In his 1967 book, The Temper Of Our Time, Eric Hoffer has written Chapter 6, which runs from Page 119 to 135, and the chapter is entitled Some Thoughts On The Present Day. I type out the entire chapter below and comment on it when necessary. Here is the chapter. Hoffer (H after this): “It is remarkable that after a century of incessant change the paths of change have not become smooth and easy. On the contrary, our world seems to be getting less and less suitable for people who undergo change.”
My response: I almost always trust Hoffer to detect what is going on, and then to listen to what he advises. I have long realized that people are naturally averse to change; we are superstitious, very primitive, fatalistic, timid creatures, arch-conservative and we have little self-esteem innately. Change challenges that sense of residual self-confidence and our backwards-looking penchant to avoid change at all costs.
So, when people do not fit into a changed world, and lack the skills, confidence, competence, cool temperament, adaptability, hope in the future, and willingness to reason their way through quickly, successively rising challenges and hurdles, their meager self-esteem plummets further, and all manners of chaos and fallout result personally and socially. Hoffer, in The True Believer, has captured all of this in a detached, incomparable manner.
Below he will lay out his case for why people handled change better in the 19th century than today, and he likely will nail it as usual; my quick presupposed opinion is that people by the 1960s were psychically and emotionally exhausted from the unending, escalating changes of the previous century. Only as rationally egoistic individuators would Americans then and now be able to handle the future without succumbing to the pressure to change and keep up.
Hoffer: “Never before has the passage from boyhood to manhood been so painful and so set with explosions. The passage from backwardness to modernity which in the 19th century seemed to be a natural process is now straining a large part of the world to the breaking point. The hoped-for changes from poverty to affluence, from subjection to freedom, from work to leisure do not enhance social stability but threaten social dissolution. However noble the intentions and wholehearted the efforts of those who initiate change, the results are often the opposite of that which was reasonable to expect. Social chemistry has gone awry: no matter what ingredients are placed in the retort, the end product is more often than not an explosive.
If one were to pick the chief trait which characterizes the temper of our time it would be impatience. Tomorrow has become a dirty word. The future is now, and hope has turned into desire. The adolescent cannot see why he should wait to become a man before he has say in the ordering of domestic and foreign affairs.”
My response: Yes, youths of both genders, have been groomed to serve as social justice warriors, when they have not cleaned up their own private mess first. Personal incompetence and mediocrity for Leftists serves as a sign of expertise on running the affairs of others and society at large.
H: “The backward, also, panting to catch up tomorrow with our yesterdays, want to act as pathfinders in the van of mankind. Everywhere you look you see countries leaping. There is no time to grow. New countries want to bloom and bear fruit even as they sprout, and many have decked themselves out with artificial flowers and fruit.”
My response: Real growth and change require hard work, repeated applications, patience and steady improvement, and there are not shortcuts. We cannot wave a magic wand and presto, we are changed and improved without effort or planning, or traumatizing emotional impact.
H: “Everywhere there is greed for pride. Pride is the only currency that will buy souls. In the backward countries an undertaking will gain headway only if it generates pride. These countries find it easier to induce a readiness to fight and die then a readiness to work, easier to attempt the impossible than the possible, easier to build damns and steel mills than raise wheat, easier to start at the end and work backward than begin at the beginning. Never has giving been so urgent and the act of giving so difficult. To preserve your pride you must vilify those who help you. You accuse them of practicing the colonialism of giving. Rudeness has become a substitute for power, for faith, and for achievement.”
My response: It seems that the pride in those days expressed among the peoples and leaders of undeveloped countries was a group pride or false pride, required to save face. Fanaticism is embedded into this psychological and social maize of false pride--willing to die, not willing to work, aim for the impossible when the even the modest possible by them cannot be achieved, no sense of steady gain, no gratitude for foreign aid received.
H: “Amidst the leaping, running and shouting no one can tell whether the momentous events of our times are real and not merely the echo of words. How real are the new nations? Is the Occident really in decline? And who can tell with certitude if the world is being Communized or Americanized?
So evanescent are world situations that we cannot suit our actions to the facts. Never has the present been so perishable: things which happened yesterday are ancient history. The better part of statesmanship might be to know clearly and precisely what not to do, and leave action to the improvisation of chance. It might be wise to wait for our enemies to defeat themselves, and heed Bacon’s advice to treat friends as if they may one day become our enemies, and enemies they might one day become our friends.”
My response: It seems as if in this essay, Hoffer is hinting that people today are not optimistic and able to adjust gently to change because they have lost faith in themselves, in a chaotic world, where nothing is as it seems to be, and friends could be enemies and enemies could be friends.
H: “The decline of the Occident has been proclaimed on housetops for over half a century. Knowledgeable people are still telling us that Europe is finished, America is rotten to the core, and that the future is Russia, China, India, Africa, and even in Latin America. We are urged to learn the meaning of life from these bearers of the future. Yet it is becoming evident that if there is going to be anywhere a genuine growth of individual freedom and human dignity it will come from cuttings taken from the Occident.”
My response: Yes, the West, especially America, exemplified in our The American Way Culture, offer the best chance for people anywhere to experience growth of individual freedom and human dignity.
H: “Even the Communist parties of the Occident are discovering that their historical role is not to change the Occident’s way of life but to put a brake on the dehumanizing juggernaut of the Communist apparatus in Russia and China.
The fact is that the awakening of Asia and Africa has turned the West into a mystery. When we see to what ugly stratagems the new countries have to resort to in order to make their people do the things which we consider natural and matter-of-fact we begin to realize how unprecedented the Occident is with its spontaneous enterprise and orderliness, and its elementary decencies. The mystery of our time is not the enigmatic Orient but the fantastic Occident.”
My response: So true.
H: “The Occident is at present without fervent faith or hope. There is no overwhelming undertaking in sight that might set minds and hearts on fire. There is no singular happiness and no excessive suffering. We have already discounted every possible invention, and reduced momentous tasks to sheer routine. Though we are aware of deadly dangers ahead of us, our fears have not affected our rhythm of life. The Occident continues to function at room temperature.
Now, there are those who maintain that lack of strong faith must in the long run prove fatal to society, and that the most decisive changes in history are those which involve a weakening or intensification of faith.”
My response: Hoffer the ethical moderate and rational egoist is identifying the exemplary Western trait to function at room temperature, able to operate and even revolutionize without blind passionate faith, true believers and mass movements to bring about social change—not necessary, and harmful.
H: “Whether this be true or not it should be clear that a weakening of faith can be due as much to a gain power, skill, and experience as a loss of vigor and drive. Where there is necessary skill and equipment to move mountains there is no need for the faith that moves mountains. Intensification of belief is not necessarily a symptom of vigor, nor does a fading of belief spell decline. The strong, unless they are infected with a pathological fear, cannot generate and sustain a strong faith. Nowhere in the West is there at present a faith comparable to that which is being generated in the meek, backward masses of Russia and China. The Occident has skill, efficiency, orderliness, and a phenomenal readiness to work. It would be suicidal for the Occident to rely on a concocted new faith in a contest with totalitarian countries. We can prevail only by doing more and better what we know how to do well. Those in the West who wring their hands and pray for a new faith are sowing the wind.”
My response: Hoffer did not know about cultural Marxists but they prayed hard (and lost) that their new faith/secular ideology would catch on in America in the mid-2020s.
H: “Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc., are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings towards the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestations of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance and equity.
The present Americanization of the world is an unprecedented phenomenon. The penetration of a foreign influence has almost always depended on the hospitableness of the educated and well-to-do. Yet the world-wide diffusion of American habits, fashions and ways is proceeding in the teeth of shrill opposition of the intellectuals and the hostility of the better people. The only analogy which comes to mind is the early spread of Christianity, with the difference that Americanization is not being pushed by apostles and missionaries but like a chemical reagent penetrates of its own accord and instantly combines with the common people and the young. ‘The American way of life,’ says a British observer, ‘has become the religion of the masses on five continents.’* (*David Marquand in the Manchester Guardian Weekly, March 17, 1960.).”
My response: Hoffer is remarkable in noticing what no one else notice before him, that in underdeveloped countries, the educated and well-to-do decide typically what foreign influences are allowed in and encouraged, and these elites loathe and fiercely denounce American mass culture, which their masses on their own do adore. Masses in many countries recognize that America’s culture is a mass culture, what is needed by downtrodden, tyrannized masses everywhere.
H: “Ironically, at a time when the world is being Americanized the American intellectual seems to be seceding from America. Here in the San Francisco Bay area, the dramatic change in the intellectual’s attitude toward America has the earmark of a historical turning point. The first impression is that the American intellectual is being Europeanized, and one is tempted to see a connection between influence and being influenced: that by influencing the world America unavoidably opens itself up to foreign influences; and in this case, as so often before, the intellectual is the carrier of foreign influence. Actually, the intellectual’s revulsion from contemporary America has little to do with the penetration of a foreign influence but is the result of a recent tilt of the social landscape.
The nature of society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flow—by the tilt of the social landscape. In America, until recently, most of the energy, ability, and ambition found its outlet in business. In Notes of a Son and Brother Henry James tells how, as children, he and his brother William were mortified that their father was not a businessman but a philosopher and author. In a European country like France, where writers and artists rank high in public esteem, boys and girls probably find it humiliating to admit that their father is a mere businessman and not a writer or artist. In France, said Oscar Wilde, ‘every bourgeois wants to be an artist.’ Now it stands to reason that the central pursuit of a society attracts and swallows individuals who by nature are meant for other careers. In America, until recently many potential poets and philosophers became businessmen, while in France many potential business tycoons go through life as intellectuals; and the paradox is that these misplaced individuals who do not really belong are often the ones who shape the character and style of the sphere in which they operate. It was not the conventional businessmen but misplaced poets and philosophers who set in motion the vast combinations and the train of ceaseless innovation which gave American business it Promethean sweep and drive. To a philosopher who finds himself immersed in a milieu of sheer action, all action will seem to be of one kind and he will shift easily from one field of activity to another. He will combine factories, mines, railroads, oil wells, etc. the way a philosopher collates and generalizes ideas. In France where the misplaced individuals are chiefly among the intellectuals, the tone and pace of the intellectual establishment are generated not by authentic intellectuals to whom words and ideas are ends in themselves, the center of existence, but by the potential men of action, potential organizers and administrators, who find themselves trapped in the mold of intellectuals. To this type of intellectual ideas only have validity only as a prelude to action, and he sees commitment and history making as vital components of an intellectual existence.
Now, the important fact is that since Sputnik the prestige and material rewards of intellectual pursuits have risen sharply in this country, and the social landscape has begun to tilt away from business. Right now the career of a scientist or a professor can be more exciting then that of a businessman, and its material rewards are not to be sneered at. A recent survey showed that only 20 percent of undergraduates intend to go into business. The chances are great, therefore, that at present many individuals with superb talent for wheeling and dealing and for building industrial empires, are pawing their way up the academic ladder or are throwing their weight around in literary or artistic circles. This is a state of affairs not unlike that which prevails in France, hence the impression that the American intellectual is being Europeanized.
It goes without saying that a change in the direction of flow of social energies constitutes a turning point in the life of a society or a civilization. If the Reformation figured as a historical turning point, and marked the birth of the modern Occident, it was largely because it brought about a diversion of energies from sacerdotal to secular channels. We are told that during a twenty-year period in the sixteenth century not a student of the University of Vienna became a priest. In this country, with the opening of the West in the middle of the last century, the sons of New England divines, poets, writers, and scholars went into railroading, mining, and manufacturing, and this diversion of energies from one field to another marked the birth of modern America and brought to an almost abrupt end the cultural flowering of New England.”
My response: Hoffer shows conclusively that what society values is what the young people pursue, be it being college educated, business majors, blue collar or individuators.
H: “There is no telling how soon and to what degree the diversion of talent and ambition from business might make itself felt in a diminution of economic venturesomeness and drive. Nor can we tell whether the inflow of energies into intellectual pursuits will result in an upsurge of cultural creativeness.”
My response: The young pursuing intellectual careers rather than business or technical studies may not lead to cultural creativeness, or much so, unless creative young people self-realize and individually live, it is not guaranteed—without Mavellonialist principles introduced to them--that they will maverize or that Gen Zers and the Generation Alpha will emerge as individuating supercitizens of the future which they need to become to save themselves, America and the world.
H: “There is no telling how soon and to what degree the diversion of talent and ambition from business might make itself felt in a diminution of economic venturesomeness and drive. Nor can we tell whether the inflow of energies into intellectual pursuits will result in an upsurge of cultural creativeness. But it is beyond doubt that the movers and shakers are already at work inside and outside the universities. The civil rights movement and the Vietnam war are ideal vehicles for these would-be makers of history.”
My response: Would-be history makers normally are social justice warriors clamoring, protesting, even rioting and revolting in the street: They are generally and personally unfit morally and as nonindividuators: To do things the right way, they should conduct first and fore-mostly, their quiet, substantive revolution should be internally, transforming the self for the much better. Then if it should arise that a majority of a new generation of American youth were actively becoming supercitizens, these politically, legally, thoughtfully engaged individuators would successfully run government on all levels: this will revolutionize society and make history the meaningful, substantive way, not by burning cars and buildings and attacking the police.
The young and Americans of all ages should be politically active but only as actual individuators and supercitizens first.
H: “History making is the malady of our age: the book of history seems to lie open and every two-bit intellectual wants to turn its pages.”
My response: These true believers, these politically engaged, woke social justice warriors, are pedaling as the mass movementers which they are, their holy cause postmodernist Marxism, and their history-making venture, should they topple America and the West, as they aim to do, the outcome will be the reign of the beast making Mao’s cultural revolution of the 1960s seem like a picnic.
H: “The attitude of the intellectual community towards America is shaped not by the creative few but by the many who for one reason or another cannot transmute their dissatisfaction into a creative impulse, and cannot acquire a sense of uniqueness and growth by developing and expressing their capacities and talents.”
My response: Again any lost, low-esteem, frustrated, groupist nonindividuator could transmute her internal dissatisfaction into creative impulse, performance and achievement if she believed in herself, if she never quit trying to create, if she willed to create, if she worked endlessly and energetically to do so, and if she is willing to defy her clique by nonconforming, striking out on her own, if she wills and determines to be all the she can be, all that God gifted her to be, and commands her to be.
Instead, she most often settles be being nothing, dong nothing, contributing nothing. She is dud and cipher, and the fault is hers. Mostly she chose to do nothing, so now she concludes her penchant for improvement and moral reform is fulfilled by directing her efforts politically outside of herself. This personal life of colossal failure has convinced herself that her life of abject collapse and nonperformance somehow, miraculously qualifies her to wave her ideological banner out in the world with her ideological brethren to run the world, coercing all to live in accordance with her woke ideals. She and her ilk have banded together and formed a formidable political influence and presence in current society, by working hand-n-glove with other zealous flops to remake the world, make history and bring destruction, barbarism, violence, lawlessness, poverty, chaos and darkness to the world in the name of justice and compassion.
She is evil and her history-making is evil. She is a plague turned loose upon civilized society and her passionate destruction is quite contagious, especially among the young and educated. She and her peers compensate for their stupidity with an unwavering will to dominate and take over, and, for that reason alone, she and her ilk are to be taken seriously, for they are very, very dangerous, able to topple the American Way.
H: “There is nothing in contemporary America that can alleviate and cure their chronic frutration.”
My response: I go farther, and I believe Hoffer would agree with my following conclusion that those that are frustrated and hate themselves because they are duds will find no social order or cause anywhere will can alleviate their sense of chronic frustration. The cause is their personal, deliberate willingness to remain an undeveloped ish, and the only cure for frustration is individually sought and gained: only by filling their hearts with love of God, the self, others and the world, and then by each of them maverizing to be a living angel; only these steps make that frustration evaporate, then one may esteem or love be at peace with the self. As an individuator each self will gain some sense of happiness, just pride, gratitude and contentment, inner peace and hope follow. Even suffering becomes more bearable, easier to transform into creativity and personal victory.
H: “They want power, lordship, and opportunities for imposing action. Even if we would banish poverty from the land, lift up the Negro to true equality, withdraw from Vietnam, and give half of the national income as foreign aid, they will see America as an air-conditioned nightmare unfit for them to live in.”
My response: A moderate, individualistic political reformer is a fair and an accurate reporter, reasonably accepting that a strong, moral performance by America and its government are sufficient for praise and preserving, not overthrowing America.
Here is how the metaphysical and moral law of fanaticism unfolds in the political arena. When an army of radicalized true believers politically unite to force their crazy ideas upon the public, they justify their deadly suggestions as needed correctives, and they propose how to replace the largely decent, equitable, working, present system with their version of things. These revolutionaries exaggerate existing if minor imperfections, and will not work patiently within the system to rectify them, while preserving as fine our existing dispensation as is ever possible to attain on earth.
And they dismiss how the defenders of the status quo idealists are operating, that conservatives are completely corrupt and vicious, justifying their being removed from power and radically revamping the whole establishment. The Leftist idealists, with their unreasonably, impossibly high standards of unwelcome perfection demand complete change immediately from traditionalists, and if the conservatives resist or defy Leftist revolutionary demands, the revolutionaries move to take over and impose their harsh, unrealistic standards and aims upon resistant society, upon the American masses or the government.
Those who resist are to be killed, tortured or imprisoned, and their “evil” government must be overthrown to make way for the new order, a Marxist government installed.
Conservatives deserve this harsh mistreatment, for their crimes and prior defense of their precious status quo, an utterly failed mess, so utterly rotten and tyrannical, that it is not to be saved but overthrown and wiped out. Those clinging to loyal support for the vanquished status quo now richly deserve brutal punishment meted out by the revolutionary victors, the most bloody, totalitarian punishment which the ideologue radical can inflict upon them.
Those in the political arena, whose standards standards are impossibly high, are true-believing ideologues and what they propose as the new regime to supplant the old regime, will be utterly without moral decency at all, as mass murder and genocide is inflicted upon against all minorities hated by the ideologues running the government.
It is most unfair, unwise and unworkable to let these postmodernist zealots take over our American governmental structures. When idealists seize power, they claim the right to revolt because the system did not meet their impossible standard of expected, complete perfection. Should these revolutionaries win, their zeal and idealism will not make things better, only far worse. Cultural Marxist revolutionaries and haters of America and white people like me, refuse to speak the truth, and recognize and publicly acknowledge the worth of our American culture and government, the best the world has ever produced. They cannot admit or accept what is factual: how fine actually our America is right now, unchanged.
Marxist postmodernists will not praise us, or allow us to function and live in peace, liberty and prosperity, unattacked just to enjoy our lives and live as we the masses see fit to do. Fanatics are perfectionistic against their enemies but when their people are in power then no standards or low standards exhibited by the revolutionary rulers are tolerable, even enthusiastically defended. Fanatics are hypocrites through and through: they are prejudiced liars and not to be heeded or given quarter.
H: “When you try to find out what it is in this country that stifles the American intellectual, you make a surprising discovery. It is not the landscape, though he is poignantly aware of its historical meagerness, and it is not the social system, particularly when it is headed by aristocrats like Roosevelt and Kennedy. What he cannot stomach is the mass of the American people—a mindless monstrosity devoid of spiritual, moral, and intellectual capacities.”
My response: The only chance for civilization and a classless or near classless republican society must come from the bottom up, the masses, brimming with limitless potential in their individual spiritual, moral and intellectual capacities. The people must run things as personally elitist, earned intellectually, artistically, and morally, achieved individuation and supercitizenship—let aristocratic despotic elitist be damned.
H: “Like the aging Henry Adams, the contemporary American intellectual scans the daily newspapers for evidence of the depravity and perversity of American life, and arms himself with a battery of clippings to fortify his loathing and revulsion. When you listen to him or read what he writes about America you begin to suspect that what the American intellectuals know about the American people is actually what they now about each other: that they project upon America the infighting, mistrust, envy, malice, conformity, meagerness, and staleness of their cliques and sects. Imagine an American writing about America and not mentioning kindness, not mentioning the boundless capacity for working together (None work together as well as egoistic individualists and individuators—Ed says.), not mentioning the unprecedented diffusion of social, political, as well as technological skills, not mentioning the breathtaking potentialities which lurk in the commonest American. Who among the intellectuals would have predicted that a machine politician patronized by the Knowlands would become Chief Justice Earl Warren, that a hack politician endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan would become Justice Hugo Black, that a bankrupt haberdasher who was given his start by the corrupt Pendergast machine would become President Harry Truman, that a southern politician would push through civil rights legislation. The Johnsons, Trumans, Blacks and Warrens can be met in every walk of life, and they are wholly immersed in American life.”
My response: The truth about human nature, which Hoffer leaves unstated here, but is presuppositional his thesis that from the masses may arise exception leaders: the Johnsons, Trumans, Blacks and Warrens arising from the masses in America: all people are endlessly talented and roughly equal in ability: all can be Goehring or Sister Teresa; all can be the genius with an IQ of 145 who is a high school dropout, or who is a custodian for a school system. All can be as brilliant and creative as Elon Musk, though most will have to work harder and more creatively to do as Elon has achieved.
In short, we can expect anything from anyone, from being dumb and dull, to a sea change of conceptual paradigm building as an astrophysicist, from being Ted Bundy to being a medal of honor receiving soldier posthumously for the marine that gave his life in Vietnam for save his fellow soldiers.
H: “The American intellectual rejects the idea that our ability to do things with little tutelage and leadership is a mark of social vigor. He would gauge the vigor of a society by its ability to produce great leaders. Yet it is precisely an America that in normal times can function well without outstanding leaders that so readily throws up outstanding individuals. When you talk to an American intellectual about common Americans it is as if you were talking about mysterious people living on a mysterious campus.
Yet when all is said and done about the intellectual’s preposterous stance there remains the incontestable fact that his chronic militancy and carping have been a vital factor in the Occident’s social progress. The blasts of the intellectual’s trumpets have not brought down or damaged our political and economic institutions. Napoleon predicted that ink would do to the modern social organization what cannon had done to the feudal system.”
My response: Napoleon was more prophetic than he could possibly have anticipated: when the postmodernists, by the 50s and 60s, have given up on violent revolution or Communist states to overthrow the detested free, happy, prosperous, peaceful capitalist West, these cunning Marxists elected to first overtake academia and then capture all the institutions by use of ink and words and mass media to overthrow the culture grand narratives of America and the West by language trickery, lying, by gaslighting, through deconstruction and manipulation until the people lost faith in their traditions and readied themselves for revolution.
My conclusion: we must be armed citizens who are individuated supercitizens, with lots of privately owned guns. We must keep a constant, controlling eye and presence among our intellectuals and elites, leashing them to our will, lest these rulers and intellectuals betray us by using words and language to overthrow the controlled, pliant, brainwashed masses. The masses as elite supercitizens must come to control our government and legislative process, for always the people must run the society from the bottom up, divorcing elites from sharing power or ruling anyone on a federal, state or local level.
H: “Actually, in the West, ink has been more of a detergent than an explosive.”
My response: That was true in Hoffer’s day (That the words of Progressives and intellectuals hating America were a detergent, not an explosive in individualistic, temperate, capitalist, free America.) up until his death in 1983.
But but by the 90s philosophers and a few outliers like Stephen Hicks knew serious change was brewing and imminent, and that by then nonviolent ink-wielders and their words of postmodernism worldview, began to become the replacement, increasingly popular and accepted political and cultural grand narrative of the educated and young, and by 2023, 50% of the American population were true-believing cultural Marxists in the Progressive mass movement, so the zealous, professorial wordsmiths were met with near success beyond their wildest dreams without firing a shot: they peacefully may yet take over the country and fundamentally change it for the worse.
Cultural Marxists by 2020 were taking over institutions and society by inserting Progressivism into Academic training, circles and through deceptive social media memes, offering wordy, alternative suggestions, Big Lies, and alternative narratives. It took hold with tremendous success in a very short time, so much so that they were able to capture nearly all public and private institutions across America, without firing a shot by 2015-2020. So a few decades after Hoffer’s death, words, were not just a detergent but a corrosive, deteriorating caustic chemical which dissolved all resistance to the Cultural Marxist mass movement being implemented across America.
This soft tyranny will soon become what it was or meant to be all along, an exploding of the American Way and its government, blown to smithereens, to be followed shortly by the vicious, merciless rule of the gulag builders and masters, when the postmodernist dictators in power, who will quickly weary of their soft tyranny, and the drop their masks, and openly assault the captive masses, who will feel the governmental hammer blows forged by this blacksmith, a full-fledged tyrant.
H: “It is doubtful whether without the activities of the pen-and-ink tribe the lot of the common people would be what it is now.
The events of the past fifty years have sharpened our awareness of the discrepancy between what the intellectual professes while he battles the status quo, and what he practices when he comes to power, and we are wont to search for the features of a commissar in the face pf impassioned protest. Actually a metamorphosis of militant intellectual into commissar requires a specific cultural climate and, so far, has taken place mainly outside the Occident. It is easy to underestimate the part played by Russia’s and China’s past in the evolvement of their present Marxist system. A century ago Alexander Herzen predicted that Russian Communism would be Russian aristocracy turned upside down. In China, where Mandarin intellectuals had the management of affairs in their keeping for centuries, the present dictatorship of an intellectual is more a culmination of, than a rupture with, the past.”
My response: The compassionate, idealistic intellectual revolutionary, once the revolution succeeds, will be disclosed as the vicious tyrant he planned to be all along.
H: “In Western Europe and the U.SA., where the tradition of individual freedom has deep roots in both the educated and the uneducated, the intellectuals cannot be self-righteous enough nor the masses submissive enough to duplicate the Russian and Chinese experiment. Thus in the Occident the militant intellectual is a stable type and a typical irritant; and whenever the influence of the Occident become strong enough the chronically disaffected intellectual appears on the scene and puts himself against the prevailing dispensation, even when it is a dispensation powered by his fellow intellectuals. We see this illustrated in the present intellectual unrest in Eastern Europe and Russia, and it is beginning to seem that the dominant Communist parties have more to fear from a Western infection that the Occident has to fear from the Communist subversion.”
My response: Heed that Hoffer is suggesting that the mere individual intellectual is more stable, more rational, decent, sensible and peaceful than are the true believers, passionate, frustrated, remorseless and violent when needed to prevail, or for its own sake.
H: “Stalin’s assertion that “no ruling class has managed without its own intellectuals” applies of course to a totalitarian regime. A society that can afford freedom can also manage without a kept intelligentsia: it is vigorous enough to endure ceaseless harassment by the most articulate and perhaps the most gifted segment of the population. Such harassment is the ‘eternal vigilance’ which we are told is the price of liberty,”
My response: There is no need going forward for any ruling elite with its pet, its kept intelligentsia who provide covering justification (and enthusiastically help with the actual ruling of the masses) for the elite, to misbehave legally, serving as the illegitimate rulers of society--which they are. Human nature is essentially depraved more than not. People tend to live in hierarchical arrangements in mass society. Power, money influence tends to aggregate at the top, handled and mishandled by the ruling class.
We must be eternally vigilant in each successive generation, would we remain free, for freedom is fleeting and the lure of negative power lust creeps back into mass human relations, readily.
For each self-hating human heart masochistically craves suffering from elites over them meting out injustice, exploitation, lordship over the masses to enslave, oppress, abuse and live off of them, and the masses crave to be so deprived of freedom, power, individuality and prosperity.
Only a godly, virtuous citizenry of highly educated, completed involved politically citizenry of upper middle class, learned, learning, commoners or the masses of anarchist individuator supercitizens are able to remain eternally vigilant or close thereunto to keep society a constitutional republic, high civilization and heaven on earth for hundreds perhaps thousands of years.
H” “In a free society internal tensions are not signs of brewing anarchy but the symptoms of vigor—the elements of a self-generating dynamism.”
My response: This single sentence is packed with significance to be caught, learned and then practiced as political maintenance to keep a free society free. If the masses were individuating supercitizens, then internal tensions need not lead to brewing anarchy, street demonstrations, rioting, attempts to overthrow the government, or lead to factionalism and civil war, and then martial law with federal army and police putting down anarchy, violence, lawlessness.
The conservative but resilient adaptable calm, stoic anarchist individuator supercitizens would know better than to allow rioters, factions, agitators or government leaders and demagogues to cause the masses to panic, so they abandon their American, republican utopia, in no need of replacing, and in great need to preserve, and only the united supercitizens can prolong and defend America, its traditions and the American Way.
The masses as individuating anarchist supercitizens, will disallow any radicals to foment and exploit heightened tensions among factions of society as an excuse to use establishing martial law of seek to come about to restore law and order, but a temporary dicttorship.
There is no need her to overthrow the exiting dispensation by violence and bloodshed. The armed and trained and united masses of supercitizens will not allow the vigorous, even loud and passionate arguers and violent radicals to fan the flames of differences of opinion to push the masses to embrace civil war, revolution or martial law.
Here the masses should, did or do run society and keep society calm and functioning peacefully, legally and prosperously on an keel while working out factional, internal and eternal disagreements and impasses, under which compromise and survival entail that all win some, discard some, concede some and insist upon some of their proposals being the law of the land.
The supercitizenized America masses would never tolerate any minority, either junta or majority mob rule to run things here anymore. The masses, the supercitizens, will work together with a sure hand to keep society free so the vigor of disagreement are healthy signs of a self generating dynamism which Hoffer recommends.
H: “Though there is no unequivocal evidence that the intellectual is at his creative best in a wholly free society (He would be as a individuatiing supercitizen with his constitutional, c capitalist republic a wholly free society, but such a society has never occurred—Ed Says.), it is indubitable that his incorporation in, or close association with, a ruling elite sooner or later results in social and cultural stagnation. The chronic frustration of the intellectual’s hunger for power and lordship not only prompts him to side with the insulted and injured but may drive him to compensate for what he misses by realizing and developing his capacities and talents.”
My response: Each person, educate intellectual or blue collar technician, as a misfitted ex-joiner and anomic wreck seeking reattachment to a new group, may handle his frustration by joining some cause labeled noble to side with the insulted, cast off and injured, or she can develop her capacities and talents as an individual and individuate, sublimating her anger, frustration and meaningless ness feelings into something creative and fulfilling.
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