# American Iconoclast  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Tom Shachtman]] - Full Title:: American Iconoclast - Category: #books ## Highlights > “Blind faith is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves; insatiable desire a substitute for hope; accumulation a substitute for growth; fervent hustling a substitute for purposeful action; and pride a substitute for unattainable self-respect,” Hoffer had written in his second big book, The Ordeal of Change. ([Location 95](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=95)) > Sevareid wrote that he had worked and traveled alone, because “It is the right and only way. You do not have to talk if you would rather be silent; you can stop where you will, doze when you wish, and think your own thoughts. All that the eye sees, the mind registers, and the heart envelops is filtered by the screen of Yourself, untreated, unmodified by the conditioning presence of another human being.” ([Location 131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=131)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Sevareid published an article in Look, “Dissent or Destruction,” that, his biographer ([Location 164](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=164)) > “It is much easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one’s neighbor.” ([Location 180](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=180)) > Hoffer’s anger at campus rebels and professors was part of his long battle against “intellectuals,” who were “more corrupted by power than any other human type.” The intellectual, he charged, “doesn’t want [you] just to obey. He wants you to get down on the knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love.” “Soul-raping,” Hoffer said. ([Location 190](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=190)) > He lauded the Jews for birthing the basic ideas of Western civilization, and Israel for persevering against enormous odds. “Don’t forget, Mr. Sevareid, the whole of the Occident was involved with the persecution, the humiliation, and the final annihilation of six million Jews.” ([Location 214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=214)) > “Death will come tomorrow. Death will come this evening. It matters not, see. I have no grievance against anybody. I always got more than I deserved.” ([Location 226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=226)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The morals of Hoffer’s story, which he told repeatedly, were that hope was an illusion, and that courage rather than hope was the essential quality. ([Location 353](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=353)) > His encounters with starvation and homelessness birthed what he recalled as his first insight: “Men are truly alive only when they suffer.” ([Location 360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=360)) > For instance, where-as most people precipitated into a hand-to-mouth existence claimed resulting stress and fright, Hoffer characterized existence in the gutter as emancipation. ([Location 370](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=370)) - Note: Diogenes > envisioned less as downtrodden victims of society than as bearers of unrealized potential. ([Location 376](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=376)) > Hoffer was impressed that ancient Jews had been so involved with the present that they did not bother to imagine a hereafter; ([Location 388](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=388)) > “Crops changed and scenery; but not the routine, the strangeness, and the harassment. Grapes, olives, oranges, grapefruit, peas, spinach, beet-thinning, fruit-thinning, cherries, apricots, haying, peaches, apples, pears, hops, prunes, and then tomatoes again. … Always on the run; always with the crowd; and always utterly alone.” ([Location 405](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=405)) > All that was required by individuals to prevail in a reasonable society, Hoffer was certain, was good availability of opportunities. ([Location 446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=446)) > Very quickly he decided that the pioneers had not been the best or the fittest of men but, rather, “men who went broke or never amounted to much; men who though possessed of abilities were too impulsive to stand the daily grind; men who were the slaves of their appetites—drunkards, gamblers, and women chasers; outcasts.” In other words, men very much like the migrants in El Centro. ([Location 504](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=504)) > Seizing on the idea of tramps as pioneers, ([Location 532](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=532)) > read the 1,200 pages of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays twice and skimmed them a third time, discovering in them the master to unlock his potential and influence his writing style and attitude toward life. ([Location 536](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=536)) > Montaigne tried to live as the Stoics and Epicureans had, maintaining emotional distance in order to assay life with proper detachment. ([Location 550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=550)) > Huxley described the three “poles”—three axes—on which Montaigne’s essays hinged: “from the personal to the universal, from the abstract back to the concrete, from the objective datum to the inner experience.” ([Location 560](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=560)) > These reveal the steady increases in his vocabulary, in the sophistication and range of his word usage, in the accuracy of his images, in the aptness of his metaphors, and the sharpness of his social criticism. ([Location 574](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=574)) > I have no veneration for popular judgment. If the voice of the people is the voice of God, then the bleating of sheep is heavenly music. … ([Location 622](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=622)) > Hoffer mused about the ancient Greek notion that children should only be taught while standing, to avoid them learning useless stuff, and wondered how a future society should be arranged so that “pleasant gifted children would retain [their] vigor and alertness … into maturity.” He imagined a setting: “They will be surrounded on every hand with monuments and magnificent achievements buildings dams aqueducts bridges roads and organizations of large scale production of all of these achieved by their immediate ancestors. … They will be as familiar with all manner of activity as the child of a nomad Arab tribe with horses and camels.” ([Location 628](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=628)) > His pages would report on “one attempted cure” of a “minor ailment,” the problem of transients. Prior to being called “transients,” he noted for the reader, he and his kind had been known as “hoboes, bums, tramps, stiffs, and floaters”—in other words, as “a menace.” ([Location 636](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=636)) > “When we engage in a selfless undertaking, we not only rid ourselves of private greed but also of private responsibility. ([Location 708](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=708)) > By keeping clear of the guilt of selfishness, we deprive our conscience of its voice and we commit atrocities and enormities without shuddering and without fear of remorse. ([Location 709](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=709)) > A sense of duty and of devotion to an ideal often produces a brand of selflessness more ruthless and harmful than extreme selfishness.” Hoffer would enshrine that sentiment in The True Believer. ([Location 710](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=710)) > I felt that words had no meaning; that they were hatched at the root of the tongue.” ([Location 726](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=726)) > For two decades he had shunned stability, security, and specific purpose; now, recognizing these as necessary to the writing that would create his future, he took steps to acquire them. ([Location 822](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=822)) > Hoffer volunteered for the U.S. military; then, rejected on medical grounds because of a hernia and chronic gastric problems, ([Location 826](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=826)) > “I felt at home in the union from the first day,” Hoffer would write, explaining that the ethnic mix of dockworkers was similar to that of the migrants, and so was the nature of dock work—not steady, consisting of various kinds of toil done for many different employers. ([Location 833](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=833)) > Hoffer did not allow his antipathy to Bridges to overrule his admiration for the union and for the lifestyle that its contracts made possible: “You can work when you want to. You have no boss. You can have time for the good things in life—for books, for music, for hobbies. One of the things I have against Harry Bridges is that he cannot see this [independence] as a worthwhile goal, that he tries to lead the men in other directions.” ([Location 849](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=849)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > He endured many injuries, beginning in 1943 with the loss of a thumb, which put him in the hospital for nine months while doctors grafted onto the stub a piece of his rib and skin from his thigh. ([Location 863](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=863)) > 1943 translation of Jacob Burckhardt’s Force and Freedom: Reflections on History, from which he learned a great deal about mass movements. ([Location 891](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=891)) > As Hoffer told Koerner, “You steal ideas, you steal sentences. If you don’t know how to steal you don’t know how to create.” ([Location 902](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=902)) > As he would later explain to interviewer James Day,   If you just hug [the problem], just hang onto it, long enough, some solution will offer itself. … I believe in familiarity. I believe in living with your problem—sitting with it, eating with it, carrying it around with you. All the time. Some solution will offer itself. … All kinds of right accidents will happen to you. You’ll find out that the whole world—even the newspapers—are talking about your problem, even children will be talking about your problem. The whole world will come to your door and bring mortar and brick for you to build. ([Location 904](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=904)) > “Duties are the strings which attach us to a pattern of existence.” ([Location 915](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=915)) > “It’s refuge from our own selves we seek when we run to join the crowd and make noise.” ([Location 921](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=921)) > Hoffer, in other words, wanted the settlement to concentrate on the present; he was also exploring, just then, in his draft of the book, how true believers related to the present: “All mass movements deprecate the present, mask its reality, and employ every device to divert the gaze of their followers from it. They depict the present as a mean and shameful prelude to a glorious and noble future.” Ever his toughest editor, he immediately shortened and improved the thought: “They depict the present as a mean prelude to a noble future.” ([Location 956](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=956)) > After years of thinking about mass movements, Hoffer posed one such question, in pen: “What happens to a doctrine when it is adopted by a mass movement?” Below that he wrote “a, b, c,” and left space for filling in those blanks. He already had the “a” and “b” answers: “It is dramatized” and “It is dogmatized.” But “c” eluded him for a while, perhaps no more than a few hours, until he affixed “c,” in pencil: “It is vulgarized.” ([Location 967](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=967)) > Wondering whether all mass movements had a holy book, he quickly listed a few: the Bible, the Koran, the writings of Marx and Lenin, and Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Trying to figure what these tomes had in common, he wrote in a rushed hand his startling conclusion: “All mass movements have a Devil.” Not satisfied with that expression of the insight, he mulled it over until he wrote, “There are mass movements without a God, but none without a Devil.” Reworked as “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil,” this became one of his most quoted lines. ([Location 976](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=976)) > “There is apparently some connection between dissatisfaction with oneself and a proneness to credulity. … There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. … They ask to be deceived.” ([Location 1004](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1004)) > Continuing to search for information about its function within a mass movement, he found in a 1946 book, Why They Behave Like Russians, by Jack Fischer, an apt quote from an official history of the Communist Party: “The power of the Marxist-Leninist theory lies in the fact that it enables the Party to find the right orientation in any situation.” ([Location 1012](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1012)) > “We have more faith in what we imitate than in what we originate. We cannot derive a sense of certitude from anything that has its roots in ourselves,” ([Location 1075](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1075)) > “It is probably better for a people that its government should be overthrown the moment it begins to show signs of chronic incompetence—even though such overthrow involves a frightful waste in lives and wealth—than that it should be allowed to rot and crumble and fall of itself.” ([Location 1076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1076)) > Part of the book’s appeal, Harper & Brothers knew, was that an unschooled manual laborer could write such a wide-ranging, deeply intellectual book that cited the Bible, Luther, Renan, Dostoevsky, Montaigne, Pascal, Hitler, Trotsky, Yeats, H. G. Wells, Homer, and de Tocqueville. ([Location 1098](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1098)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The True Believer enjoyed as near-perfect timing and circumstances as any author could wish for. The book argued for equating America’s prior, Nazi enemy with its current, Communist enemy on ethical, moral, and psychological grounds. ([Location 1159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1159)) > when America’s “non-Communist left,” as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. styled them, desperately sought ways to be against Communism without rejecting the positive social progress achieved through leftist ideas in the U.S during the New Deal and post-war years. ([Location 1161](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1161)) > Readers opening The True Believer found a preface that began boldly: “All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred, and intolerance.” ([Location 1163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1163)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > “A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.” ([Location 1172](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1172)) > if the Communists won in Europe or Africa, it would not be “because they know how to stir up discontent or how to infect people with hatred, but because they know how to preach hope.” ([Location 1174](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1174)) > mass movements’ leaders manipulated true believers by means of their fears, failings, and hopes; and holy causes were not only those that readers loathed, Communism and Nazism, but included some that some readers embraced—fervent religiosity, socialism, and ethnic nationalism. ([Location 1178](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1178)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > he ratified American readers’ belief in the inherent superiority of an American way of life based on democracy, capitalism, tolerance, equal opportunity, and individualism. ([Location 1183](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1183)) > Few readers would have sensed, in advance of reading the book, that the notion of “true believers” was so integrally related to the role of “undesirables” in human affairs, or that undesirables could be celebrated as the spearhead of change. ([Location 1187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1187)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves”—and ([Location 1201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1201)) > He analyzed the poor from the point of view of someone who had always been poor and chose to remain so: refusing to lump all poor into a single category defined by income level, or to dismiss them as powerless, he instead sorted the poor by their varied routes to poverty and their attitudes toward money. ([Location 1202](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1202)) > “Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less satisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack one thing.” ([Location 1218](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1218)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > “Failure in the management of practical affairs seems to be a qualification for success in the management of public affairs,” ([Location 1228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1228)) > Throughout history, he asserted, mass movements had often brought stagnant periods to an end and thus advanced human progress. ([Location 1245](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1245)) > Seeking to identify what made a nation “virile” and properly aimed at a self-sustaining future, he posited that it must have a goal that was palpable, distant, and not overwhelmingly concrete, rather than an unrealizable “sublime” goal such as universal equality. ([Location 1245](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1245)) > A collection of abject individuals can be turned into a cruelly fanatical society; but only a community of self-respecting individuals can practise freedom and tolerance. ([Location 1306](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1306)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > His insights into the character of fanatics provide a window into the most perplexing “true believers” of the twenty-first century, the suicide bombers and al Qaeda members bent on destruction in the service of their holy cause, but also into the fervent beliefs that energize the partisans of many contemporary causes, from that of the Tea Party to ardent environmentalists and fanatical soccer fans. ([Location 1316](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1316)) > The True Believer takes an honored place as an essential guide to a timeless subject: how to recognize and to resist the enemies of freedom, individuality, and personal responsibility. ([Location 1321](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1321)) > it was important to Hoffer to continue as a working member of the working class, perhaps sensing that this connection, in addition to aiding his legitimacy, also made him more unlike other writers from impoverished or difficult backgrounds who at the first opportunity left behind those surrounds and manual labor jobs. ([Location 1330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1330)) > Sketching out a letter to Margaret Anderson, he pushed back against being rushed to produce a new book: “I loathe excitement, hurry, and the common restlessness of ambition. … You can’t help seeing life as a race. You have placed your bet on me and I am supposed to run and make good. I think you’ll spare yourself many disappointments if you’ll realize that I am not running.” ([Location 1333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1333)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > He had not yet understood that for him the subject of mass man was an “inland sea,” as he would later characterize it, and that it would remain the source and the context of everything he wrote. ([Location 1390](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1390)) > Those chapter subjects would become the substance of The Ordeal of Change, published in 1963, which Hoffer eventually judged to be his best book. ([Location 1400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1400)) > A second reason was his insularity, which translated into reluctance to obtain guidance from an agent, editor, or intellectual peer who might have helped him define his focus. ([Location 1406](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1406)) > Some Hoffer aphorisms fit readily into the same category, as in his already-famous line, “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves,” ([Location 1427](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1427)) > “Passions usually have their roots in that which is blemished, crippled, incomplete, and insecure within us,” Hoffer asserted in the first of the 280 short sections The Passionate State of Mind and other Aphorisms, thereby setting out the 1955 book’s purview, style, and tone. ([Location 1459](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1459)) > “All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.” ([Location 1471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1471)) > “Dockside Montaigne” ([Location 1486](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1486)) > In that moment, Hoffer realized that Hitler’s seductiveness as an orator had been the source of his power. Lili later emphasized that aspect of Hoffer by referring to what happened in that auditorium as “making love in public.” The persuasive power that Hoffer felt frightened him, so much so that he resolved never again to lecture in public. ([Location 1580](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1580)) > Working and Thinking on the Waterfront. ([Location 1591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1591)) > In June, Hoffer mused that African-Americans, more so than whites, seemed to present exaggerated, “stereotypical” characters, such as “the unctuous hypocrite, the barefaced cheat, the windbag, the lecher, the miser,” and he decided this must be attributable to their need for “play-acting” to get by in a white society. ([Location 1627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1627)) > Imagination could never synthesize for us the state of mind of a Negro in a white environment,” and he wondered “whether a Negro intellectual can feel himself truly and wholly an American.” ([Location 1634](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1634)) > complaining to the diary on July 22 that African-Americans, although late arrivals to his union, held a disproportionate number of its higher posts. “They have achieved much without having to fight for it. Yet the Negro longshoreman sounds bitter and frustrated.” ([Location 1638](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1638)) > How could a man who had written so insightfully about America having been built by undesirables, by immigrants from the lowest rungs of society, refuse to award any percentage of truth to the similar assertion made by African-Americans, that black slaves had been the South’s engine of wealth? And, when confronted with the former colony of Gold Coast becoming the independent nation of Ghana, disparage the possibility that this triumph could do for blacks everywhere what the founding of Israel had done for the Jews? ([Location 1642](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1642)) > You do not give up the unperishable advantage of an alibi for the short-lived exhilaration of achievement.” ([Location 1647](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1647)) > Contemplating this, he reached a central idea: “Vigor and creative flow have their source in internal strains and tensions. It is the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music.” ([Location 1660](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1660)) > “The thwarted impulse toward action … works itself out in creativeness,” he judged, and asserted that thwarted people “tend to become either revolutionaries or writers, artists, etc. … Where there are no talents, tension vents itself in a variety of action.” ([Location 1693](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1693)) > “Fair play is primarily the practice of not blaming them for anything that is going wrong with us. We tend to rub our guilty conscience against others the way we wipe our dirty fingers on a rag. This is as evil a misuse of others as the practice of exploitation.” ([Location 1703](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1703)) > “Once man was tamed by the manipulative magic of Priest and King he stopped tinkering with and probing the world around him and became a beggar—begging Gods for good crops and good fortune. With the birth of the new Occident, man resumed to question nature and pry answers from her. He became a miracle maker, and ceased to believe in miracles.” ([Location 1710](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1710)) > “every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem,” ([Location 1774](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1774)) > What, he rhetorically asked, did the “ill-fed, ill-clad, and ill-housed masses in China, India, Indonesia … deeply desire?” Not better food, clothing, or shelter, he argued, but collective “pride”—lacking because colonization had destroyed the patriarchal, clan, and tribal cultures ([Location 1780](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1780)) > elite.” While Lord Acton had famously posited, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely;” Hoffer argued that “power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many,” ([Location 1786](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1786)) > “Deeds and Words,” that this split exacerbated change, and that it was affected by “imitation.” Later in life, Hoffer would judge this analysis as one of his most important. ([Location 1790](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1790)) > that they were unduly dismissive of the importance, the integrity, and the genius of the masses. This last, to Hoffer, was the unforgiveable sin. ([Location 1812](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1812)) - Note: Natural aristocracy or natural democracy? Both, combined, most likely. > But not everyone sought an “autonomous existence,” which was “beset with fears” and required “confidence and self-esteem.” Rather, “It is only the few who can acquire a sense of worth by developing and employing their capacities and talents. The majority prove their worth by keeping busy. A busy life is the nearest thing to a purposeful life.” ([Location 1839](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1839)) > mass civilization: “worship of success, the cult of the practical, the identification of quality with quantity, the addiction to sheer action, the fascination with the trivial.” ([Location 1845](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1845)) > “A superb dynamism, an unprecedented diffusion of skills, a genius for organization and teamwork, a flexibility that makes possible an easy adjustment to the most drastic change, an ability to get things done with a minimum of tutelage and supervision, an unbounded capacity for fraternization.” ([Location 1848](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1848)) > True creatives did not try to exert authority over ordinary people; but intellectuals incapable of great creativity—pseudo-intellectuals—tried to “imprint [their] mediocrity and meagerness on every phase of cultural activity” in their effort to “rule the roost.” ([Location 1858](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1858)) > “A fiercely independent labor force,” Hoffer concluded, was “not incompatible with efficient production.” ([Location 1889](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1889)) > Hoffer welcomed automation on the dock and in the factories, as it could relieve workers of what De Tocqueville had labeled “the disease of work,” ([Location 1891](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1891)) > “The capacity for getting along with our neighbor depends to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves,” was an extension of The True Believer’s already-famous sentence, “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.” ([Location 1904](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1904)) > Great’ thinking consists in the working out of insights and ideas which come to us in playful moments,” he wrote, with autobiographical relish; “It is doubtful whether a mind that is pinned down and cannot drift elsewhere is capable of formulating new questions.” By contrast, mass movements were “fits of deadly seriousness” brought on by “sterile pedants possessed of a murderous hatred for festive creativeness.” ([Location 1913](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1913)) > In 1963, Hoffer thought that only authoritarian regimes were troubled by an overabundance of intellectuals; today, all governments, especially those of the democracies, increasingly rely on the expertise of specialists in all fields of endeavor and, as Hoffer predicted, ordinary people are even more at their mercy—for example, when governments choose fixes for their economy, or when they decide what scientific innovations and weaponry to pursue, or what strategies to use to fight crime. ([Location 1965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=1965)) > Rather, what scared him was that skilled, competent, and resourceful workingmen—his kind of people, the ones he thought of as real Americans—would be unable to find jobs. This situation could become “explosive,” so he hoped that the “potent irritation” of those twenty million unemployed would lead to innovations that could ameliorate this terrible problem by providing work for the skilled. ([Location 2057](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2057)) > Daniel Bell would not announce until 1973 the “post-industrial society,” with its transition from “a goods-producing to a service economy,” the rapid decline of the blue-collar proletariat, and the “preeminence of the professional and technical class,” all elements that Hoffer had predicted. ([Location 2064](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2064)) > But Hoffer was not wrong about the crisis attendant on skilled workers losing their jobs—that crisis had simply been postponed. It arrived in late 2008, and since then, job loss has been substantial, throwing more than ten million people out of work and making all the more difficult the creating of new jobs for them; many economists believe that the absorption of all who want to work may not be fully accomplished until the “baby boomer” generation retires. ([Location 2067](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2067)) > Hoffer’s prejudice toward the descendants of slaves, people who were still daily contending with debilitating discrimination, seemed all the more illogical when juxtaposed to his long-term, well-expressed sensitivity to the downtrodden in history. ([Location 2123](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2123)) > Used to drawing generalities based on his own experience, Hoffer refused to acknowledge that there might be experiences so different from his that they would contradict his generalizations or not fit comfortably within them—this was particularly true for the lives of African-Americans. ([Location 2138](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2138)) > “That which corrodes the soul of the Negro is his monstrous inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against him.” ([Location 2152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2152)) > sociologist Lauren Langman would label “western industrial man,” which she listed as 1) a belief in rational explanations; 2) self-reliance, independence and individualism; 3) hard work as a moral calling; 4) domination over nature; and 5) future orientation. On each of these points, Langman contended, the “countercultural child” of the 1960s held opposite views. ([Location 2166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2166)) > Hoffer admired the world of learning as only a man who had never been to school could. Accordingly, he positioned academia as an ideal to which all of society should aspire. ([Location 2179](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2179)) > Hoffer asserted, “Creativeness … needs cesspools, it also needs grievances, it needs nightmares, it needs memories, unpleasant memories.” ([Location 2208](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2208)) > the monsignors at the University of San Francisco admired his contention that God and the devil battled not in heaven but in each individual’s soul, and his defining of God’s influence as anything that humanizes people. The Jesuits thought of him as a theologian, ([Location 2231](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2231)) > “A man could speak and write all his life and not accomplish what Hoffer accomplished in that one hour,” Sevareid told the San Francisco Chronicle soon after the CBS broadcast. “What Hoffer does is to cut through the scab of doubt about this country, its purpose and its future, to touch the nerve of faith about ourselves and our nation. It is something like Churchill talking to the English people in dark times.” ([Location 2302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2302)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Current college students had not been able to progress beyond adolescence, he charged, because our civilization had no “puberty rites” to smooth the transition between boyhood and manhood. He proposed that before high school graduates became eligible for college, they should perform a couple of years of mandatory manual labor, which would force them to become adults worthy of entry into college. Then, “With a student body made up of grown men and women, universities could become what they are supposed to be: places to learn at leisure, unhurried by examination and supervision.” ([Location 2405](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2405)) > “change itself is the cause of the madhouse,” ([Location 2422](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2422)) > The “apocalyptic madhouse” of the Hitler-Stalin decades, he now realized, had been due to attempts by Germany and Russia to “modernize themselves at breakneck speed,” ([Location 2423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2423)) > “Negro revolution:” because the white majority had been unable to stop judging African-Americans as anything other than black people, despite all efforts, blacks had been unable to achieve a true rebirth. ([Location 2426](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2426)) > Boobus Americanus, ([Location 2547](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2547)) > Lane College in Eugene, Oregon, where the professors were retired mechanics and military, and the subjects included trade skills along with the academics. ([Location 2563](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2563)) > It should be obvious that you cannot stop the militant students by satisfying their demands. These would-be history makers have stumbled on a terrible secret. They have discovered that the men in power on the campus are too confused, too unsure, too humane, and probably too cowardly to hit back hard. So they are pushing and pushing to see how far they can go. ([Location 2604](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2604)) - Note: Applies equally to today. Radical right holding the majority captive due to our civility, commitment to the law, & free speech. > As an example, he outlined the spring 1968, students takeover and defacing of the office of Columbia University President Grayson Kirk:   They got into his room. They pissed on his carpet. They burglarized his files. They used his shaving kit. Grayson Kirk did not forget himself. Now I remember when the longshoremen were talking about that. I think it would have been a wonderful thing, although it is not civilized, I think it would have been a wonderful thing if Grayson Kirk got mad, grabbed a gun and gunned them down. I think maybe he would have gotten killed, maybe he would have killed two of them when they were jumping up, but I think he would have saved Columbia. You have to get angry; you have to have courage enough to lay your life on the line. I think what you need, Mr. Chairman, is not new strong laws. You need men of strong character … chancellors of universities and mayors of cities who have the muscle, who love a fight, who when they get up in the morning, spit on their hands and ask, “Whom do I kill today?” These are the people who will save you. ([Location 2611](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2611)) > “Imagine, senators, [the rebellious students] can make history! They have power! It’s intoxicating. They have a taste for academic flesh. They want to kill them! They want to eat them!” ([Location 2623](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2623)) > during which Ribicoff reminded him that the labor movement had had violent episodes. Hoffer conceded this too, but pointed out, “We didn’t want to destroy the establishment, we wanted a piece of the pie.” ([Location 2637](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2637)) > Hoffer made some less heated and more cogent points:   The sociologists and academists in general have so many articles of faith, like ‘poverty breeds crime,’ just like in some Catholic dogma … or that violent programs from the television breed violence. … My idea is just the opposite: that what television induces is passivity in the majority, meekness, timidity, cowardice in the majority, and when the majority is meek and cowardly, then the violent minority becomes more violent. ([Location 2639](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2639)) > For a while longer he pressed on, to the point of writing a column on the “Negrification” of white American youth:   The effect of the Negro Revolution on the non-Negro is as unexpected as it is puzzling. Why have the young so wholeheartedly adopted the Negro’s style of life? The negrification of the young will have profound and durable effects on our language, sexual mores, the attitude toward work, and on tastes and manners in general. Even white young racists are negrified and do not realize it. ([Location 2696](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2696)) > Though Hoffer professed not to care what other people thought of him, he was aware of his own “hunger for praise. It is a misfortune that confidence should depend so much on what other people think of you—that faith in oneself, like any other faith, needs a chorus of consent.” ([Location 2704](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2704)) > But he also insisted, “We have become a nation of cowards. … I am worried about a country in which people will not speak out for what they believe.” He had spoken out, repeatedly, for what he believed and thought that others believed, but “I don’t want to die barking. I’m going to crawl back into my hole where I started.” ([Location 2712](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2712)) > Hoffer responded, “Lili, I have told you a hundred times: it is easy to die for what you believe. What is hard is to live for what you believe.” ([Location 2735](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2735)) > It had become what he labeled a tragic view, built on three linked beliefs: that good and evil coexisted and that neither would ever fully triumph over the other, that there was no existence after death and therefore no discernible meaning to anyone’s life beyond what one made of it, and that these understandings freed individuals to enjoy themselves in the present. First Things, Last Things also illustrated Hoffer’s big turn, from deconstructing America’s external enemies to analyzing its internal ones. ([Location 2787](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2787)) > In this book, he did outline a solution to the problems facing the silent majority: “Learn how to contain anarchy, how to regulate and manipulate everyday life and, above all, how to concoct a faith, a philosophy, and a style of life to suit the needs of a noncreative horde hungering for meaningful, weighty lives.” ([Location 2803](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2803)) > such as the burden of freedom, that mix of open horizons and heavy responsibilities that Hoffer saw as the autonomous individual’s glory and challenge. ([Location 2839](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2839)) > “It is remarkable how little history can touch us at present. The past seems too remote and different to matter. We can obtain insights about the present not from books of history but from books dealing with the human condition.” ([Location 2870](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2870)) > Stephen Osborne, twenty-two and recently returned from two years in the Peace Corps, “about the stagnating effect of Islam. Islam's lack of inner contradictions induced not only stability but inertness. It is infinitely easier to be a genuinely good Moslem than a good Christian. ([Location 2872](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2872)) > Reflections, he advanced a more complete argument: “There is a spoiled-brat quality about the self-consciously alienated. Life must have a meaning, history must have a goal, and everything must be in apple-pie order if they are to cease being alienated. Actually, there is no alienation that a little power will not cure.” ([Location 2927](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2927)) > The savior who turns men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who turns them into puppets”—its ([Location 2930](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2930)) > Nature had left man unfinished, and “in the process of finishing himself man got out from underneath nature’s inexorable laws, and became her most formidable adversary.” ([Location 2934](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2934)) > If man created God in his own image, Hoffer asked, then in whose image did he make the devil? ([Location 2935](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2935)) > Venturing to teach people how to live—something he had previously avoided—Hoffer stated, “It is not only more sensible but more humane to base social practice on the assumption that all motives are questionable and that in the long run social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.” To assume otherwise was “romanticism.” ([Location 2940](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2940)) > He chided all groups that insisted on having their members refer to themselves principally by occupation, origin, or beliefs—businessmen, religious followers, ethnics, or adherents to political parties—because, he wrote, such identifications prevented people from acting as human beings committed to freedom for themselves and for everyone else. ([Location 2948](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2948)) > The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.” ([Location 2983](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2983)) > What we all seek, Hoffer concluded, is to have others understand us as individuals: “Societies, cultures, and civilizations—past and present—are often incomprehensible … but the individual’s hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia. … The individual who is more complex, unpredictable, and mysterious than any communal entity is the one nearest to our understanding.” ([Location 2984](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=2984)) - Note: !!! > Hoffer moved from the Chinatown walk-up to a seventeenth-floor apartment in a new high-rise apartment on the water’s edge that had replaced the union hall from which he had once been dispatched daily to dock work. The irony of the location was not lost on Hoffer. Enjoying the comfort and the view, he told his diary that he had earned it. ([Location 3005](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=3005)) > Although defiantly claiming that his biases were still “the testicles” of his mind, this voice of the silent majority no longer wished to remain in a state of permanent anger at that majority’s rebellious sons and daughters. Henceforth he would try to persuade both groups to do as he did, take the long view of America and its present predicaments. ([Location 3011](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=3011)) > Consider what happened to us: An America that fought two wars simultaneously and was victorious in both in the Pacific and Europe; that gave billions to rebuild Europe and Japan; that pushed through the second industrial revolution and gave its people a taste of unimagined plenty; that plunged into an unprecedented attempt to right all social wrongs overnight—an America that has done all these things and also landed the first man on the moon, wakes up one morning and finds itself weirdly diminished and flawed. It finds its dollar devalued, its natural resources apparently depleted, its ethnic minorities climbing out of the melting pot, its youth alienated, its armed forces demoralized, its manufacturers shoddy, its workers negligent, its history besmirched by revisionist historians, its cities decayed and stewing in crime, its air and water polluted, and its leaders drained of confidence.   This analysis became part of a long speech that he gave several years later, in 1977. ([Location 3015](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=3015)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > But he now realized that what he had once dismissed as the naïve goal of rebellious youth, the pursuit of “meaningful” lives, had become critical to America’s future. “Certain things have improved,” he conceded. “The camaraderie of the young from all walks of life and their readiness to share what they have is beautiful to behold. … Personal relations have become more gentle and kind, [giving] the hope of peace and amity between classes, nations and races. … We now know … that a sense of usefulness is more vital to the quality of life than abundance or even freedom.” But he hastened to point out that the events of the Sixties had also demonstrated “that the adult’s failure of nerve is more critical than the young’s impulse toward anarchy [and] that righting wrong is a perilous undertaking which needs a tightening of social discipline.” ([Location 3029](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=3029)) > Hoffer also lauded the eco-consciousness of the young, although he fretted that it might be counterproductive, since man’s basic task was to subdue nature; and he embraced a cherished ecological goal, the elimination of America’s over-reliance on fossil fuels, warning that “we shall somehow manage to hang on to the fossil-fuel tit for decades and go on wanting what we no longer really want. It is this lingering, debilitating crisis that we have most to fear.” ([Location 3039](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=3039)) > In America, where this phenomenon existed at its worst, the adversary intellectuals’ actions undermined the faith of the country’s potential defenders, producing “a society that cannot meet, let alone anticipate, challenges and has no goal to strive for and hardly anything worth fighting for.” ([Location 3056](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=3056)) > Hope—the belief that the future will be better and more benevolent—he similarly judged to be the most important casualty of the 1960s. ([Location 3091](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=3091)) > Hoffer’s plaint, “Loss of nerve at the center and excessive safeguards of individual liberty have made of freedom an evil that robs us of personal security … destroys schools [and] undermines morale in the armed forces. … Libertarian legislators, judges, educators and doctrinaires [have been] the wreckers of free societies.” ([Location 3099](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=3099)) > He first noted “an increased hostility towards the rich among common people,” which he thought stemmed from believing, as he now did, that “come what may, the rich will grow richer while we grow poorer. The rich will never pay their full share of taxes, and will not reconcile themselves to diminished or fixed profits. No matter what laws are passed, the rich, with their battalions of shysters, will by-pass them.” ([Location 3104](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=3104)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > In a third, later diary entry that did not make it into the published version, he stated, “I shall not welcome death. But the passage into nothingness seems neither strange nor frightful. I shall be joining an endless and most ancient caravan.” It was a sentiment that echoed Montaigne and the Stoics. ([Location 3111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=3111)) > diary, “Self-denial is self-assertion,” ([Location 3124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=3124)) > The children of the Sixties, he acknowledged, had shown themselves to be very good at the “creation of family ties between strangers,” another obvious key to having compassion. In compassion was hope for the survival of mankind. We all must learn, Hoffer wrote, that we ride together on the planet, “an island of life in a dark immensity of nothingness.” Then, mutually aware that all living things will eventually die, we will realize that “the survival of the [human] species may well depend on the ability to foster a boundless capacity for compassion.” ([Location 3153](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=3153)) > He drew laughter and applause with such lines as, “No one foresaw that the education explosion, made possible by advanced technology, would swamp societies with hordes of educated nobodies who want to be somebodies and end up being mischief-making busybodies.” ([Location 3243](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=3243)) > A typical quote was from Lord Acton, “There is no liberty where there is hunger. The theory of liberty demands strong efforts to help the poor, not merely for safety, for humanity, for religion, but for liberty.” Hoffer’s comment was not so much an interpretation of this statement as an answering one that emphasized his own take on liberty and its relationship to hunger: “Acton could not foresee that the end of hunger will mean the end of the invisible hand of scarcity which regulates and disciplines people, and creates the need for a new despotic power to contain anarchy. In other words, there is no liberty not only where there is hunger but also where there is widespread abundance. The zone of individual freedom is midway between the extremes of scarcity and plenty.” ([Location 3268](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=3268)) > The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon brought Eric Hoffer’s name and his works back into the public discourse. ([Location 3437](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=3437)) > The crowds in the streets of Cairo, Tripoli, Sana’a and other capitals are largely composed of those who had until recently been without hope and, as Hoffer had described, appear to be motivated principally by hope allied to the promises of a more equitable, less repressive society that their “revolutions” are projecting. ([Location 3455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=3455)) > Lines like the following seem all the more relevant now:     Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs [and] know that basic human problems can 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 toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity. ([Location 3461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B006KIAUII&location=3461))