While reading this article about the trendy socialism among New York City’s “creative underclass,” I had a strange feeling of déjà vu. Then I realized it wasn’t that I’d read the article before; it was that Eric Hoffer had already summed it up much more succinctly in his book The Ordeal of Change: “Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status.”