Hoffer 4

More from Eric Hoffer. If you don't like his aphorisms as I do, skip this. As before, I've added comments to many of them.

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Rabid suspicion has nothing in it of skepticism. The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person. I'm one of those who believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person. I guess I'm suspicious. In reality, however, suspicion has nothing to do with it. There is evil every person, and it often comes out.

Conservatism is sometimes a symptom or sterility. Those who have nothing in them that can grow and develop must cling to what they have in beliefs ideas and possessions. The sterile radical, too, is basically conservative. He is afraid to let go of the ideas he picked up in his youth lest his life be seen as empty and wasted.  I must admit to being a conservative. I picked up sterile radical ideas in my youth, but I let go of them. My ideas have grown and developed.

Those who proclaim the brotherhood of men fight every war as if it were a civil war. Nowadays it's protest and riot.

The hardest thing to cope with is not selfishness or vanity or deceitfulness, but sheer stupidity. One needs the talents of an animal trainer to deal with the stupid.

The passionate are not as a rule culturally creative, but only they make history.

Add a few drops of venom to a half truth and you have an absolute truth. Actually what it yields in the modern world is accusations and negative appraisals of anyone you don't like.

The true prophet is not he who peers into the future but he who reads and reveals the present. Or pays attention to opinion polls and focus groups. The prophet, today, sees where we are going then runs to the front to lead.

Fear and freedom are mutually exclusive.

To the old, the new is usually bad news. The old are smarter than the rest of us.

America has never ceased to be an experiment. In every generation America has still to prove that a society founded on values cherished by common people can endure, and that it is possible to fuse hordes of heterogeneous immigrants into one nation indivisible.

     [Achievement is largely the product of steadily raising one's levels of aspiration and expectation. (Jack Nicklaus)] It applies to all of society, not just sports.

Everyone expects 1975 [this was written early in 1975] to be a year of decision for the Occident, My fear is that it will be a year of protracted crisis. It is the lingering crisis that debilitates. An explosion would cleanse the air. I would welcome a blowing up of the oil wells in the Persian Gulf. A dramatic end of the fossil-fuel age could be an opening act in the renewal and rebirth of the Occident. The balance of century should be devoted to the search for cheaper and cleaner fuels. In the meantime the Occident should adopt a simpler and slower mode of life and use its manpower in a concerted effort to cleanse and water of pollution, replenish the soil, reforest the hills, and clean up the cities.

Who in the 1950s had a premonition of the witches' sabbath that would be enacted in the 1960s? Once events have taken place, a horde of commentators demonstrate that the unexpected was inevitable. Actually, chance stupidity and cowardice were chief factors. Nothing was inevitable. As I said earlier, evil, as well as stupidity, is lurking in everyone.

To give equality to people who cannot be equal is to intensify their feeling of inequality. So too to give freedom to people who cannot help themselves is to increase their feeling of oppression, Moreover, to give freedom and equality to people who cannot help themselves is to rob them of soul-soothing alibis.

Old age has made me common. I have the typical aches and predicaments of the old. It is true that my nose is not dripping when my head nods in drowsiness and I manage to keep the corners of my mouth clean.

       It is good to remind myself that it is by sheer wild luck that I have in my old age enough money to live on and no money worries at all. So far I have no misfortunes, and at seventy-three I feel that I have won the race. It is true that I am easy on myself. I have a right to an unstrenuous old age. But it must be free of boredom and a feeling of stagnation. This means that I must go on thinking, learning and writing. All I can allow myself is a slower tempo. Mostly this describes me.

The birth of the nineteenth century: the prelude to this most stable and peaceful century was a massive hemorrhage, a twenty-year war. We cannot blame war for the demented savagery of the twentieth century. It is legitimate to wonder whether the nineteenth century would have become what it was had the French come out of the Napoleonic wars as conquerors. The reason the First World War did not wind up the way other wars (including the Second World War) did was that France wanted to be the foremost nation in Europe and would not leave Germany alone. Vive la France. It could use help before it destroys itself.

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More to come, sooner or later.

Hoffer 3

More of the wisdom of Eric Hoffer. I'm putting some of his aphorisms on the internet because I suspect that most people are as unaware of them as they are of him. The quotations, themselves, are in the order that I found them. They have no meaning as a unified whole, but they're thought-provoking. At least I hope you'll find them so as I do.

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Fear comes from uncertainty. When we are absolutely certain, whether of our worth or worthlessness, we are almost impervious to fear. Thus a feeling of utter unworthiness can be a source of courage.

Absolute power is partial to simplicity. It wants simple problems, simple solutions, simple definitions. It sees in complication a product of weakness – the torturous path compromise must follow. There is thus a certain similarity between the pattern of extremism and that of absolute power.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart. For we can win a man's heart one day and lose it the next. But when we break a proud spirit we achieve something that is final and absolute.

When the weak want to give an impression of strength they hint meaningfully at their capacity for evil. It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.

Though the reformer is seen as a champion of change, he actually looks down on anything that can be changed. Only that which is corrupt and inferior must be subjected to the treatment of change. The reformer prides himself on the possession of an eternal unchangeable truth. It is his hostility toward things as they are which goads him to change them; he is as it were inflicting on them an indignity. Hence his passion for change is not infrequently a destructive passion.

There is always a chance that he who sets himself as his brother's keeper will end up by being his jailkeeper.

There is perhaps in all misfits a powerful craving to turn the whole of humanity into misfits. Hence partly their passionate advocacy of a drastic new social order. For we are all misfits when we have to adjust ourselves to the wholly new.

The real “haves” are they who can acquire freedom, self-confidence and even riches without depriving others of them. They acquire all of these by developing and applying their potentialities. On the other hand, the real “have nots” are they who cannot have aught except by depriving others of it. They can only feel free by diminishing the freedom of others, self-confident by spreading fear and dependence among others, and rich by making others poor.

The pleasure we derive from doing favors is partly the feeling it gives us that we are not altogether worthless. It is a pleasant surprise to ourselves.

To find the cause of our ills in something outside ourselves, something specific that can be spotted and eliminated, is a diagnosis that cannot fail to appeal. To say that the cause of our troubles is not in us but in the Jews, and pass immediately to the extermination of the Jews, is likely to find a wide acceptance.

Our impulse to persuade others is strongest when we have to persuade ourselves. The never wholly successful task of persuading ourselves of our worth manifests itself in a ceaseless effort to persuade others of it.

Those who would sacrifice a generation to realize an ideal are the enemies of mankind.

The only index by which to judge a government or a way of life is by the quality of the people it acts upon. No matter how noble the objectives of a government, if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion – it is an evil government.

There are people who seem continually engaged in an effort of self-proselytizing. To whomever they may talk or write it is to themselves they are talking or writing. They are continually engaged in talking or writing themselves into a conviction, an enthusiasm or an illusion.

Hoffer 2

Here are more quotes from Eric Hoffer. I don't agree with them all, but they reflect more thought then most of us are willing to give to any subject. They continue what I started last week and I know this won't complete the effort, but I doubt that it will be possible for me to publish them weekly. We'll see.

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Communism can reconstruct the chronically poor and launch backward countries on a road to modernization. Capitalism is ideal for enterprising, self-starting people but cannot do much for people who cannot help themselves. Clearly, where communism succeeds it makes the helpless fit for capitalism.

[Hoffer lived through the Second World War and most of the Cold War and had a low opinion of the Soviet Union and its actions. Had he lived to the present he might have developed an antipathy for the capitalism of our times, but we'll never know.]

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As hard as breaking an ingrained habit is the discarding of a reform that is no longer relevant. Our time cries out for child labor – there are no children anymore – but no one dares say it.

[OK. I don't agree with everything he said, but his underlying point, the discarding of a reform that is no longer relevant, makes sense – irrespective of his views on child labor. A regular review of “precedents” would also be in order. They don't always make sense.]

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The uncompromising attitude is more indicative of an inner uncertainty than of deep conviction. The implacable stand is directed more against the doubt within than the assailant without.

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It is by their translation into mere words and almost meaningless symbols that ideas move people and stir the to action. The deintellectualization of ideas is the work of pseudo-intellectuals. The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood.

[How often have “saviors” with the sword pretended to have high ideals and unique insights but lacked both?]

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A living faith is basically faith in the future. Hence he who would inspire faith must give the impression that he can peer into the future, and that everything that is happening under his guidance – even when it turns out disastrously – had been foreseen and foretold.

Some of the most successful prophesies of the future were written after the fact, or were based on inside information. Or they were ambiguous and “understood” by those who advanced them in a way that supported their views.]

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The only way to predict the future [correctly and with assurance] is to have power to shape the future. Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophesies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.

[A reasonable position, but not always true. Wishing doesn't always make it so. Consider, for example, the failed five-year plans of the Soviet Union.]

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Rudeness seems somehow linked with a rejection of the present. When we reject the present we also reject ourselves – we are, so to speak, rude toward ourselves; and we usually do unto others what we have already done to ourselves.

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There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the responsibility for acts which are prompted by our own questionable inclinations and impulses. Both the strong and weak grasp at this alibi. The latter hide their malevolence under the virtue of obedience: they acted dishonorably because they had to obey orders. The strong, too, claim absolution by proclaiming themselves the chosen instruments of a higher power – G-d, history, fate, nation or humanity.

[Don't blame me. It ain't my fault.]

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More will come. But I'm not sure when.