Elites Usually Decide

 

Elites usually set the theme or narrative that governs what goes on in every society in every generation. Eric Hoffer regards this meme as axiomatic, and I rarely disagree with him, and I do not here either.

His Chapter 4 in his book, The Temper of Our Time, is entitled A Name For Our Age. I will write out and respond to the entire chapter which runs from Page 71 through Page 91 of his book, and will comment where appropriate.

Here it is—(Hoffer or H after this): “The general impression seems to be that the age in which we live is the age of the masses. Half the time when you open a book or start a discussion you find yourself dealing with mass production, mass consumption, mass distribution, mass communication, mass culture, mass this and mass that. We blame the masses for our ills: for the vulgarization of our culture and politics, for the meaninglessness of our way of life, and of course, for the population explosion.”

My response: We are a mass culture but if our culture and politics are vulgar, if the masses would maverize, the vulgarity would disappear. If we have abandon God, so our lives are empty and meaningless, we need Jesus, good deities, Mavellonialism, and good old American culture to right that ship, and enjoy meaning and purpose, bursting at the seams.

H: “Actually, America is the only country in which the masses have impressed their tastes and values on the whole of a society. Every-where else, from the beginning of time, societies have been shaped by exclusive minorities of aristocrats, scribes, businessmen, and the hierarchies of sacerdotal or secular churches. Only in America did the masses have a chance to show what they could do on their own, without masters to push them around, and it needed the discovery of a new world to give them the chance. But in America just now the masses are on their way out. With the coming of automation 90 percent of the common people will be unneeded and unwanted.”

My response: Only in America have the masses been able to impress their tastes and values upon society as a whole. Almost everywhere else, through out human history, aristocrats of all stripes have called the shots. It is my contention that in America, with constitutional republicanism, capitalism, individualism sand egoist-altruist ethics, was a singularly unique historical change, where the masses ran things, where equality was rather common, and class structure not so pronounced.

By contrast through out history and in prehistory, where elites run things and impress their tastes and values upon the masses, there class structure is rigid and vertical, poverty, tyranny, human rights abuses, slavery are the norm, with all repressed due to predominating altruist morality and collectivist politics and economics. Where altruism and groupism are the norm, there elites run things, there unnatural suffering and evil is maximized.

When the masses run things, especially if they were individuating anarchist supercitizens, there egoism and individualism will bring about free, prosperous, happy masses running things.

As for automation or AI making the masses superfluous, unneeded and unwanted, the masses will need to continue to work and grow business so they make themselves needed, feel needed and self-wanted.

H: “Nor is there room any longer for the special aptitudes and talents of the masses. There was a time in this country when the masses acted as pathfinders and pioneers.”

My response: America was the first mass society in history, the first real democracy or republic where the little people ran things, but now elites are starting to run things again, as the people lose their grip on power and say-so, but as individuators, the masses could here stay on top, and then let that mass culture spread across the globe.

H: “They plunged into the unknown, cleared the land, built cities, founded states and propagated new faiths. The masses built America and for almost a century shaped its future. But it is no longer so. America’s future is now being shaped in fantastically complex and expensive laboratories manned by supermen, and the masses are on the way to becoming a waste product no one knows what to do with. No. Our age is not the age of the masses but the age of the intellectuals. Everywhere you look you can see intellectuals easing the traditional men of action out of their seats of power. In many parts of the world there are now intellectuals acting as large-scale industrialists, as military leaders, as statesmen and empire-builders. By intellectual I mean a literate person who feels himself a member of an educated minority. It is not actual intellectual superiority which makes the intellectual but the feeling of belonging to an intellectual elite.”

My response: From the 1960s until today, America has been ruled by intellectuals not the masses, and they, the elite rulers, are not intellectually superior, but they really believe they are—and often the masses believe they are--because they hold superior rank and power to run things. The human need to gain rank over others is so alluring and all are easily corrupted by and addicted to crave to hold power and rank over others.

H: “Indeed the less valid his claim to intellectual superiority the more typical will be the intellectual. In Asia, Africa, and Latin America every student, every petty member of the professions, and every clerk feels himself equipped for national leadership. In Britain and Western Europe the intellectual, though not as assertive in claiming his birthright to direct and order society, nevertheless feels far superior to the practical men of action, the traditional leaders in politics and business. In Communist countries the intelligentsia constitutes the ruling class.

In America the educated have not until recently developed a clear-cut, unmistakable intellectual type. There has been a blurring of types in this country. The differences are relatively slight between the educated and the uneducated, the rich and the poor, the old and the young, civilians and soldiers. It is remarkable how many topics there are—sports (including hunting and fishing), cars, gadgets, diets, hobbies, the stock market, politics—in which Americans of all walks of life are equally interested and on which they can all talk with expertise. The paradox is that it is this sameness which gives to every human type in this country a striking singularity in the eye of the foreign observer. When Edmund Wilson went to London some years ago the British intellectuals could not believe their eyes: Edmund Wilson looked like a businessman. In 1963, a delegation of American longshoreman to Latin America found it hard to convince local labor leaders that they were bonafide workingmen. To a foreign observer, the American businessman is classless; ‘grandee, entrepreneur and proletarian all in one.’* (*Richard Hertz, Man on a Rock (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1946), p. 28.)”

My response: Hoffer the worldly, insightful practical sociologist has uncovered something traditionally at work in America. Here class differences and tastes in culture, and values are relatively the same across different classes, and intellectuals and the ruling elites see the world largely the same as and share values with the working people (look at billionaire President Trump with his lunch-bucket, prom-American outlook) and poor sees the world, and the society is relatively classless with a large middle class and a not unsubstantial upper middle class. Implicit in the original observations and accurate Hofferian conclusions, if I may extrapolate that America is the only or nearly only country ever run by the masses, and is a society of individualism, freedom and democracy, an ideal political social, cultural and economic arrangement, that it is relatively a classless society with some rich, some, poor, a huge middle class, fairly large upper middle class.

Americans: They share values and they are largely one class whereas a feudal or Marxist or Soviet country is run by a few at the top, a few in the middle, but most are really poor. These impoverished masses are nonindividuating, groupist enduring slavery, want, tyranny and the frustrating ethics of altruism-collectivism, whereas to be American is to anticipate enjoying individuating, liberty, equality, peace, law and order, capitalism, democratic governance and egoist-individualist ethics—or heading that way.

Where elites run things and impose their values on society, there the stratification is entrenched and stark; their the ruling class does not share the values and culture of the masses. Hoffer does not quite say all of this as I did but he said some of it and anticipates all of it.

H: “The American intellectual has not always been what he is now. When you read what New England intellectuals were saying about common people early in the nineteenth century you are reminded of what British and French colonial officials were saying about the natives when the clamor for independence rose after the last war: ‘Wait and see what a mess these savages will make of things.’

A resemblance between intellectuals and colonial officials strikes us at first sight as incongruous. We associate colonialism with soldiers and businessmen. I remember how when I first read about the Italian Catholic hierarchy in northern Europe during the late Middle Ages, I was struck by how much it resembled a colonial regime. There was a continuous flow of tribute from the North, and cushy jobs for young Italians. It reminded me of the relations between Britain and India in the heyday of the British Raj. I saw the Reformation as a colonial revolution, and it seemed to me quite logical that is should have fostered national as well as religious separatism. Luther was a colonial revolutionary. ‘In the eyes of the Italians,’ cried Luther, we Germans are Teutonic swine. They exploit us like charlatans, and suck the country to the marrow. Wake up, Germany!’ Though I knew that the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was made up of intellectuals, it did not occur to me at the time that here was an example of colonialism by intellectuals. I could not connect intellectuals with colonialism.”

My response: Hoffer the clear, original thinker connected the dots, and is concluding that the intellectual, in any other political arrangement but America is like a colonialist and member of the elite ruling class, expressing its own values and culture and inflicting them upon the exploited, pliant masses. Through out history intellectuals were part of the elite that rules society and imposed their tastes on the masses, and intellectuals view that as their mission in life. They usually admit it openly and feel justified in ruling others. They are groupists not individualists and they disallow individual's freedom and power to run one’s own life.

H: “With the lessons of the present before our eyes we know better. We know that rule by intellectuals—whether by an intelligentsia in a Communist country, by native intellectuals in the new countries, or by Professors in Portugal—unavoidably approaches a colonial regime.”

My response: Hoffer’s realization and then updated generalization was that intellectuals in a society not run by the masses will be a society dominated by the elites who rule it, and these harsh, cruel overlords and over-ladies will run their nations just like they would if they were colonial administrators of a far-flung empire with colonies around the world. These woke and Progressive intellectual rulers, professors and other college-educated rulers of the institutions in America by 2015, that nearly captured all American institutions—public, private, educational, religious and military, Hollywood and mass media—leaders of the cultural Marxist mass movement, were ready to rule the masses in America ready to rule them as ruthlessly and without understanding as colonial intellectuals ruled over natives in the far-flung British empire.

H: “This is a colonialism that begins at home. Hence, too, the obvious fact that the liberation movements in Asia and Africa which were initiated and won by native intellectuals, have not resulted in democratic governments but in a passage from colonialism by Europeans to colonialism by natives.”

My response: Hoffer is informing us that all elites, intellectuals and the rest of them constituting the elite, are really just colonial administrators, enforcing their brand of tyranny upon the local population. I think Hoffer's analogy of ruling intellectual elites as interchangeable with colonial administrators of old is apt. Notice that native elites did not bring democracy to ex-colonial nations: aristocrats hate democracy and kill it every time.

H: “The typical intellectual everywhere is convinced that the common people are unfit for liberty and self-government. It is instructive to read what Patrice Lumumba wrote about the African masses before he became Saint Lumumba. In his book, Congo, My Country, written before Congo’s independence, Lumumba proposed to the Belgian rulers that they assimilate the African intellectual and together form an elite. As to the masses: ‘The status quo will be maintained for the uneducated masses who would continue to be governed and guided, as in all countries, by the responsible elite—the white and African elite.’

What does an economy run by intellectuals look like? It is colossal: big plans, big statistics, steel plants, factories, dams, power houses—the biggest ever. The intellectuals cannot be bothered with the prosaic business of producing food, clothing, and shelter for the people. He wants to start at the end and work backward. He pants for the grandiose, the monumental, the spectacular. Though factories, dams, etc. are practical things, the intellectual sees them as symbols of power and lordship rather than means for utilitarian ends.”

My response: Intellectuals lack common sense, practicality, modesty, realistic expectations.

H: “In Russia they build the biggest steam shovel ever made, while everywhere in the country you see people carrying brick and mortar on wooden platforms, four men lifting at four corners, because there are neither buckets or wheelbarrows. It would be hardly possible to make sense of rule by intellectuals without taking into account their consuming passion for grandeur. ‘The human heart,’ wrote D. H. Lawerence, ‘needs, needs, needs splendor. gorgeousness, pride, assumption, glory and lordship. Perhaps it needs these more than it needs love; at least even builders of a heaven on earth have made a nightmare of the words of Jesus that ‘whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of heaven as a child shall in no wise enter therein.’ And it is in this nightmare that the schoolmaster’s wildest dream is coming true: when he speaks the whole world listens. And how these schoolmasters do talk. Four-hour speeches, six-hour speeches—a schoolmaster’s heaven.

In international affairs the coming of the intellectual has brought to the fore the cult of naked power. To an intellectual in power liberalism, the readiness to compromise, and moral considerations are the mark of a paper tiger, and the sight of a paper tiger incites him to a most reckless ferocity. Never before has there been such a disdain for truth and the ‘court of world opinion.’ The intellectual in power seems to understand only the simple language of divisions, warships, bombers, and missiles. He has a most sensitive nose for iron determination. Who would have dreamed fifty years ago that the intellectual ready to give their lives for the oppressed would make an article of faith of cynicism and the big lie? Who would have thought that power would corrupt the idealistic intellectual more than it does any other type of humanity?”

My response: Because centralized power so sickens intellectuals, they should never be allowed to run anything.

H: “The age of the intellectual is full of surprises and paradoxes. One would have thought, for instance, that in societies dominated by intellectuals the atmosphere would be ideal for the performance of poets, writers, and artists. What we find instead is that a ruling intellectual tends to hamper or even stifle the creative individual. The reason for this paradox is that when intellectuals come to power it is as a rule the meagerly endowed among them who rule the roost. The genuinely creative person seems to lack the temperament requisite for the seizure, exercise, and, above all, the retention of power.”

My response: It is not that intellectuals who seek power over others only do so if they lack ability, that gathering power to themselves is a substitute for creative endeavor, be they personally gifted or not. Rather an intellectual too lazy to discipline herself to become creative and wield the power of powerfulness, settles for being a mediocrity seeking power over others, the corrupting power of powerlessness.

H: “If Hitler had had the talents (Actually Hitler did potentially but did not because he gave up to soon and believe he could not, so he could not; then he wanted to not hate himself, so he took his murderous revenge upon humanity be killing and destroying, and we like him are all immensely talented and immensely destructive if that is how we choose to live and express ourselves—Ed says, disagreeing with Hoffer here.) of a great painter or architect, if Lenin and Stalin had the makings of great theoreticians, if Napoleon and Mussolini had it in them to become great poets or philosophers, they might not have developed an unappeasble appetite for power,”

My response: To reiterate, those that do not create or use as individuators personally their positive, loving power to build and create, the power of powerfulness; then they work for Satan and Lera, and destroy and maim and smash, and they wield institutional, political, tyrannical power, the power of powerlessness.

H: “Now, one of the chief proclivities of people who hunger for literary or artistic greatness but lack talents is to interfere with the creativeness of others. They derive an exquisite satisfaction from imposing their taste and style on the gifted and the brilliant. Throughout most of history the creative intellectual was at his best in societies dominated not by ‘men of words’ but by men of action who were culturally literate. In Florence of the Renaissance, Cosimo the Elder, a banker who dreamed of having God the Father on his books as a debtor, reverenced talent the way that the pious reverence saints. Though he was the first in the state, and unequaled in fortune and prestige, he played the humble disciple to scholars, poets and artists.”

My response: Men of words, or intellectuals, suppress individuality and creativity, while cultured bankers historically are more pro-intellectual and tolerant of creativity in others because as egoists, capitalists, business-people or trades-people, they are more individualistic and creative or tolerant of creativity than are authoritarian, aristocrat intellectual elites, who are very groupist and conformist, jealously intolerant of talented others enjoying their intellectual independence. Hoffer instinctively knows the more egoistic bankers like Cosimo are more tolerant of talent in other individuals than are petty, jealous authoritarian prescriptive intellectuals, groupist and controlling. I go farther and urge the people to be individuators; all are talented so as intellectuals, they can do banking as a sideline, and as bankers, they can be brilliant mathematicians as individuators. All may have fun as experts or as amateurs in all kinda of ways in all kinds of diverse fields.

H: “And how do the common people fare in societies possessed by intellectuals?”

My response: Not well: the educated elites in America by 2015 with their mass movements and holy cause, cultural Marxism or Marxist postmodernism, these true believers would run a society as totalitarian and vicious as anything under Pol Pot.

H: “It is well to remember that all through history the masses have found the intellectual a formidable taskmaster. In the past, rule by intellectuals went hand in had with the subjection or even the enslavement of those who do the world’s work. In India and China where the scholarly Brahmins and Mandarins were at the top for millennia, the lot of the masses was oppression, famine, and grinding poverty. In no other society have the weak been treated so mercilessly. In ancient Greece an aristocracy of intellectuals, unequaled in body and mind, had its foot on the neck of a large population of slaves. Even in Palestine, where after the return from Babylonian exile the scribes and their successors, the Pharisees, were in power, the common people were considered outcasts unfit even for piety. During the Middle Ages a hierarchy of clerks left the common people to sink into serfdom and superstitious darkness.

One cannot escape the impression that the intellectual’s most fundamental incompatibility is with the masses.”

My response: I agree with the brilliant Hoffer that the intellectual’s most fundamental incompatibility is with the masses, not because the educated elite are smarter, better or even different from the masses: they just have more power, money and education that the masses. That the intellectuals actually believe they are genetically better and smarter than the masses, inferior, immoral naughty children who need and deserve to be ruled by the elite with a whip in their hand—this is part of historical lies the haves recount to justify what they do the have-nots.

The masses need to run things always, never trusting any elite to run their lives for them. Only as individuated supercitizens, will the masses be those political creatures, half-intellectual and half-electrician or nurse, who will competently run things and keep elites decentralized, powerless, toothless.

H: “In every age since the invention of writing he has given words to his loathing of the common man. Yet, knowing all this, we were not prepared for the fate that has befallen the masses in the present age of the intellectuals. A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will. Charles Pe’guy saw it long ago, before the first World War. The intellectuals, he said, dealt with the people the way a manufacturer deals with wares; they were capitalists of people. Yet the ruling intellectuals see themselves as champions and spokesmen of the people, and call their societies ‘people’s democracies.’”

My response: Always intellectuals and social justice warriors claim to be for the people, but all they ever want and seek, behind their lies and self-justifications, is power over the people as their aristocratic masters and mistresses.

H: “When intellectuals come to power they develop a profound mistrust of mankind. They do not trust each other, but their deepest distrust is of the common people. Tell a Russian, Chinese, or Cuban commissar that the masses, if left to themselves, would perform well, and he will laugh to your face. He knows that the masses are incurably lazy, stupid, and dishonest.”

My response: The masses are basically evil, as we all are, and we are all naturally but not incurably lazy, stupid and dishonest, and we will act that way as long as the elites ruling us treat us as if that is are we are capable of—it is most unwise to underestimate how easy people are to accept that they are nothing, capable of nothing, and things will never get better, so why try, as long as their ruling elites, their culture heritage, and their cliques reinforce this terrible, depressing narrative upon the masses, upon the young. We can do better if we esteem ourselves, dare to maverize, dare to build a life, a better future for ourselves, for our families, for society.

What just occurred to me was what a kind and decent man Hoffer was, that he really loved the masses, here in America and everywhere, as he wanted them to run their own lives, their societies, finally to have a chance to be free, happy, prosperous, fulfilled, content, enjoying their few years on this mortal coil.

H: “You have to watch them all the time, breathe down their necks, push them, and crack the whip if you want anything to get done. The ratio between supervisory and producing personnel is always highest where the intellectuals are in power. In a Communist country it takes half the population to supervise the other half.

The intellectual does not believe in high wages. Affluence, he thinks, corrupts the people. He wants them to work not for filthy money, (People need to work for high wages, not for words and a holy cause.--Ed Says) but for a holy cause, for the fatherland, for glory, honor, the future. He wants to ennoble them by making them work for words. The ability to induce people to work for words, can, of course, be of vital importance to poor countries trying to get ahead. But enthusiasm is perishable and cannot serve for the long haul. Sooner or later, the working people in societies ruled by intellectuals refuse to perform. They labor-fake, act dumb, and pilfer the cargo the moment the intellectual turns his back. They cannot be frightened with prison since in these societies the difference between life outside and inside prison of one of degree rather than of kind. So you have to introduce the death penalty for economic offenses, and you have to build high wire fences and brick walls to keep the masses from running away.

Closely allied to the intellectual’s attitude toward the masses is his incompatibility with America.”

My response: Intellectuals are inherent elitists and aristocrats: whether educated or otherwise, they hate the masses and vie against them fearing the masses would treat them the same way in reverse if they came into power, and if revenge occurred to them, if they united, got angry and revolted.

America is the land of the self-governing masses, so intellectuals hate it and want it toppled and overthrown, and the virulent hatred of American and the deep, strong passion of Progressives who have overthrown and now direct the Democratic Party in America, these Marist postmodernists seek to supplant the American Way with their holy cause, cultural Marxism, so that America ruled by elites is the realized nightmare, a severe, socialist tyranny which they seek to instantiate and inflict upon American masses. The cultural Marxists have come close to succeeding their dream being achieved, getting their way here.

H: “With rare exceptions, foreign intellectuals, even when their interests incline them toward us, cannot really stomach America. In France some years ago, the French writer Francois Mauriac found himself at a lunch table with Cardinal Spellman. He tells us that all the time he was conscious of a feeling of revulsion. ‘Most probably,’ he says, ‘I would have felt closer to the Dalai Lama.’ This from a very French Catholic intellectual about an American cardinal. British intellectuals have said they feel more at home France, Germany, Russia and even in India than in English-speaking America.

Wherever American influence penetrates it rouses the fear and the hostility of intellectuals. What is there in American influence that so offends and frightens the foreign intellectual? What happens when a country begins to become Americanized? We have been told so often that America has a business civilization that you would expect American influence to manifest itself first in its effect on foreign businessmen. We find instead that the Americanization of a country means, above all, the de-proletarianization of its working class—the stiffening of the workingman’s backbone, and the sharpening of his appetites. He not only begins to believe that he is as good as anyone else but wants to look and live like everyone else. In other words, the Americanization of a country amount to giving it a classless aspect, a sameness that suggests equality. It is this that the foreign intellectual fears and resents. He feels the loss of the aristocratic climate as a private hurt. It is a drab, uninspiring world where every mother’s son thinks himself as good as anyone else, and the capacity for reverence and worship become atrophied. This to the intellectual is truly a ‘godless” world, and this ‘vulgarization’ and the debasement against which he rails.

Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve monumental things in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words.”

My response: I have noted elsewhere that individualists are more rational, moderate, temperate and modest, able to achieve monumental things without all the drama and words; words and drama must be displayed and orchestrated by intellectuals, so passionate, extreme and theatrical, their excessive enthusiasm showing.

H: “Think of it: Our unprecedented productive capacity, our affluence our freedom and equality are not the end product of a sublime ideology, an absolute truth, or a Promethean struggle. The skyscrapers, the huge factories, dams, powerhouses, docks, railroads, highways, airports, parks, farms stem mostly from the utterly trivial motivation of profit.”

My response: There is nothing trivial about the profit motive, and it should serve as our primary and often only motivation for acting and choosing to act.

H: “In the eyes of the foreign intellectual, American achievements are illegitimate, uninstructive and uninspiring. An Indian intellectual protested that America has nothing to teach because all her achievements came about by chance.

Equally galling is the fact that until now America has run its complex economy and governmental machinery without the aid of the typical intellectual, and wherever American influence penetrates, the services of the intellectual somehow cease to be indispensable. When an American consulting firm was brought in to straighten out the affairs of a South American company, the first thing it did was fire two-thirds of the pencil pushers, most of whom were university graduates who would rather starve than perform manual labor.

The intellectual’s loathing of America is of long standing. Heine spoke of the country as ‘the prison of freedom’ and saw in our equality a tyranny more stifling than any despotism. Carlyle and a whole tribe of nineteenth century British intellectuals were appalled by our commonness and alarmed by our materialism. Renan saw the end product of our democracy as ‘a degenerate populace having no other aim than to indulge the ignoble appetites of the vulgar.’* (*Saul Bellow echoed Renan when he said that affluence has ‘left us without a system of values’ and made America ‘a pig heaven.’) Freud protested: ‘I do not hate America. I regret it. I regret that Columbus discovered it.’ In his ‘Reflections on America’ Jacques Maritain tells in vivid words how the foreign intellectuals, out of their fear and hatred of the common man, have been telling each other that the common man’s continent is ‘a great death continent populated only with machines and walking corpses,’ a world ‘only intent on sucking all the vitality and the creative instinct of the universe in order to foster with them the levelling power of dead matter and a swarm of automatic ghouls.’

Thus it seems that the protagonists of our present age are not in America and Russia, or in America or China, or Russian and China, but America and the intellectuals. Though the indications are that America will somehow manage to come to terms with governments by intellectuals in Europe, the prospects are not promising for a modus vivendi with dominant intellectuals in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. A letter recently received from an American diplomat serving in Asia says: ‘I am always surprised at the amount of raw, venomous hatred for the U.S., that is displayed by everyone with more than six years of education in this part of the world. Strangely, the poor and illiterate masses remain well disposed towards the U.S., but that will certainly disappear with the next generation . . . By recognizing as a constant factor the hostility of the underdeveloped intellectuals, we would avoid the costly effort in trying to win world public opinion, and cold-bloodedly realize what they already know—that we are by our basic nature and destiny a subversive force in these societies, and that our own security lies in the transfer of power to the masses and to real mass leaders, not elite class leaderw.’

Time seems to be working for the intellectuals. With the spread of automation the intellectuals will be everywhere on top, and the common people unneeded and unwanted. In Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed a brash intellectual shoots of his mouth on the subject: ‘For my part, if I didn’t know what to do with nine-tenths of mankind, I’d take them and blow them up unto the air instead of putting them in paradise. I’d leave only a handful of educated people who would live happily ever afterward on scientific principle.’ I’m quite certain that nothing of this sort is going to happen to us. Still, the question remains: How can common people safeguard themselves against tyranny by intellectocracy?”

My response: Only as anarchist individuating supercitizens can the masses fend off and safeguard themselves against tyranny by intellectocracy.

H: “Strangely enough, the answer, though not easy, is relatively simple. Just as tyranny by an aristocracy or a plutocracy can be most effectively checked by turning everyone into an aristocrat or capitalist, so tyranny by an intellectocracy can be neutralized by turning everyone into an intellectual.”

My response: Well, there I found what I did not know Hoffer had concluded fifty years before I thought it up on my own: the masses can neutralize any intellectocracy or any ruling elite by becoming capitalists and each of them aristocrats and intellectuals, which is about equivalent to my suggestion that each of them self-realize into anarchist individuating supercitizens.

H: “This of course means society as a university, with a Berkeley-style ‘Free Speech Movement’ acting as a formidable opposition against tyranny from any quarter.

Since the central concern of the Great Society must be the realization and cultivation of its human resources, it might have to turn itself into a school even if there were no need for a safeguard against any sort of tyranny. But as we try to visualize society as a school—a country divided into hundreds of thousands of small school districts, each charged with the realization of its natural and human resources—we find the pleasant surprise that what we have would be less society as a school than society as a playground. A wholly automated society would demand only a token effort from the individual and give him back the child’s freedom to play. The relatively small number of people in each school district, with their various interests and pursuits, would have the time and inclination to know each other, learn from and teach each other, compete with and spur each other. There would be no dividing line between learning and living. All that schoolmasters can teach in a classroom is as nothing when compared with what we cannot help teaching each other on a playground. ‘Man,’ said Walter Bagehot, ‘made the school; God the playground.’”

My response: I like and approve of Hoffer’s suggesting that a society of learning, individuating adults-- or children for that matter—likely learn better and with more enthusiasm when learning is experienced, gained and conducted less in the classroom, but moreso in the world of experience, the playground of life.