Gonzalez Writes On Eric Hoffer

 

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-à-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.

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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. “