I copied and pasted the below article or synopsis of an interview conducted an unknow person from The Sunday Magazine, of Tom Schactman. I find it instructive and will comment on the short interview. Here is the Internet article”
Sunday (S for Sunday Maganize): “
Tom Shachtman on the influence of Eric Hoffer and his book 'The True Believer'
The author and documentary filmmaker explains why Hoffer was so wary of ‘followers’”
My response: Hoffer was wary of followers, because he knew that he was naturally a great-souled fanatic, a potential demagogue or guru with the ability to spellbind the masses, to inaugurate a mass movement which would consume, corrupt and destroy his followers and himself. All of his life, Hoffer avoided such temptations to gather the power of powerlessness unto himself. He was an honest man of unusual scrupulousness and integrity.
S: ““CBC Radio · Posted: May 22, 2020 1:53 PM CDT | Last Updated: May 22, 2020
Eric Hoffer's first book, The True Believer, has been hailed as prophetic, a book that foresaw the rise of militant populism in the United States and right wing forces around the world. (HarperCollins)
The Sunday Edition20:02Why Eric Hoffer was so wary of 'followers'”
My response: Hoffer’s first book, The True Believer, was prophetic, a book which foresaw the rise of militant populism here in America, and right-wing forces around the world; also, Hoffer foresaw that any Leftist, nationalist, or religious mass movement would take the world to the brink of totalitarian government, world war and potential Armageddon.
S: “Almost seven decades ago, an American longshoreman with no academic training of any kind wrote a book that became a bestseller. That longshoreman was Eric Hoffer and the book was The True Believer, about the nature of mass movements.
The True Believer has been hailed as prophetic, a book that foresaw the rise of militant populism in the United States and right wing forces around the world. The fanaticism we see around us today was described by Eric Hoffer in the 1960s.
"He believed that ideas are dangerous things, especially when they get into the minds of a lot of people at the same time," explained author and documentary filmmaker Tom Shachtman, who has spent much of his career studying Hoffer.
Hoffer was born in New York City at the turn of the century to German parents from the Alsace region of France, but continually lied about his age.
"He didn't want to be known as a man of the 19th century," said Shachtman. "He was actually born in 1898, but he said he was born in 1902."
He believed that ideas are dangerous things, especially when they get into the minds of a lot of people at the same time.
- Tom Shachtman
He never went to school but was always reading and, in 1943, he moved to San Francisco to become a dock worker. In between shifts, he would take long walks jotting his thoughts down on pocket-sized notebooks or on a makeshift desk in his tiny apartment.
"It wasn't really a desk," explained Shachtman of Hoffer's modest lifestyle. "It was sort of a door plank he put over his knees."
His ideas formed the basis for The True Believer, Hoffer's 1951 debut. In it, he attempted to explain why people join mass movements. He shocked his readers by drawing a comparison between Nazis and Communists, who in Hoffa's eyes both were mass movements with true believers.
"Hoffer was trying to figure out why people would do this, what would lead them to give themselves up and let themselves be led, especially in a direction that may be far beyond what they had initially imagined," said Shachtman.
The True Believer was a sensation. It was endorsed by then U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower and the English philosopher Bertrand Russell. In the decades after Hoffer's 1983 death, the book took on a life of its own. In the aftermath of 9/11, pundits turned to it as a way to explain radical Islamists across the world. Others say the book helps explain Donald Trump's following.”
My response: Notice that the Leftists, true believers in lockstep, unswerving to inflicting their cultural Marxist holy cause and mass movement upon America, accuse Trump’s followers of being true believers in a white, Christian nationalist, home-grown Fascist movement, when, the Left, these neo-Communists are all are accusing democratic conservatives and Republicans of being what the Left and the Democrats in America are and promote. The Left always accuses its enemies of doing what it is guilty of, and we know what they are up to, because they project these sins and crimes onto their adversaries, usually innocent and blameless of such a defamatory campaign, a Big Lie operation if there ever was one.
S: "All mass movements scared him [Hoffer] and that was why he wrote about them," explained Shachtman. "Not because he was particularly afraid of the movement, but because there are things that followers do when they get going that are really scary."”
My response: Hoffer was afraid of mass movements, because they, their leaders and followers, are, if they are not kept of short duration, turn vicious and ugly, and become the center of pure evil on earth.
Hoffer gave us a taxonomy of mass movements because they are based on group-living, group morality, group identity and group governance (authoritarianism or totalitarianism, Left or Right, Sacred—theocracy like Iran—or Secular—Red China). He knew they were evil and to be opposed.
What Schactman and others do not realize—it may be Hoffer’s fault that he did not explicitly point out what below I will attribute to him, but more likely, he anticipated this warning and its cure but died before he could articulate its fully expanded implication for the future, requiring but not possessing my Mavellonialist morality and theology to make it fully expressed and consciously communicable to an audience—is that Hoffer warned the reader as to what led to the eruption of an occasional mass movement, which brought needed change, but at such a bloody, expensive cost to humanity.
In short, Hoffer knew people were born mostly depraved, but not utterly depraved. To be depraved innately, or to be evil, is to loathe the self, to suffer from low self-esteem.
For almost of its history, humanity has been burdened by group-living, group morality (altruism, which deepens people’s low self-esteem, thus growing evil in each of them), authoritarian and collective/tribal political and economic dispensations, and group-identifying.
When the metanarrative of a dispensation, a tissue of lies believed by the masses and the elite by the way, and its mores are popular, powerfully supported by the people, and universal in acceptance, change will not occur, or very slowly; the people group-live and the fall-out of their personal and self-loathing is kept moderated by altruist morality and altruist religious faith, but all still suffer from self-hatred and this is the discontent with the self that Hoffer identified.
When the status quo, its values, its mores, its weakened elite, its official religion and political structures wither, the masses lose the collective arrangements which allowed them to escape from facing their unwanted selves. Now, impelled by guilt to amount to anything, then the moorless masses’ self-loathing skyrockets, as they go from feeling perennially discontented, having morphed into full blown rage and despair as frustrated misfits, deplatformed from a way of life that has disappeared. These folks are most willing to join a mass movement, and now things have gotten real scary.
Hoffer and I suggest that we teach people to individual-live based in serving God as rational egoists and individuators, grounded in egoist morality. When people are free, free-willing, love themselves and now enjoy earned, merited veridical self-esteem, there is no danger of mass movements arising, and no danger of pure evil being unleashed upon the world.
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