Defending Workers' Rights

Though I am over 72 years of age, I still work full-time in a union shop, a maintenance engineer, at a small, private, religious college in Minnesota. I am a union steward and have let them know that I am a blogger (philosophyfromaworkingman.blogspot.com) very concerned about workers’ rights, and we are up against a thuggish employer out to weaken or break our union, and beat up the workers. It is an uphill battle. I sent out the following email a couple of hours ago, and I want to share it with my readers on the blog site. I will leave out the name of the university (just refer to as U for the university in question. Here is my email sent the campus President, and officers all up and down the Facilities and HR hierarchy, tot he chief union steward, and the local union council—our business agent (the union with just be referred to as The Local). Here is the email No Reign Of Terror Please 8:05 AM (8 hours ago) My supervisor in a mandatory meeting last week and in a conversation with me later that day emphatically emphasized that any union worker that disrespects in any way ever peers, bosses, lecturers, or students will be disciplined and he the supervisor will not waver from that. Let us all agree that being respectful at work is expected and desirable. But, context is everything. I suspect the supervisor and HR have worked together to devise the rolled-out, hyper-emphasis on being hyper-respectful as a mechanism for bringing into line what they construe to be unruly employees. My take on this is three reactions. First, our engineers are rarely disrespectful to anyone. If they are do something about it. We are often treated as second class citizens for being blue collar as students and other staff sometimes mistreat us but we are afraid to speak up or defend ourselves because Management too readily sides with the student or staff abusing us. We do not want to risk being fired for defending ourselves. We are often regarded as guilty until proven innocent if anyone, anywhere complains about us. What about our rights? I guess we have none. Know that the Local will defend its employees if this disrespects thing takes off as anticipated. We are assertive and express ourselves but that is normal and proper and these worker communications must not be shutdown and mislabeled as disrespect in some zealous Management attack on Labor to weaponize disrespect as a means of suppressing worker individuality, independent thinking, self-starting enthusiasm for the work and the job. Intentional or unintentional running a weaponized anti-respect campaign is also a way of maximizing Management control over every aspect of workers thoughts, words and deeds and that is totalitarian supervising, a most effective means of union-busting or union weakening.. Second, we have dedicated, skilled engineers, and if this reign of terror ensues, they will resign, move on, some will be fired. Can the U with its embarrassingly low wages find comparable replacement workers? Judging from recent hires being short on experience, qualifications and licensing, it may be unwise to wipe out great staff already here out of some weird ambition to gain control of Labor at any price by any means necessary. The students and the U will suffer as new engineers will come here for 2 or 3 years to get experience and then move next door for more money, a humane, a democratic supervisory arrangement, better opportunity for advancement. Being an engineer at the U will then be a training  ground only. Few stay and those that may be 2nd tier caliber of employees. This is where the U is headed. How can Managers so educated, personally decent, well-meaning, industrious and smart devise and implement such a stupid, mean, dehumanizing and institution-destroying campaign as this hysterical push, this manic grab for power? Third,  we are entering an age as a people where blue collar skilled technicians' job descriptions are radically evolving and blurring up against supervisory and IT job duties. The intellectual technician of the future needs better pay, paid training, democratic and tolerant supervision, more praise and rewards, more power and say in running the joint, and Management encouragement of, enjoyment of and tolerance for a free-speaking, honest worker--still respectful of course--and if this disrespect, reign of terror campaign is carried out, workers that stay will be obedient, silenced, cowed little zombies, controlled but without the zest and creativity individually stifled-hardly candidates for growing into being intellectual technicians the future demands. Will HR lead us to the Promised Land or send us back to the Pharaoh to be chained-up slaves? Ed Ramsey Workers' Rights Blogger, the Local Union Steward

Gijsbers On Realism And Antirealism

Dutch philosopher Victor Gijsbers put out a video on 5/8/24 about Truth—realism and antirealism about truth. I took notes on this short video and will write them out below, slightly edited, and comment on them—here is the video: Gijsbers (G after this): “Antirealists are pilloried by the public as not believing in truth, in being anti-truth and being the cause of much falsehood, lying and fake news. The public and some philosophers level this criticism against antirealists about truth. Philosophers and deconstructionists are criticized as being anti-truth, arguing that falsehood is a good as truth.” My response: I agree with critics of antirealists like Gijsbers. Stephen Hicks criticizes Kantians like Gijsbers as getting rid of a belief in the human being’s ability to perceive objects in the world as they actually are, and without an ability to escape our perspectival bias would mean we cannot know reality, and that is an inability to know or offer propositions about either small t truths, or big T truths, and that inability as a bad thing to advocate and conclude, let alone allow to serve as the metaphysical base line for how we conduct our research, our investigations, our very lives. G flatly denies that take that antirealists are disrespecting truth, or calling it unimportant. Philosophers who are antirealist are misunderstood by the public and other philosophers. Antirealism is not a scary anti-truth position, dismissive of truth. G: “What is realism and antirealism about truth? I offer a mathematical analogy to demonstrate what are realism and antirealism about truth, and then I will apply this paradigm to things about the world around us. We have already proved some things in math like 1+1=2. We know there are infinite amount of prime numbers. And, also, in math there are things we don’t know: e.g., something call the Twin Prime Conjecture. This is about pairs, 2 numbers apart, e.g., 3 & 5, 5 & 7, and 11 & 13—all prime pairs. Twin Prime Conjecture conjectures there are an infinite number of prime pairs. We don’t know of Twin Prime Conjecture is true or false. There is no proof that it is true; there is no proof that it is false. There are three scenarios here: One, we can prove Twin Prime Conjecture (TPC) is true. We have not done so yet, and found it yet, but let’s assume for a minute it is true, or it’s possible to prove it is true, so TPC is true, and both realists and antirealists agree here. Two, Maybe we can prove TPC is false, or it is possible to prove it is false than both realists and antirealists agree here. In both these two cases, they are true or false not just because they could be true or false, but we should be able to prove they are true or false (TPC). The mere possibility that we can prove TPC could be true or proved false, even if we do not have the proof captured yet intellectually the potential is enough to guarantee TPC is true or false.” My response: G is trying to show that antirealists liberally allow propositions like TPC to be cognitively identified as true or false, even when we have not capture the proof yet, and this intellectual generosity demonstrates that antirealists are not only against truth, but they they epistemologically go out of their way to give truth-seekers the benefit of the doubt. I think that is fine as far as it goes. G: “Three: Third possibility. Can’t prove TPC is true or false. There exists a well-established math assumption that not all mathematical claims are provable or disprovable. Some mathematical claims—we already know these are not provable or disprovable (third category). With TPC who knows? Yet realists and antirealists do not disagree about the first two categories, but disagree about the third category. Realists: there exists a preexisting, independent realm of mathematical entities. Realists: They are there, the mathematical facts are there independent of our practices of proving. So either there are or are not TPC, an infinite number of them. TPC is either true or false in objective reality, and even if we can’t prove TPC either way, TPC is still going to be true or false.” My response: I agree with the realists more than with the antirealists that TPC is either true or false whether humans practices of proving or disproving can ever solve the puzzle or not. That is my primary ontological outlook, but the moderate in me concedes the though antirealists are mostly wrong, they still have some truth to add with their skeptical, subjectivist constructions proffered. G: “Antirealist mathematical theorists argue that provability is just provability. If we can prove some claim is true, it is true. If we can prove that a claim is false it is false. But if you can prove neither—if you can’t prove the claim true, or disprove it as false about TPC, then there is no fact, and it is neither true or false.” My response: Here is where Gijsbers needs to add that, regarding mathematical proposals which can be proved true or false (now and perhaps ever) the antirealists are noncognitivists, that claims that are neither provable or disprovable are meaningless, not cognitive, not truth apt, just mere opinion or whim. Many traditionalists, like Mark Levin and Dennis Prager, argue that there is a Creator who crafted natural laws to operate and regulate the cosmos created by God. Humans are able to rationally, empirically and intuitively ascertain what is true, what is false, what is right and what is wrong, that there are moral facts, and that studying the natural world and the social world will allow us to generalize what these laws governing the universe and human society are. This is both a cognitivist and realist set of premises. The danger is the noncognitivists and antirealists so depreciate traditional acceptance of Platonic, acceptable Forms or universals like Love, Beauty, Goodness, Evil and God, that humans have lost their traditional values, now with no spiritual, natural, rational or historical standards to lead civilized lives, so evil and barbarism and tyranny will abound were antirealism and noncognitivism to be accepted as the ontological and epistemological tropes guiding our declining into postmodernist Leftism. G: “The realist asserts that that any math claim is true or false independent of if we can prove it. The antirealist counters that if we can’t prove it to be true or disprove it as false, the claim is not having the property of truth. So it is neither true or false. Realists postulate an independent realm of mathematical facts. They accept not that these proofs and disproofs are just our methods of proof, and these define what mathematical truth and falsehood is, and anything that doesn’t fall under our methods of proof are neither true or false. Which of these 2 positions is better? I’ll not try to decide that but I want to point out that there is at least one problem the realist faces that the antirealist doesn’t, and that is the realist has to explain how do we get into contact with this realm of mathematical facts. And how do we know our methods of proof are the right way of investigating this independently existing mathematical world?” My response: I think the realist is able to make contact with the independent world, not only of concrete, solid things, and by inference, imagination, research and intuition, able to make contact with the world of Form, Spirit, Logos, the a priori, infinite world intrinsically sensed by extrasensory means by Aristotle, Plato and many others. I think epistemological direct realism is at work and serves to allow human search for the nature of physical and immaterial reality to be adequately experienced, conceptualized, knowable as cognitively true or false knowledge. G: “The anitrealist does not have to face this challenge. For the antirealist mathematical truth is defined in terms of our methods of proof. And so for the antirealist there is not question of adequacy. Let us apply realism and antirealism now to the world around us. We use a very complicated set of methods involving empirical investigations, theorizing, building instruments to investigate the natural world. And we are sometimes changing, improving our methods of investigation concerning investigation about the world. Realists and antirealists agree about searching for truths. They agree about how to do it, using our best empirical methods, improving empirical methods.” My response: Gijsbers is an antirealist, not a neutral commentator as he pretends to be. He keeps reminding the viewer how much realists and antirealists have in common, but what he fails to realize or at least admit to the reader is that all of these agreeing aspects of studying reality are minor agreements in light of the huge, un-proclaimed disagreement that really is the only debate that matters. Antirealist are epistemological perspectivists, that we can never know objects out there in the world as they are in themselves. If the external world even exists, then it is not knowable, rationally apprehended by our perceptions and conceptions based upon these sensed experiences. This disagreement is unbridgeable and primary with prodigious influence and consequence. Gijsbers in the spirit of intellectual honesty and fair play for his students and the public must acknowledge this disagreement as singularly significant, and that students are being lulled into accepting the real world is ever inaccessible to their consciousness, rendering them into little Kantians and postmodernists. Eric Hoffer has well documented what happens to a people without their tradition of a good deity, traditional culture, values and a way of life predicated on the premises that objective reality is where their morals, values and faith originate from. Once deconstructionists get the young to accept this skeptical nonsense it opens the way for Satan, isms and mass movements, the very utopian dream salivated over and sought after by too many leftist professors and intellectuals. Concerning propositions that seem to be or are actually unprovable for now, or for any pondering human intellect, my response is the realist solution, that the truth or falsity of any or most proposition is known by God and the angels, and perhaps we can only learn these answers as our knowledge grows, as we get smarter as individuators, or if by divine revelation, God imparts the answer or answers to one of us seekers after truth. G: “But they do disagree about the empirical method on one hand, and on the other hand the world (I add for clarification its nature, is knowability, its very existence, Ed Says). If we follow the best imperial methods we have we will discover reality, and on this realists and antirealists agree (Do they, I doubt it, Ed says. But let me suspend judgment and allow Gijsbers to develop his argument,) G: “But there is a philosophical disagreement about which half of this story is more fundamental. The realist says the fundamental thing here is reality. And a good empirical method is one which puts us into touch with reality independently existing. Anti realists respond, yes, good empirical methods bring us into touch with reality because that’s what reality is. The fundamental idea here is a good investigation, a good empirical method or epistemic standard. Reality can be defined as that which gets uncovered when we use the best empirical method that we have. Realists think of reality: a fundamental and good method bring us into touch with reality. Antirealist: Our method, our epistemic norms, are the fundamental point here. Reality is what we come up with or find when we use those methods and norms. So there is a distinction in what is more fundamental. Is reality fundamental (Ed Says, yes!) and our norms have to live up to that. Or: our norms are fundamental and reality is what gets discovered when we follow through on those norms. When we perfectly follow through as best we can come up with. So this is not a distinction between someone who wants to search for the truth and someone who doesn’t.” My response: To be more than a little bit antirealist or quasi-realist beyond a need for both to keep us honest and humble, is to be anti-truth. G: “Both say they want to use our best empirical methods to find out about reality. It is a discussion about what is more fundamental. Our norms, or is it reality? Is reality the authority that determines if our norms are any good? Or are we the authority that determines if our norms are any good and reality is what comes out of that? Those are the two pictures that we have, the realist and the antirealist picture. So in mathematics we have a nice test case where we thought about these unprovable truths like maybe we don’t know if it’s an unprovable truth. But maybe the twin prime conjecture, right, suppose it’s unprovable. You can’t prove it. You can’t disprove it. Is it still true or false, right and the realist says yes and the antirealist says no, it’s neither true or false. I think we can come up with you know vaguely plausible scenarios like that in the empirical realm as well. Let us say there is a particle a do-nothing-on (dno), tiny particles flying through space. They do nothing and do not interact with any other particles. So, by definition they are undetectable. Are there dnos? Do they exist? Obviously we have no evidence for dnos. A realist will postulate about dnos—either they are there or not there, but we will never be able to know. Reality is independent of us, so it is still true or false that dnos exist. The antirealist: No, it is not going to be true or false if dnos exist by definition they are even beyond our best empirical methods. There’s no truth or falsity about them. There is no sense of which they are or are not part of reality. They are just outside the scope of what it is to discuss what is real. The realist declares that all is either true or false. The antirealist dismisses certain ideas as being neither true or false. In terms of authority, where does the authority for our claims come from? Everybody in a sense is going to agree that the authority for our claims come from our norms, our methods of investigation, right. If I want to tell you that this, this and this is true about the world, I’ve got to show you my method, so that’s where the authority comes from. But where do these epistemic norms get their authority? Right, this is where the realist is going to say well, the world, right, the world is going to give its authority to certain epistemic methods namely in the following way: only those epistemic methods that are good at uncovering reality have authority. Only they are good, right, only they count as generating knowledge. It’s possible for the realist to say this because they believe reality is more fundamental than the norms. In fact, it is necessary because they believe reality is the fundamental thing, and norms are trying to latch onto that. The antirealist methods and norms are going to be the primary thing and reality is what comes out of that, what we discover when we follow through on those norms. Antirealists need another story about authority. The normativity of our methods comes from us. It comes from our community, our thinking, maybe from the basic structures of the human mind-on the basic structure of finite thought in general—a Kantian story. Or maybe it comes from more historically general situations in society, our culture, our science. So that would be a more contextual story. We need some kind of story that takes us as the primary locus of authority, not independent reality as the primary locus of authority is what is needed. There is no true object but reality must be the source of our claims, claim realists. Antirealists causes worry for the realist by suggesting that realism is going to lead to skepticism.” My response: This worry, which antirealists seemingly cause for realism suggesting their confidence in their empirical knack for directly encountering the given, or objects in external reality, revealed as they actually are, is not as certain as they presume, that they can never know for sure if they experience things out there as they actually are, is an attempt to discombobulate and stop realists in their tracks that their direct realist epistemological assertion leads to vexing skeptical puzzles, suggests that realists in their objectivist epistemology are beset by skeptical worries and criticism, which antirealists with their subjectivists perspectival epistemology are able to avoid because they encounter reality indirectly as part of their subjective world-encountering experiencing. This claim the skepticism besets realists but not the antirealists themselves contradicts the overarching epistemological facts governing reality in which antirealist function as subjectivists. They are profoundly pessimistic or skeptical that they will ever know the world as it is outside of human consciousness, whereas realists or objectivists are much more optimistic, certain and confident that human can grasp or know reality in effable, clear concepts, words and propositions thereby eschewing and sloughing off skeptical concerns. G; “If reality is independent of our norms, how do we know our norms are actually adequate/ to reality? How do we know our way of investigating that what comes out of that is reality, and not something that has nothing to do with reality? It is not so easy for realism to solve that to avoid a skepticism that suggests there may be an unbridgeable gap between reality and our norms. As we discuss realism and antirealism, we also touch on skepticism, idealism, contextualizaiton. Antirealists about truth are not pro fake news, not dismissing truth, not saying our methods of investigation are perfect. No antirealists say it is just our best methods for now used in the best possible way.

Peak Experiencing

Many people fondly recall a favorite, peak experience, perhaps the only one which they will ever enjoy. Such accidental events are precious, unexpected, to be treasured and remembered always for sure. My suggestion would be that a nearly as thrilling, satisfying, if not quite so emotionally intense experience, is available to all humans who choose to so live—by self-realizing, they replace the experience of a life time with a lifetime of near peak experiences on a daily basis. If one individuates daily and continually, loving and serving God at the same time and all that while, one’s actualized talent, creativity and intelligence will grow and develop, getting better and better as the years go by, and the merited enjoyment of that journey will develop with it.

Reverse Gaslighting

It occurs to me that if one is an egoist and loves and esteems oneself, one has no motive or predilection to whisper like Iago into his master’s ear to undermine his happiness, to feed his jealousy, to upend his mind, to ruin his life. If one is a rational egoist and maverizer, then one in action should be practicing in thought, word and deed, reverse gaslighting or reverse Iagosim. What this entails is that with carefully selected, kind but honest words, both whispered or openly declared, he will work to build up the self-confidence and self-worth of every adult, peer, child or pet over who he holds sway over, is able to influence, or even comes into contact with. I can think of no better or efficient means of spreading love and happiness in the world than by not seeking any longer in one’s utterances to tear down whatever modest level of self-esteem another person or creature has managed to cling to. To practice reverse gaslighting in public or in private is to live, act and speak altruistically within an egoist morality. The reverse gaslighter is determined to undermine the psychological health of no one or no creature under his sway, and nor will he allow a malicious gaslighter to attack and undermine his own mental health or sense of well-being.

Altruism At A Glance

Altruism, if properly applied, will be embedded within an egoist ethical code, where I will construe it as productive other-dealing, by verbally and in action working to, establish, build up, reinforce, or uphold and restore another’s legitimate, wholesome self-esteem by providing upbeat, positive feedback to the other in one’s remarks and suggestions to her, to bolster her self-image—this is socially beneficial and proper.

Endless Night

Occasionally I enjoy reading or rereading an Agatha Christie novel, for light entertainment. I recently finished her novel Endless Night where Mike Rogers, the serial killer and psychopath, the villain and narrator who conspires with his lover Greta Anderson for Mike to capture and marry poor, impressionable, credulous little rich girl, Ellie Guteman to murder her for her money. The villains succeed but are caught in the end. The Rogers build their dream mansion on Gypsy’s Acre, a haunted, cursed, evil place where evil long lingered, and it seems to me that Christie believes in demons—as I do--that some spots are cursed and haunted, and unfit for inhabiting lest, the evil spirits there tempt human sinners to commit grave, serious crimes for gain. The Rogers were warned by the gypsy woman not to build there and live there, but they dismissed her dire warning, so their lives ended up being quite tragic. Far too often humans do not heed warnings as to what they should avoid and stay away from. I enjoy Christie’s remarkable character development, and how true is their hunches about human nature. For example, Santonix, the gifted architect who builds the Rogers’s mansion is part evil, so he knows how evil Mike and Greta are and what they plan, so he builds a mansion to reflect the complex relationship between the three main characters. Let me quote from Page 154 where Christie’s characterizes Santonix as a perceptive genius, almost clairvoyant who knows who people are, even better than they know themselves. He is such a developed individuator, that he has learned about himself, and through his deep, vast, wise self-knowledge, based in truth and reality, he thus is able to know others as they are, even when they have not discovered who and what they are: “’What a strange man he is,’ Ellie said thoughtfully. ‘You mean he knows the future.’ ‘No,’said Ellie, ‘I didn’t mean that. He knows people. I said it to you once before. He knows people better than they know themselves. Sometimes he hates them because of that, and sometimes he’s sorry for them. He’s not sorry for me, though,’ she added meditatively.” Then on Page 156 MIke’s mother chides him for rising above his station, that being ambitious is unnatural, accursed and somehow an affront to God who will strike down the conceited and proud, and this too seems to be a trope which Christie mentions again and again. Here is the quote from Page 156: “’Too grand for the likes of me, eh.?’ I said. ‘I didn’t say that lad.’ ‘But you thought it.’ ‘It wasn’t what you were born to, and no good comes from getting out of your station in life.’” My response: Christie the Dame, millionaire and famous individuator also is a British snob who thinks the burghers, workers and poor should accept their lot in life and not seek to better themselves, which is malarcky. Her nature is complicated and self-contradictory too.

Justice Thomas Speaks

I saw an online clip of Justice Clarence Thomas speaking on The Second Amendment, and the videotaped quote was aired on Facebook on 9/17/26 by American Firearms Association, of which I am a member. Here is the tape: “The right to bear arms shall not be infringed. It assumes the right. It does not grant the right. Yes. And then so you go First Amendment, etc., etc., etc. Where does that come from? And that’s what I was interested in. What establishes this whole notion of liberty? What establishes this order of right? And so it matters if you think the government is the primary giver of, a granter of rights. And you receive rights and benefits from the government versus you have the right and the government receives its authority from you.” My response: Thomas is brilliant and wise for rights come from God to the individual, therefore the government receives its authority from us, the governed, and as individuating supercitizens united in focus and action, we can and should impose our rule upon the government and politicians. I also have a short but rather related quote from Marco Rubio on 9/18/26: “Our rights come from God, not from our government.” I could not agree more.

Natural Gifts

It has long been my contention that all humans are viable candidates to self-realize, that a successful career and life plan of self-realization is much less about one’s natural gifts—yes, geniuses are a bit ahead of the average person—than it is about one choices, one character traits: if one loves and esteems the self so that only life lived as an individuator will suffice; whether one has a vision and is imaginatively creative (aptitudes which develop as one uses them); if one is willing to put in the time and hard work to get ahead; if one has the perseverance, patience to see it through, a willingness to sacrifice short term pleasures for long-term gain

To Be Great Is To Be Misunderstood

I can imagine my friends, neighbors and family have been so standoffish for decades due to what hey regard as my megalomaniac sense of self, and my profoundly shocking bragging about my own superiority. If I am lying, mistaken or out of touch with reality, if I am not the great soul and prophet from God that I claim to be, then they are correct and God smiles upon them for opposing my overweening pride, my bald assertions, my outrageous claims. If I am telling the truth and am what I claim to be (I am and know I am.), then God does not smile upon them for rejecting De’s prophet. I am almost 72 & ½ years old, and I am as isolated, unknown, unrecognized and marginalized as ever I have been since I started writing Mavellonialist philosophy in 1974. It occurred to me several days ago that I am a one-man band and that will not change. I will not necessarily die alone, but I will likely go on ignored, not acknowledged or receiving the attention and respect which I have earned and deserve. So be it, the people have spoken. I forgive them and wish them all the best and pray for them. I am not an exceptionally gifted person—I have just done what any human being can do and is to do, answer affirmatively, with one’s whole heart and soul, the divine invitation and commandment to self-realize for a lifetime as a living angel. The paradox is this: as a person grows into his personal great-souledness while alive, his singularity, his individual soul becomes proportionately unattractive and repulsive in social circles to popular, mediocre nonindividuators, the vast social majority of humans. The consequence is the more one individuates, the more the wisdom and advice which one has gleaned and is willing to convey to the masses, to that extent necessarily a sleeping people will ignore, repel and tune out advice beneficial to these persons and their communities, their nation. The masses listen to whom they should run from, and are suspicious of and are hostile to who their real friends and benefactors are. It is the way of the world, and all I can do is get my works published for posterity. That is the best possibility.

Objective Morality

I am a moderate and yet I am mostly an objective moral realist. This may seem fuzzy, contradictory or muddled-thinking, but it really is not. God exists and God is love. God is a moderate too so the divine moral code and natural law which God constructed and bestowed upon us earthlings as our code to guide our thoughts, decisions and actions. This code mostly is objective and yet it is also intrinsic (like Platonic Forms) and subjective and conventional. Moderation is not equivalent to relativism or the stance that anything goes. Still, a clear, crisp, effable moral code to live by is a must for human survival, for human happiness, for humans to be allowed by God to enter the kingdom of heaven after death.

The State Of Yale University

I get a free electronic newsletter sent to my gmail account from The Washington Free Beacon. Below enclosed is their article which was written on 9/18/26 by Eliana Johnson. I copied and pasted it below and will comment on it. Here it is: “ Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more An F for Yale University President Maurie McInnis Eliana Johnson Sep 18 Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more An F for Yale University President Maurie McInnis Eliana Johnson Sep 18 READ IN APP (American Enterprise Institute YouTube) Yale University president Maurie McInnis released a report in late April from a committee on trust in higher education that acknowledged the issues afflicting the Ivy League, from exploding tuition to runaway grade inflation and theatrically intolerant student activists. But the question remained: What would Yale do about it?” My response: Exploding tuition, runaway grade inflation, and theatrically intolerant student activists (woke true believers for their cherished cause of cultural Marxism). Academia is barely functioning, and Dennis Prager warns that it is near impossible for our youth to be sent their and not be culturally and morally corrupted by the conformist insanity which they are inundated with. Johnson: “ McInnis appeared at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday afternoon to answer that question. “And yet she couldn’t quite say how Yale is going to tackle this problem,” our editors write. On admissions, McInnis defended Yale’s holistic approach against a “test-based system” because Yale doesn’t want undergraduate classes in which “maybe everybody’s going to want to be a physics major.” (We would like to see the meritocratic, test-based system that produces an entire class of physics majors as opposed to a class of students with diverse academic interests.)” My response: Yes, we need to return to a meritocratic, test-based system which all have to compete inside of. Johnson: “Rather, she said, “I want to be sure that we both have physics majors and arts majors, that we have people who play on 1 of our 35 Division I athletic teams or play in our Yale Symphony Orchestra.” Yale has furtively brought back the requirement, starting this fall, that all applicants must submit ACT or SAT scores. But informed observers aren’t buying that Yale has truly reformed its ways. … McInnis’s response to how Yale will tackle grade inflation was similarly dispiriting. While we might think it’s “easy to fix grade inflation,” she said, it actually requires “multiple institutions,” as well as “K-12,” because Yale students arrive on campus so fragile they are actually incapable of receiving anything but an A. Students “have never seen anything other than an A their entire lives, and it can be really challenging for the faculty who are the first trying to give that student that grade that is not an A,” she said. Maybe it’s time for a committee on faculty fragility?” My response: If professors or students are too psychologically or emotionally fragile to not be given an A when the student doesn’t earn it or deserve it, it is time to kick that student and professor out of college. Johnson: “ Were Yale to implement an honest grading regime, she added, “What you would hear from the students are [sic] ‘Well then, you’re putting me at a disadvantage when I apply to medical school. You’re putting me at a disadvantage when I apply for other sorts of graduate and professional schools.’ So that’s why it kind of needs to be a collective conversation.”” My response: The school is not putting an underachiever or low performer at a disadvantage: by their own laziness, they have put themselves at a disadvantage and cannot be coddled, though they are young adults—it is time to grow up and quickly, taking responsibility for one’s poor choices and lackluster academic effort. Johnson: “ We don’t believe for a moment that graduate and professional schools wouldn’t take into account what a Yale GPA really means were the institution to chart its own course, just as Yale itself takes into account what GPAs really mean from more and less rigorous high schools across the country. But that would mean standing up to activist and entitled students, something McInnis evidently isn’t yet prepared to do. Don’t worry, though, there is a committee, and “we will see what comes out of this committee.”” My response: Student activists and entitled students need to grow up and mature, and earn the grade or flunk, full stop. Johnson: “ The Washington Free Beacon awards this performance no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

The Duty

 

I read many things, and I enjoy Agatha Christie novels. I will quote from her book, Murder Is Easy, and then comment on and develop the theme of her quote.

The murdered doctor’s wife, Mrs. Humbleby warned amateur detect Fitzwilliam that great danger was afoot: “She said, rather unexpectedly, ‘The world is a very wicked place, Mr. Fitzwilliam. Do you know that?’”

My response: Being a Christian and a Victorian, Mrs. Humble by firmly believes in good and evil as real forces at work in the world, at work spiritually, morally, socially, naturally—and that is my view too.

Christie: “Luke was a little surprised. ‘Yes, perhaps that may be.’

She insisted, ‘No, but do you know it? It’s important, that. There’s a lot of wickedness about. One must be prepared – to fight it. John was. He knew. He was on the side of right..’

Luke said gently, ‘I’m sure he was.”

‘He knew the wickedness there was in this place,’ said Mrs. Humbleby.’”

My response: She lays out a moral program which the good Christian is to practice in this Vale Of Tears. She is to believe that evil exists, and that Jesus, God and the good deities lay a moral duty on us to believe such, know such, and to fight such. One is to fight evil, one must be a soldier of God on the side of right, pushing back the darkness and cruelty of evil, for this is the Devil’s world, and we are born sinners. We run in packs, and Satan owns our groups, our group-living, our altruist ethics, so this wickedness is entrenched and institutionalized, widespread, enduring, persistent, almost impossible to dislodge.

Dennis Prager, our wise, decent Jewish elder and mentor, had made a claim nearly identical to the one made by Mrs. Humbleby: That we are not just to be good and loving, but are here to fight evil openly, officially and relentlessly, that is what it means to be good and that may be the primary route to heaven.

I agree with all these views and conclusions and I have incorporated these points within developing my moral system, Mavellonialism.

Now let me point out how clever Satan is: I believe he is most effective when his most ardent followers do not know they are working for him, whose motive is selfless love of humanity, operating and acting to make the world a better place, all for humanity which they do and avow that they love.

The fanatical idealist is cable of utter viciousness and murderous, genocidal violence against those standing in the way of the implementation of his program. This true believer is a lethal, living demon who would be shocked to realize what he is, and how his efforts fail miserably at making the world a much better place.

My conclusion: Yes, fight wickedness, but remain modest, humble and detached as to one’s own capacity to be violent even to kill In the 20^th century, historically unprecedented killing was done in the name of idealism and reform, so this motive to fight evil and do good is easily inverted and one serve Satan rather than fights Satan.

Hoffer's Working And Thinking On The Waterfront June 1958--May 1959, Pages 31-36

 

I am writing out each paragraph in Eric Hoffer’s book, Working And Thinking On the Waterfront June 1958—May 1959, Pages 31-36. I will comment as I go. Here it is: Hoffer (H after this): “August 27

Eight hours on the same ship. Steady grind all day long, and I had neither the time or the inclination to write a line.

August 27

In the morning on the bus I heard a Negro longshoreman argue that the ‘No Smoking’ signs are put up by the fire insurance companies. Pretty soon they will have ‘No Smoking’ signs inside the house, even in the bedroom. In other countries people smoke wherever they please but here the insurance companies are running things.

I haven’t had a good look at the bay all day. The feeling of being rushed drains the capacity for enjoying things.”

My response: Ever the intuitive genius and philosopher, Hoffer seems right that being rushed drains the capacity for enjoying things. I much endorse and favor our capitalist American economic system, bustling and hard work, but a civilized people, a maverizing people, need to stop and smell the roses some once in awhile too.

H: “In the morning I read an article by Max Nomad ‘Masters Old and New.’ Writing in 1937, he clearly discerns the intelligentsia as the coming elite in both capitalist and non-capitalist countries. But the article is without a hint of the intellectual’s role in history, and the significance of his dramatic comeback in the twentieth century.”

My response: Both Nomad and Hoffer, both Jews (Hoffer an illegal Jewish immigrant from Bavaria to America?), both very isolated intellectuals, separately and independently concluded that intellectuals were dangerous participants in and often rulers of elites controlling society or out to overthrow the existing elite. They love power and dominance and their cruelty corresponds to how far they must go to get and keep accumulated power.

Hoffer the original thinker goes beyond Nomad and suggests that intellectuals paid an unrecognized role in history, and that they coming to the fore in the 20^th century poses real

hazardous conditions, if left unchecked, for the masses everywhere.

I looked up Max Nomad in Wikipedia, and they quote this paragraph which he wrote and which I would like to, as an aside, comment on. Here it is: “I remain a lone-wolf philosophical anarchist whose sympathies go out to the poorest of the poor struggling for more and more of the good things of life. But I feel akin only to those rebellious but politically unattached intellectuals who dream of justice and an equal chance for everybody, but know, as I do, that, given the eternal recurrence of predatory elites, and the incurable ignorance and gullibility of the masses, a privileged and educated minority will always rule and exploit the uneducated majority.[4]”

My response: Note that Nomad is a lone wolf like Hoffer, though he is a reformer and Hoffer is not, at least not politically though he is a moralist.

Nomad is a reformer for bettering the living conditions of the poor and downtrodden, but accurately has appraised wicked, fatalistic human nature as dooming people to the eternal recurrence of predatory elites of all stripes everywhere and always running things and running rough shod over the incurably gullible, ignorance, compliant, masochistic, prideless (lacking the positive pride of self-esteeming) masses. Thus a privileged and educated minority will always rule and exploit the uneducated majoirty.

Actually the masses as individuating anarchists supercitizens will break the recurring, unjust pattern.

H: “August 28

Eight hours on the same ship. We follow the ship tomorrow to Alaneda. The hard work during the last three days is affecting my stomach. Something gets tied up in a knot when I strain my guts. I shall try to straighten it out tonight by drinking hot tee and relaxing.

August 29

Finally finished the ship. Eight and a half hours in Alameda. I am weary and on edge. I must slow down or even stop work for a week.

I must get hold of a biography of Bentham. His transition from a preoccupation with the all-seeing eye (panopticon0 to the promotion of the general welfare is an instance of the intimate connection between the intimate connection between the intellectual’s idealism and his innermost craving for a role of supervision (Vision and Supervision).”

My response: We are to beware of and always oppose idealists promoting their program or cause for through its acceptance in society, they seek to grab concentrated power to rule the masses. Same old story.

H: “September 1

I just read the introduction to Men of Words. It is not bad. I also copied Sections 8 to 11. I have so far 40 pages of manuscript. The things is crude and fragmented, bit it is a beginning.

September 3

Eight hours on the Arizona Maru at Pier 24. An easy day, and I am off tomorrow. My head worked in spasms. The beginning of Part 2 must tackle the problem of the optical milieu for literature. I shall trace the chain of events which led to the appearance of written literature in Egypt, Sumer, Palestine, Greece, and China. But the main thing is to outline the conditions optimal for literary creativeness.

After all, the chief value of history is not that it helps us understand the present or decipher the future but that it furnishes us with clues concerning the manner in which man is affected by his natural and social environment. We cannot experiment with humanity, but history is a record of how man reacted to variety of conditions.”

My response: I approve of and concur with Hoffer that history can offer us clues and perhaps a record of how human should react to change and not react to change.

H: “September 4

I have said it again and again. The only thing that will cure the Negro’s ills is that the Negro community perform something that will win it the admiration of the world. Yet it is difficult to see what this something might be. A Negro revolt in Mississippi; a desperate battle to the last man, a Negro Alamo. Or an excellent negro school for song and dance. Or an excellent trade school. Or a model organization for mutual help. It is the slow, hard way, and the indications are that the Negro will not take it.”

My response: Is it not that blacks cannot collectively or individually step up their game: they can if they will and I hope all people of all races and ethnic groups collectively and individually step up their game even more so, choosing to foster individuation among the young.

H: “He would rather derive pride from an identification with the achievement of colored races elsewhere. Yet I doubt whether even a triumphant Ghana could ever be to the Negro in America what Israel has been to the Jews.

The crucial question is whether the Negro will ever give up his alibi of discrimination.”

My response: Alibis hold all down and back, not just blacks. The individualist is one who shreds all of his alibis along the path of discovering and realizing his identity and talents. This blacks must do to of they will be made whole.

H: “

You do not give up the imperishable advantage of an alibi for the short-lived exhilaration of achievement. (Our successes only buoy us for a short time and then we must evolve further to remain self-esteeming, Ed Says.) There is trouble ahead. For the less justified the Negro’s alibi the more passionately will he cling to it, and the louder he will voice his grievances.

Were I a genuine American I would believe in the possibility of the automatic absorption of twenty million Negroes into the body of American life; that almost overnight, without special effort or an intermediate phase, the Negro in America can become a human being first and only secondly a Negro.”

My response: Over thirty million blacks will not be fully absorbed into the body of American life until the black in America can be a human being first (As a human being a person is a unique person who could maverize if she willed to be a person separate and distinct from their racial and ethnic identification.

H: “September 16

Seven and a half hours discharging cargo at Pier 17. It was very hot but work did not seem irksome. One of the reasons is that I got a good night’s sleep, and my partner (Juan Gonzales) though not much of a worker is a pleasant person to be with.

In the morning while eating breakfast, it occurred to me that the equivalent of a Khrushchev in the West is to be found not among the politicians but among the businessmen. A Communist regime is capitalism gone berserk. It is incredible how many insights one obtains while viewing a ruling Communist party as a company of merchant adventurers lodge in the body of a backward country.

During the day a winch driver I knew only by sight came over to talk. He started out with the union but immediately passed over to his own affairs. He must have been married for a long time since he has two grandchildren. His wife now is partly paralyzed, and as he talked I could sense the despair and bitterness simmering inside him. The must have been slovenly, lazy and self-centered even while she was well, and now paralyzed she is a millstone around his neck.”

My response: It is often observed and commented that we never know the private hell and suffering another person is enduring or struggling against, or perhaps is being defeated by. All we can do is commiserate, be a good friend, and pray for them, maverick to make sure we don’t make a mess of our lives, so we are then a burden to our family, friends, loved ones and the taxpayer.

H: “September 29

What is the optimal milieu for creativeness in literature, art, music, etc.? It is a milieu that rewards excellence. Cosmo the Elder reverenced talent the way the pious revere saints.”

My response: My version of what would be the optimal milieu for creativeness being fostered, rewarded, encouraged and promoted would be a milieu, familial, cultural and social, which identifies the self-realizing individual as the primary locus and vehicle for the creation of excellence, brilliance and originality in society. A society which bolsters the individuating individual as its norm, its mode of behaving and acting for its average, typical citizen, that is a society which rewards and reveres excellence, and the people mostly will live up to high high, noble standard of expected behavior and performance.

H: “When the Arab civilization was at its height, the Ommiad caliphs gave poets and scholars precedence over officials, and some of them were governors of provinces. To Louis XIV a good sentence was a major achievement.

In an optimal milieu there is considerable leisure. When the people are engrossed in some feverish pursuit so that they are neither bored, nor dream dreams, nor nurse grievances, creativeness will be anemic.”

My response: I believe Hoffer is an authority and expert of the first rank as to setting up a milieu optimum for fostering creativeness, but I believe a deeper motive would lead each of the masses, if they learn to esteem themselves, think for themselves and choose to maverize, then they are optimally motivated for internal reasons to take advantage of the ideal milieu Hoffer has discovered.

Finally, an optimal milieu is one in which the creative are in close intercourse with each other—hating, loving, envying, admiring; where faces flush, hearts flutter, and minds swell with the passion to rival and emulate.

September 30

The Embarcadero Freeway is building rapidly, yet one rarely sees more than three workingmen on the job. There are, of course, more than three, but the organization of the work is such that no one stands around. The same holds true on other jobs. Though it would be difficult to prove that the American workingman is the best in the world, it is nevertheless true that the American way of doing things is determined largely by the American workingman’s attitude toward work.’

My response: America, with its capitalist economy, its individualism, its love of working and its vitality for life, fostered a work culture of being organized, resourceful, innovative and productive working men and working women. That was California in 1958, not in 2026. See what the wrong values have wrought there, and everywhere in America.

H: “I do not know how it is with workingmen elsewhere, but I cannot see an American workingman fitting in and feeling at home anywhere outside this country.

I am beginning to believe that I shall never finish the book on the intellectuals. I am making no headway and the outline I have done does not help much. It is a peculiar situation: the material I have collected on the intellectual can be used in connection with all manner of topics but not with the intellectual as such.”

The Balance

 

I think the individuator, on average, would be a person of solid common sense, and moderate judgment. One way to construe this would be that he would be idealistic, ever out to improve things, all while living in the world, allowing his practical sense and material needs to be bet without guilt or flinching or refusing to work for his daily bread.

They Go Together

 

There are lots of interesting Prager U interviews now in late 2026, and with Dennis at reduced capacity, Marissa Streit has come to the fore. She was interviewing someone recently, and one of them repeated a comment from the late, great Charlie Kirk that hit me like a ton of bricks, as original and profound,. Kirk had said that faith and freedom go together, and that just intuitively seems correct to me.

God is a God of love, and gave us free will to worship De if we will, as we will—though there are consequences for our choices. God had made it a metaphysical axiom for reality, likely for all eternity that faith and freedom are connected, and go intimately together, that we cannot have one without the other. I would throw in love and reasoning as well for good measure.

It seems to me that if faith, freedom, love and reasoning go together, then adding egoist-altruist ethics together should bind them together even more tightly.

Imagine how free and healthy and equalizing it would be if this togetherness principle guided our political relations, informal and formal, ad hoc and structural.

Where Values Take Root

 

Where do values take root? Where do they come from? The answer may be complex and multifaceted, and it probably is, but I am supplying three answers, rather a simple response at that.

God is the great deity, A Being whose near perfect nature is love and spiritual and moral goodness, all in one and all that the same time. Humans being born sinful and fragile, but still of free will empowerment and endowment, lack the instincts to know what to value, what to choose, and how to act, based on their feelings, their intuition, their instincts. These rational beings require a moral code—preferably egoism—s standard against which to measure, to compare and contrast potential moral choices to realize the right choices to make and how to act. God is the first and primary source of these moral codes like the Ten Commandments.

Nature is the second source and of secondary importance to providing people with instinctual or hunch-engendered preference as to how to carry on, how to choose.

Nature can also serve as a moral laboratory for humans to study to know how to live. For example in Switzerland, if a squirrel gathers and stores or hides nuts so it has food to survive the winter, the farmer could observe these behavior and conclude that he should set aside farm foodstuffs so his family will not starve to death in the pending winter on his doorstep.

Third, from society and/or history we can observe how our ancestors lived, and if we were smart, we could learn what to do and how to live to flourish and be happy, and what is the outcome of ignoring or flouting these wise practices by ancestors.

Hoffer's Working And Thining On The Waterfront, June 1958-May 1959, Pages 25-30

 

I am writing out and comment Eric Hoffer’s entire book, Working And Thinking On The Waterfront June 1958 May 1959. Here I write out and comment on Pages 25-30. Here it is: Hoffer (H after this): “July 15

5 A.M. It is wonderfully good that I don’t have to go to work. A four-day stretch of work gives a special flavor to a free morning. Come to think of it: no particular place or particular day has ever had a special flavor for me. No homesickness for a place, and no looking forward to a holiday.”

My response: It saddens me that a genius and great soul like Hoffer had no place to go for holidays, belonging everywhere and nowhere like other fellow loner-giants (like I am). It causes great pain to such a great soul, and it is a longing for companionship that never subsides and is a gnawing emptiness which he must abide.

Still, if he can handle it, it spurs him to self-realize, and the more he individuates, the greater is his expressed genius and singularity, and the greater is his unpopularity and complete loss of social standing but we all pay a price for the choices we make.

H: “The situation in Iraq is not yet clear. Yesterday five thousand marines landed near Beirut. No one knows how the Russians will react. The idea occurred to me that the present confused goings-on in the Near East made good sense to members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. According to them, all that is happening in the world at present is a prelude tot he battle of Armageddon which will take place on the plain of Jezreeel. The return of the Jews to Israel has for its chief purpose the readying of the battlefield. The kibbutzim which now dot the plain of Jezreel are clearing and leveling the ground, and draining the swamps. Movements of troops, whether in the frozen expanse of Russia or in the heart of America, are preliminary stages in the unfolding of the drama. Yesterday’s landing of five thousand marines is a meaningful development. I wonder how many hypotheses which make sense in nuclear physics are more valid than the meaningful hypothesis of Jehovah Witnesses.”

My response: Intellectuals have noted elsewhere that Hoffer was no neoconservative about Americans policing the world or engaging in foreign wars. He approved of fighting Communism abroad, but also was ambivalent about our foreign wars, as witnessed by his uneasiness about the wisdom of sending thousands of Marines to Beirut in the summer of 1958.

He also was afraid of Russia and America stumbling into World War II and a nuclear holocaust, thus his wry remark as to whether the absurd hypothesis given by the Jehovah Witnesses was any more absurd than the shaky, reckless, wildly optimistic expectations of nuclear arsenal scientists and technicians.

H: “July 22

Seven and a half hours on the Lurline at Pier 35. The depression of spirit which weighed on me last night continues. I slept badly and felt sleepy all day.

It is questionable whether total integration and removal of discrimination would cure the American Negro of that which ails him, and leave him without a grievance.”

My response: Hoffer wants blacks and all Americans to set aside all alibis, most of which are socially constructed with iron-clad linking of the individual’s identity and prospects to grouped others characterized as victimizers and victims, all made plausible by crying about social justice spouting altruistic-collectivistic morality, and seeing all people and problems based upon each and every person’s group identities. Such views are not only lies and unrealistic, they offer no solutions to the suffering of blacks or of any human being.

Deep down, the Good Spirits are self-actualized individualists, and they expect the same from us if we would be successful in this world and the next. Blacks or anyone else, on their own, have the innate capacity and must internally assemble and gather as an integrated whole, the self-esteem, will, confidence, courage, energy and perseverance to bootstrap themselves out of any quagmire they happen to be mired in, were born into, or stumbled into. Crawl out of the swamp on your own and get moving, or die in the cesspit. At bottom it is that simple, and that difficult. If you refuse to crawl out of the pit, your immortal soul may be in danger, and you have laid a moral and spiritual curse upon your children too, but exposing them to an immoral, demonic or irreligious upbringing.

One must repudiate all justifications for not succeeding in decent, minimally discriminatory, fair, equal America where hard work and educating the self can lead to one become prosperous if not rich if one will work smart, long and hard of equal, fantastic opportunity.

Hoffer knew the bulk of the blame and responsibility for black under-performance in America lay with blacks themselves and the victimization-peddling others using blacks to get and keep political and social power (the power of powerlessness); blacks and their Progressive, racist handlers are the ones holding them back, not whitey, American societal laws or injustice.

For his hurling the truth at Leftists bigots all those years ago, Hoffer was smeared as a racist, a lie and a despicable stain upon the reputation of this fine, wise man.

H: “A Negro minority in a white world could perhaps never become wholesome.”

My response: The only way blacks or anyone in America to become wholesome is to embrace Mavellonialism and the American Way full stop. With the right culture and values, the ascendancy of most blacks in America would zoom into the stratosphere.

H: “In our union the Negro has total equality. There is no discrimination in the assignment of jobs, in earnings, in election to office. There are many Negro dispatchers, and a Negro business agent. There are Negroes in the interunion leadership. Considering that most of them are recent arrivals, and hence low in seniority, they have achieved much without having to fight for it. Yet when you hear them talk at our meetings you would think that our union is the darkest South. The Negro living in a white world hates his black skin, and probably agrees with the prevailing prejudice against him.”

My response: Hoffer elsewhere has often pointed out that when a people suffer from racism and discrimination, they often secretly agree with their attackers and accusers that they should hate their black skin or whatever. Then the haters get rewarded perversely for their blood libel-level lies against their victims: when their victims, in the way they act and self-identify, agree with the slanderous attacks upon them and live down to the low standard of performance their detractors accuse them of being and doing.

Their self-esteem plummets to new lows, and the victims then refuse to assimilate, and to adopt often better cultural and moral valuers of the majority/haters culture and moral code. They then mimic in non-action and under-performing the stereotypical caricature of themselves that the lying bigots assigned to them. Then the bad behavior becomes endemic and epidemic in the targeted group, a lived reality, that never had to be, and never needs to be perpetuated into the future, but probably will be. For it is now that group’s traditional way of life. People are lazy and basically evil, so once a bad way of life infects a community, an ethnic or racial group, it is the bad way of life that is carried forth by the people being destroyed by it, generation after generation. Never underestimate people’s refusal to reform themselves, to accept wise guidance, or to ignore God’s ministrations.

This lousy kind of conservatism is near impossible to eradicate because its victims cling to it, their cultural addiction to poisonous, ruinous values. People do not like themselves, and secretly seek to punish themselves and maximize their personal suffering, and it works well too. By poor choices and ignoring God’s moral laws about how to conduct their lives, people sin and suffer and their lives are a living hell because they will to continue to sin.

We need to tear up no one and allow no one to tear us up, and this way we can feel good about ourselves, and borrow superior cultural values from wherever because we do not care what the holders of those values say about us, for we just objectively weigh and scrutinize their values, and adapt what is useful or beneficial for ourselves. I think this approach would help blacks, native Americans and other minorities to assimilate into the wonderful, superior white culture, benefiting themselves and no longer being a drag on the entire country, holding us down and back.

H: “But there are remarkable exceptions. I know several Negroes on the waterfront who as workers and human beings have no match. They are gentle, quiet, conscientious, and highly competent. I would give much to have their life histories—how they managed to go through life without being tainted and blemished.

August 4

Five hours on the Mikagesan Maru at Pier 23. I did some composing during the short shift. The reason for today’s composing was partly that we had hardly anything to do, since it was all heavy lifts, and partly that I had nothing to read.

It is important that I should note the difficulty and pain I experience in writing. It is incredible how vague is my memory of past difficulties. It is only now, when I am beginning to go through it again, that there is a revival of faded memories. Since the publishing of a couple of books I have been cast in the role of a writer and without being aware of the utter absurdity of it. I have come to expect things to flow out of my finger tips. The truth is I have to hammer out each sentence, and must hang on to an idea for ages if aught worthwhile is to be written.

Last evening I sat down at the table to write and could make no headway at all. The irritation was such that I had to dress and get out of my room. I drifted to a cheap movie and saw an old Western (The Far Horizon). It was eleven before I went to bed and I was up at four-thirty.

August 15

Nine hours on the Dutch ship Batjan. As easy a day as one could wish and no sort of unpleasantness. Still the depression this evening is as black as yesterday. I must face the fact that the chief reason for the depression is that I cannot compose.”

My response: When one is as successful and ingenious of a writer and philosopher as Hoffer had become by 1958, he had dedicated his whole life to writing philosophy, so for such an ambitious intellectual, suffering severe writer’s block, would or could very depressing indeed.

H: “August 16

Still on the Batjan at Pier 23. Today I somehow managed to compose and make some progress on ‘Intellectuals as Schoolmasters.’ In Jewish history between the return from the Babylonian captivity and the destruction of the second temple the schoolmasters prevailed against kings, nobles, and priests. The result was a school possessing a nation rather than a nation possessing a school. In China, too, during the period of the contending states, the schoolmen were on the march. Confucius, Mo Ti, and their disciples felt themselves qualified as rulers. The schoolmaster Mo Ti organized his disciples into an army of experts in all departments of government. In Greece, schoolmaster Plato maintained that cities will never have rest until schoolmasters become kings. All through the ages schoolmasters seem to have had the delusion that they could order society as readily as they could a classroom. But it is probably the twentieth century that will be seen in retrospect as the golden age of the schoolmaster.

In all contemporary mass movements schoolmasters played a vital and leading role. I am willing to bet that more than half of the leaders in Africa are ex-schoolmasters. In the Nazi movement grammar-school teachers played a prominent and fateful role. Now and then I am inclined to think that the passion to teach, which is far more primitive and powerful than the passion to learn, is a factor in the rise of mass movements. For what do we see in the Communist world. Half of the globe has been turned into a vast schoolroom with a thousand million pupils at the mercy of a band of maniacal schoolmasters.”

My response: These two paragraphs are Eric Hoffer at his best. It seems that these nouns schoolmaster and intellectual are interchangeable. There are several salient points raised here by Hoffer, all excellent, all that should make the masses afraid. First, schoolmasters have a bottomless taste for power, to instruct, to control their subjects or students as part of the elite running the government. Conclusion: Never allow intellectuals or schoolmasters to run society.

Second, Intellectuals actually believe they are superior to the masses, thus justifying as compassionate their sick, twisted power-addiction to rule others as demonstrated by their insatiable desire to lecture and think they have all the answers.

We cannot be individuators unless we seek to learn humbly knowing we do not know it all while remaining curious to learn more. The desire to teach is seductive a powerful inducement, tool and rationalization for elitists to grab and maintain control and direction of the masses. Conclusion: The masses need to be intellectual as individuating individuals, and to maverize, to learn, allowing almost no one for very long to instruct them, or they will take up arms and cast of their schoolmasters and schoolmistresses.

Third, Hoffer has aptly identified that schoolmasters are fanatical and deeply entrenched in all mass movements. Another reason woke classrooms and institutions, run by schoolmasters, become factories for rearing millions of selfless, true-believing little zombies is that they have been broken and brainwashed by the intellectuals running the educational hierarchy.

Parents need to heed Dennis Prager by pulling these kids out of schools and colleges which are postmodernist Marxist child-wreckers and home school the kids, or send them to private schools which parents control. Conclusion: Deinstitutionalize society and education bureaucracies, and if a schoolmaster is part of a mass movement, head the other way.

Fourth, as fanatics the schoolmasters are cruel utterly vicious maniacs Conclusion: Fight them to the death and never let them run things, and never obey if they do.

Fifth, it chills me to think of how, since about 2010 intellectuals and professors plotted to take over the institutions—especially if huger learning—and then take over all institutions. Schoolmasters and or intellectuals wish to rule, teach and prescribe—such is their totalitarian mindset.

Conclusion: Neither America or the West is out of the woods, and the cultural Marxists may yet carry the day.

H: “August 17

Still at Pier 23. Nine hours. Fishing fever has seized many of the people working on this ship. The striped bass are running, and they have been catching real big ones. The result was that half of the time we were short-handed on a big pile of drums. The strain and irradiation combined to make it an unpleasant day. Of course I didn’t write a line.

August 24

Finished loading the Hawaiian Packer. The remarkable thing is that I am less tired after a s0x-day retch of fairly hard work than after I have often been after a one-day job.

What bothers me is that for the first time in my life I am becoming a regular worker, and what’s more I am beginning to feel like one. I wonder whether my preoccupation with the role of the intellectual, and my antagonism towards him, have driven me to act the typical workingman.

During the day I got to thinking about the dovetailing and mutuality of inclinations. This came up in connection with the intellectual’s need for pride. Being without an unequivocal sense of usefulness and worth, the intellectual has a vital need for pride, which he usually derives from an identification with some compact group, be it a nation, a church, or a party.”

My recommendation for intellectuals—or anyone for that matter—that has a desperate need for pride or a sense of self-worth, which they lack and cannot stand to be conscious without, lacking it because they do not individuate, do not work with their hands, are not commercially active out in the world creating wealth, products and services of need and demand; they do not feel a healthy pride int themselves for accomplishment and creativity--is that they work some with their hands and maverize—then they could genuinely feel good about themselves, and no need to chase after the empty tainted substituent of facile collective pride.

H: “The idea of a chosen people has been an invention of intellectuals rather than of domineering men of action. But the promotion of a compact, centralized social body not only satisfies the intellectual’s need for pride but also offers him opportunities for leading, directing, supervising, managing, and planning—pursuits tailored to the needs and talents of the scribe from the first invention of writing.

August 25

Eight hours on the Norwegian ship Evanger at Pier 41. The cargo was cocoa beans and coffee. It was hard work part of the time, but I had a good partner. I began to write the introduction to Men of Words. It should be brief.

Just now I’m stuck with the beginning of Part 2. I need information about the earliest examples of written literature in Sumer, Egypt and China.”

An Updated Defintion

 

Here is a definition for egoism, which I came up with yesterday, 9/8/26: an egoist is a person inisting that you keep your cotton-pickin hands off of his power, his wealth, his property, his life, his mind, his freedom of expression, and his liberty.

He also promises to so treat you in return.