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.
