character. The inadaptable would perish, and those who survived would be the
equal of the successful pioneers.
I also considered the few instances of pioneering engineered
from above—that is to say, by settlers possessed of lavish means, who were
classed with the best where they came from. In these instances, it seemed to
me, the resulting social structure was inevitably precarious. For pioneering de
luxe results in a plantation society, made up largely of landowners and peon
labor, either native or imported. The colonizing activities of the Teutonic
barons in the Baltic, the Hungarian nobles in Transylvania, the English in
Ireland, the planters in our South, and the present-day plantation societies in
Kenya and other British and Dutch colonies are cases in point. Whatever their
merits, they are characterized by poor adaptability. They are likely eventually
to be broken up by a peon revolution or by an influx of typical pioneers—who
are usually of the same race or nation as the landowners. The adjustment is not
necessarily implemented by war. Even our old South, had it not been for the
complication of secession, might eventually have attained stability without
war: namely by the activity of its own poor whites or by an influx of the
indigent from other states.”
My response: Hoffer’s intuition that deluxe pioneering
instituted, inaugurated and ruled from above will lead a a severe caste system,
which would disallow adaptability and social or technological advancing because
the masses were so suppressed and beaten-down and fatalistic.
Hoffer indicates that the motley masses, set loose
helter-skelter to come and get it, stand a greater chance of growing and
improving in all kinds of ways, and that intuition seems right to me.
H: “There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation, or an
organization by its least worthy members.”
My response: This innate, prevalent human tendency to
stereotype an individual by their group affiliations is both unfair and
unproductive. Each person needs to be judged based on his merit and initiative,
not characterized in a way presumed to be locked in stone, be the members of
his groups judged by its most worthy or least worthy members.
H: “The tendency is manifestly perverse and unfair; yet it
has some justification. For the quality and destiny of a nation are determined
to a considerable extent by the nature and potentialities of its inferior
elements.”
My response: This may be one of Hoffer’s most original and
significant insights which we have ignored at our peril: that the quality and
destiny of a nation are determined to a considerable extend by the nature and
potentialities of its inferior elements. All elements in any society, I avow,
are inferior not due to racial or genetic inferiority, but instead are due to
weak character self-development chosen by each nonindividuator as her
lifestyle, a choice made by each member of that inferior element: their
inferiority is earned by the lack of hard work, a grand personal vision to
maverize as their telos. To be a great people, a really great people, we need
to inspire and educate a majority of youths to live as individuators.
H: “The inert mass of a nation is its middle section. The
industrious, decent, well-to-do, and satisfied middle classes—whether in cities
or on the land—are worked upon and shaped by minorities at both extremes: the
best and the worst.
The superior individual, whether in politics, business,
industry, science, literature, or religion, undoubtedly plays a major role in
shaping the nation. But so do the individuals at the other extreme: the poor,
the outcasts, the misfits, and those who are in grip of some overpowering
passion. The importance of these inferior elements as formative factors lies in
the readiness with which they are swayed in any direction. This peculiarity is
due to their inclination to take risks (‘not giving a damn’) and their
propensity for united action. They crave to merge their drab, wasted lives into
something grand and complete. Thus they are first and most fervent adherents of
new religions, political upheavals, patriotic hysteria, gangs, and mass rushes
to new lands.
And the quality of a nation—its innermost worth—is made
manifest by its dregs as they rise to the top: by how brave they are, how
humane, how orderly, how skilled, how generous, how independent or servile; by
the bounds they will not transgress in their dealings with a man’s soul, with
truth and with honor.
The average American of today bristles with indignation when
he is told that this country was built, largely, by the hordes of undesirables
from Europe. Yet, far from being derogatory, this statement, if true, should be
a cause for rejoicing, should fortify our pride in the stock from which we have
sprung.
This vast continent with its towns, farms, factories, dams,
aqueducts, docks, railroads, highways, powerhouses, schools, and parks is the
handiwork of common folk from the Old World, where for centuries men of their
kind had been beasts of burden, the property of their masters—kings, nobles,
and priests—and with no will and no aspirations of their own. When on rare
occasions one of the lowly had reached the top in Europe he had kept the
pattern intact and, if anything, tightened the screws. The stuffy little
corporal from Corsica harnessed the lusty forces released by the French
Revolution to a gilded state coach, and could think of nothing grander than
mixing his blood with that of the Hapsburg masters and establishing a new
dynasty. In our day a bricklayer in Italy, a housepainter in Germany, and a
shoemaker’s son in Russia have made themselves masters of their nations; and
what they did was to re-establish and reinforce the old pattern.”
My response: Revolutionaries may seem revolutionary or even
believe they are revolutionary by overthrowing the corrupt, oppressive status
quo, but they really just repeat the old pattern, and settle into the new
authoritarian order. For example, in 1917 Lenin brought Communist revolution to
Russia, but, in 2025, Putin the neo-czar is but the lastest generation of the
old Russian pattern.
H: “Only here, in America, were the common folk of the Old
World given a chance to show what they could do on their own, without a master
to push and order them about.”
My response: The masses rule and ruled in America, and the
is the true revolution, so rare in human history, so precious, enviable, easy
to destroy, but desperately in need of saving, preserving, and extending as a
capitalist constitutional republic of upper middle-class masses, a rather
classless society of individuating supercitizens.
H: “History contrived an earth-shaking joke when it lifted
by the nape of the neck lowly peasant, shopkeepers, laborers, paupers,
jailbirds, and drunks from the midst of Europe, dumped them on a vast, virgin
continent and said: ‘Go to it; it is yours!’
And the lowly were not awed by the magnitude of the task. A
hunger for action, pent up for centuries, found an outlet. They went to it with
ax, pick, shovel, plow, and rifle; on foot, on horse, in wagons, and on
flatboats. They went to it praying, howling, brawling, drinking, and fighting.
Make way for the people. This is how I read the statement that this country was
built by hordes of undesirables from the Old World.
Small wonder that we in this country have a deeply ingrained
faith in human regeneration.”
My response: It seems to me that this American attitude of
faith in human regeneration is a realistic optimism about human potential,
which at its best, would be expressed in action by each American, the individuators,
underway on his personal adventure to be excellence itself.
He is to cast off his old self and be reborn, born again,
with his new unnatural self, the individuators coming alive, and this role
adoption and artificially assumed personal transformation can be a Christian
readjustment, or following one of the good deities instead.
H: “We believe, that given a chance, even the degraded and
apparently worthless are capable of constructive action and great deeds. It is
a faith founded on experience, not on some idealistic theory. And no matter
what some anthropologists, sociologists, and geneticists may tell us, we shall
go on believing that man, unlike other forms of life, is not a captive of his
past—but is possessed of infinite plasticity, and his potentialities for good
and for evil are never wholly exhausted.”
My response: It appears that Hoffer concludes that the
masses can run their own affairs, that they are talented enough and
free-willing sufficient to justify their running their own affairs, if elites
would but leave them be so they can demonstrate how they will run things well
most of the time.
