Hoffer's Working And Thinking On The Waterfront June 1958-May 1959, Pages 43-48

Hoffer’s Working And Thinking On The Waterfront June 1958 May 1959, Pages 43-48 I will write out what he wrote from Pages 43 through 48 and then comment on him. Here it is: Hoffer (H after this): “October 15 It is not usually the overpowering experience which sets of a flow of thought.” My response: Hoffer’s instincts are very sound, for he penetrates to the essence of things. Here is is offering proof of what I would refer to as metaphysical or natural law axiom that the middle is the way. This axiom this time is applied to the state of consciousness and right environmental conditions most conducive to sparking an upsurge of internally generated original thinking or artistic insight. It is not usually the lofty thoughts of a professional thinker, or a painting by Reuben which triggers creativity in the thinker or artist. Rather it is the ordinary, the banal, even the trivial which triggers the creative muse more than the grand and sublime source. Take note too here that Hoffer again presents a paradoxical twist in which what is reality is not the commonplace expectation or characterization of things—inspirational source is more often the every day and mandate than inspired by reading the lofty and world class poem It also likely Hoffer is suggesting that the self-realizing amateur will often think more organically and acutely than the professional thinker, the laded artist. That too is a true paradox, for reality is often not the expected, popular view of things. H: “Some trivial incident or even a mere word will pull the trigger. Hence the fact that a second-rate book may be more stimulating that a masterpiece.” My response: I often get stimulus from 2nd-rate novels of Louis L’Amour or Agatha Christie. Here is an example from Agatha Christie’s novel, The Moving Finger Pages 132 and 133, an excerpt which I will copy out and comment on to exhibit how trivial sources gave me wise ideas to ponder. Here is the excerpt from her book: “There we were in the church, and Dane Calthrop was reading the service in Latin. And in the middle of it Mrs, Dane Caltrop jumped up and cried energetically, ‘It’s got to be stopped, I tell you. It’s got to be stopped.’ For a minute or two I didn’t know whether I was asleep or awake. Then my brain cleared, and I realized I was in the drawing room of Little Furze and that Mrs. Dane Caltrop had just come through the window and was standing in front of me saying with nervous violence, ‘It has got to be stopped, I tell you.’ I jumped up. ‘I beg your pardon,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid I was asleep. What did you say.?’ Mrs. Dane Caltrop beat one fist fiercely on the palm of her other hand. ‘It’s got to be stopped. These letters! Murder! You can’t go on having poor innocent children like Agnes Woddell killed!’ ‘You’re quite right,’ I said. ‘But how do you propose to set about it?’ Mrs. Dane Caltrop said, ‘We’ve got to do something,!’ I smiled, perhaps in rather a superior fashion. ‘And what do you suggest that we should do?’ ‘Get the whole thing cleared up! I said this wasn’t a wicked place. I was wrong. It is.’” My response: Here are two Victorian women, Caltrhop and Marple, Christian and righteous, that sense evil abounding around them, and they want it punished and stopped. This moral sense is so lacking today, underpinned by a solid ethical code of objective values, and a clear sense of right and wrong, and a willingness to fight wickedness in one’s midst. That is what the virtuous and godly do to prevent Satan’s world from growing and expanding. Leave it to a novelist to make vividly these salient points without didactic lecturing. What professional ethicist could have demonstrated—better than does Christie here-a nose for evil, and the will to extirpate it, that evil is a biological, ontological, natural, immoral and spiritual force and intelligence at work in the world, and it is our Christian duty to actively oppose it. Christie: “I felt annoyed. ‘Yes, my dear woman,’ I said, not too politely, ‘but what are you going to do.’ Mrs. Dane Caltrop said, ‘Put a stop to it all, of course.’ ‘The police are doing their best.’ ‘If Agnes could be killed yesterday, their best isn’t good enough.’ ‘So you know better than they do.’ ‘Not at all. I don’t know anything at all. That’s why I’m going to call in an expert.’ I shook my head. ‘You can’t do that. Scotland Yard will only take over on a demand from the chief constable of the county. Actually they have sent Graves.’ ‘I don’t mean that kind of expert. I don’t mean someone who knows about anonymous letters or even about murder. I mean someone who knows people. Don’t you see? We want someone who knows a great deal about wickedness.’” My response: Mrs. Calthrop, the wise old lady, wasn’t settling for superficial reliance on authoritative police experts, credentialed and impressive; no she went for the amateur crime solver, Jane Marple, an uncanny expert on human psychology and on wickedness, sharp as a tack, seeking patterns, discovering them and making sense of them, as she depicts how criminal cause and effect is unfolding in each case, where the formal experts were stumped. I would argue that we need our individuating amateurs to advance human knowledge and human civilization, and I think Hoffer advocates the same. H: “Christopher Dawson in Dynamics of World History pictures H.G. Wells as a schoolmaster to whom statesman are no more than a number of troublesome and occasionally incendiary school boys. The intellectual’s taste for making history and his penchant for immortality add up to species of insanity. How strange that both society as a business corporation and society as a school are likely to be tyrannies.” My response: No matter the kind of hierarchy it is that runs society is, when intellectuals are part of or are the most powerful members of the ruling elite, then they will destroy the people and the country in their insane lust for making history and achieving immortality. They truly are scary people, to be put in charge of nothing. H: “October 16 Eight hours on the German ship (the Bamberg?) at Pier 26. I still wonder whether the German republican flag (black, red, and yellow) grates on the average German as it did after the first World War. Considering the present absorption of the Germans in private affairs and their determination to cultivate each his garden it probably matters little what the flag is. It will be a momentous turning point in the affairs of Europe if it is true that the Germans have wearied of their nationalism. Of course, the German tendency towards fanaticism may find a new dangerous outlet, though I cannot see what it would be. All day long I was musing vaguely and apprehensively about the coming vacation. I must guard myself against isolation. I shall be seeing Lili and the boy every Tuesday. I have just received two invitations to dinner, and I have to meet the editors and journalists from Southeast Asia. The main thing is not take myself seriously.” My response: If we get swelled up by our success, taking ourselves too seriously let we are losing our self-esteem, our self-loathing grows, and bad things begin to happen to us and inside us. H: “October 17 Finished the German ship at Pier 26. Seven hours. On the way home I was overcome by a fit of drowsiness. This is surprising since I had a good night’s sleep and the work during the day was fairly easy. I just read several thoughts I had copied last night. It is surprising how many words I missed. After a day’s work I find I can sketch a train of thought in bold strokes, but I can’t copy faultlessly nor can I express myself with precision.” My response: Hoffer most definitely was in a writer’s slump. H: “October 18 Eight hours at Pier 29 on a Luckenbach ship. I am replacing a regular dockman in Rekula’s gang. Most of the gang are Finns, and when I am with them they stuff me full of Finnish words. Today I learned to count up to ten, and a dozen words or so concerning the weather, ships, and the work. It occurred to me during the day in my present state of weariness I ought not to make any plans. My mind is not in good shape. After catching my breath and spending some time with myself I may be able to gauge things and decide what to do. Perhaps for the first time in my life I am looking forward to a vacation. I seem to be afraid to make an outline of what I am going to say to the intellectuals from Southeast Asia next Thursday. I ought to speak about the American worker—his readiness to work, his skill, his ability to get things done with minimum supervision, and his attitude towards the pencil pushers.” My response: American workers, blue collar especially, are dovetailed for my idea of what an anarchist individuator supercitizen would be like, be he or she white, blue or pink collar, he or she would not think highly of pencil pushers, or allow them to dominate. H: “October 19 Finished the job at Pier 29. It was a pleasant job. The Finns are the salt of the earth. The fact that my vacation starts tomorrow settled everything for me, else I probably would have trailed with the gang for weeks.” My response: There were times when Hoffer was popular and invited to join a clique somewhere or another, but he always seemed to find an excuse to break away, because a great soul must live alone, or with but a few people with who he is intimate in order to not let groups, however welcoming and friendly, begin to smother him, making his conformist, declining, non individuating. H: “What surprises me again and again in this country is the rapidity with which an experience is savored and exhausted. Each new fashion, vogue, and attitude is pushed up the hill with utter abandon, and once at the top it is allowed to roll back and into the ashcan. The senselessness of it is monumental.” My response: It occurs to me that there is something moderate, and desirably moderating about this American trend not to allow any trend to be a true belief., as a ‘truth” held by true believers. H: “It happened to me several times: just when it seemed I had lost the to grasp and hold a whole train of thought, there followed a period of rapid development. October 20 5 A.M. Concerning fanaticism in awakening Asia. If you want people to work for little or nothing you have to infect them with fanaticism.” My response: Hoffer’s truthful, original hunches never cease to amaze me. He knows like Ayn Rand does that people with self-esteem and some level of individualism require emotional and financial rewards to work hard, for the individual worker has a private self, a need for wealth, property and moderate self-esteem and all of this goes together. So too does a people on the march: the leaders or the ruling elite of their society have not the wealth to entice them to work without the rewards of wealth, property, material possessions a sturdy sense of self. So this nation without wealth, must appeal to passion and fanaticism to prod the masses to perform for they have nothing else but their allegiance to some cause, so these selfless zealots unite and will give their very lives for a word, a trope, an empty promos of future success. H: “Fervor is a substitute for skill and also for capital.” My response: The skilled, well-compensated worker is employed in America by a wealthy employer, and individualism, rationality, moderation and self-esteem all flow naturally where skill and capital tell the story of a work day for a worker and his boss. Where there is no wealth, no skill, passion and fervor will have to be resorted to. H: “When a poor country wants to modernize itself in a hurry, it must know how to induce it people to work for words. Hence the vital role ‘men of words’ play in the awakening of stagnant socieities. Thinking in my case is like sluicing poor placer dirt. You must trap every flake of gold if you are to get anything. The final lump is not a nugget but a ‘button’ made up of innumerable flakes each so slight that it floats. I am still full of the pleasure I savored while working two days with the Finns. Usually when I work with people for any length their voices keep hammering inside me after I leave them, and I feel like shaking them out of my head. With the Finns it is the other way around—the aftertaste is extremely pleasant, and you allow it to linger on. This country seems to be undergoing a decisive, transformation. I may be wrong but I detect a change in tempo, a letting goof the thundering, gaudy, relentless juggernaut. One of the results of this transformation is that the country is becoming a better place for the old. Up to now the old felt out of place—useless, unwanted, a nuisance to themselves and others. Now there is a mood for enjoying leisure. People do not feel guilty and dejected when they cease working. Axel and Ole, whom I saw while working at Pier 26, looked relaxed. They have been retired for over a year, and they seemed at peace with themselves and the world. This morning, about 7 A.M., I walked through the Golden Gate Park. Trees and flowers had sharp shapes in the morning air. The park looked somehow different from what I remembered.” My response: We can view and experience the commonplace, familiar and ordinary, from a slightly different vantage point, and that point is unlike what we knew before—no one knows every point of view to some moderation and epistemic humility might be called for. H: “In full daylight the trees blend and all you see is a mass of green against the sky. In the morning you notice the many nuances of green, and how the foliage of each species forms a different pattern: one a mass of crosses, one of circles, and one of sweeping lines. The first day of my vacation does not seem memorable. I do not feel particularly free, relaxed or expectant. Tonight I shall go to the union meeting. 12 P.M. Back from the meeting. Had an unpleasant falling-out with Selden. After the meeting we went to have a drink, and he said something about the fact that we are prone to detect in others the faults we hide in ourselves. He said: ‘I think our union officials are lazy and dishonest. Does that mean that there is in me a tendency towards laziness and dishonesty? I tried to tell him that such insights are not cut and dried, that a statement of proven facts about the outside world does not reflect an inner situation, and there are varieties of laziness and dishonesty. I did not tell him that his sin of laziness was in not making the effort to utilize the training he had been given at Stanford, and that his dishonesty manifests itself in crass self-righteousness. Instead I brought up the subject of pretentiousness. Selden is always surprised that people are not as pretentious as he had expected them to be. Why does he expect people to be pretentious? I mentioned something I had observed in him the other day. He had read a report about the cost of containerization at Matson Co. and he was telling us about it. Instead of summarizing what he had learned he made the whole thing seem terribly abstruse and complex—something that the average longshoreman could not hope to master.” My response: I know that Hoffer and Selden had a long, complex history together. He likely is correct that Selden was self-righteous and pretentious, that he made his container report complex and abstruse appearing so that he could convey how much smarter, better and superior he was to his blue collar audience, a lie, for none are much smarter or dumber, naturally better or worse than anyone else. H: “Actually, the morning papers of that day gave a straight-forward report on the subject. Even as I spoke I realized I was being tactless and stupid. Selden needs sympathy and encouragement rather than criticism. He is genuinely convinced that he has not an atom of pretense, dishonesty, or self-seeking and so on. He knows he is perfect. He is convinced that the reason the majority of longshoreman do not admire him, trust him, and vote for him is that they are stupid, malicious and dishonest. Criticism could not possibly change his opinions and attitudes. It only embitters him. The best course is to listen to him and get used to his self-righteousness. For all I know, in Selden’s present state of mind, seeing things as they are might be fatal. He perhaps has to be self-righteous in order to survive. Since I see little of him it should not be a strain on me to be uncritical. Selden fits Nietzsche’s description of the idealist: ‘A creature who has reasons for remaining in the dark about himself, and who is clever enough to remain in the dark concerning these reasons.” My response: My hunch is that Selden and Eric detested each other, and that Eric saw Selden for the angry intellectual on the make that he was, and Selden did not like that. I also suspect Lili did not like the angry quarreling between the two men in her life. One of the things that I notice with a boss who is a narcissist is his complete inability to know who he is, and he does cruel things to employees, but views himself as righteous and virtuous. He like intellectuals have no ability to face what they are, and, thus are so self-deluding and delusional, they, zealots of great passion, can hide behind altruistic claims of virtue to commit any sin or crime which they can get away with, without losing one minute of sleep over it. Never is the conscience deadest but in the psyche of the educated idealist in power pushing forward his ideological agenda, all in the name of compassion, and done to the people mandated but for their own good, he suggests.