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by
Eric Hoffer
Read between
July 18 - October 16, 2023
The consciousness of a barren, meaningless existence is the main fountainhead of boredom.
Fervent patriotism as well as religious and revolutionary enthusiasm often serves as a refuge from a guilty conscience.
Notice that these feathers are all mechanisms to protect the beholder of a burden of self
vigor of a mass movement stems from the propensity of its followers for united action and self-sacrifice.
When asked who he is, his automatic response is that he is a German, a Russian, a Japanese, a Christian, a Moslem, a member of a certain tribe or family. He has no purpose, worth and destiny apart from his collective body; and as long as that body lives he cannot really die.
The ego is a cell of an organ that therefore cannot die
“if one had to live on some high rock on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life whatever it may be!”
The wonder of life
One realizes now that the ghetto of the Middle Ages was for the Jews more a fortress than a prison. Without the sense of utmost unity and distinctness which the ghetto imposed upon them, they could not have endured with unbroken spirit the violence and abuse of those dark centuries.
Jews, their behavior in Palestine could not have been predicted from their behavior in Europe. The British colonial officials in Palestine followed a policy sound in logic but lacking in insight. They reasoned that since Hitler had managed to exterminate six million Jews without meeting serious resistance, it should not be too difficult to handle the 600,000 Jews in Palestine. Yet they found that the Jews in Palestine, however recently arrived, were a formidable enemy:
It is only when we see ourselves as actors in a staged (and therefore unreal) performance that death loses its frightfulness and finality and becomes an act of make-believe and a theatrical gesture.
Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience—
To lose one’s life is but to lose the present; and, clearly, to lose a defiled, worthless present is not to lose much.
To enjoy oneself is to have truck with the enemy—the present.
The enslaved Hebrews in Egypt, “their lives made bitter with hard bondage,” were a bickering, back-biting lot. Moses had to give them hope of a promised land before he could join them together.
Notice how all civil rights leaders give the promise of a better future. This enthuses the people. But aren't they obviously synonymous? Wouldn't a leader most likely be focused on the future?
there is no more potent dwarfing of the present than by viewing it as a mere link between a glorious past and a glorious future.
The glory age of Africa will return for example. Same you see in Israel, glory of past and future
the true believer sees himself part of something that stretches endlessly backward and forward—something eternal.
A pleasant existence blinds us to the possibilities of drastic change.
On the other hand, those who reject the present and fix their eyes and hearts on things to come have a faculty for detecting the embryo of future danger or advantage in the ripeness of their times. Hence the frustrated individual and the true believer make better prognosticators than those who have reason to want the preservation of the status quo. “It is often the fanatics, and not always the delicate spirits, that are found grasping the right thread of the solutions required by the future.”
There is less risk in being discredited when trying the impossible than when trying the possible.
fanatical conviction that he was building a new order that would last a thousand years communicated itself both to followers and antagonists.
The devout are always urged to seek the absolute truth with their hearts and not their minds.
“It is the heart which is conscious of God, not the reason.”16 Rudolph Hess, when swearing in the entire Nazi party in 1934, exhorted his hearers: “Do not seek Adolph Hitler with your brains; all of you will find him with the strength of your hearts.”
Pascal was of the opinion that “one was well-minded to understand holy writ when one hated oneself.”
Man on his own is a helpless, miserable and sinful creature. His only salvation is in rejecting his self and in finding a new life in the bosom of a holy corporate body—be it a church, a nation or a party.
sense of security is derived from his passionate attachment and not from the excellence of his cause.
“The day after that on which the world should no longer believe in God, atheists would be the wretchedest of all men.”
Most of the traitors in the Second World War came from the extreme right.
The spokesmen of democracy offer no holy cause to cling to and no corporate whole to lose oneself in.
The ex-soldier is a veteran, even a hero; the ex-true believer is a renegade.
the other hand, the leader of a mass movement has an overwhelming contempt for the present—
He destroys his country and his people rather than surrender.
Hitler
“O my friend, if we, leaving this war, could escape from age and death, I should not here be fighting in the van; but now, since many are the modes of death impending over us which no man can hope to shun, let us press on and give renown to other men, or win it for ourselves.”
Actualisation through sacrifice
Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.
When Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: “No…. We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.”2 F. A. Voigt tells of a Japanese mission that arrived in Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement. Voigt asked a member of the mission what he thought of the movement. He replied: “It is magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can’t, because we haven’t got any Jews.”
Finally, it seems, the ideal devil is a foreigner.
Same as the rivers of blood speech
Germans, aggrieved by the Versailles treaty, avenged themselves by exterminating Jews; Zulus, oppressed by Boers, butcher Hindus; white trash, exploited by Dixiecrats, lynch Blacks.
Same as chimps harming lesser status chimps for stress relief.
A sublime religion inevitably generates a strong feeling of guilt. There is an unavoidable contrast between loftiness of profession and imperfection of practice.
The hypocrisy of religion
Hitler, who sensed the undercurrent of admiration in hatred, drew a remarkable conclusion. It is of the utmost importance, he said, that the National Socialist should seek and deserve the violent hatred of his enemies. Such hatred would be proof of the superiority of the National Socialist faith.
“When my heart is cold and I cannot pray as I should I scourge myself with the thought of the impiety and ingratitude of my enemies, the Pope and his accomplices and vermin, and Zwingli, so that my heart swells with righteous indignation and hatred and I can say with warmth and vehemence: ‘Holy be Thy Name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done!’ And the hotter I grow the more ardent do my prayers become.”
Not very holy
There is also this: when we renounce the self and become part of a compact whole, we not only renounce personal advantage but are also rid of personal responsibility. There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and the vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgment. When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom—freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse.
The less satisfaction we derive from being ourselves, the greater is our desire to be like others. We are therefore more ready to imitate those who are different from us than those nearly like us, and those we admire than those we despise. The imitativeness of the oppressed (Blacks and Jews) is notable.
I would say the moderates model the fringe
A feeling of superiority counteracts imitation. Had the millions of immigrants who came to this country been superior people—the cream of the countries they came from—there would have been not one U.S.A. but a mosaic of lingual and cultural groups. It was due to the fact that the majority of the immigrants were of the lowest and the poorest, the despised and the rejected, that the heterogeneous millions blended so rapidly and thoroughly. They came here with the ardent desire to shed their old world identity and be reborn to a new life; and they were automatically equipped with an unbounded
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Spewing of opinion, unfounded, from my perspective and experience untrue. Smart people know when to conform and what to protect
Both they who convert and they who are converted by coercion need the fervent conviction that the faith they impose or are forced to adopt is the only true one. Without this conviction, the proselytizing terrorist, if he is not vicious to begin with, is likely to feel a criminal, and the coerced convert see himself as a coward who prostituted his soul to live.
Almost as though they have to feel as though they ar e saved? A victim? Or they may feel an imposter
Propaganda thus serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others;
Every lynching in our South not only intimidates the Negro but also invigorates the fanatical conviction of white supremacy.
Britain, too, the leader had to wait for the times to ripen before he could play his role. During the 1930's the potential leader (Churchill) was prominent in the eyes of the people and made himself heard, day in, day out. But the will to follow was not there. It was only when disaster shook the country to its foundation and made autonomous individual lives untenable and meaningless that the leader came into his own.
Leaders are opportune
most decisive for the effectiveness of a mass movement leader seem to be audacity, fanatical faith in a holy cause, an awareness of the importance of a close-knit collectivity, and, above all, the ability to evoke fervent devotion in a group of able lieutenants.
All mass movements rank obedience with the highest virtues and put it on a level with faith:
Action is a unifier. There is less individual distinctness in the genuine man of action—the builder, soldier, sportsman and even the scientist—than in the thinker or in one whose creativeness flows from communion with the self.
If that's so, what about artists like Michal Angelo, Davinci etc
The real International is that of men of action.
true believer who is wholly assimilated into a compact collective body is no longer frustrated.
“We Germans are so happy. We are free from freedom.”
