I will write out Chapter 15 of Eric Hoffer’s Chapter 15 from his book, The Ordeal of Change. This chapter runs from Page 117 through 136 and is entitled The Unnaturalness of Human Nature. I will respond where appropriate.
Before I launch into this Chapter, I would like to make some general remarks. Human nature is unnatural because we have a soul, and our souls are in nature and outside of nature, but are not the same as physical nature, inanimate and animate. Our souls are the divine spark which the good deities, our creators, instilled in each fetus at birth.
Our soul, our consciousness, our mind, is more than just our biological brain, and our unnaturalness separates us from the rest of nature, all its creatures and flora. We have free will: I am not sure if I am a compatibilist or not at this point—like Dennis Prager, I am likely a metaphysical libertarian and incompatibilist--but, if the individual maverizes, then most certainly she may will to do otherwise, and she is the source of her own choosing. This may or may not defeat causal or nomological determinism, but as the individuator’s consciousness develops, she is able to grow in her power to self-determine, so she becomes a living angel, a miniscule divine creator, and at that point, natural determinism ruling her body and her brain is her servant, more than her master, as she alters the fabric of reality, usually not miraculously or magically (The Mother and the Father forbid her altering natural law any more than necessary).
Hoffer the atheist knew human nature was unnatural, but, he did not believe in God or souls in humans, so, unlike me, he would not equate human unnaturalness with supernaturalness, the divine spark intrinsic within and expressed unavoidably by each human being.
Satan and Lera own the world of nature more than do the Father and Mother, so evil or naturalness is still what humans are: we are born evil and depraved (more natural than unnatural), more than born good and just, so, we have to choose to be free and become spiritually and morally good, loving and personal talent-developers and enhancers.
Here is Hoffer (H after this): “In the early days of modern science we find outstanding scientists expressing their wonder and delight that the prodigious variety of nature should be the work of but few, simple laws. Galileo saw it as ‘a custom and habit of nature’ to achieve its ends by means which are ‘common, simple, and easy.’ Kepler was convinced that ‘nature loves simplicity,’ and Newton wrote feelingly how ‘nature is pleased with simplicity and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.’
During the same period, the men whose preoccupation was with human nature spoke not of simplicity but of incredible complexity. Montaigne never wearied of expatiating on the inconstancy, lack of uniformity, involuteness, and unpredictability of human manifestations. It seemed to him that every bit in us plays every moment in its own game, and that ‘there is as much difference between us and ourselves, as between us and others.’ Pascal, a student of both nature and human nature, contrasted the simplicity of things with man’s double and complex nature. He saw man as a mass of contradictions: an angel and a brute, a monster and a prodigy, the crown and scum of created things, the glory and scandal of the universe. Whatever harmony there is in us is ‘fantastic, changeable and various.’ He concluded that ‘men are of necessity so mad that not to be mad was madness in another form.’ He thought it quite in order that Plato and Aristotle should have written on politics as though they were laying down rules for a madhouse.”
My response: I could not agree more with Hoffer, Montaigne and especially Pascal. I have long thought humans were basically evil and basically insane, that to become good, loving, and sane are innate but naturally weak set of capacities that each sinner possesses, and must strive mightily, consciously, and consistently to will that his character will become a good will.
Nature and all the animate and inanimate life forms or objects populating it are rich and varied beyond belief, but they are relatively simple in comparison to humans, part simple and natural, and part angelic and supernatural, very complex indeed.
H: “In the study of nature an explanation must not only be consistent with the facts, but also as simple and direct as possible. Where several explanations are advanced, the rule is followed that the one which is more simple is also most nearly correct. To choose the more complex explanation, says a recent writer on the nature of science, would be as sensible ‘as traveling eastward around the world to reach your neighbor’s house which is next door to the west.’
In human affairs the sensibleness of the direct, simple approach is by no means self-evident. Here it is often true that the simplest ends are reached by the most roundabout and extravagant means. Even the predictable comes here to pass in unpredictable ways. To forget that man is a fantastic creature is to ignore his most crucial trait, and when contemplating human nature the wildest guesses and hunches are legitimate.”
My response: It is not that above Hoffer is discrediting or dismissing the application of Occam’s razor as a heuristic method for scientific hypothesizing, but he insists rightly that such an approach to studying humans would be simplistic and unfruitful.
Hoffer refers to man’s fantastic nature as his most crucial trait, and I interpret this to mean that man’s essence is being a fantastic creature, more than just being a rational animal. Recognizing humans as fantastic creatures might serve as a more realistic and productive psychological approach to understanding humans, what they are, how they work, and how they should proceed personally and unitedly.
H: “ 2
The fantastic quality of human nature is partly a product of man’s unfinishedness. Being without specialized organs, man is in a sense a half-animal. He has to finish himself by technology, and in doing so he is a creator—in sense a half-god.”
My response: These three sentences anticipate my Mavellonialist assertion that all are ordered by God to individuate, to finish or more nearly complete and fulfill their angelic destiny to make actual their potential, their innate gifts, and talents. Hoffer anticipates Mavellonialism so closely, 60 years ago, that I find it a breathtaking realization.
H: “Again, lacking organic adaptations to a particular environment, he must adapt the environment to himself, and re-create the world. The never-ending task of finishing himself, of transcending the limits of his physical being, is the powerhouse of man’s creativeness and the source of his unnaturalness. For it is in the process of finishing himself that man sloughs off the fixity and boundless submissiveness of nature.”
My response: I cannot improve upon what Hoffer wrote in these three sentences above, but clearly, he regards humans as activistic beyond the submissive fatalism of other creatures in nature, doing what nature programmed them to do and allowed them to do. If a human self-realizes and is energetic and industrious, her unnaturalness can push her to produce new concepts and technologies.
H: “The unnaturalness of human nature should offer a clue to the central meaning of man’s ascent through the millennia: it was a result of a striving to break loose from nature and get out from under the iron laws which dominate it.”
My response: Only in breaking free from the iron grip of nature and its laws, in a state of existential and social liberty, can free-willed humans who are beasts, defy this basic nature by growing unnaturally in the artificial human realm, and begin to explore what it is to be human or angelic, unnaturally creative and living a full life filled with purpose, meaning and satisfaction.
H: “The striving was not conscious, and it did not start from an awareness of strength. The process of reflection—of self-awareness—which fueled man’s ascent was to begin with an awareness of helplessness: man the half-animal became poignantly aware of his unfinishedness and imperfection. He worshiped the more favored forms of life; worshiped their specialized organs, their skills and strength. He probably first killed animals, ate their flesh, and put on their skins, not to still his hunger and to keep warm but to acquire their strength, speed, and skill and become like them. Naked, unarmed, and unprotected, man clung desperately to an indifferent mother earth and passionately claimed kinship with her more favored children. But the discovery that he could create substitutes for the organs and inborn perfections which he lacked turned worship and imitation into a process of vying—into a striving to overcome nature and overtake nature and leave it behind. By finishing and remaking himself man also remade the world, and the man-made world no longer clung to nature but straddled it. Instead of claiming kinship with other forms of life man now claimed a descent and line apart, and began to see his uniqueness and dignity in that which distinguished him from the rest of creation.”
My response: Humans started off aware of their helplessness, nakedness, and imperfection, so they worshiped animals as deities. As their technology and culture grew and expanded, they begin to vie with nature, and then surpass creatures of nature. I worry that increasingly skilled humans will see themselves as superior to the good divinities which they once faithfully and humbly served and relied upon, and transhumanistically, in a disastrous mood of Luciferian pride, aspire to overthrow the good deities, and to rule the universe in their place. Should we go that route, we will be destroyed our divine mistresses and masters, as the price paid for our reckless hubris and rebellion.
H: “Seen thus, the human uniqueness of an aspiration or an achievement should perhaps be gauged by how much it accentuates the distinction between human affairs and nonhuman nature: and it should be obvious that the aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations. Freedom from coercion, from want, from fear, from death are freedom from forces and circumstances which would narrow the gap separating human nature from nature and impose on man the passivity and predictability of nature.”
My response: In other words, human uniqueness, that state of existence most desirable and conducive to human happiness and positive self-esteem, is best exemplified in the individual chasing after his aspirations and dreams in a manner which removes natural control over him, so he is able to be free to be all that he can be. In a state of divine grace, and worldly liberty, the individuated individual is most able to demonstrate his uniqueness as a living angel.
H: “By the same token, the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness is that of absolute power. The corruption inherent in absolute power derives from the fact that such power is never free from the tendency to turn man into a thing, and press him back into the matrix of nature from which he has risen.”
My response: Authoritarian dispensations, complete with hierarchies, ruling elites, and class stratifications, undergirded by altruist morality, nonindividuating, group-living and mass enslavement and self-denial, this is the unnatural extension of the iron laws of nature into the human realm, complete with humans being reduced to enslaved things, pushed down into the mud, all will, resistance and the fire of individual uniqueness are snuffed out.
H: “For the impulse of power is to turn every variable into a constant, and give to commands the inexorableness and relentlessness of the laws of nature. Hence absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its antihumanity.”
My response: Only as free persons and frees spirits with the freedom, power, space, resources, and opportunity to develop as they see fit, can the uniqueness, wondrous singularity and beauty of each living angel be manifested in reality, and that is what the good deities envision for us.
H: “
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To make of human affairs a coherent, precise, predictable whole one must ignore or suppress man as he really is, and treat human nature as a mere aspect of nature. The theoreticians do it by limiting the shaping forces of man’s destiny to nonhuman factors: providence, the cosmic spirit, geography, climate, economic or physiochemical factors. The practical men of power try to eliminate the human variable by inculcating iron discipline or blind faith, by dissolving the unpredictable individual in a compact group, by subjecting the individual’s judgment and will to a ceaseless barrage of propaganda, and by sheer coercion. It is by eliminating man from their equation that the makers of history can predict the future, and the writers of history can give a pattern to the past. There is an element of misanthropy in all determinists.”
My response: I imagine that Hoffer is a believer in human free will, that the completion in establishing personal human uniqueness and individuality require that each person maverize, and, to experience freedom in and from coercion in surrounding society and its social structures, extends to each member of society the freedom to be all that she can be, if she so chooses to live. Social determinists and tyrannies of all sorts hate people, hurt them and plan to control them.
H: “To all of them man as he is is a nuisance, and they strive to prove by various means that there is no such thing as human nature.”
My response: Hoffers seems like an essentialist: that there is a universal human nature that binds us all, and, paradoxically, we are all blessed and cursed with a divine command to maverize and live creatively in freedom and happiness.
H: “Even in the freest society power is charge with the impulse to turn men into precise, predictable automata. When watching men of power in action it must always be kept in mind that, whether they know it or not, their main purpose is the elimination or neutralization of the independent individual—the independent voter, consumer, worker, owner, thinker—and that every device they employ aims at turning man into a manipulatable ‘animated instrument,’ which is Aristotle’s definition of a slave.”
My response: Hoffer, ever the realist and shrewd reader of the human heart, knows that every human suffers from low self-esteem, and that that innate human taint propels that person to seek power of the wrong kind, the demonic, selfless power of powerlessness, a dispensation under which all are enslaved and subjugated, be they oppressor or oppressed.
Only the free, principled, liberty-loving individuators, as a role model for our citizenry, would be right-oriented in terms of the power the individual seeks to acquire, the power of powerfulness by which each individual in a free society refuses to oppress others, or allow others to oppress the self, while all maverize and work and live politically, economically and socially.
H: “On the other hand, every device employed to bolster individual freedom must have as its chief purpose the impairment of the absoluteness of power. The indication are that such an impairment is brought about by strengthening the individual and pitting him against the possessors of power, but by distributing and diversifying power and pitting one category or unit of power against the other.”
My response: Here I disagree with Hoffer a bit: The impairment of the absoluteness of centralized power is best impaired by strengthening the individual and pitting him against the possessors of power, but, Hoffer, rightly had no hope, in his day, that such stalwart, virtuous humans existed, let alone that Mavellonialist training to rear up a generation of individuating supercitizens, would come about a few years after his death, a generation of supercitizens to end tyranny and keep it at bay for hundreds of years, but not permanently for a good culture never stays good forever: entropy returns and evil will rebound at some point.
Still, Hoffer was correct in working with what was available, by decentralizing power between competing units of power, so that a tradition of liberty and decentralized social and institutional power could come about in society for the gain of all.
My recommendation of Mavellonializing the masses (This only works if the majority of the masses, each of their own free will, elect to become feisty, fearless, principled, involved supercitizens.) to convert them into individuating supercitizens does not contradict, but complements Hoffer’s plan to keep power units battling and relatively weak, so that freedom can accidentally arise.
H: “Where power is one, the defeated individual, however strong and resourceful, can have no refuge and no recourse.
There is no doubt that of all political systems the free society is the most ‘unnatural.’ It embodies in the words of Bergson, ‘a mighty effort in a direction contrary to nature.’”
My response: I hand it to this remarkable man, with this enlightening observation that of all political systems, the free society is the most unnatural: only a moral genius with a pure connection to cognitively identifying and being able to articulate what is true, would construe the free society as the most unnatural. For me, a theist, an unnatural but free society is an earthly but poor imitation (still very good and very free) of an unnatural or supernatural free society that is the kingdom of heaven, a constitutional republic ruled by the Father and Mother, the Individuating Supercitizens In Charge, and their lesser good deities, angels and human saints would enjoy, if not complete and perfect liberty, but the next thing to it. In that kingdom, the power of powerfulness would reign supreme.
H: “Totalitarianism, even when it goes hand in hand with a modernization of technique, constitutes a throwback to the primitive, and a return to nature.”
My response: The vicious CCP ruling Red China with AI surveillance and cyberworld technologies to oversee and rule the abused masses of China, for all its Space Age glitter, has reduced the average Chinese citizen to being a piece of dirt to be shoveled whenever and wherever the government decides to spade him to.
H: “It is significant that the ‘back to nature’ movements since the days of Rousseau, though generous and noble in origin, have inevitably tended to terminate in absolutism and the worship of brutish force.”
My response: Once again, we view the horrible repercussions of ultraist idealists when their revolution for the sake of the masses takes hold in a country, and totalitarian hell is the unintended (or secretly plotted for by the revolutionary elite) consequence of violent upheaval committed for the sake of the people in the future.
H: “Considering the complexity and unpredictability of man, it is doubtful whether effective social management can be based on expert knowledge of human nature.”
My response: Take that, elitists on the Left and on the Right, religious or secular. People are so complex that only the individual is able to, by maverizing, figure out what works for her, and if she cooperates and gently competes with other individuating supercitizens, then democratic, wholesome social management can be made to work, warts and all, by the masses, upon the masses and for the masses, experts and ruling elitists be damned and handcuffed permanently.
H: “Societies are likely to function tolerably well either under a total dictatorship, which need not take human nature into account, or when least interfered with by government. Both absolute government and nominal government are ways of having to avoid dealing with human nature.”
My response: People cannot be free, happy, prosperous, and fulfilled unless the dispensation, which rules them with their willing consent, is a polity which directly confronts the need for a functioning society to embrace human nature directly as it is.
This entails allowing all children to self-realize, based in egoist morality, and to grow into adulthood as individuating supercitizens, and thus human nature is neither suppressed, ignored, or shunted aside, as a free, individuating people live their uniqueness as talented individuals, happy and contributing.
H: “
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Power, when exercised over matter or over man, is partial to simplification. It wants simple problems, simple solutions, simple definitions. It sees in complication a product of weakness—the torturous path compromise must follow.”
My response: Authoritarian power requires and seeks simplification, one way, our way, is the absolutely perfect and only way to proceed, and there will be tolerated no republican qualifications and protests from vying individuals or critical thinkers freely speaking their point of view. There will be no enduring them, no compromise, only total violent state defeat of such dissident voices.
H: “Now, whereas in the realm of matter the great simplifiers are the great scientists and technologists, in human affairs the great simplifiers are the great coercers—the Hitlers and Stalins. To some extent, Hitler and Stalin were scientists of man the way the physicist and chemist are scientists of matter. Their policies and crimes were motivated as much by the scientist’s predilection for simplification, predictability, and experimentation as by doctrinaire tenets or sheer malevolence. Even their murderous intolerance of dissenters had a ‘scientific’ aspect: a dissenter is to the absoluteness of power what an exception is to the validity of a formulated scientific rule—both must be dealt with and somehow eliminated.”
My response: Both science and health standards can be twisted to serve totalitarian ends.
H: “It is no coincidence that the men of absolute power in Soviet Russia have been so intrigued by the social implications of the Pavlovian experiments on dogs, and that concentration camps in Germany and Communist countries became factories of dehumanization, in which men were reduced to the state of animals, and were experimented on the way scientists experiment on rats and dogs. Absolute power produces not a society but a menagerie—even if it be what D’Argenson called a ‘managerie of happy men.’
It is an awesome thing that the most breath-taking example of daring we have witnessed in the second quarter of the twentieth century was the daring to think low enough of human beings. Both Hitler and Stalin displayed this daring in an unprecedented degree, and they caught the world unawares and almost overwhelmed it.
The full savor of power comes not from the mastery of nature but of the mastery of man.”
My response: This quote is amazing: that feeling powerful is at its zenith when a strongman crushes the innocent beneath his boot.
The uptick in scientific research and experimentation in the last 300 years has transformed society beyond recognition, and the empirical impulse to predict and control nature can be perverted to predict and control people. And this is Hoffer’s thesis, a warning that the passion to reduce human nature to manageable proportions, to simplify and to make this nature predictable has been converted into a brutal campaign to control make humans and humanity simple and predictable humanity for the convenience and satisfaction of ruling elites who applied mutilating “scientific principles” to human nature.
But the scientific, objective orientation can resort to studying and working with nature, and this more modest ambitiousness need not lead to totalitarianism; note the Hebrews lived apart from nature without tearing up people or nature, and that is the wholesome relationship between God and nature, and God is freedom and love.
The drive to reduce, direct and crush humans is the impulse to reduce humans to matter. Enslavers need not grow only out of a scientific disposition: enslavers can grow their oppressive dispensations instinctively too as organic irrational forces in their natures motivate them to oppress others, subjecting and forcing people into groups with hierarchical class assignments designated to formalize and legalize patterns of exploitation, enslavement, abuse, and oppression.
H: “It is questionable whether he who can move mountains and tell rivers whither to flow has as exquisite a sense of power as he who can command the multitude and turn human beings into animated automata. Hence we find that a spectacular increase in man’s power over nature is likely to be followed by a passionate attempt to master man—to use power gained by victory over nature in the enslavement of men. Such a diversion is first discernible in the transition from the late Neolithic to the totalitarianism of the ancient river-valley civilizations. In the Near East, as pointed out earlier, the late Neolithic saw something like an industrial revolution; the era of civilization that followed was mainly preoccupied with the taming of man by coercion and magic.
The scientific and industrial revolution of modern times represents the next giant step in the mastery over nature; and here, too, an enormous increase in man’s power over nature is followed by an apocalyptic drive to subjugate man and reduce human nature to the status of nature. Even where enslavement is employed in a mighty effort to tame nature, one has the feeling that the effort is but a tactic to legitimize total subjugation. Thus, despite its spectacular achievements in science and technology, the twentieth century will probably be seen in retrospect as a century mainly preoccupied with the mastery and manipulation of men.”
My response: It is chilling to think that mastery of nature via science and technology might have inspired authoritarians and ruling elites to turn those new skill into mastering and manipulating fellow humans.
H: “Nationalism, Socialism, Communism, Fascism, militarism, cartelization and unionization, propaganda and advertising are all aspects of a general relentless drive to manipulate men and neutralize the unpredictability of human nature. Here, too, the atmosphere is heavy-laden with coercion and magic.”
My response: Hoffer is not repelled by science and technology, but he is worried that to master nature is as a deterministic master of it is fatally attractive to totalitarian elites to seek to determine and make predictable and controllable all citizens, all reduced to slavery as corralled, meek groupists.
We need to insist that people resist as individuals where control and determinism for the self are self-chosen and self-regulated, be the future for the individual know to them or unpredictable and open-ended.
H: “
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It was not the least part of the uniqueness of the ancient Hebrews that they were the first to enunciate a clear-cut separation between man and nature. In all ancient civilizations there was a feeling that a profound relationship existed between things that happened in nature and the course of human affairs. The whole structure of magic was founded on the assumption of an identity between human nature and nature. The Hebrews were the first to reject any close ties or kinship between man and the rest of creation.”
My response: Hoffer is onto something here: once the Hebrews led the way—that human nature was different from and apart from the rest of nature and creation—then began the slow moral and cultural progressing upward and outward for humans to live the unique, unnatural, unfinished, individual lives which God meant for them to experience.
H: “Since their day, sun, starts, sky, earth, sea, rivers, plants, and animals have no longer been the seat of mysterious powers and the arbiters of man’s fate. They have been but the handiwork of a one and only God who created both nature and man, yet made man in his own image—a fellow creator.”
My response: We were made in God’s image, as fellow creators or individuators, living in history, not in indistinguishable, eternal time.
H: “Since the Hebrews, history rather than cosmic phenomena has been the meaningful drama of the universe.
The ancient Hebrews were the first to demonstrate that man can defy and put to naught the law of the survival of the fittest which rules the rest of lfie. They set in motion an alchemy of the soul which transmutes elements of weakness into potent substitutes for all the attributes of the strong. They invented fanaticism, the distant hope, the boundless dedication; and equipped with these substitutes the weak not only survive but often confound the mighty.
On the whole, the unnaturalness of human nature is more strikingly displayed in the weak of the human species than in the strong. The strong are as a rule more simple, direct, and comprehensible—in a word, more natural. The indications are that in the process of tearing loose from nature it was the weak that took the first steps, Chased out of the forest by the strong, they first essayed to walk erect, and in the intensity of their soul, first uttered words, and first grabbed a stick to use as a weapon and tool. The weak’s singular capacity for evolving substitutes for that which they lack suggests they played a chief role in the evolvement of technology.”
My response: The weak may have been physical weak, or mostly they might have just been misfits or social rejects that could not fit in the communal groups of their tribes, so being ejected, forced them to innovate to survive, to cope, to find substitute meaning, and these individualized individuals, ejected from the herd, may have contributed to slow human advancement.
H: “Man is most peculiarly human when he cannot have his way. His momentous achievements are rarely the clean forward thrust but rather of a soul intensity generated in front of an apparently insurmountable obstacle which bars his way to a cherished goal.”
My response: If I interpret Hoffer correctly here, man is most peculiarly human when he cannot have his way; he individuates, innovates and invents as an awakened individual when group-living and group-identifying are denied him, or he somehow gets shunned by the powers that be in his community. When the atomistic individual cannot have his way, is permanently misfitted and displaced from the group or community to which he desperately wanted to remain part of, then he the weak and powerless socially is forced, if he would survive and have some sense of meaning and purpose, must find new narratives and technologies which he invents, so the majority or their descendants, the socially strong, will benefit from his innovating. As an exiled soul, the ancient individual became animated and alive accidentally, unwittingly, and unwillingly, not as planned and set up under Mavellonialism.
H: “It is here that potent words and explosive substitutes have their birth, and the endless quest, and the stretching of the soul which encompasses heaven and earth.”
My response: It sounds as if Hoffer is also suggesting that people as groupists can react to being thwarted or dispossessed by joining or starting mass movements, as well as making individual contributions.
H: “Since it was man’s unfitness—his being an outsider and outcast on this planet—which started him on his unique course, it should not seem anomalous that misfits and outsiders are often in the forefront of human endeavor and the first to grapple with the unknown. The impulse to escape an untenable situation often prompts humans not to shrink back but to plunge ahead.”
My response: It seems likely to me that man’s ontological and biological unfitness to easily, seamlessly immerse himself in nature like other creatures is due to his angelic unnaturalness, and this heightened if painful dislocation or consciousness, if handled carefully, can impel a person to become a developing individual, apart from nature and even his own human pack.
The misfit, the weak, the outside, the individualist often was the one at the forefront of change and working against the unknown.
H: “Moeover, it is in accord with the uniqueness of the human pattern that the misfits of the species should try to fit in not by changing themselves but by changing the world. Hence their bent for reform, innovation, tinkering, and plunging.”
My response: Misfits may be individualistic or groupist, but they are more activistic than popular joiners that fit in; the latter (joiners) are likely more fatalistic, less inclined to change where they find warmth, status, recognition and meaning. It could be that being fit can be defined as fitting in, as well as being adept at role-playing competently in a social dispensation in such a way as to gain and keep social approval.
H: “This we find misfits in the vanguard of the settlements of new lands and the elaboration of new ways and methods in the economic, political, and cultural fields.
It is the unique glory of the human species that its rejected do not fall by the wayside but become the building stones of the new, and those who cannot fit into the present become shapers of the future. Those, like Nietzsche and D. H. Lawerence, who see in the influence of the weak a taint that might lead to decadence and degeneration are missing the point. It is precisely the peculiar role played by the weak that has given the human species its uniqueness. One should see the dominant role of the weak in shaping man’s fate not as a perversion of natural instincts and vital impulses, but as a starting point of the deviation which led man to break away from, and rise above nature—not as a degeneration but as the generation of a new order of creation.”
My response: Hoffer, not Lawerence and Nietzsche, better realized how the collectivized weak, advance the human cause. The weak are the unwitting change agents of history, and that is socially useful, but if they maverized rather than revolted or destroyed, then their contribution would aid humanity, as well as make them psychologically and morally strong in the process.
H: “The weak are not a noble breed. Their sublime deeds of faith, daring and self-sacrifice usually spring from questionable motives. The weak hate not wickedness but weakness;”
My response: This is a stirring, famous Hofferian quote of special interest. If they can be strong in a collective totalitarian state that has worldly success, though it is wicked and is replete with malevolence, they are perversely proud of it, like Russian citizens are of their authoritarian state invading Ukraine to expand the empire and Motherland once again.
Hoffer: “and one instance of their hatred of weakness is hatred of self. All the passionate pursuits of the weak are in some degree a striving to escape, blur, or disguise an unwanted self. It is a striving shot through with malice, envy, self-deception, and a host of other petty impulses; yet it often culminates in superb achievements.”
My response: If people were individuators rather than unhappy, desperate, selfless groupists, there would be no need to escape the self, and people could culminate in superb achievements by working together at room temperature without all the drama, bloodshed, and needless suffering.
H: “Thus we find that people who fail in everyday affairs often show a tendency to reach out for the impossible. They become responsive to grandiose schemes, and will display unequaled steadfastness, formidable energies and a special fitness in the performance of tasks which would stump superior people. It seems paradoxical that defeat in dealing with the possible should embolden people to attempt the impossible, but a familiarity with the mentality of the weak reveals what seems to be a path of daring is actually an easy way out: It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings. For when we fail in attaining the possible the blame is solely ours, but when we fail in attaining the impossible we are justified in attributing it to the magnitude of the task.”
My response: I do not deny that Hoffer here displays his shrewd read of the psychology of the weak, and I accept readily his analysis. Nonetheless, people are weak failures, lacking worldly success and competency, not because they innately lack the aptitude, talent, or competence to cope and win in the world, but, rather, they did not believe in themselves, they gave up to readily to soon, and they should have persisted building competence, skill acquisition and professional competency, which would allow them to esteem themselves, and justifiably to feel able, successful and strong. They never lacked the ability, will, confidence (confidence is based on task success patterns) or talent to be worldly strong, worldly successful; they are only weak failures with no self-esteem because their believing such about themselves made being a weak failure a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe you are nothing and can only be nothing, so will not even try to better yourself, you end up as a weak nothing. That sad personal state is earned, not biological destiny.
H: “The inept and unfit also display a high degree of venturesomeness in welcoming and promoting innovations in all fields. It is not usually the successful who advocate drastic social reforms, plunge into new undertakings in business or industry, go out to tame the wilderness, or evolve new modes of expression in literature, art, music, etc. People who make good usually stay where they are go on doing more and better what they already know how to do. The plunge into the new is often an escape from an untenable situation and a maneuver to mask one’s ineptness. To adopt the role of the pioneer and avant-garde is to place oneself in a situation where ineptness and awkwardness are acceptable, and even unavoidable; for experience and know-how count little in tackling the new, and we expect the wholly new to be ill-shapen and ugly.”
My response: A society of skilled, highly competent, innovative, intellectual individuators, as workers and doers, would be and feel fit and competent to work and function in the system at hand, while being mildly adventurous to keep from themselves or society from growing stale, as they constantly tinker with new fashions, and technologies, to be married to existing customs and skill sets. People can have their cake and eat it too.
H: “Now, to point to the discrepancy between questionable motives and imposing achievements is not to decry humanity but to extol it.”
My response: As Hoffer here identifies another paradox or quandary, that questionable human motives can serve to motivate desperate people to unite to achieve great things, that reality and inconsistency uncovered, disclosing the gap between what the idealists and masses comprising a mass movement, ascribe to themselves (the highest and most noble motives), and what are their actual motives, need neither horrify us, or enrage us so we accuse Hoffer of being cynical and grim about human motives for what they do.
Implied in Hoffer’s sentence above is that we should worry less about purity of motive, then to worry about the consequences of action. We also cannot help people live better until we understand what are their motives, what is the likelihood that they are being honest about their aims, and that, unless they publicly admit and confess that they are sinners of questionable motivation, there will be no moral progress without this personal and collective difficult first step.
Moral consequentialists like Dennis Prager, Hoffer and I am, worry not much about someone’s motivation—we like it if their intention is kind and honorable—but we keenly attend to what actions they take, and what are the ramifications for society downstream of their idealistic ambitions being reified?
H: “For the outstanding characteristic of man’s creativeness is the ability to transmute petty and trivial impulses in momentous consequences.”
My response: We are born wicked and many of our desires, feelings and impulses are shameful: it is a waste of time—and an impossible task—to seek to transform living people into perfect angels thinking only loving, ethical, pure, and holy thoughts. Let us settle for right actions and useful consequences, and quite fussing about perfect motives and good intentions (For example, accusing white people of microaggressions and being racist). We gain more ground if people’s policieis practiced are non-racist, and they usually are in America.
Better that we teach people to maverize, take what they have, and sublimate it into ethical, productive, and artistic ends, and, as people as individuals and groups, aim higher, their increasingly improved, better, more good wills and character, will improve slightly the caliber and acceptability of their thoughts, and that is about all we can expect or extract from people.
It is not kind, productive or efficient to demand perfection of anyone, even oneself: we are frail mortal, not sterling divinities and our expectations must match what we are and what we can achieve. One does not love oneself or humanity, if one is not gentle with oneself and people, expecting more than they can give or do; if they maverize, and keep at it for a lifetime, then they can improve somewhat and that is no mean victory. And whatever moral and creative gains they make, despite their questionable motives and impure thoughts, their improving despite their corrupt constitutions does make their gains truly commendable and admirable, for it is difficult to will to get better and originate.
We can get ourselves and people to do better, if we orient to self-discipline in line with egoist morality, and these individuals are best equipped, and best positioned to convert their impure impulses and questionable motives into social reform.
H: “The alchemist’s notions about the transmutation of metals is absurd with reference to nature, but corresponds to the actualities of human nature.”
My response: Again, Hoffer instructs us be pointing out the paradox between our intuitive expectation about human nature and motives, versus how humans are actually built, and how we can get the best out of them, as individuals.
H: “There is in man’s soul a flowing equilibrium between good and evil, the noble and the base, the sublime and the ridiculous, the beautiful and the ugly, the weighty and the trivial. To look for close correspondence between the quality of an achievement and the nature of the motive which gave it birth is to miss a most striking aspect of man’s uniqueness.”
My response: Doctrinaire idealists, who demand not only noble action from people for them to be considered worthy, but also that the action be matched by the agent’s motive being only the purest, highest, most noble or lofty motive generating an action—or the entire noble actions is dismissed as 100% flawed, rotten and unworthy of acceptance, such exacters of moral perfectionism are cruel, rage and hate-filled fanatics, out to grab power and attack people, though they claim to mean well. Practically, their unreasonably high standards and moral expectations will lead to people being less moral instead of more moral.
Hoffer is ethically moderate and practical: if a social reformer can get people to act a little better, and make things a little better, applauding and rewarding the masses for doing the right thing which cumulatively will lead to social betterment, that is real gain, and likely all that can be achieved. If enough of these small gains over time start to accrete, then social revolution can be achieved, but the compliance must be voluntary and individually navigated, and no thought must be entertained about authoritarian coercion or punishment inflicted by the rulers upon the people for not complying.
Human uniqueness is best made real and instantiated by the individuating supercitizen pursuing his enlightened self-interest: his motive is not the most noble, but neither is it base and cruel, so he and his fellow citizens can modestly improve and work together to make a real difference, and this slow moderate pace of reform is the only one that works.
H: “The greatness of man is in what we do with petty grievances and joys, and with common physiological pressures and hungers. ‘When I have a little vexation,’ writes Keats, ‘it grows in five minutes into a them for Sophocles.’ To the creative individual, all experience is seminal—all events are equidistant from new ideas and insights—and his inordinate humanness shows itself perhaps mainly in the ability to make trivial and common reach an enormous way.”
My response: Should the individual maverize, she transports herself to a higher plane of being, and all her intrinsic petty grievances and joys are grist for the mill of her imagination.
H: “
6
The significant fact is that the attributes at the roots of man’s uniqueness are also the main factors in the release of his creative energies.”
My response: It is because we are born hating ourselves, sensing our incompleteness, feeling raw and abandoned while not knowing what we lack or what would fill the hole in our souls, feeling anguished, angry and frustrated that we belong neither easily or organically to heaven or earth, while craving to be invited to belong to one or both, perhaps both simultaneously, this is why only serving God, self-realizing: thinking originally, making beauty in the world, and mastering skills and technology, only these substantive efforts make us feel good enough about ourselves to dare to face tomorrow and even the afterlife, without much flinching.
H: “As we have seen, it was man’s unfinishedness—his being an incomplete animal—which started him on his unique course. This unfinishedness consists not only in the lack of specialized organs and organic adaptations, but also in the imperfection of man’s instincts, and in an inability to grow and mature.”
My response: I believe if people will individually maverize, and dedicate their lives to the Good Spirits, then they will be able to grow, mature and develop their innate, marvelous gifts to the wonder, appreciation, and approval of the good deities, of oneself and society.
H: “Now each of these defects plays a vital role in the release of creative flow. If the lack of specialized organs started the groping towards tools and weapons, then the lack of instinctual automatism introduced into man’s behavior the seminal pause of hesitation. In animals, action follows on perception mechanically with almost chemical swiftness and certainty, but in man there is an interval of faltering and groping; and this interval is the seedbed of the images, ideas, dreams, aspirations, irritations, longings, and forebodings which are the warp and woof of the creative process. Finally, the retention of youthful characteristics in adult life endows man with a perpetual playfulness so fruitful of insights and illuminations.”
My response: What an eloquent description of how humans, lacking specialized organs and ready instinctual programming to guide them each moment, must hesitate and falter before brainstorming creative solutions to their problems and obstacles. As perpetually youthful perceiver with a bent for playfulness, a well-disciplined indiviudator has the opportunity to discover and invent.
H: “It is expected that the pattern of unfinishedness should be most pronounced in the autonomous individual.”
My response: When Aristotle suggested that each acorn could actualize its potential and grow into a mighty oak tree; when a young wolf puppy can actualize its potential to grow up, learn to hunt, start a family and a pack as an alpha male, he becomes finished or fairly perfected for his kind. What the acorn and the wolf have, which the unfinished human child lacks, are guiding natural laws and instincts to firmly guide him as he actualizes his potential. The human youth, feeling uncertain and unfinished, lacking sure instincts and explicit natural law formulations to enable him to guide himself into adulthood and completeness or finishedness, so without egoist morality, without being told by religious authorities to individuate as the good deities Individuate, without individual-living and be shown how to proceed so that he may veridically esteem himself highly, he may remain low self-esteeming, nonindividuating, wallowing in altruist morality and group-living, never informed only as an autonomous, individuating individual that can he embrace and gain transcendence in action and creativity to affirm his worth via a life well lived.
H: “Nothing on earth or heaven is so poignantly and chronically incomplete as the individual on his own. In the individual totally integrated with others in a compact group, human uniqueness is considerably blurred.”
My response: I cannot argue with Hoffer over what he writes in the two sentences just above. When hidden and ensconced in the collective, a person’s consciousness can be so conforming to group role-playing that individual uniqueness disappears entirely. When aloneness his uniqueness comes to the surface and he must work hard, find projects to do, or simply maverize to fill the meaning void in his soul.
H: “Fusion with others complete, stabilizes, and defuses. A compact collective body displays a submissiveness, predictability, and automatism reminiscent of nonhuman nature. Thus the emergence of the unattached individual must have been a crucial step in the attainment of human uniqueness. Yet the indications are that this step was not the end result of a slow process of social growth and maturing but a by-product of catastrophe and disaster.”
My response: If we raise up a generation of individuators, then slow social growth will accrete; but individualism and personal uniqueness only arose in the West, a bit at a time, when and where the collectivized dispensation collapsed for a while before coalescing into collectivist hegemony once more, so for a few years or for a few decades, in various locations, historical accident allowed individualism to sprout up like a flower volunteering to grow in the cracks of the pavement.
H: “The first individual was a lone survivor, a straggler, an outcast, a fugitive. Individual selfhood was first experienced not as something ardently wished for but as a calamity which befell the individual: he was separated from the group. All creative periods in history were preceded by a shattering or weakening of communal structures, and it was the individual debris who first set the creative act in motion.”
My response: I have several takeaways from these two sentences. First, naturally, no one wants to be an individual: we are born group-oriented and will spend our lives in the herd unless thrown out of it, involuntarily. Second, the development of civilization, technological innovation and moral progress occurred with the weakening of communal structures, before the shattered dispensation reforms—as it always does, and then creative work and living are stilled once again as strong communal living patterns reemerge, and conformity and mindlessness are visited upon the cowed masses, who accept this enforced re-submission to collective authority willingly and voluntarily, for they believe that submission is their destiny. Third, human creativity occurrence is an individual issue, and, if we wish to progress more, we need to teach the young to maverize and adopt egoist morality.
H: “Fugitives seem to have been at the birth of anything new. They were the first free men, the first founders of cities and civilizations, the first adventurers and discoverers: they were the seed of Israel, of Greece, of Rome, of America.
The severing of the individual from a compact group is an operation from which the individual never fully recovers. The individual on his own remains a chronically incomplete and unbalanced entity.”
My response: I would suggest that each citizens, regard his feeling chronically incomplete and unbalanced as motivation spurring him to individuate: this uneasy and discontented feelings could serve as a blessing in disguise.
H: “His creative efforts and passionate pursuits are at bottom a blind striving for wholeness and balance. The individual striving to realize himself and prove his worth has created all that is great in literature, art, music, science, and technology. The individual, also, when he can neither realize himself nor justify his existence by his own efforts is a breeding cell of frustration and the seed of the convulsions which shake a society to its foundations. These convulsions, being in essence a flight from the burdens of an individual existence, often terminate in totalitarian bodies dominated by absolute power.”
My response: This remarkable moral philosopher can say so much with such few words. When individuals cannot realize themselves nor justify their existences (They could have done both as maverizers that kept at it for a lifetime, no matter how little they accomplished, or how much, for that very struggle makes them worthy to esteem themselves veridically.), that is when their natural selfless, self-loathing, discontented, group-living selves morph into being bitter, frustrated and desperate to see the self and its scolding conscience no more by fleeing to anonymity and erasure of personal consciousness in a mass movement or some similar, hyper-compact group. The following social upheaval leads to totalitarian dispensation dominated by absolute power, and groupism is life, and individualism is wiped out in that society.
H: “It is a strangely moving spectacle this: the individual wearying of the burden of individual uniqueness, shifting the load on his shoulders, and finally dropping it. For as he turns about to walk back, he finds himself one of a vast army with flags flying and drums beating, marching back to the unbounded submissiveness and certitude—back to being a crumb of the rock of ages and an anonymous particle of a monolithic whole.
Yet it is part of the fantastic quality of man’s nature that this passionate retreat should have often turned out to but a stepping back preliminary to a leap ahead. In the modern Occident there has been a continuous tug of war between individualist and anti-individualist tendencies. The chauvinist and Socialist collectivism of the twentieth century is to individualism of the nineteenth what Jacobinism was to the Age of Enlightenment and what the Reformation was to the Renaissance. And every time, until now, the resourceful Occident individual somehow managed to reassert himself and come out on top.”
My response: Since the good deities and Good Spirits are individuators and individualists more than they are nonindividuators and joiners—though they are both—they want us to individuate and live as individualists more than remaining what we have been traditionally, nonindividuators that are joiners. For this reason, I believe Mavellonialism is the ethical and religious plan of the good deities, for the future, to ensure that individualism comes out on top, and that gives me hope, no matter if North Korea and Red China conquer the world and set up the reign of the Beast at the end of times—goodness and individualsm will eventually be restored for God cannot be denied forever.
H: “He managed to convert the enthusiasm released by the anti-individualist movements into a stimulus of his own creative capacities, and an aid in his self-striving and self-realization and self-advancement. Thus we see again and again during the past four hundred years how the aftermath of every anti-individualist movement was marked by an outburst of individual creativeness in literature and art, and an upswing in individual venturesomeness and enterprise. It is true that the unprecedented ruthlessness displayed by contemporary anti-individualist drives makes one wonder whether this time, too, the individual will be able to come out on top. One wonders whether with their fearful instruments of coercion and control the contemporary mass movements may not at last succeed in bludgeoning the Occident individual for good into collectivist submissiveness.”
My response: In life there are no guarantees, and, in this corrupt world, evil often prevails. I believe the that the Light Couple and all the good deities are individualists and individuators: they are rational, freedom-loving and lovers of humanity, so I believe the Occidental individualist will eventually surmount the murderous, cruel attacks by mass-movementized, totalitarian collectivists to conquer the world, and wipe out liberty, individualism, and goodness.
H: “
7
Nothing so baffles the scientific approach to human nature as the vital role words play in human affairs.”
My response: Sober, empirical scientists, skeptical and physicalist, have no way to imagine how human, those fantastic, unfinished, passionate, massed creatures who lives in packs, who live in a world of lies which they accept and believe, told to them by their elite deceivers, when radicalized in time of social collapse, upheaval and chaos, these self-loathing groupists will seek and find a guru’s metanarrative, holy cause, and distinguishing words and phrases which so electrify them, and fire their imaginations, and spur them to grand, united displays of action and undertaking, that they will overthrow the government, or fight to the death for their ism.
This magical aspect of these key words and the complete faith that these mass-movementized fanatics share enthusiastically with each other about these holy words, that is a most powerful social influence that a logical, sober-minded intellectual could not foresee let alone fathom.
Now, I am an amateur philosopher at best, and my understanding of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language is extremely limited and rudimentary, but I will digress and speculate wildly here, and then I hope to tie these speculations back to Hoffer’s claim about how wondrous and startling is the role played by the masses animated by the magical, motivating aspects of words, arousing the masses so they are on fire with purpose and revolution.
I cannot help recalling from a Dan Bonevac Youtube video on the correspondence theory of truth, where he warns the viewer that Roderick Chisholm believes that human consciousness is thought first, and that language flows out of that, whereas Wilfred Sellars, more the anti-realist and constructivist than is Chishom, insists that language comes first and that thought grows out of a language framework.
Bonevac, who I believe is a coherentist, discounts the correspondence theory of truth, not so much on the standard grounds that the perceiver can never get outside of his mind, his subjective perspective, to perceive and conceive, without distortion of objects out in the world as they actually are, that his conceptions and propositions about those worldly predicates do not correspond closely to objects out there in the world.
Instead, it seems as if Bonevac discounts the theory of corresponding truth between the subject and the object through his idealistic, subjectivistic denial that human consciousness or thought efficiently and directly engenders language that corresponds the triggering thoughts, conceptualized, made linguistic with terms, definitions and proposition in the the rational mind of the perceiver or conceiver with one-to-one internal correspondence to his linguistic expression of this relationship between thought and language, and, based upon this denial of a solid, working epistemological, detectable, traceable, internal foundationlism, the perceiver then is unable to apply directly, realistically, his active internal mind to sense, perceive and conceive, define and name truthfully the external objects of reality, as they are in themselves.
Bonevac is denying correspondence internal to the subject’s mind, that a person’s rational mind or thought processes are all that his consciousness is, and that it engenders controls directs and handles how his mind uses language as an instrument of construing meaning, clear definitions and terms which describe his concepts, so that internal disjunction or fluctuating degree of accurate, linked correspondence between the subject’s consciousness and his use of language to communicate his ideas, experiences and reactions to stimulus received from objects out there in the world; if disrupted or distorted is this internal correspondence between the subject’s consciousness and his verbal descriptions of how he conceives of his psychic events, then the lack of internal clarity and certainly will render it impossible for him to claim as objective and true, his perspectival, limited, subjective interpretations of what he perceives from external objects; their stimuli will not reach the level of correspondence between his propositions and the objects out there in reality, as he claims as an objectivist and foundationalist, that his concepts and propositions truly, certainly, accurate correspond to objects in relativity outside his mind.
I may be mistaken, but I am anticipating that Hoffer below will contrast secular scientism and its deterministic view of human nature construing as determinate and simple, each human being who is a mere biological machine with no ghost in it.
These reductionists have not sense of how humans as fantastic, unfinished creatures, running about in their mass movements with words made magical and to be worshiped as divinities, use language in a way which scientists understandably do not comprehend or envision.
I think Hoffer is hinting that if humans come to life as individuals, then their use of language and civilized living will all work as tools for human benefit and survival, should things work out.
Hoffer has a keen sense of how language is employed by gurus against the masses in mass movements, and that whole display leads to open-ended, unpredictable, disturbing, profound, metaphysical outcomes that defy expert efforts to measure, define and hypothesize about, and bracket predictively the human creature and her potential, which are limitless and undeterminable, as she is a fantastic creature of free will, spiritual energy, who needs and loves freedom—when she feels good, and realizes what is good for her—and her fumbling, crude use of language and speech, and how leaders mesmerize her and her fellow humans with their verbal incantations—all of this indicate that the human is unlikely to be explained with deterministic, exact, scientific precision by social scientists and philosophers.
H: “How can one deal with a physiochemical complex in which reactions are started and checked, accelerated and slowed down, by the sound or image of a word—usually a meaningless word?”
My response: I am trying to follow Hoffer here without losing his train of thought: he seems to be asking or doubting if scientists are able to deal with human affairs where logic, experimentation, observation and assumption of deterministic regularity governing all events and objects, including human objects, that their investigatory methodology and heuristic is not inadequate to capture and explain social, human interactions, where language stems from indeterministic, perhaps illogical or whimsical sources, making explaining the speaker and listeners, what they are about to and getting at, a near impossible task.
H: “It is of interest that the practice of magic where nature is concerned—the attempt to manipulate nature by words—rested on the assumption that nature is not unlike human nature, that methods of proved effectiveness in the manipulation of human affairs may be equally potent when applied to nonhuman nature. It can be seen that such an assumption is the mirror image of, and not infinitely more absurd than, the assumption implied in the scientific approach that human nature is merely an aspect of nature.
We know that words cannot move mountains, but they can move the multitude; and men are more ready to fight and die for a word than anything else. Words shaped thought, stir feeling, and beget action; they kill and revive, corrupt and cure. The ‘men of words’—priests, prophets, intellectuals—have played a more decisive role in history than military leaders, statesmen, and businessmen.”
My response: Were the masses populated by individuating supercitizens, these intellectual-burghers and intellectual-laborers would still be moved by words, but, they run their society, so they use agreed upon words and slogans to live and die for, and usually could change without social upheaval or resorting to a tyrannical dispensation, because their temperate, conservative, rational political stance disallows them to overreact or underreact to impending change.
H: “Words and magic are particularly crucial in time of crisis when old forms of life are in dissolution and man must grapple with the unknown. Normal motives and incentives lose their efficacy. Man does not plunge into the unknown in search of the prosaic and matter-of-fact. His soul has to be stretched by a reaching out for the fabulous and unprecedented. He needs the nurse of magic and breath-taking fairy tales to lure him on and sustain him in his faltering first steps. Even modern science and technology were not were not in the beginning a sober pursuit of facts and knowledge. Here, too, the magicians—alchemists, astrologists, visionaries—were the pioneers. The early chemists looked not for prosaic acids and salts but for the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. The early astronomers and discoverers, too, were animated by myths and fairy tales. Columbus went looking not only for gold and fabulous empires but also for the Garden of Eden. When he saw the Orinoco he was sure it was Gihon, one of the four rivers of Eden. He wrote back to Spain about all the tokens and virtues and mathematical calculations which forced him to the conclusion that ‘Paradise is to be found in these parts.’
It is, indeed, questionable whether we can make sense of critical periods in history without an awareness of the role words and magic play in them. This is particularly true of a century we live in—a century dominated on the one hand with the scientific spirit and a superb practical sense, and on the other hand by the black magic of chauvinism, racialism, Fascism and Communism. The rapid transformation of millions of peasants into urban industrial workers, which often meant a leap from the Neolithic Age into the twentieth century, could not be realized without soul-stirring myths and illusions about an impending national, racial or social millennium.
There is a widespread feeling at present that mankind has come to a fateful turning point. This feeling stems partly from the threat of a nuclear holocaust and partly from the fear that in a drawn-out contest with Communist powers we shall unavoidably be shaped in the image of the totalitarianism we loathe, and slay our hope even as we battle for it. More ominous perhaps are the signs that the weak of the species are about to be elbowed out of their role as pathfinders and shapers of the future.”
My response: The weak are weak in the world because they are groupist, altruistic, masochistic slaves who enjoy being enslaved, and the strong oppressing them are not really strong but are the weak in a position of power a parasitic robber exploiting and living off of the weak and poor downtrodden and powerless. Both the oppressors and the oppressed are all weak and all enslaved, so we need all to individuate as individuating supercitizens so there are no or few weak people remaining. Where most or all are strong, then the unjust social order engendering class system, injustice and disparity of power and wealth necessarily will end. None are naturally strong, all are born weak and with low self-esteem. All can and must choose and will to be strong and this is how gentle, slow, lasting, powerful, peaceful revolution will occur --no shorts will work—it must grow in acceptance among the people just one volunteer at a time. We want not the collectivist strong or the collectivist weak shaping the future, but the individualist strong, and no more are weak.
H: “The new revolution in science and technology which has so enormously increased man’s power over nature has also enormously reduced the significance of the average individual.”
My response: Hoffer sees science and technology as power over nature easily turned totalitarian as strong elites enslave the masses. He is not-anti-science or progress: he just does not want neo-Hitlers to utilize the latest technology against the masses. Actually, Hoffer is all for individual freedom, democracy and free will.
H: “With the advent of automation and the utilization of atomic energy it might soon be possible for a relatively small group of people to satisfy all of a country’s needs and fight its wars without the aid of the masses.”
My response: Such Orwellian future hellish scenarios can be reality, but need not be human inevitably the human future as individuating supercitizens in the thousands, millions or billions can take over and run society humanely, prosperously and freely.
H: “Man’s destiny is now being shaped in fantastically complex and expensive laboratories staffed by supermen, and the new frontier has no place for the rejected and unfit. Instead of being the leaven of history and the mainspring of the ascending movement of man, the weak are likely to be cast aside as a waste product. One is justified in fearing that the elimination of the weak as shaping factors may mean the end of history—the reversion of history to zoology.”
My response: The weak might be cast aside, subjugated or murder by totalitarian elites, or by murderous Skynet Robot-Warriors. If that occurs, then all alive, rulers and rule alike, would be slaves in a monster dictatorship of unprecedented, centralized power, domination, and cruelty.
Hoffer regards history, rightly so, as the moral progression of man (humans) toward freedom, self-esteem, capitalism, democracy, rationalism and happiness; if the CCP AI police state monitoring and oppressing its people goes worldwide, then history is over and human are animals in nature, totally robot determined and unfree, reduced to pliable matter shaped and reshaped at their master’s say, only instinct in nature ruled it biologically ruled human slaves, and the weak and the masses now with a chip in their brain and totalitarianized robots ruled by the master computer and or small elite that is the new king of the government, it unbridled junta tyrant.
H: “Yet there is the possibility that the weariness and dejection induced in us by the present crisis are clouding our vision, and impairing our capacity for prognosticating the future.”
My response: Hoffer’s prophetic ruminations here are legitimate for there is no guarantee that the future will be better than the past, though we hope and pray that it will be.
H: “For even as we enumerate the forces which threaten to cast out the weak to outer darkness, there are things happening in every part of the globe which should make us pause, wonder, and hope. Precisely at this moment, we see everywhere backward countries—unimaginably poor in worldly goods, knowledge, and skill—awakening from the paralysis of centuries and vaulting themselves onto the stage of history to re-enact the immemorable drama of the hindmost become foremost. This surely is a performance of the most poignant significance; and if we can savor its full import we shall not be discomfited by the crudity, arrogance, hostility, savagery, and hysteria of the performers. Our most ardent hope should be that this be not a last performance.
It is difficult to see how without an awareness of the unnaturalness of human nature one could make sense of the goings on in the underdeveloped parts of the world.”
My response: Not only must we build upon and apply our awareness of the unnaturalness of human nature to the happenings in the undeveloped world of the 60s and today, that same awareness that human nature is unnatural and apart (We are still half-beast, as well as being half-angel/ minor divinities in potential.) from determined and deterministic nature—where all creatures are instinctually regulated robots, more or less. We must be cognizant that there is a recurring, lethal pattern of slow, back-sliding into collectivism, authoritarianism and barbarism which inhibit human progress. Human progress in history is not a straight line, but marked by spurts of human, intermittent emergence of consciousness and accompany moral growth (The slow introduction of individualism and egoism to teach people about love, especially self-love.).
With natural, rudimentary per person freedom of the will to start with, we teach people to individual-live and to maverize, so that their free will will become strong and better and with good wills and good character they will usually elect to do the right thing, following a general course which they have decide to live in accordance with, following God and not Satan.
The unnaturalness of human nature indicates that determinism, which rules the natural world, does not control the consciousness of the free soul or agent, though this incompatibilist claim, linked by interactionist dualism, that the body, the determined machine of nature is somehow working with and fighting the mind which is free and self-determining, and how this occurs is not yet known, but it sure seems to be our reality, not just our subjective illusion of freedom, choice, free will and moral responsibility.
H: “Why should the sober, practical task of modernizing a backward country requiring the staging of a madhouse? Here certainly is an outstanding example of the fantastic discrepancy between means and the means and ends often observed in human affairs. Incantations, myths and preposterous illusions are often required to release the energies which enable the weak to vault over or explode the obstacles athwart their path.”
My response I do not want to digress here, but, think what Jungians and evolutionary/biological psychologists like Jordan Peterson could add—if they ever heard of or studied Eric Hoffer—to the study of mass psychology and social science if they could provide theoretical and scientific explanatory expansion of Hoffer’s sure instinct that the gurus manipulating the masses utilize magic, magic words, incantations, vast panoramic plays and motifs, accompanied by undergirding metanarratives to provide meaning and direction for the masses as they seek to thrive while bombarded by current drastic, relentless social and technological advancement.
H: “The untrained and unequipped masses in the backward countries cannot be stirred to utmost effort by self-interest or logical persuasion.”
My response: Hoffer equates appeals to motives like self-interest and logical persuasion as amenable to Western population with a long tradition of individualism, moderation, nonviolent adjustments to change (on their best days)--advances in reasoning science, education, capitalism, affluence and living in a free society--whereas communal, collectivist citizens of the Thrid World will require selfless motivations, group betterment and appeals to united gain and collective national, religious, ethnic pride to help their asses begin to modernize and adjust.
H: “Nor can they be induced to learn and advance step by step. For learning to them is one more proof of their inadequacy, and a gradual advance but a flailing of the arms in the morass of the present. They want not a prosaic step ahead but a miraculous leap out of a mean present into a glorious future. They need the illusion that in trying to catch up tomorrow with other people’s yesterdays they are actually running ahead and showing the way for the rest of mankind. The practical task of industrialization must figure as a momentous undertaking in the service of a holy cause. Potent words, communion with the faithful, and flaunting defiance are as essential as technical training, adequate equipment, and satisfactory food and housing. The backward masses clambering up the steep incline of history must see themselves as the vanguard of humanity, the bearers of the one and only truth, the chosen instrument of human destiny. The march out of their backwardness must be as the march of conquerors.”
My response: He is so sensible and realistic, that I listen to him more than just about anyone.
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