Jesse Adams On Eric Hoffer

 

Writer and Consultant Jesse Adam’s wrote the article below relating Eric Hoffer and his relationship with Academia. I copied and pasted it online and it is below and lightly edited.

 

 

Adams (A after this): “Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer and the trouble with academia

By Jesse Adams

 

 

 

 

 

January 2, 2025 10:37 pm

Right before Thanksgiving, social media’s latest viral star was born: a Cambridge academic named Ally Louks, who posted a photo of herself on X posing with her successful dissertation only to generate hundreds of thousands of comments mocking her work due to its title, “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose.” Having not read her opus, neither I nor the vast majority of commenters are in a position to judge its merit, but the text itself is really beside the point of why so many people were nonetheless primed to erupt so vehemently. Popular perceptions of academics at prestigious institutions, of the things they study and the ways they write and the politics they hold, are deeply divided for a reason. People reacting to Louks were really reacting to whatever earlier experiences they’ve had with other academics holding preposterous beliefs alongside overweening confidence that they’re the sort of meritocrats who know how to reorder society and deserve the right to rule over others.”

My response: Many, perhaps most academics are bureaucrats and very group-oriented, conformist ideologues, fanatics, and true believers on cultural Marxism. Most are atheists or irreligious, who are not individualists.

Becase they have sold their souls to fit in, to become credentialed and promoted, in return all incoming students are their victims: the professors  drum out all traces of nonconformity, independent thinking, personal integrity and intellectual divergence out of most of their students, who being normal young people—are of low self-esteem, group-oriented, naturally and socially geared to enjoin being controlled as masochistic slaves and nonindividuators reared with low quality altruist morality.

Adams describes these educational aristocrats and would-be strict, harsh, tyrannical rulers of the masses as holding preposterous beliefs alongside their overweening confidence as meritocrats who know how to reorder society and deserve the right to rule over others.

I could not have said it better. Humans naturally are depraved, lazy, cowardly and joiners. The good deities are individualists and individuators, filled with and grounded in love and egoist morality, so it is sin to stay in the group and not develop the self.

Professors and intellectuals run in packs, and few of them self-realize as individuators. When a person individuates, her desire to rule and control others disappears because she is preoccupied with cleaning up her own mess, and she is busy minding her own affairs and creating art, new technology, new theories and ideas, a gift back to the good deities.

Society will not be just, stable, prosperous, or free until we the masses refuse any long to allow any elite, and I mean any elite, to do our thinking for us, to provide us with words and narratives to define who we are and where we are headed, to set our personal agenda.

It is the masses that can and must rule society, and they can, but it will only take and perpetuate itself if each of them or most of them self-realizes and an individuators, dedicates her life to God, and then agrees to work with other supercitizen individuators to run society. This will eliminate the need for elites, meritocrats and experts to rule society and the masses.

A: “ . . . It’s not entirely academics’ fault that so many are so prone to groupthink, naivete, and utopian fantasies. It’s hard to know what you don’t know, especially when your whole career and identity are wrapped up in notions of intellectual superiority. Just ask any starving postdoc or adjunct, or even their tenure-track colleagues: Trying to make a career in academia takes an obscene amount of time and sacrifice. Getting into the right schools and programs, impressing the right people, accruing the right credentials, furiously publishing enough not to perish, and hopefully someday winning tenure all add up to a grueling uphill slog that doesn’t leave much room for extracurricular explorations.”

My response: If someone wants to get a doctorate, and work inside Academia or take his doctorate, dig for coal in a West Virginia coal mine, to support his wife and three children, and at night and weekends to write stunning, original lovely poetry for an anticipated colony to live in Mars in 150 years, it is all good. What needs to disappear is the concept, by those with more education, that they have a divine calling to rule others, to run their affairs. That attitude needs to disappear forever.

 

A: “To finally somehow make it in that milieu is almost necessarily to have passed up on years of diverse life experience in favor of endless hours in libraries, classrooms, and conferences, interacting primarily with fellow self-selected strivers rather than a more representative cross-section of humanity. So, it’s little wonder that the ivory tower, and particularly its upper floors, has become ever more sequestered in recent decades. As a result, as I saw constantly during my years chronicling Columbia University, broad swaths of academic literature now rival the worst of medieval scholasticism for sheer irrelevance, going all but unread for good reason.”

 

My response: Adams almost has it right; it would help to emphasize that professors are bureaucrats clawing their way up a peg or two in the educational bureaucracy by decades of efforts. Any bureaucrat in any hierarchy, to excel, must be a pure joiner, a pure party hack to get ahead, and this conformity, this sameness of thought, no matter how innately brilliant a scholar was initially, it breeds the brains, will, independence and initiative of of most scholars.

Since they cannot work and live in Academia as individuators and invididuals—who tend to do their thing and leave others to do their own thing, they seek status as experts and elite rulers of the masses, and now they are addicted to bad power, the power of powerlessness, where an elite of experts control and direct the masses.

Hoffer knew exactly what professors and intellectuals were and they hate him for exposing to the world their real intent, that they are the enemies of the masses, and deeply wish to attack and suppress them.
 

A: “In the starkest of contrasts, the 1951 classic The True Believer, by the legendary Eric Hoffer, remains every bit as relevant as it was on its day of publication. The precise details of Hoffer’s exceedingly picaresque life story are hazy, but for whatever his probable embellishments, the proof positively radiates from the text that, in some way or other, he lived a far more varied and colorful life than most scholars of his time, or ours.”

My response: Again, it is okay for a scholar to want her doctorate and to spend a life doing teaching, research and writing in Academia. But the laws of moderation, individuation and egoist morality all instruct the individual that as a successful individuator, that outside of academia he can lead a farm more varied, enriching and color life than most scholars.

A: “A voracious autodidact, Hoffer apparently didn’t attend college and purportedly spent his first few decades of adulthood — years most academics are socially and spiritually confined to campus — variously as a vagrant, a drifter, a migrant worker, a prospector for gold, and most verifiably as a longshoreman on the San Francisco docks before publishing his first and most famous volume around age 50 (and later becoming an adjunct at Berkeley). Whatever question marks in his biography, there’s no question he spent that half-century honing keen insights into human nature as it is rather than how ideologues would prefer it to be.

“The burning conviction that we have a holy duty towards others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft,” Hoffer writes in one passage. Elsewhere he expands the thought: “A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence … by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.”

Pithily delving into the histories and psychologies of dehumanizing mass movements spanning communism, fascism, and other spasms of revolutionary fervor, The True Believer’s core focus is exploring how ordinary and even upstanding citizens can be drawn to bloodthirsty madness, even when they have no history of violence. Hoffer’s explanations are, in short, restless boredom, a critical mass of comfort and free time, and above all, the persistent desire of human beings to slough off our fragile individual identities and petty concerns in favor of transcendent crusades.

Different factions have tapped The True Believer for different political purposes over the decades — a sign of a volume with universal pertinence, no doubt. Almost 20 years after Hoffer’s death in 1983, the book surged back into the popular discourse as thinkers struggled to understand the jihadism behind the 9/11 attacks, and it has remained a frequently cited touchstone as partisans have sought to smear their domestic opponents as an undifferentiated mass of dangerous lunatics. A typical liberal leafing through The True Believer might draw parallels with QAnon or the more gung-ho fringes of MAGA, for instance, but in my experience, the ideological derangements that have afflicted left-leaning institutions over the past 10 or 15 years offer at least as dramatic demonstration of Hoffer’s evergreen insights.”

My response: Adams seems to understand Hoffer better than most, but few really know his message and wise guiding suggestions.

A: “In the stampede to affirm Black Lives Matter, people who even now still consider themselves sober technocrats eagerly demonized police, sanctified rioters, and denounced such bedrock civic principles as equality under the law. And, during the surreal COVID regime, a lot of folks who’d always presented themselves as mild-mannered moderates grew intoxicated on punitive authoritarianism and actively called for the debanking, excommunication, and even outright starvation of the apostates who dared defy the holy word of Anthony Fauci and the public health establishment. Just as Hoffer might have expected, upscale professionals with impressive credentials and three-digit IQs proved no less susceptible to the lure of a mob mentality than the drunken rabble in a beer hall putsch.””

My response: Yes, brilliant and PhD (Goebbels had a doctorate.)-credential intellectuals can become stupid, vicious, arrogant, and able to back really bad plans, once they are true believers serving their holy cause.

A: “For the moment, revolutionary fervor has subsided in America, and something closer to sanity has prevailed. But zealous embers still glow in every human heart, waiting for that next opportunity to be fanned into a bonfire of messianic fury. Eric Hoffer’s uniquely grounded, worldly, and interdisciplinary work provides a timeless reminder that academic scholarship is but a subset of the larger universe of human learnedness and wisdom. It’s why he’ll still be read, remembered, and revered well after almost every scholar with vastly more formal education has long since been forgotten.

 

My response: If the public would assume, I have come to realize, that much of Hoffer’s unique gift and insight is his recommendation that people live out their lives in America, at room temperature, to follow the dictates of egoist morality, and develop their individual capacities here.