Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Person:
Thomas
Sowell:
The
Legacy of Eric Hoffer
The twentieth anniversary of the death of Eric Hoffer, in May 1983, passed with very
little notice of one of the most incisive thinkers of his time -- a man whose writings
continue to have great relevance to our times.
- How many people today even know of this remarkable man with
no formal schooling, who spent his life in manual labor -- most of it as a longshoreman --
and who wrote some of the most insightful commentary on our society and trends in the
world?
You need only read one of classics like The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature
of Mass Movements to realize that you are seeing the work of an intellectual giant.
Having spent several years in blindness when most other children were in school, Hoffer
could do only manual labor after he recovered his sight, but was determined to educate
himself. He began by looking for a small book with big print to take with him as he set
out on a job as a migratory farm worker.
That book turned out to be ... the essays of Montaigne. Over the years, he read many
landmark books ... If ever there was a walking advertisement for the Great Books approach
to education, it was Hoffer.
- Among Hoffer's insights about mass movements was that they
are an outlet for people whose individual significance is meager in the eyes of the world
and -- more importantly -- in their own eyes...
Hoffer said:
- "The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for
his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for he nation, his religion,
his race or his holy cause."
People who are fulfilled in their own lives and careers are not the ones attracted to
mass movements: "A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding.
When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other
people's business."
What Hoffer was describing was the political busybody, the zealot for a cause -- the
"true believer" -- who filled the ranks of ideological movements that created
the totalitarian tyrannies of the 20th century...
Contrary to prevailing assumptions of his time, Hoffer did not believe that
revolutionary movements were based on the sufferings of the downtrodden:
- "When people toil from sunrise to sunset for a bare
living, they nurse no grievances and dream no dreams." He had spent years living
among such people and being one of them.
Hoffer's insights may help explain something that many of us have found very puzzling
-- the offspring of wealthy families spending their lives and their inherited money
backing radical movements. He said:
"Unlimited opportunities can be as potent a cause of frustration as a paucity or
lack of opportunities."
What can people with inherited fortunes do that is at all commensurate with their
unlimited opportunities, much less what their parents or grandparents did to create the
fortune in the first place, starting with far fewer opportunities?
- Like the frustrated artists and failed intellectuals who turn
to mass movements for fulfillment, rich heirs cannot win the game of comparison of
individual achievements, so they must change the game. As zealots for radical
movements, they often attack the very things that made their own good fortune possible, as
well as undermining the freedom and well-being of other people.
Part II
- "There are many who find a good alibi far more
attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently.
We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today
as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are
fixed, so to speak, for life."
This is just one of the pungent insights of Eric Hoffer. This particular quote is from
his book of short sayings called The Passionate State of Mind...
Some of Hoffer's books are collections of short, sharp insights, while others -- The
True Believer, The Ordeal of Change and The Temper of Our Times,
for example -- offer more extended discussions of particular issues...
Hoffer's strongest words were ... against the intellectuals. "Intellectuals,"
he said, "cannot operate at room temperature." Hype, moral melodrama and
sweeping visions were the way that intellectuals approached the problems of the world.
But that was not the way progress was usually achieved in America. "Nothing so
offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve the momentous in a
matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words."
- Since American economy and society advanced with little or no
role for the intelligentsia, it is hardly surprising that anti-Americanism flourishes
among intellectuals. "Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of
their country by educated people as in America," Hoffer said.
Some of the outrageous comments from intellectuals and academics, that the 9-11
terrorist attacks were somehow our fault, bore out what Hoffer had said many years
earlier.
- Eric Hoffer never bought the claims of intellectuals to be
for the common man. "A ruling intelligentsia," he said, "whether in Europe,
Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed and
wasted at will."
One of the many conceits of contemporary intellectuals that Hoffer deflated was their
nature cult:
"Almost all books I read spoke worshipfully of nature," he said, recalling
his own personal experience as a migrant farm worker that was full of painful encounters
with nature, which urban intellectuals worshipped from afar.
- Hoffer saw in this exaltation of nature another aspect of
intellectuals' elitist "distaste for man."
Implicit in much that they say and do is "the assumption that education readies a
person for the task of reforming and reshaping humanity -- that is, equips him to act as
an engineer of souls and manufacturer of desirable human attributes."
Hoffer called it "soul raping" -- an apt term for what goes on in too many
schools today, where half-educated teachers treat the classroom as a place for them to
shape children's attitudes and beliefs in a politically correct direction.
- This is creating the next generation of "true
believers," indoctrinated with ideologies that, in Hoffer's words, provide
"fact-proof screens from reality." It is the antithesis of education...
- [Editor's note: it is most interesting to consider that, if Hoffer's assessment
is correct, and I think it is, the typical "true believer" is one who,
essentially, does not like him or herself; and, as such, seeks a sense of self worth by
"running with the pack," fanatically and neurotically glorifying "the
group" -- be it the political party, the church, the family, the football team --
and, in so doing, opposes all forms of non-group individual achievement, that which the
"believer" finds so threatening. Criticism of others, it is said, can be a
dishonest and indirect means of advancing oneself; the "true believer" has made
an art-form of this principle.]
- "The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in
weakness... When the weak want to give an impression of strength they hint menacingly at
their capacity for evil. It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often
attracts the weak."
Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind
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