In his book, The Ordeal of Change, Eric Hoffer wrote Chapter
13, which ranges from Page 101 through 111 of the book, and the chapter’s title
is Scribe, Writer, and Rebel. I will type up the entire chapter and comment on
it occasionally.
Hoffer (H after this): “It is often stated that the
invention of writing about 3000 B.C. marked an epoch in man’s career because it
revolutionized the transmission of knowledge and ideas.”
My response: It seems obvious that the invention of writing
did revolutionize the transmission of knowledge and ideas, but that was likely
a later unintended if progressive consequence of writing invented or applied
for more humble, utilitarian purposes as Hoffer lays out below.
H: “Actually, as I have said before, for many centuries
after its invention, writing served solely as a tool of bookkeeping and
administration, and it was not until the first millennium B.C. that people
began to write down their observations and thoughts. Nevertheless, the
invention of writing had an immediate and fateful effect by giving rise to the
class of the educated. Though the scribe started out as a craftsman, he found
himself from the beginning associated not with the working force but with the
supervisory personnel. In the tomb painting of Egypt the scribe with his scroll
and pen stands alongside the overseer with his whip—both facing the common folk
who did the world’s work.”
My response: Though Hoffer’s historical speculation that the
scribe almost immediately was recognized and categorized by early societies as
part of the management class is his original theory—I believe—it is not just
imaginative speculation—it seems intuitively plausible.
As soon as humans formed complex societies, class
structures, hierarchies and institutional stratification of power and wealth
maldistribution seemed common, perhaps universal, scribes were born and then
absorbed into the ruling elite of their society, in their day. If the common
people lacked wealth and education, then it would be the children of the ruling
elites that received whatever education available, and most of all the scribes,
officials and scholars easily wrapped up into the ruling class. Scribes, thus
historically and genetically (If any human, because he dislikes himself, is
given a little bit more power, wealth, literacy, popularity, authority, and
education than his common folk neighbors, he will soon start crowing and
asserting his divine right to manage and shape their lives for them, “for their
own good.”) were predisposed to enjoy help ruling the masses, and now they
regard it as their birthright.
H: “The career of the scribe became, therefore, an avenue by
which common people could gain entrance into the privileged segment of society,
and it inevitably drew unto itself talent and ambition which might have flowed
into more practical crafts and occupations. Thus the invention initiated a
change in the direction of the flow of social energies, and such a change is
crucial event often characteristic of turning points in history.
Ever since the invention of writing, the educated minority
have been a factor in social stability. Where the educated make common cause
with those in power there is little likelihood of social unrest and upheaval,
since only the educated can supply the catalyst of words that turns grievances
into disaffection and revolt.”
My response: Hoffer accuses, or at least observes, that
despite their self-aggrandizing claim that they-those scribes exiled from the
circle of power--promote change to bring justice, equality and wealth
redistributioned relief for the masses (who certainly deserve relief), when
they are not part of those in power, these disaffected, scribes or
intellectuals will use their words and eloquence to convert grievances into
disaffection and revolt, but their hidden and primary motive is to replace a
ruling dispensation with a social order in which these outcast scribes are then
included in the new dispensation as part of the ruling elite, and then they
will turn on the masses they lied to, riled up, and enraged so they, the
masses, would fight to overthrow the current ruling elite. The new rulers, the
scribes included, did by force, almost always, post-revolution, subdued the
masses, and reimposed serfdom upon them.
H: “On the other hand, a ruling class of vigor and merit may
be swept away if it does know how to win and hold the allegiance of the
educated. With few exceptions, wherever we find a long standing social
organization there is either an absence of an educated class or a close
alliance between the educated and the prevailing dispensation.”
My response: My whole plan is for the American citizenry to
be strong-minded, highly educated, highly skilled, sharp intellectuals so that,
be they farmers, tech billionaires or babysitters, these individuating
supercitizens will be educated to change
the dispensation when it needs changing and to preserve it when it needs
preserving, and with their sophisticated, organized, inter-cooperating social
and political skills applied to work together on their agreed-upon united
agenda, they likely can pull off an ongoing series of mini-revolutions without
violent upheaval or bloodshed. Each new individuated supercitizen,
self-created, is a Prometheus, stealing the fire of education from elites, and
giving fire, (heat, warmth, light) to all the people, the common people.
H: “This was true of Sumer with its scribes, Egypt with its
literati, India with its Brahmins, China with its mandarins, Judaism with its
rabbis and scholars, the Roman Empire
with its Roman and Greek intellectuals, Byzantium with its kritoi and
sekretoi, and the Catholic Church with
its clerks. The Chinese sage Mo Ti said of the ruling classes of Chi and Chu
that ‘they lost their empire and their lives because they would not employ
their scholars.’ Stalin the Terrible echoes this truth when he said: ‘No ruling
class can endure without its intelligentsia.’
To win and hold the allegiance of the educated they must be
given a chance to live purposeful and prestigious lives; and almost all
long-lived social bodies solved the problem by absorbing the educated into the
bureaucratic hierarchies. Since he is not an actual producer, the scribe needs
a clearly marked status to certify his worth, some connection with the world’s
work to prove his usefulness, and some arrangement of automatic promotion to
give him a sense of growth.”
My response: Hoffer shows the reader that no human being can
last long without a sense of fitting into his community or dispensation,
without feeling useful, worthy, and of socially affirmed and rewarded purpose.
If his sense of worth is individually derived and self-provided or
self-created, by his skilled work with his hands, or, if he is a scribe or
artist, he is so brilliant or talented, that his production provides him with a
genuine sense of self-esteem and fittedness in his society, then he is content
even happy.
Where the skilled farmer or bricklayer is discontented but
skilled, he feels self-esteeming enough to accept his lot in life. If he were a
scribe, without status, accolades, and promotion in the hierarchy run by the
governing elite, he will have not even fake or substitute self-esteem, and that
is when he potentially could become a revolutionary.
H: “All these needs are ideally fulfilled by the status and
function of a civil servant. Ensconced in his bureaucratic niche, the scribe
looked at his world and saw it was good. He had no grievances and dreamt no
dreams.”
My response: I am sure that intellectuals and academics,
most of whom are Leftists, and likely the majority of them are elitist snobs
and aristocrats, seeking power, say and influence over the masses, impugn the
masses, accusing these putative social, intellectual and moral inferiors of not
able to run their lives on their own. I also presume, that the intellectual
contemporaries of Hoffer in his day, if they knew of Hoffer, hated him and
suppressed his influence, because he revealed to the American public what and
who they were, and how malevolent and dangerous they truly were. Intellectuals
hated him because he spoke the truth about them.
H: “ 2
At what point did the scribe make his appearance as a
writer?
For centuries after the invention of writing the scribe
exercised his craft solely in matters
connected with his employment as a civil servant. He kept records, took
dictation, copied documents and religious texts. Literature was the domain of
bards and storytellers who no more thought of writing down their stock in
trade.
When we note the approximate dates at which literature made
its first appearance in several of the ancient civilizations we detect a
certain regularity. In Egypt the earliest examples of literary writing are from
the latter part of the third millennium B.C., the period of confusion which
marked the breakdown of the Old Kingdom—the first catastrophic crisis since the
birth of civilization. In Summer, the oldest literary records are from the
early part of the second millennium B.C., after the fall of the Third Dynasty
of Ur—‘the most glorious age of Sumer.’ Sir Leonard Woolley remarks on the
strangeness of the fact ‘that the great days of the Third Dynasty of Ur have
left virtually no trace of any literary record.’ It is only when the great age
was brought to an abrupt end by the invading Amorites and Elamites that we find
a period of genuine literary activity. It was then (around 2000 B.C.) that
‘Sumerian scribes took it in hand to record the glories of the great days that
had passed away.’* (*C. Leonard Woolley, The Sumerians (Oxford: The Clarendon
Press, 1929), p. 178.). In Greece, written literature begins after the fall of
the highly bureaucratized social organization of the Mycenean age, and in
Palestine after the breakdown of the centralized Solomonic kingdom. Finally, in
China, literature begins in the sixth century B.C. during the chaotic period of
the ‘contending states’ which follow the dissolution of the Chou Empire.
The recurring connection between social debacle and the
birth of literature might suggest that it needed the apocalyptic spectacle of a
world coming to an end to release the creative flow of the scribe. Still,
granting that he was deeply moved by the sight of an eternal order dissolving
into violence and anarchy, it is questionable whether it was the spectacle as
such, however soul-stirring, that started the scribe writing. The dissolution
of the social order had a personal significance for the scribe, more so than
any other segment of the population. The aristocracy and the priesthood
weathered the social breakdown without experiencing a radical change in their
standing. Indeed, in Egypt and China the breakdown of the Empire resulted in
the creation of numerous feudal states in which the power and prestige of the
aristocracy and priesthood were unimpaired or even enhanced. The masses,
submerged in age-long subjection, continued as they were irrespective of a
change of masters. Not so the scribe: he who had been snugly embedded in his
bureaucratic berth, secure in his worth and usefulness, found himself suddenly
abandoned and unemployed.”
My response: Hoffer seems right here, that the abandoned and
unemployed scribe, dislodged from his often hereditary, bureaucratic berth, now
feeling worthless and useless, so using his writing talents to create
literature was a way to grapple after a sense of fittedness and earned
self-regard, rather than a pure love of creating for its own sake.
H: “We hear an echo of the scribes ‘private ail’ in one of
the earliest examples of Egyptian literature written by the treasury official
Ipuwer: ‘They pay taxes no more by reason of the unrest . . . The magistrates
are hungry and suffer need . . . The storehouse is bare and he that kept it is
stretched out on the ground. The splendid judgment hall, its writings are taken
away, the secret place is laid bare . . . public offices are opened and their
lists are taken away . . . Behold the officers of the land are driven out
through the land.’* (*Adolph Erman, The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians
(London: Methuen & Co., 1927), pp. 97-99.).
Stripped of his official identity the scribe not only
reached out for a new role as sage, prophet, and teacher, but had a desperate
need to shine again in the use of his skill with pen, stylus, or brush. Thus
Neferrohn. ‘a scribe with cunning fingers . . . stretched out his hand to the
box of writing materials and took him a scroll and pen-and-ink case, and then
put in writing. He wrote: ‘Up my heart that thou mayest bewail this land whence
thou are sprung . . . Rest not! Behold, it lieth before your face. . . . The
whole land hath perished, there is naught left, and the black of the nail
surviveth not what should be there.’** (**Ibid, p. 112.). He goes on lamenting
and admonishing in the manner of his contemporary Ipuwer.
In Palestine and Greece the social debacle coincided with a
diffusion of literacy due to the introduction of a simplified alphabet. The
increase in the number of literate persons at a time when there were only
meager opportunities for their adequate employment added to the unrest. Amos, a
shepherd, and Hesiod, a farmer, mastered the art of writing and were gripped by
the impulse to instruct and admonish their fellow men.
In China, many of the hereditary scribe families sank into
the masses during the period of social disintegration, and carried the art of
writing with them. Confucius came from such a family.* (*Liu Wu-chi, Confucius,
His Life and Time (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), p, 27.). It is often
the descendants of families that have come down in the world who act as a
creative ferment. The memory of past splendor is like fire in their veins and
it is likely to leak out in romancing, philosophizing, and prophesying.
So long as the scribe was kept busy as a civil servant there
was little likelihood that he would start writing. The creative impulse is
often born of a thwarted desire for commanding action.”
My response: I detect a recurring theme here in Hoffer’s
ruminations. The scribe does not turn romantic, creative, revolutionary,
philosophical, ethical or prophetic because he is driven to be creative because
it is a standard he values: rather, it is the desperate reaction of a stymied
seeker after power, as was Machiavelli the thwarted, exiled diplomat, forced to
turn to writing political philosophy.
Accidents of history force some of the talented that are
frustrated and dispossessed to take up writing and doing art. Perhaps we can
provide a positive, proactive culture that rewards the young to individuate so
that being creative and artistic is one of their outlets, to develop as private individuators, creating, thinking,
inventing, discovering purely for its own sake. Indirectly, that collectively
contributes to social stability.
H: “It was the hankering after a busy, purposeful life which
forced the energies of the disinherited scribe into creative channels. Once
started, he used everything he could lay his hands on and begin compiling
collections of poetry, myths, legends, histories, proverbs, and so on.
3
It should be obvious that the circumstances which started
the scribe writing could have equally turned him into a sheer rebel.”
My response: Hoffer the great psychologist is asserting that
the scribe, dislodged from his niche of power, wealth, usefulness and
fittedness, has two chocies. If he is an individuator to some degree, he can
create as a literary figure. If he is a determined nonindiviudator (He has
talent enough to create something brilliant or beautiful, as do all average or
exception humans, but he wills not to develop his talent, or lies to himself
that he is without talent, or quits to early after early failures when experimenting
to find and develop his latent but remarkable abilities.), then he maybe be
tempted to turn towards the destructive and revolutionary: he will do this if
he is obsessed with gaining revenge upon the world and other people: he seeks
to bring to them violent upheaval and destruction—this is how he finds his
purpose and substitute for veridical self-esteem.
H: “The revolutionary, whatever be his holy cause or
ideology, is often a man thwarted in his consuming passion for purposeful and
imposing action. ‘Next to love,’ wrote Bakunin, ‘action is the highest form of
happiness.’ He may spend most of his life talking and arguing, but once he gets
his chance he reveals himself as a superb man of action.”
My response: I think how Lenin spent a lifetime talking,
writing, and arguing, but he started a Communist juggernaut rolling once he got
his chance.
H: “In Palestine and China, the writer and the revolutionary
appeared simultaneously and were often embodied in the same person. The
prophets, as Renan suggested, were the first radical journalists, while in
China the roving bands of unemployed clerks that were a feature of the period
of the ‘contending states’ cultivated both literature and subversion. It has
been alleged that Confucius was ‘inciting the feudal lords against each other
in the course of his wandering from one state to another, with the intention of
somewhere coming into power himself.’* (*Wolfram Eberhard, A History of China
(Berkeley: University of California, 1950), p. 38.).
The scribe ancestry of the revolutionary manifests itself in
the fact that when he comes into power he creates a social pattern ideally
suited to the aspirations and talents of the scribe—a regimented social order,
planned, managed, and supervised by a horde of clerks.”
My response: The intellectual/fanatic/idealist/ideologue/revolutionary,
via applied violence and bloodshed, creates a totalitarian social pattern, and
soul-raping, brutally, federally enforced, will guarantee that the
individualism is drummed or beaten out of each and every citizen.
H: “Still, despite their common ancestry, there is a
fundamental difference between the writer’s and the rebel’s attitude toward the
world. To the genuine writer the word is an end in itself and the center of his
existence. He may dream of spectacular action and be lured to play an active
role, but in the long run he does not feel at home in the whirl of a busy life.
However imposing and successful his action, he feels in his innermost being
that he is selling his birthright for a mess of pottage. It is only when the
creative flow within him materializes in serried ranks of words that he feels
at home in the world.
Not so the rebel: to him words remain a means to an end; and
the end is action. His eyes remain fixed on the denied goal, and his energies
keep pressing against the obstacle. He cannot derive a sense of fulfillment
from the sheer manipulation of words, and inevitably drifts toward the zone
where words turn into action. Ideas has significance for him only as a prelude
to action. Theorizing, philosophizing, and writing are a means for hurdling or
exploding the obstacles on the road to action.
There is a certain antagonism between the writer and the
revolutionary. In general it is probably true that by how much the writer is a
revolutionary by so much less is he a writer. At bottom it is perhaps a
question of inner endowment: the genuine writer can write his rebellion while
the revolutionary can only live in it. In the rare instances where outstanding
capacities for revolutionary activity and creativeness are present in the same
person, the two capacities do not manifest themselves simultaneously. In
Milton, Trotsky, Koestler, Silone, and other writers came to the fore in periods
of forced or voluntary inaction. Trotsky knew that ‘Periods of high tension and
social passions leave little room for contemplation and reflection. All the
muses—even the plebian muse of journalism in spite of her sturdy hips—have hard
sledding in time of revolution.’ He also recognized that to a true rebel
writing was an anemic substitute for action. In his Diary in Exile Trotsky says
of Lassalle that he would have gladly left unwritten what he knew if only he
could have accomplished at least part of what he felt able to do, and he adds:
‘Any revolutionary feels the same way.’
4
Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence
of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status.”
My response: It is my contention that one should be skilled,
perhaps credentialed at some trade or white-collar job. What this allows is the
diversity in skills and certification so that one should able to or always can
find employment or start one’s own business. If one lives the life of the
indviduator on the side and after hours of employment, there should be no great
hue and cry for revolution against the existing dispensation, because each
individual—potentially ever one fof us--is then a hybrid creature, part
intellectual and part carpenter, but all individuator. He makes money proving
his worth to himself, which he indigenously provides for himself, out of his
own resources and efforts, via his own constructed social and private
touchstone of personal value, and these efforts provides him with his coveted,
authentic, merited veridical self-esteem. He esteems himself realistically,
thus it requires no substitute holy cause to find some passionate means cheaply
to affirm himself, based upon a creed foreign to and external to what he is and
does.
H: “The spread of literacy in an illiterate society is,
therefore, a critical process, and it has probably been an element in many
turning points in history. Perhaps in retrospect the present convulsions in the
underdeveloped countries will be seen mainly as the by-product of a sudden
increase in the number of literate persons. One hears a lot about the revolt of
the masses, but rise from the rise of the United States, it would be difficult
to point to a single historical development in which the masses were the prime
mover and chief protagonist. Certainly, the present world crisis is not
mass-made. Neither in the underdeveloped or in the advanced countries are the
masses restless, militant, and vainglorious. The explosive component of the
contemporary scene is not the clamor of the masses but the self-righteous
claims of a multitude of graduates from schools and universities. This army of
scribes is clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation and
supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated.”
My response: Hoffer, perhaps in solitary protest against
campus unrest, which other intellectuals did not at all grasp the ominous
significance of, regarding student protests here in the 60s, by 1963 Hoffer knew
that the campus protesters were not idealistic for the sake of justice,
equality and compassion, but they—or their leaders like Marcuse—were
authoritarian, Leftist fanatics, ideologues and
revolutionaries, who sought to overthrow the American dream, to implement
the rise of Communist totalitarianism in this country. These youths likely were
useful idiots, but their puppet masters were moral monsters.
H: “They hanker for the scribe’s golden age.”
My response: The 60s radicals failed, were defeated, or grew
out of their college radicalism, but when the postmodernist Leftists captured
the institutions of learning with their quietly expanding mass movement, by
2022, they were close to setting up their socialist dictatorship in America, so
everything Hoffer warned about 62 years ago is applicable today. The rise of
100 million indivuduating supercitizens is our only lasting, durable defense of
the American Way from Leftist scribes, intellectuals and revolutionaries who
hate America and work tirelessly to destroy it.
We must not persecute them or purge them with secret police,
but we should nonviolently, politically, and socially, alert the masses to what
these people are, what they are up to, and how vicious they are—not just
Leftists, but Fascists, white nationalist, radical Islamists, and ideological
mass movements of any other stripe which may arise and threaten our greatest
nation.
H: “for a return to something like the scribe-dominated
societies of ancient Egypt, China, and Europe of the Middle Ages. There is
little doubt that the present trend in the new and renovated countries towards
social regimentation stems partly from the need to create adequate employment
for a large number of scribes. And since the production of the literate is
continually increasing, the prospect is of ever-swelling bureaucracies.”
My response: Thus, as near universal literacy of some level
of accomplishment is our reality as nearly all Americans earn high school
diplomas and tens of millions are credentialed college graduates, we have
educated millions of young people who want to be pencil-pushing, mid-level
bureaucrats and change agents, berthed in bureaucratic hierarchies of every
type and description.
We cannot turn America into Soviet Russia where perhaps half
of the population supervising the working half, where millions were members of
the Communist Party, existing in huge bureaucracies which controlled every
aspect of private life and regulated the economy. Such a dispensation
necessarily is or will become authoritarian at first, and then totalitarian and
socialist. Where the government has such control of the people, they are also
purely nonindividuating, self-loathing, lazy and group-living, and are slaves
to that dispensation Communist Party running the government.
The only solution in America and for other countries in a
world with increasing literacy is to make people individuating supercitizens so
they make their money, self-realize to satisfy their intellectual cravings and
ambitions, and then they—unified in numbers and purpose—shall run together.
They will run this country as a capitalist, constitutionally republican haven
for their kind, fixed on preventing the installation of a cultural Marxist
revolution, which will later devolve into an open, full a socialist or fascist
dictatorship.
H: “Obviously, a high ratio between the supervisory and the
productive force spells economic inefficiency. Yet where social stability is an
overriding need the economic waste involved in providing suitable positions for
the educated might be an element of social efficiency.
It has often been stated that a social order is likely to be
stable so long as it gives scope to its talent. Actually, it is the ability to
give scope to the untalented that is most vital in maintaining social
stability. For not only are the untalented more numerous but, since they cannot
transmute their grievances into a creative effort, their disaffection will be
more pronounced and explosive.”
My response: I rarely criticize Hoffer, but he is mistaken
here. Like Jordan Peterson, though Hoffer allows that the masses have a lot of
talent for and despite being people of just average intelligence and talent (Peterson
will not even concede this, suggesting only that the untalented masses of
average IQ can at best achieve moral excellence—which is worthy, of course, in
and of itself.), but that the natural and rare elite talented people of high IQ
are few in number (say less than 6% of the population), so only for them is
self-realization, advanced personal expression of individualism and the
opportunity to develop their talent as geniuses for the benefit of the rest of
society.
These geniuses will often make their own routes to express
or give scope to their talents, thus, if successful and productive as talented
geniuses, geniuses and the gifted usually need not revolt or overturn society
to find substitute fake esteem, so unsatisfying, as passionate promoters of
fake self-worth, gotten as they work to further a rapid cause to gain power for
their master. For the zealots, the acquired sense of substitute, mendacious
self-esteem is provided for them by their mass movement, whose guru is pushing
ideological solutions which are but his unjustified attack upon blameless
society, and the revolution is his power grab to take over the system, and then
rule the masses with a firm hand and iron fist.
My view is that of course there are the few innately gifted
of exceptional talent and IQ, but the other 94% of the people have plenty of
talent and IQ, which as rational egoists individuating their potential, likely
can work hard, overachieve, and somehow unlock the latent higher IQ hidden in
their consciousness, and they will be able to locate and express practically
and externally what their talents are urging them to produce and make. All are
impressively talented, and if they maverize, they will light up their
consciousness so they can create and think wondrously, beautifully, originally,
even though the geniuses will stay ahead of them a bit all the time. That is
fine and need not intimidate them at all, or make them jealous, or obstructive
of superior geniuses.
Such a society of the
masses that are individuating supercitiens, will give scope to their talents in
making money, self-realizing and forming civil if open groups (Individuals and
individuators will be able to come and go as living angels as each wants to,
without social punishment or disapprobation). This advanced and advancing society
will be of the people by the people and for the people, in great majorities.
These individuating citizens will be social rather stable and contented, so
automatically the majority will turn their back on untrustworthy, anti-social revolutionaries,
who deservedly will be shunned, marginalized, ignored, and kept powerless. If
they turn violent or terroristic, then the police, prosecutors and judges can
put them in jail where they belong.
All are naturally very talented and smart--very smart-- and
there are not untalented people: all people, even the mentally-handicapped and
the mentally ill, and the autistic are individualistic enough, that by
concentrating and keeping at it, they too can find new ways to individuate and
maverize.
For those that do, nonindividuated, group-live and do
nothing with their lives, these are only people that will not to actualize
their amazing abilities, being as they lack self-confidence, are
self-destructive, favor ease, pleasure, hedonism and self-indulgence over
self-discipline and self-sacrifice, and besides they enjoy disobeying the Good
Spirits ordering them to get going and serve God by making something of oneself
and improving the world thereby.
In the defense of all the people, average or exceptional, we
are all imbued with altruist morality, and that is not the moral code of the
good gods and the angels. Humans are biologically made evil, lazy, cowardly,
and self-destructive, so for anyone to will to maverize is a big, commendable, impressive lift, but
it can be individually done and gained, and it must be done if one would enter
the kingdom of heaven.
People, each of them, must decide to individual-live and
individuate, to repudiate being any longer, indolent, and weak, to lack self-confidence
and self-discipline, and not to possess the iron will to make something of
their lives.
And, eventually when the majority of a people decide that it
is not only socially acceptable to maverize, but socially mandated to maverize,
as majority decide to individuate, then the untalented will be few in number
and easy for the peaceful law-abiding majority of individuators to nonviolently
and socially suppress, as that majority of supercitizens are able to transmute
their grievances into a creative effort, so the society need not become
explosive while still evolving and changing, but to develop gently, steadily at
room temperature, legally too.
H: “Thus the most troublesome problem which confronts social
engineering is how to provide for the untalented, and what is equally
important, how to provide against them. For there is a tendency in the
untalented to divert their energies from their own development into the
management, manipulation, and probably frustration of others.”
My response: The untalented in any society are the sleeping
majority, be they PhDs, college-educated, high school educated, literate,
illiterate or grade-school dropouts; and these people, every one of them, are
blessed by the Good Spirits with miraculous capacities to create, and none are
untalented (Hoffer is referring to them as untalented, like Peterson similarly ascribes
them as being.). They are untalented because they refuse to answer personally
the divine call from the Light Couple, Individuators Both, for each human to
take up her cross and self-realize while worshiping God. They were not born
untalented but remain untalented because they refuse to be visionary and be
born again as individuating anarchists.
They choose to be
nothing or very little, and these people run in packs. They must lie to each
other and themselves, declaring that, as they are unchanged and unmotivated,
they are healthy, normal, moral, typical and fine just the way they are. So
they live and die wasting their lives, doing group-living, group-identifying, serving group
holy causes. They play sadomasochistic group social games to hide behind to
keep their weak, nagging consciences at bay.
Proponents of their collectivist, group values and selfless
altruistic morality urge them to remain humble and nonindividuating which they
conveniently construe as modesty, but their raging lack of self-esteem will
undercut them every time.
As a consequence, they remain untalented, and must push for
expanded, group-living arrangements, group power sharing arrangements (the
masses ruled by elites), group sponsored and official metanarratives and
doctrines.
Immersed in a web of lies so deep and wide, groupists lie
even more, as they double down, taking perverse pride in these empty, corrupt
living arrangements and bad values. They continue lying to themselves and to
each other, attributing self-esteem to themselves and each other as they are, a
mendacious self-esteem unmerited and tawdry, under which all are hurt and hurt
each other in this failed power model, the collectivist power of powerlessness
model. They will get sick of it all occasionally, and get angry enough to revolt
and burn down society, once the inner anger, bitterness, frustration and
self-hatred become too passionate, too intense too unbearable. But revolution
and mass movements do not help or alleviate their pain: it only intensifies it
and prolongs their suffering.
Hoffer, the champion of latent egoist morality well knows
that when people work and are successful in their personal lives, many of them
untalented by his definition (not mine), they will be individualistic and
rational enough to have some fair degree of basic veridical, merited
self-esteem so they have not need to have power over others as intellectual or
junta elites ruling the masses who just need to be left alone to run their own
lives and affairs.
H: “They want to police, instruct, guide, and meddle. In an
adequate social order, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of
usefulness and growth without interfering with the development of talent around
them. This requires, first, an abundance of opportunities for purposeful action
and self-advancement. Secondly, a wide diffusion of technical and social skills
so that people will be able to work and manage their affairs with a minimum of
tutelage. The scribe mentality is best neutralized by canalizing energies into
purposeful and useful pursuits, and by raising the cultural level of the whole
population so as to blur the dividing line between the educated and
uneducated.”
My response: By raising of a generation of Americans as
individuating supercitizens, the dividing line between the educated and
uneducated is not only blurred, it is erased outright. This more than anything
will eliminate elites, and thus end class society and all its accompanying
political, cultural, political, and legal injustices, inequalities, and
violation of rights.
There can be no rough equality of power, wealth, and human
rights, until we rid society of elites (the few) oppressing, exploiting,
enslaving, and abusing the masses (the many); both types of maladjusted groupists
need to go away. When every or most members of the masses finally become elite
in their consciousness, rationality, confidence, and competence with
demonstrated products of their efforts seen
by neighbors and society, and yet are about average in wealth, power and
voting rights, an upper middle class majority of such elite average citizens who will bend the knee to no
elite, and crave no collective power to subjugate their neighbors. Th is the
only social justice warrior worth his salt: the average individuating supercitizen.
We cannot have Utopia on earth because darkness is strong
and pervasive here, and we are fallen creatures; still, with maverizing and
service to a good divinity, we can come close as a possible.
H: “If such an arrangement lacks provisions for the
encouragement of the talented it yet has the merit of not interfering with
them. We do not know enough to suit a social pattern to the realization of all
the creative potentialities inherent in a population. But we do know that a
scribe-dominated society is not optimal for the full unfolding of the creative
mind.”
My response: If all can individuate and actualize their
talents as individuals using their reason, intuition, and creativity in a
playful yet serious set of self-application exercises and operations with no
scribe elites interfering, then liberty, creativity and high civilization and a
free, prosperous, peaceful society can be realized and kept.
