The Imaginative Conservative is an online conservative
magazine. Professor Pedro Gonzalez wrote an article on Eric Hoffer, published
in this magazine on July 18, 2024. I copied and pasted the entire article below
and will comment occasionally about what in it interests me. I did some light
editing, but not what Gonzalez actually wrote, but I did delete online
additional information included but was not directly germane.
Here is the article: “
Eric Hoffer:
The Longshoreman Philosopher’s Thought & Work
By Pedro Gonzalez|July
18th, 2024|Categories: Communism, Freedom, Philosophy, Politics, Timeless Essays
Gonzalez (G after this): “In a time
of social and political radicalization, Eric Hoffer remained a free and
independent thinker and identified the threat that Marxism posed for citizens.
He reflects on human nature, individuality, and the responsibility and duty of
thoughtful and informed citizens to upkeep open, democratic societies.”
My response: Hoffer remained a free
and independent thinker because he was great soul, and individuators and
individualist. Hoffer the ethical moderate, understood that groupist,
fanatical, radicalized masses, propelling forward an adopted holy cause such as
cultural Marxism, were advancing a lethal, totalitarian cause. Democracy and
constitutional republicanism can only survive or flourish, where the masses are
somewhat sober, temperate, moderately and limitedly group-oriented rational, self-ruling
voters whose partial allegiance to egoist ethics would prevent them from
true-believing and serving as the muscle bring tyranny down upon all of
society, the worst outcome possible for all
Too often intellectuals, however
credentialed and brilliant, end up being stilted, dull thinkers for several
reasons, group-living, group-thinking, nonindividuating and operating as
ideological true believers. They are not their true selves, so their best
thinking goes undeveloped. Fanatic loyalty to one’s ideology or holy cause
makes one mentally unoriginal and limited as a thinker.
G: “The American philosopher, Eric
Hoffer (1902-1983), is a rare thinker. He is a philosopher in the classical
sense of the word. Hoffer asks concrete and pressing questions that seek
life-affirming answers. Rhetoric, radical skepticism, and intellectual game-playing,
Hoffer asserts, defeat the point of philosophical reflection. Philosophical
reflection is a vital activity that props man up to truth, regardless of where
this may deliver us, for truth cannot be corralled.”
My response: Gonzalez is pointing
out that Hoffer was a philosopher, in the best, classical sense of the
word—fearlessly speculative and metaphysical—all the while his transcendental musing
is made practical and anchored in the everyday life and work of this
longshoreman philosopher. Hoffer was unafraid to deal with ultimate issues, not
unlike Dennis Prager with his emphasis on ultimate issue pondering.
Hoffer had no acceptance of the
sweeping dismissal of metaphysics by the logical positivists as a meaningless
endeavor.
G: “There is much of the stoic in
Hoffer. His books embody that indispensable quality that informs the thought of
all great thinkers: intuition and perspicuity about the essences that inform
human reality. In the absence of these staple qualities, philosophical
reflection falls prey to stale, uninspired positivism. Positivism has infected
all aspects of human life in postmodernism and reduced man to his bodily,
mundane function in the world.”
My response: I wish Gonzalez would
have defined what a stoic thinks, but it seems to me that Hoffer is a stoic
perhaps in the sense of seeking less to change the world, than to change and
improve himself, and his reading, writing, and musing were driven in partly
this stoical motivation.
It seems ostensible that Hoffer
would never admit a vision of philosophizing reduced to postmodernism
skepticism and antirealism, reduced to the mere sharing of ones’ private
opinions with others, one’s lived experience.
It also has become apparent that
revolutionaries promote deconstructive critiques of society’s metanarrative so
that the masses lose faith in the existing order, and then can be so
frustrated, that they in panic and anger stampede into the arms of the
revolutionaries manning the mass movement and holy cause into which the masses
are herded, defeated, and reduced to slave status.
Revolutionaries advocate
positivistic, skeptical, anti-metaphysical attacks upon society’s metanarrative
to unmoor the people from the mythology which justifies the status quo.
Revolutionaries are nihilistic for
gain, and once they grab power, their replacement metanarrative and mythology
justifying the revolution now assume absolute correctness of its statements of
justification. They are revolutionary in a regressive way, reverting society away
from free society, back to tyranny and authoritarian rule of the masses by a
power-sickened elite.
G: “Ironically, because he lived
late into the twentieth century, a time that saw an explosion of professional
possibilities for the chattering class, Hoffer found himself in the difficult
position of remaining a solitary thinker. Philosophical reflection in the
second half of the twentieth century no longer demanded that reason make sense
of man in the cosmos. This was an unprecedented move on the part of affected,
academic intellectuals. This lamentable cultural situation made Hoffer’s moral,
heuristic teaching a thing of the past. By the 1970s, Hoffer was definitely not
“cool.”
My response: The chattering class of
professional intellectuals run in packs, so a solitary thinker life Hoffer, a
philosophical stoic, who did metaphysics and speculated wildly and deeply,
using his powers of reason to make sense of the cosmos, would have no home
among the chattering fools. His open-ended, free-ranging, inductive heuristic
is rich and original, because it opens one up to the joy and fun of pure
thinking for its own sake, and the more one thinks, the greater the odds that
one will stumble onto a seminal point, and all humankind gains thusly.
Every amateur thinker should be encouraged to
delve deep, read widely, discuss metaphysics with anyone who will listen, and
then write short white papers about every subject under the sun. This deprives
the chattering, managerial class of their monopoly on thinking, and sets
society up to receive the generation of individuating supercitizens required to
run society well, keeping it pleasant, prosperous, and free.
G: “As a philosopher, not merely a
writer, Hoffer is supremely original. Consider that Hoffer’s major themes have
to do with the nature of autonomous, self-ruling individuals and how these
persons exist as a cosmic being. However, the influence that Marxism began to
exert over Western man post-WWII, especially as dictated by the proponents of
the Frankfurt School beginning in the 1960s, bolstered the rule of centralized
government and the state, and attacked man’s capacity for self-rule.
The Marxist Frankfurt School
elevated intellectuals to the role of burgeoning government bureaucrats. The
role of intellectuals in Western civilization, the members of the Frankfurt
School proposed, should be at the forefront of life in Western societies. This,
they demanded, ought to be the case regardless of their lack of creative output
or talent.
What mattered most to intellectuals
of the Frankfurt School was the re-organization of the Christian West into
communist societies. However, before full-blown communism could become a
reality in Western nations, an elaborate mechanism of brainwashing and
corruption of culture needed to be put in place.”
My response: Hoffer is a supremely
original thinker because he was an egoist, an individualist and individuators,
and these traits and life approaches are optimal for personal creativity and original
thinking.
Gonzalez accurately describes how Hoffer
is fascinated with and much explored how the autonomous, self-ruling individuals
are and function, and what is their cosmic relationship to existence as part of
the universe, and that these philosophical investigations on the part of Hoffer
do incline him to see the world as a stoic would.
Gonzalez then contrasts Hoffer with
the Frankfurt School intellectuals, who seek to wipe out the Western idea of
the sovereign individual, pursuing his own interest as he sees fit, running his
own affairs, ruling himself.
These thinkers are ideologues, true
believers in Marxism and postmodernism, denying that we can know reality, know
anything really, that all knowledge claims and metanarratives are but personal
opinion.
The cultural Marxist, by 2023,
almost toppled our society and their revamping the culture and brainwashing the
young took effect.
G: “The long march to communism, the
Frankfurt School proposed, needed to concentrate on the destruction of Western
culture, family structure and values, commerce, the free market, and people’s
reliance on free will. Given the assault on culture, reason, and common sense
employed by the Frankfurt School and its many variegated forms of Marxism, how
can individuals pretend to autonomy and self-rule in an era of “all is
political”?”
My response Gonzalez largely nails
what the problem is that the West is under hostile attack from within by its
own thinkers.: they want no private lives, no self-ruling, no individual-living
nor individuating.
When all is political, the group is
all and the individual ceases to exist.
G: “During the 1960s, human
responsibility and duty, the embrace of which is essential to man’s
differentiated reality, were relegated to the aberrant notion that the
social/political is the central axis of human life. This is one reason why
Hoffer’s thought cannot be grasped using quantitative sociological and
psychological categories.”
My response: Hoffer and
individualists promote personal responsibility and duty, for conscience and
integrity are individual virtues. The social and political are an irreplaceably
central axis of human life, but the most central and foundation axis of human
life is the private citizen, self-realizing, individual-living, individually self-identifying,
an moral egoist and advance self-actualizer who runs his private affairs while
balancing this with his important, secondary obligation to run his township,
county, state, federal government and the world in his capacity as an
individuated supercitizen. The social/political axis flows out of this primary
and foundation axis of human life.
Another way of stating the
relationship between these two axes is to point out that the primate life of
the citizen as egoist maverize, has priority and pride of place over his
involvement in his public life socially, politically, and legally, as a
supercitizen.
Once citizens are no longer raised
as thinking, ethical citizens, once this private and public individual orientation
is replaced by a collectivist or societal morality and culture pronouncing all
is social (groupist) and political (All is politically sorted out—and can only
be sorted out politically, there is no need for the continuance of
private-living, self-ruling citizenry to run society and the legal system, as
their political heritage and duty.), then it follows that Hoffer’s solutions
seem old-fashioned and unpopular, and he would not be respected let alone
heeded.
G: “In response to the politicization
of Western culture by the Frankfurt School, Hoffer’s thought embraced the
nature of individual persons and their ability to decipher reality. Hoffer is
essentially a stoic, uprooted in a world where man has lost all moral/spiritual
bearing. For instance, when Hoffer writes about intellectuals, he does so from
the understanding that these self-possessed “professionals” do not represent
the world of the men and women with whom he shared a vast amount of time
working in the fields and waterfront.
Hoffer is an original thinker for
several reasons. He reflects on human nature, individuality, and the
responsibility and duty of thoughtful and informed citizens to upkeep open,
democratic societies. Beginning in the 1960s, this broader and vital world of
culture, Hoffer pointed out, was relegated to the myopic poverty of
social/political categories. In other words, Hoffer understood to what alarming
degree American culture had become politicized and poisoned by Marxist
ideologues.
Hoffer’s thought cannot be reduced
to narrow and intellectually lazy political categories. His thought addresses
the contribution of self-governing individuals to open societies. The
importance of self-governance in Western democracies came under attack after
WWII. Hoffer was one of the first American thinkers to identify the threat that
Marxism posed for citizens in open societies. While many commentators and
critics of his work have focused on the content of his books, e.g., race
relations, individual freedom, personal responsibility and duty, his thought is
essentially an exploration of philosophical anthropology. Hoffer’s main concern
is the nature of man.”
My response: I think Gonzalez reads
Hoffer rather or very well. Gonzalez is beyond all other commentators on
Hoffer. Hoffer likely is a philosophical anthropologist, because, as a latent
egoist moralist, Hoffer’s main study is the nature of man, and man knows know
how to live and behave if he is to have any chance to survive, let alone
flourish.
G: “Hoffer is clear about the
meaning of his words. This is one indication that he is not an academic
intellectual. This aspect of his thought is poignant, given the soft spot that
post-WWII intellectuals had for totalitarianism, especially in the 1960s.
Hoffer’s conversational writing
style is vibrant and reflective of his working-class upbringing. His writing is
no-nonsense. He believed that because he lived among the derelict men and women
of the world, he never failed to capture the true motivations and aspirations
of the working class. His experience working alongside others in the fields of
northern California and the San Francisco waterfront taught him not to
romanticize the virtues and vices of working people.
Hoffer’s books contribute immensely
to eradicate the vacuous romanticism of people who make a living from paying
lip-service to the working class. Hoffer had an uncanny ability to predict the
takeover of Western culture by true believers.”
My response: Gonzalez and I seem to
think convergently: we both have identified postmodern Marxism and its
ideological adherents as true believers in this holy cause; they are relentless
fanatics and world domination is their aim. Hoffer anticipated their arrival on
the scene, and that is remarkable: he warned us as to whom they were and how
dangerous they were so perhaps we could rally our forces and allies to defeat
them.
G: “Hoffer toiled in the fields with
farm workers, in the storerooms of ships as a longshoreman and other menial
jobs. Because he worked with the people about whom leftist intellectuals
romanticize in their books, he found very little use for theories that obfuscate
human nature. Hoffer prided himself in writing and thinking about things that
he experienced firsthand. He detested abstract thought.
Hoffer had very little compulsory
education. Yet he possessed an insatiable desire for knowledge. After teaching
himself to read, he became a lifelong voracious reader. The study of history
was his greatest preoccupation.
Hoffer offers his readers insight
about the most pressing problems of our time, including how best to utilize
free will in response to the increasing complexity and pace of life in Western
democracies. His most important book is The True Believer (1953), a
superb example of philosophical perspicuity.
Hoffer’s books are deceptively
simple. He has no use for neo-logisms or fashionable academic theories. His
prowess as a thinker is rooted in wonder, respect for common sense, and his
ability to communicate profound ideas through clear writing.
Hoffer argues that personal
freedom—what is every man’s existential burden—makes some people neglect duty
and responsibility through a form of decision-making paralysis. Hoffer is one
of the few thinkers in the mid-twentieth century who realized that free will
was a burden for some people. This is one of the profound contributions that he
made to philosophical reflection.”
My response: I have come to conclude
that free will, that inescapable personal cross to bear for each adult, can be
an impossible burden, for man--perhaps most people: for a free will is a fierce
and scary proposition, for God commands each of us to use this tool of
individuating to grow our consciousness: knowing and growing as a consciousness
is most apt and fruitful as the maverizer bcomes every more alert and curious.
Her intelligence is most vibrant, alive, intelligent, aware, conscious and learning
about the world and her place in it: advanced, free-willed consciousness expansion
on her part as the developed individualist is the life quest of one who seeks
not escape from running her own life into the numbing, consciousness killing
collective.
G: “Hoffer’s understanding of mass
man is monumental. The True Believer warns readers about the dangers of
totalitarian societies and the forces that help shape them. His philosophic
vision detected a time of change, when intellectuals placed themselves at the
service of what Francois Revel later referred to as the totalitarian impulse.”
My response: Hoffer knew that mass
man is a person that group-lives, non-individuates in his group identity, his
altruist ethics and this exacerbates and makes unbearable his natural lack of
self-esteem: he makes a bargain with the Devil: in exchange for being admitted to a mass movements and its
leaders with their totalitarian, collectivist goals, he is given a haven into
which to immerse himself into, both escaping from the unwanted, unbearable
self, and, in the process, murdering his private ego.
G: “Other similar works to The
True Believer include Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses,
Camus’ The Rebel, Marcel’s Man and Mass Society, Milosz’s The
Captive Mind, and Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West. These works explain
how morally bankrupted and fallacious ideas give rise to totalitarianism.
Hoffer did not romanticize his
wayfaring ways as a young man. His was a difficult life. There is no sense of
adventure or exploration in his description of life as a migrant worker or
longshoreman in his work. He was not a rebel without a cause, as is often
romanticized by leftist intellectuals. It is a significant detail that he did
not use the people he worked with as tokens to promote social/political notions
of disenfranchisement and other catchphrases of social/political radicalism.
His modest fame as a thinker and
writer did not come about until the 1960s and ‘70s. This is a significant fact,
for those were times of Marxist student revolts and mass upheaval that were
inspired and organized by activists who were aligned with the Frankfurt School.
Hoffer could have played the revolutionary card. Having done so, he would have
gained unspeakable appeal and fame. This is particularly true given that he was
a working man. He would have also gained wealth.”
My response: Hoffer was a profoundly
moral person he wrote what he thought, felt, and knew, and his loyalty and
allegiance was not for sale.
G: “Because Hoffer worked in San
Francisco’s waterfront, a place in America that was a hotbed of unionists and
Marxists, he would have garnered immense fame among the radicals who strove for
political power at the time. Undoubtedly, he would have been promoted to
community organizer and radical-at-large. Hoffer could have sold books in much
greater numbers than he did. In addition, he would have yielded power over
students and other intellectuals, given the opportunist power-grab of Marxism.
He would have influenced policy makers and politicians. Instead, Hoffer chose
not to prostitute his convictions, a trait that great thinkers share.
Hoffer’s understanding of the
upheavals of the 1960s is indicative of the sophisticated grasp he had of
Marxist ideology in the latter half of the twentieth century. It would have
been easy for Hoffer to play the American counterpart to the communist ideologue,
Jean-Paul Sartre. Hoffer could have rubbed shoulders with the power brokers of
his time. In doing so, he would have saved himself many headaches from the
attacks leveled at him by his malcontented, radicalized critics.
The Personality of True Believers
Hoffer defines the personality of
true believers as that of a fanatical person who is easily blinded by radical,
mass-man notions. Part of the profundity of The True Believer can be
attributed to Hoffer’s firsthand account of the fanatical beliefs and actions
of true believers. In our own time, we can substitute the word fanatical for
radical ideologue.”
My response: Yes, the word fanatic
is interchangeable with radical ideologue or true believer.
G: “The True Believer
is one of several important works that trace the radical ideology of true
believers in the twentieth century. In many regards, Hoffer’s book is a rare
psychological and moral exposition of the Soviet new man, as this ideologically
crafted entity morphed in Western democracies. Hoffer explains how
intellectuals sold Western man Marxist ideology. The new Soviet man is not an
organic, grassroots entity. Instead, Hoffer contributes vast understanding to a
philosophical-sociological phenomenon that is unprecedented in human history:
the explosion of mass man values. Stroking the fire of this newest form of
barbarity, Hoffer informs the reader, are self-absorbed intellectuals.”
My response: Mass-man values is the
modern, latest, most concentrated form of a recurring theme in human history:
that humans are low self-esteemers, that they are not noble born, that they run
in packs and live in accordance with corrupt, altruist morality.
Hoffer is the first philosopher that
I know of so clearly to identify how human nature is and how humans function,
based upon their essential nature.
Slowly, haltingly—with many
reversals and setbacks—the history of civilizations and human progress is the
story of the rise in the West of the sovereign individual. The self-absorbed
intellectual ideologues, promoting their mass-man values, were stoking the fire
of this newest form of ancient, groupist/tyrannical/collectivist barbarity.
Though they seem and in a funny way are self-absorbed, they actually, there are
pure joiners. Their excessive self-involvement is a manifestation of their
personal identity being dominated by their group’s identity and their adopted
holy cause’s identity.
They are not individualists, but are
the elite joiners heartlessly, selfishly, and ruthlessly rule the masses from
the top of the heap: these parasites and thugs are actually evil because they
are wholly selfless and other-centered, thus their potential for cruelty and
viciousness is a bottomless temptation, once they run things, and give in to
their worst instincts.
G: “Hoffer’s thought is unique
because he did not consider himself an intellectual. A few introductory
comments about his work in relation to other seminal works of the same
orientation, seem in order.”
My response: Hoffer did not consider
himself to be a professional intellectual, but he knew and valued the fact
nonetheless that he was an intellectual and individuator, whose thought and
philosophy were grounded in reality and grew out of his lived-experience as one
of the masses. Hoffer warned that professional intellectuals, as part of every
ruling elite, are much sickened by power-lust, more so than any other human
type.
G: “Hoffer’s Perspicuity
While The True Believer is
the first of Hoffer’s books to be published, it is also the mature thought of a
thinker who, by the time of the book’s publication, had spent several decades
working alongside other people in difficult jobs. Hoffer was a consummate
observer of the thought, values, and actions of people. His gift of perspicuity
alone separates his work from many other twentieth-century intellectuals.
Because he understood the spread of
communism in Europe, especially post-WWII, his poignant analysis of Marxism and
communist disinformation is akin to that of Ayn Rand and Malcolm Muggeridge,
thinkers who lived in the bowels of Stalinism. This is indicative of thinkers
who knew more about Soviet communism than hapless Western intellectuals.
With an economy of language that
does not over-intellectualize, Hoffer offers his readers stark realism about
human nature. Lest we forget, observation of our surroundings is an essential
tool of thoughtful philosophers. This aspect of Hoffer’s thought placed him in
stark contrast with members of the Frankfurt School. In contrast to the
Frankfurt School’s apologia for Marxism that destroyed spontaneity in Western
life through the politicization of culture, Hoffer’s thought offers vast
avenues to understand the nature of man.
Hoffer Identifies the Culture War in
the 1950s
The True Believer
was one of the first books of philosophy in the English language to concern
itself with the crisis of moral self-rule and individuality vis-Ã -vis mass
society during the mid-twentieth century. This makes The True Believer
an existential work that focuses on authenticity. This also places Hoffer in
the company of existentialists like Albert Camus, Ortega y Gasset, and Gabriel
Marcel. Existentialism and philosophy of existence, both of which Hoffer
explores, concentrate on concrete human existence.”
My response: I like Gonzalez’s
assertion that Hoffer had existentialist leanings in his pondering how each
individual is to run his own affairs, and maintain his private life,
self-interest and retain power to run his own affairs in modern mass-society.
G: “Even today, few cultural
commentators and historians of ideas have caught on to the fact that Hoffer is
a philosopher who writes about the nature of work from the perspective of the
working man. This is a notable achievement because Hoffer does not offer a
radicalized, sanguine rendition of the working man. The working man, Hoffer
tells us, is the oldest embodiment of human beings that can be identified in
history.
From prehistory, human existence has
been marked by man’s capacity to toil and do so repeatedly without invoking the
ire of God or other men. Human survival beckons man to embrace work. Survival
is instinctual, not learned behavior. It is likely that prehistoric man
imitated hunting and gathering technics that he observed in animals. This was a
laborious task that led to longevity.
Other notable twentieth-century
works that explore Marxism’s exploitation of the working man for its
totalitarian agenda include Malcolm Muggeridge’s work, especially after his
disheartening and eye-opening trip to the Soviet Union in the 1930s; José Ortega
y Gasset’s seminal work The Revolt of the Masses, which appeared in 1930
but was not translated into English until 1960; and Albert Camus’ analysis of
revolutionary nihilism and tyrannical Marxist governments and institutions, The
Rebel: An Essay of Man in Revolt, published in 1951 and appearing in
English in 1953. Of equal importance are Czeslaw Milosz’s portrayal of the
communist psyche in The Captive Mind, published in 1953; Gabriel
Marcel’s Man Against Mass Society, a masterful book that analyzes man’s
embrace of nihilism and what this means to personal autonomy in mass society;
and Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West.
The True Believer
made great strides in making sense of fashionable social-political trends in
the twentieth century. Hoffer exposed American communists and their
Internationalist cadre like few other thinkers during his lifetime.
The True Believer
showcases Hoffer’s understanding of the politicization that America was
undergoing at the hands of the Frankfurt School, and other forms of communist
ideology in the 1960s. We encounter Hoffer’s philosophical prowess in his
detailed account of man’s metaphysical and existential nature, and how,
depending on man’s moral make-up and spiritual fulfillment, an individual
fashions his life.
Hoffer possessed a street-wise
understanding of man, of his dreams and aspirations, but also of man’s capacity
for envy, resentment, and calumny. The story that Hoffer conveys about man is a
universal tale. Like Pascal, Hoffer does not cover man’s nature with one
finger, as the saying goes. What he describes in his books, he learned in the
streets. Much like Pascal, Hoffer views man as fallen, yet capable of
contentment. If man is to find inner peace in this world of strife, he must
begin by recognizing his limitations. Hoffer attributes the discontent and
dysfunctionality of true believers to unhappiness and their incapacity to
simply let life be.”
My response: Yes, humans are fallen,
yet we can become happy and content, and we should seek happiness, not just
enduring suffering as Jordan Peterson so drearily overemphasizes (Suffering is
real, though.).
Hoffer may have been the stoic that
Gonzalez portrays him as being, to seek and find contentment and inner peace in
this world of strife by recognizing his personal limits. Hoffer might attribute
the discontent and dysfunctionality of true believers to their painful live
filled with unhappiness and their incapacity to simply let life be.
But I think Gonzalez is
unintentionally selling Hoffer short here. Hoffer also suggested that people
needed meaningful work to give them self-esteem and meaning, and this will
provide them with contentment and desperately needed self-esteem. Implicit in Hoffer’s
answer to helping each person avoid becoming a true believer is to understand
and accept his suggestion that every human being is born a true believer, and,
only by meaningful work, being productive and perhaps self-realizing too, may
the person come to esteem himself, able to resist the attraction to join a holy
cause.
All are born selfless true believers,
but the moral functioning healthy adult has come to live with his nature, and
he will refuse to flee knowledge of himself, and to hide into a collective
movement or holy cause robbing him of his personality, spiritual and rational
existence, and his personal power which he surrendered to his guru as the price
of admission into that guru’s holy cause.
G: “The Spanish philosopher José
Ortega y Gasset refers to true believers as mass man. Ortega characterizes mass
man as a loafer, the type of person who does not care to cultivate higher
values and keeps others from doing so. This condition demonstrates irreverence
for free will, Hoffer argues.
A word of caution in writing about
Hoffer’s work is warranted. To do justice to his thought, two ingredients are
necessary. First, one must try to understand the lucidity of this hard-working
autodidact without recoiling to academic theories, given that Hoffer’s thought
rejects fashionable theory. Hoffer was a worker, not an intellectual who wrote
about workers. This situates him in a unique minority of writers who have
written about labor.
The twentieth century was dominated
by thinkers and writers—intellectuals—who romanticized about the plight of
workers, many of whom knew nothing about work. One of these is Jean-Paul
Sartre, communist bon vivant and recipient of the 1964 Nobel Prize for
literature. Unlike Sartre, Hoffer did not use workers as tokens of Marxism.
Stated in simple terms, Hoffer was not born with a silver spoon. To critique
the work of a thinker who shied away from self-indulgent pseudo-values requires
honesty.
A unifying theme of Hoffer’s work is
modern man’s inability—or lack of desire—to confront existential freedom.
Freedom, Hoffer reminds us, is a heavy burden to bear for many people.”
My response: People are born
disinclined and not desiring to be free, to self-consciously assess the self’s
moral quality, and to will to live and individuate to rehabilitate the self, so
that the self comes to esteem the self veridically because the self has taken
up his cross, and shouldered his adult responsibilities, and the burden of
living, facing reality.
And standing alone on one’s own two feet is a
personal burden he is willing to assume and work through. Only in this way is
the discontent of this innate true believer, not to blossom into full scale
renunciation of a spoiled unbearable personal life and soiled consciousness, as
the panicked, desperate frustrated atomistic failure of a human being, whose
final resort is to flee from himself into true-believing, mass-movement
alternative to be rid of the self forever.
G: “If the aforementioned is
symptomatic of a morally and spiritually bankrupted age, the major culprit is
self-consciousness. Hoffer was one of the first thinkers to identify the
narcissistic malaise that began to consume Western civilization in the 1960s, and
how this has come to influence all aspects of life in the twenty-first century.”
My response: Gonzalez did well up to
this point. Yes, there is a sick form of self-consciousness, a narcissistic
malaise that has infected the consciousness of all frustrated true believers of
any ideological bent. But this self-consciousness is the arrogance and
selfishness of a pure joiner, playing roles and participating in destructive
social games always with one eye glancing at approving peers, for all said
thought and done by this self-conscious person is in complete agreement with,
group thing, its demand for his complete conformity and doing and saying
whatever the collective demands from him. This grows evil in our world.
The healthy self-consciousness of an
egoist developing his individual talents as a rational self-interested agent
and maverizer is not concerned pro or con what the group or community think of
him. Their praise and reward, and their punishment and criticism are mostly irrelevant
background noise.
Jordan Peterson severely denounces individualism
in 2025, castigating self-interest as actual Luciferian pride, as selfishness
and arrogance which will turn the world into hell and will land the person if
hell if he does not watch out. I would not like Gonzalez to equate any form of
self-consciousness as neurotic, narcissistic and selfish as Peterson seems to
have concluded.
I wish it to be known that I neither
approve of nor like arrogant, selfish people, though I have these natural
attributes too, as do every other person. Both Peterson and Gonzalez come down
on arrogant, selfish, narcissistic people as wielding an immoral, unhealthy
sense of self-consciousness, which is true but requires contextual
qualification. Selfish, arrogant narcissists generally are groupists, not
individualists. The phony, artificial poseurs are strictly herd creatures.
Their unpleasant personalities a
behavior is typical of a joining individual determined to play a role in a
social arena. The roles they assume and adopt are not at all organic to their
actual, undiscovered selves; these roles lived and acted out are not in the
least genuine or authentic, and that is appropriate, but what both Peterson and
Gonzalez seem to fail to comprehend is that it is the selfless, altruistic
joiners who are arrogant, selfish, narcissistic, and active true believers.
The individuating egoist is
self-conscious in a healthy way, and this must be distinguished from the herding
form of corrupt individual existence exhibiting and fielding a corrupt self-consciousness
of the pure groupist, the source of evil and suffering in the world.
When people are arrogant, cruel, selfish,
and discourteous, I argue their motive and inclination is treating others as
they treat themselves, being sadistic and masochistic towards themselves, a
hateful pattern, which they also export to others. When one hates oneself, an
evil state of existence, then one cannot treat others well. When one loves the
self, and works and self-realizes, them one is kind to the self, and then
treating others similarly is an easy transition to make.
If one is kind to others, one
esteems first the self, and then others afterwards. If one is cruel to others,
one esteems not the self nor the other, either. When one is selfish, arrogant,
and discourteous to others, one lacks high self-esteem. When one lacks high
self-esteem, one mistreats others. When one esteems others, it is because one
treats the self well. Without decent treatment of others, the moral actors lack
self-esteem. Without self-esteem, others will be mistreated. High self-esteem
and considerate treatment of others track together.
G: “True believers have radicalized
all aspects of postmodern life. This observation is perhaps Hoffer’s greatest
contribution to twentieth-century thought. Western man no longer exercises
spontaneity in his dealings with other people or institutions. True believers
are self-conscious people. Existential reflection, which is a creative act that
enables man to cultivate self-knowledge, ought not to be confused with life as
self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is the purview of narcissists.”
My response: Again, Gonzalez calls
for spontaneity from each individual in his dealings with (I would include the self-first
and foremostly) with other people or institutions. If Gonzalez wants
existential reflection, the creative act with enables man to cultivate
self-knowledge, then the self-consciousness of the individuated individual
alone can make that person, free, happy, contented, at ease with himself while
maverizing as a living angel.
G: “According to Hoffer, for true
believers, life means discontentment. True believers can never experience the
intense joy that C.S. Lewis celebrates. Instead, the true believers’ attitude
toward life culminates in the virulent “all is political” slogan of the 1960s.
In embracing popular causes, true believers find it necessary to merge
themselves with the confluence of the popular causes they promote.”
My response: One of the things that
Jordan Peterson has done very well is to point out, like Gonzalez is noticing
above, that the social justice activist shouting that all is political, that
the only moral, social or legal solutions that work and are virtuous are
executed politically by taking over the legal and cultural machinery of
society. Now political involvement is vital but most moral and legal solutions
are best done privately, independently as self-help chasing after completing
one’s goals of enlightened self -interest. Once tens of millions of American
individuating supercitizens have their private affairs arranged and in order,
then they can enter social and political arenas to dominate there, and to run
those arenas well, better than ever before.
G: “Hoffer’s analysis of true
believers is not isolated to mass movements. He laments that true believers are
not content to live their lives in the absence of taking up a myriad of public
causes.
Hoffer argues that the character of
true believers has infected Western society. As self-possessed entities, the
ideas and behavior of true believers has spread to all aspects of Western
culture, for the radicalization of true believers destroys man’s capacity for
self-rule.”
My response: Yes, when the people
are prepared to live in, and come to agree to accept being enslaved in a totalitarian
Marxist state, they are actively true believers, and they are narcissistic and
selfless, and militant and utterly obedient to the dictates of their holy cause
and guru, but they are negatively self-conscious; they are bought political
robots who have no private selves left, and their capacity and power for self-rule
are gone, and taken away from them as they collapse permanently into the devouring
collective. They live no private lives, and all their improvement efforts are
public and communal: self-rule as a practice dries up.
G: “With the age of
self-consciousness, Hoffer argues, also comes an asphyxiating loss of
innocence. The opposite of innocence, at least as it plays out in our
self-possessed age, is cynicism. Innocence allows for good will. In turn, this
safeguards human aspirations about life and other people.
A self-possessed age leaves no stone
unturned, no form of imagination left standing. A self-possessed age
scrutinizes culture, vital life, friendship, love, sexuality, language, beauty,
religious belief, and art ad nauseum. In a self-possessed age thought reaches a
low-water mark that eventually has nothing to offer thoughtful individuals.
Under such conditions, what passes as reason is merely conditioned groupthink.”
My response: Gonzalez sure gives a
weird misleading definition of self-possession which is usually defined as
self-control and earned calmness of temperament when in duress. It seems like
he equates self-consciousness and self-possessiveness as equivalent to
narcissistic self-obsession, but, again, I object that such corrupting
self-indulgence is typical of discontented joiners, not self-directing
maverizers, loners and individualists.
Those that are joiners and altruists
are selfless enough, but it is not an innocent state of mind, nor smacking of
good will.
G: “Eric Hoffer is a symbol of the
type of man and thinker that can no longer be replicated today. Hoffer’s
perspicuity and ability to decipher destructive social trends was never
contaminated by fashionable theories or radical ideology. By keeping the latter
forces at bay, he was able to keep his thought rooted in truth, as this informs
the lives of independent, free thinkers.”
My response: I enthusiastically deny
Gonzalez’s point that a thinker like Hoffer cannot be replicated today or
tomorrow. That Hoffer, by nature, accident or sheer free willed choosing, became such a brilliant, original thinker and
great soul, though an obvious, impressive occurrence, society can grow millions
upon millions of both greater and lesser great souls than Hoffer by teaching
the young to maverize, to become civilized, to live by their egoist moral code,
and be encouraged to believe in and dedicate their lives to a good deity or
deities.
G: “Because Hoffer’s thought is not
that of a “committed” intellectual, he did not fall prey to the many forms of
hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty that are so prevalent among
intellectuals. Hoffer may be wrong in some of his assessments. However, his errors
are not the result of having to make reality conform to social-political
ideology.”
My response: Gonzalez is insightful
here. Hoffer does not intellectually fall apart as many other intellectuals
due, not because he is that much smarter than they are. Rather, their poor life
choices delimit their potential to think well and uniquely. By running in
packs, and selfless devotion to a holy cause, by altruistic dedication to
general causes, by striving for ideological purity, by refusing to individuate
for a lifetime, it is easy to predict that they will vege out as the
mediocrities that they have become, though thy could have been more.
G: “Hoffer’s stoicism has much to
tell us about the man of flesh and blood. His horse sense, as it were, refused
to embrace social/political mendacity. Also, because Hoffer embraced physical
labor from an early age, his ability to make sense of essential categories of
human reality remained rooted in the values of working people. His genius for
pointing out the essences that determine man’s understanding of reality is that
of a man who demonstrated respect for work. Hoffer shared Wyndham Lewis’ idea
that too much schooling does serious harm to a person’s ability to separate
falsehood from reality.”
My response: Gonzalez is quite eloquent
here, and, other than myself who likely understands Hoffer the best, Gonzalez
has captured what makes Hoffer tick and what is his greatness.
Again, it would have been most
instructive and helpful for Gonzalez to define how a stoic thinks, lives and
approaches the world, for that would give me a window of understanding how he
saw Hoffer as interacting with, and ultimately, thinking and writing about
people and the world with which he interacted.
I am beginning to get an inkling
that Gonzalez defines someone as stoical if she enjoys a rich, lively,
imaginative, spiritual inner life: she does not deny the world as it is, and her
unwillingness to impose a false, distorting characterization upon the world as
to what it is, and what laws which govern its regularities: She does not much
seek to remake the world, but to remake herself to fit how the world operates.
She improves herself, and little does she seek to make things better by
rearranging the world, or the lives of millions of people in it. She is not
social or political in the current sense used by intellectuals to praise
hyper-groupist true believers engaging in ideological group think as selfless,
radicalized group-livers.
In this sense she is an individual
and individualist, and if she did it as well and thoroughly as Hoffer did, she
would become a great soul as he achieved. That would make her and him
individuators whose moral code was egoism.
Hoffer was rational and alone and
yet was comfortable with himself as he was,, and this allowed him to be able to
be alone out there in reality, and if one can as a consciousness live
comfortably with a self as it is, without distorting how that self is to avoid
self-improving, or to hide in lies and justifications to shield one from
awareness of personal faults, sins and deficiencies, then one will encounter
the world as it is and others as they are, and then one largely knows the truth
from the lie, the good from the evil, the right from the wrong, the beautiful
from the ugly and sordid, and Hoffer excels at living in the Truth.
Gonzalez seems to define a stoic as
an individuator who dares to learn about who he is internally, and then find
the energy, will and determination and means to tackle internal faults and
vice, to make the self-better. That maverizer will by means of his journey of
self-discipline and self-discovery, learn and gain knowledge of the self, of
others, of reality and about good deities.
Finally, it is not that too much
schooling necessarily harms a person’s ability to separate falsehood from
reality, though Gonzalez by writing this is coming close to revealing that
Hoffer’s philosophical writings and his lived life demonstrate how a genuine
intellectual think, operates and acts.
There are millions of illiterate
peasants around the world with no formal or informal schooling who live
discontented lives of quiet desperation, who likely can separate falsehood from
reality better than can professional intellectuals, very schooled, very
credentialed, who think for a living, but these peasants can spend whole
generational lifetimes as groupist, nonindividuating, emotional more than
rational, collective not individualistic, held back and down by altruist
morality, living in non-capitalistic economies or tyrannies of some sort, as
existents somewhere along the lower runs of the ladder of a class society.
These peasants are not great thinkers or great souls, though their real world
existence might make them a bit smarter and wiser than ivory tower professors
breathing the rarefied air of Academia.
Hoffer was a genius, great
philosopher, original thinker, and teller of truths because he preached and
lived moderation in most things. He was part academic, though self-educated,
and he worked with his hands, so he was totally rooted in the grubby, everyday
practical world which gave him common sense. It is the amateur intellectual blend
which Hoffer exemplified, of working with one’s hands or driving a forklift,
driving a tractor or running a business, that root an intellectual into
reality. Still, each person working in the world should do art, philosophy,
writing, scientific research and inventing while working to pay the bills. This
blending of the world of commerce and factory production with high art and
speculating about how many angels dance on the head of a needle is what Hoffer
captured and lived while professional thinkers miss out on.
Professors run in packs, often are
ideologues (true-believing myrmidons serving a guru and his mass movement
pushing for his holy cause; and they are nonindividuating, and not rational
egoists.). They are bureaucrats in a hierarchy.
This privileged, affluent but
cramped, and truncated existence as a cog in the institutional machine can only
frustrate the self-loathing professorial ego to such a degree of pain and
agony, that he can no longer think, no longer distinguish truth from fiction,
and can no longer love himself or anyone else. He could be a monster in his
mass movement with great enthusiasm, capable of exerting violent pressure upon
others, bloody mayhem against any foe with glee and pride. This shell of a man
would rule the world and tell all how to think, and he really believes he is
better, smarter, and superior to the masses—when in reality he has become
morally and intellectually inferior to the masses to whom he despises and feels
contempt for.
When they fail to submit, obey, and join the
mass movement and revolution, this intellectual is tired of their
counterarguments and resistance: he will use terror, the state police, and the
torture rack to force them into silence, obedience and abject groveling at his
feet as they now tell him how wonderful he is, how impressive is his logic and
conclusions. He is tired of dissenters and will kill those who defy any longer.
Hoffer knew who these intellectuals were, how dangerous they were, and he
warned the world about them to save the world. This is one of his kindest
efforts.
G: “Hoffer understood that reality
has little to do with man’s wish to deform it. His writing has much to teach us
about the demise of constructive values and the destruction of once-important
institutions. It is ironic that in a time of social/political radicalization
like the 1960s, Hoffer was one of the few American thinkers who remained a
genuine free spirit.”
My response: Here is another hint at
Gonzalez’s interpretation of what a stoic thinks and does: a wise, aware,
realistic man seeks to understand reality as it is, not to deform it or distort
it in his describing it.
Too often, by stark contrast, the delusional
revolutionary would be unable to face and correct the truth of his flawed self,
which he asserts is perfection itself, but he erroneously concludes that it is
the world out there that needs a firm even bloody hand to straighten it out.
This revolutionary, of all and any
stripe, then comes forth with come his ideological narrative meant to undercut
and destroy established institutions and culture, introducing substitute,
inferior, even destructive values which smash civilization and introduce
anarchy, chaos, lawlessness, and societal breakdown, releasing depraved human
nature upon the world, with no learn constraints providing people with that
veneer of being civilized to keep him from becoming social and governmental monster.
Gonzalez nicely compliments Hoffer
was a genuine free spirit or stoic because he is not an ideologue or
intellectual clone, one of the group-living, group-identifying masses running
with their pack, the mass movement.
I add that Hoffer was a free spirit,
a great soul, a stoic, because he individuated, because he preached and
practiced egoist morality, and because he refused to group-live, the death
knell for individuating as a genuine free spirit.
G: “Hoffer’s genius can be
ascertained through his treatment of concepts like authenticity, self-rule, and
individuality. For him, these are not fashionable theories or concepts but
rather fundamental human values. This makes Hoffer a philosopher of existence;
he embraced the lived experience as vital.”
My response: Amen, well-said and
quite penetrating. Gonzalez correctly points out that Hoffer’s genius is
displayed through his treatment of concepts like authenticity, self-rule and
individuality, not as fashionable theories, but as fundamental human values. As
fundamental values, these theories and concepts of which Hoffer writes
transcend time and space, and are universal themes for analysis, which uncover
for us the human condition as it is, and hints as to where we may drive it.
Hoffer is a philosopher of
existence, yes, because he lived his philosophy, and his life and time in
libraries and at his writing table, helped him rationally make sense of and
explain his experience and the experience of all people out there in the world,
as well as in their own heads.
G: “Ironically, because Hoffer
embraced an apolitical philosophy of common-sense values that speak to everyday
life, he was essentially dismissed as a thinker by the academic establishment.
Hoffer’s major offense is that he tried to wrestle control of human values away
from opportunist Marxist intellectuals. By keeping the most basic truths and
values that man needs in order to flourish from becoming the domain of
fashionable theories, Hoffer was considered persona non grata by Marxist
ideologues.”
My response: Hoffer’s embracing an
apolitical philosophy of common-sense values that speak to everyday life did
lead to him being marginalized and spurned by professional, academic
intellectuals.
They were joiners, ideologues, nonindviduators,
narrow specialists and experts (whose fanaticism ultimately renders them as
anti-intellectual and no free thought or speech tolerated), altruists.
Altruists insist that we are moral when we aim
to make the world better by sacrificing the self to the needs of others in our
familial lives, in the community, at work, and politically as social justice
warriors seeking totalitarian political monopoly and tyrannical control of all
people in every aspect of their public and private lives, which will be run by
Big Government, its ruling Marxist Party, and its ruling elite, including the giddy but enraged professors drunk with
accumulated power over the subjugated, cringing masses.
Revolutionaries constantly plotted
to take over the government and the culture replacing it with a postmodernist,
Marxist dictatorship, and by late 2023, it became scary and apparent how close
they came to proceed. Trump is in, but the opposition is not yet down, let
alone out.
G: “Another poignant irony about
Hoffer’s thought is that he enjoyed great success in being read by the general
public.”
My response: Hoffer was read by the
American public who somehow intuited and sensed that he was their friend and
wise counselor to be read and heeded, even if they did not understand his
message, in part because he did not full explicate his views, and that task I
believe is assigned by God to me to complete.
Pedro Gonzalez goes an impressive
long way towards explaining Hoffer’s greatness, and why we should read Hoffer
today, now more than ever.
G:
“This essay was first published here in January 2021.
The Imaginative Conservative applies
the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we
approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you
help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of
modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
About
the Author: Pedro
Gonzalez
Pedro Blas González is a professor of philosophy at Barry
University in Florida. He earned a BA degree from the University of Alabama in
1987, MA from DePaul University in 1989, and PhD from DePaul in 1995. His
published books are Human Existence as Radical Reality: Ortega’s Philosophy of
Subjectivity, Fragments: Essays in
Subjectivity, Individuality and Autonomy, Ortega’s ‘The Revolt of
the Masses’ and the Triumph of the New Man,
Unamuno: A Lyrical Essay, Philosophical
Perspectives on World Cinema, Dreaming in the Cathedral,
and Fantasia. “
