eric hoffer

Valéry Triptych

By in aphorisms, books, eric hoffer, foolosophy, work

In the course of history those who have not had their heads cut off and those who have not caused others’ heads to fall leave no trace behind. You have a choice of being a victim, a tyrant, or a nobody. Had Richelieu spared the ax and Robespierre the guillotine, the former would be depreciated, the latter completely forgotten. The lesson to be drawn from this is hardly of a moral order.

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

This is worth remembering whenever someone speaks solemnly of leaving his mark on history. History is marked chiefly by blood, fire, conquest, collapse, and spectacular error. Its admissions policy should make obscurity look respectable. A quiet man who tends his garden, keeps his promises, and refrains from terrorizing his neighbors leaves little material for the chronicler. His life may be good precisely because it is uneventful. Eric Hoffer similarly noted that many problems are caused by nobodies who want to be somebodies and end up becoming busybodies. Aspire to be a nobody.

What is essential in every domain is always the work of quite obscure persons, nondescript, individually valueless. If they did not exist or were not what they are, nothing would get done. If nothing got done, it is they who would lose least. They are essential — and without importance.

Maintenance is so easily mistaken for insignificance. When it succeeds, it erases the tracks of its own necessity. The people who leave no trace are generally the people who keep everything running. They carry, clean, repair, stock, file, deliver, maintain, and dispose. Their success consists in preventing events. The shelves remain filled, the water runs, the garbage disappears, the lights stay on. Because nothing dramatic happens, nobody thinks of them.

The sanitation worker’s achievement is that nothing happens: no garbage mountains, vermin surge, or epidemic. Maintenance produces an absence, and absences attract no glory. We ordinarily imagine achievement as the creation of something visible — a building, a fortune, a victory, a name. But much of the most useful work leaves behind no object at all. Its product is continuity.

People who perform the most necessary tasks are looked down on; most honored is the man who is most helped.

Prestige increases with distance from direct necessity. One man cooks his own food, carries his own bags, answers his own correspondence, drives himself, cleans his own rooms, and keeps his own appointments. Another has a cook, driver, secretary, cleaner, assistant, adviser, scheduler, guard, and publicist. Society looks at the second man’s elaborate dependence and concludes that he must be important. The great man is not necessarily the man who can do the most. He may simply be the man for whom the most is done.

The tyrant receives a statue. The great man receives assistance. The nobody takes out the trash.

Infinite Plasticity

By in books, eric hoffer

Only here, in America, were the common folk of the Old World given a chance to show what they could do on their own, without a master to push and order them about. History contrived an earth-shaking joke when it lifted by the nape of the neck lowly peasants, shopkeepers, laborers, paupers, jailbirds, and drunks from the midst of Europe, dumped them on a vast virgin continent, and said, “Go to it; it is yours!”

And the lowly were not awed by the magnitude of the task. A hunger for action, pent up for centuries, found an outlet. They went to it with ax, pick, shovel, plow, and rifle; on foot, on horse, in wagons, and on flatboats. They went to it praying, howling, singing, brawling, drinking, and fighting. Make way for the people! This is how I read the statement that this country was built by hordes of undesirables from the Old World.

Small wonder that we in this country have a deeply ingrained faith in human regeneration. We believe that, given a chance, even the degraded and the apparently worthless are capable of constructive work and great deeds. It is a faith founded on experience, not on some idealistic theory. And no matter what some anthropologists, sociologists, and geneticists may tell us, we shall go on believing that man, unlike other forms of life, is not a captive of his past — of his heredity and habits — but is possessed of infinite plasticity, and his potentialities for good and for evil are never wholly exhausted.

— Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change

Oh! Raise Us Up, Return to Us Again

By in books, eric hoffer

That a substantial part of this generation may be lost, at least in the sense that they will accomplish little, seems to Hoffer a real possibility. “If you raise a generation,” he says, “that is used to having their appetites instantly satisfied, you are going to have a south sea island civilization. And you can’t have a south sea island civilization on this sized continent. You won’t last five minutes.” He wonders whether a generation that has grown accustomed to having its desires immediately fulfilled can produce anything of lasting value. “Instantness,” he says, ” is a characteristic of animals. If the young adopt it they will submit to the tutelage of medicine men and they will not achieve anything of importance.”

Hoffer considers it at least a possibility that an anti-Semite movement could emerge from the present racial tensions in the United States. “It would be very easy,” he says, “to make out the case that all the major problems of the country were started by Jews. All you have to do is say what people like Chomsky say. America might find itself solving its domestic problems by blaming Jews. Lili and I will be inside the barricades with them fighting for survival.”

— James Koerner, Hoffer’s America

Hoffer! thou shouldst be living at this hour. America hath need of thee.

When Two Freedoms Meet

By in aphorisms, books, bricolage, eric hoffer

It is doubtful whether the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and for power — power to oppress others.

— Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition

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Without being very sharp, you can imagine all human beings want to be free, and not unhappy. This is false. They want their own freedom, not their neighbor’s. They want their happiness, or unhappiness, not their neighbor’s. When two freedoms meet, it’s war.

— Georges Perros, Paper Collage

The Written Word Is a Lie

By in aphorisms, books, eric hoffer, writing

“You steal ideas, you steal sentences,” he says, “if you are a creative person. If you don’t know how to steal, you don’t know how to create.” It is like a cow eating grass, to use one of Hoffer’s favorite metaphors. “The cow does not become grass,” says Hoffer, “the grass turns into cow.” Quotations, thoughts, a turn of phrase, and ideas in general taken from other writers are alfalfa to the creative person.

— James Koerner, Hoffer’s America

Let no one say I have said nothing new; the arrangement of the material is new. In playing tennis both players use the same ball, but one plays it better. I would just as soon be told that I have used old words. As if the same thoughts did not form a different argument by being differently arranged, just as the same words make different thoughts by being arranged differently!

— Pascal, Pensées

Originality is often treated as if it had to be immaculate conception. A thought must arrive unsullied by influence, untouched by other minds, bearing no fingerprints from the books one has read or the sentences one has admired. But writers are not virgins visited by angels. They are ruminants, tennis players, pickpockets, ventriloquists, and bad listeners. They steal, fail to steal properly, misunderstand what they have stolen, and sometimes discover that the thing they meant to steal was never there in the first place.

Attempted theft is rarely clean. A young writer tries to copy a cadence, a tone, a gesture on the page. But he can’t do it exactly. His own lack of skill interferes. His own preoccupations intrude. The borrowed coat hangs badly on his shoulders. So he cuts it, patches it, shortens the sleeves, replaces the buttons, and by the time he can wear it in public, it is no longer the master’s coat. Imitation fails in the direction of personality.

There is a comic version of this in the mondegreen. You hear Hendrix sing “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky,” but your ear, composing behind your back, hears “kiss this guy.” For a moment you think: what a line. Then you learn it was never the line at all. Good news: now it is salvage. The original has no claim on what he never said. A mondegreen is plagiarism without a victim.

Books do something similar to the mind. You read an ambiguous passage and believe the author has opened one door, only to learn later that he was probably pointing toward another. Well, the room you entered by mistake still exists. Sometimes a book gives you an idea by failing to say it. The writer says one thing; the reader hears another; the error becomes a footpath. Misreading is often an unauthorized sequel to the original sentence.

In the fourth century, Aelis Donatus wrote a line that frequently appears in today’s quotation analogies, “Confound those who have said our remarks before us.” But with reverse quotation, our predecessors are quoting us! Instead of a “burden of the past,” in which the achievements of earlier generations rob us of opportunities for creativity, there could be a burden of the future, in which what we say merely echoes words to come. Imagine objecting: That man was quoting what I am going to say. He plagiarized what I am destined to write. However odd, it is a feeling we sometimes have. We know we created a certain thought or set of words, and so, when we discover them already expressed long ago, it feels as if they had been stolen from us in advance.

Gary Saul Morson adds the metaphysical absurdity. We all know the burden of the past: the suspicion that the dead have used up all the good sentences. But I like this idea of the burden of the future, too. Perhaps our predecessors are not merely people from whom we steal, but people who have stolen from us in advance. You labor over a thought, feel the private triumph of invention, then discover some dead man in a toga, wig, cassock, or frock coat said it more stylishly centuries ago. The outrage is absurd but real. He plagiarized what you were destined to write.

Worse still, the line of theft runs forward too. Perhaps every original sentence I write is being stolen from some unborn writer who would have arrived at it honestly in 2087. I am not merely robbing graves. I am looting cradles. The burden of the future is the suspicion that I am plagiarizing my literary grandchildren.

Burke thought civilization was a partnership between the dead, the living, and the unborn. Literature may be the same arrangement, but conducted under cover of darkness. The dead steal from us by saying our sentences before we are born. We steal from the unborn by spending their inheritance early. We steal from our contemporaries, siblings, cousins, rivals, and friends by misreading, mishearing, misremembering, digesting, rearranging, and improving whatever they leave unattended. To write is to enter a marketplace where everyone is stealing from everyone else, including the dead, who had the low cunning to rob us in advance. Call it tradition if you like. I prefer “honor among thieves.”

All Is Number

By in aphorisms, books, eric hoffer, foolosophy

How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.

— Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition

We fall in love once, or twice; have one or two real friends; hate one enemy; feel pity for a few unfortunates — and the rest of mankind leaves us perfectly indifferent.

— Jules Renard, Journal 1887-1910

The human heart is an exclusive club operating under the name Dunbar’s Number. The bouncer has a clipboard, a bad attitude, and a ruthless sense of capacity. Another way to put it: The heart is generous in theory and protectionist in practice. It cannot afford open borders.

Scarcity does not cease to exist when we leave the marketplace. It follows us into the heart. Attention, patience, the ability to worry without being consumed: all are scarce. We may dislike the intrusion of economic language into love, but the underlying fact remains: to care deeply for someone is to spend oneself, and no creature has infinite reserves. We can demand a world of unlimited sympathy as easily as we can demand a world of unlimited food, land, water, or energy. But scarcity does not vanish because the resource is invisible. Love, patience, pity, attention, forgiveness — these too must be husbanded, cultivated, restored. There is no moral genius in spending them thoughtlessly.

A Bone For the Mind

By in books, eric hoffer, foolosophy, writing

“My writing is done in railroad yards, while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch,” he explained in a 1941 letter to Miss Anderson. “Towns are too distracting. Now and then I take a day off to ‘put myself in order.’ I go through the notes, pick and discard. The residue is usually a few paragraphs. My mind must always have something to chew on. I think on man, America, and the world. It is not as pretentious as it sounds.” His usual method was simply to take a single idea and work it out in his mind, put down the result in fifty words or less, and then go on to something else.

— Calvin Tomkins, Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey

I don’t want to alarm anyone, but I was a distracted driver for many years. Oh, I don’t mean that I was watching YouTube videos behind the wheel or anything. But I used to drive hundreds of miles a day for work, and most of my writing was done in my head, sometimes with a song on repeat, putting me in something of a focused trance. Hours went by on autopilot. I navigated highways and traffic without remembering any of it, concentrating on chewing sentences into shape. I tended toward brevity because a new idea for a post had to be brief enough to remember all the moving parts. By the time I got home in front of the computer, the work was already done; the rest was just stenography. (I never had an accident while driving, by the way.)

The keyboard is often where the sentence appears, but not where it was made. The sentence was made somewhere between mile markers, or while stacking boxes, or while mowing the same quadrant of grass for the third time, the mind gnawing away like an animal with a bone. Like Hoffer, I tend to ruminate on big-picture thoughts. Everyone and his mother wants to create “content” these days. I’m driven to give myself context and perspective. I like “sensemaking” as an aspirational goal, but much of it will never be used for anything practical. It won’t make me richer, fitter, wiser in any visible way, or more efficient at any task. I only want to know where I am, what sort of thing I have seen, what company it keeps. I want to put myself in order, like returning a book to the right shelf in the inner library.

Obiter Scripta, no. 159

By in aphorisms, books, eric hoffer, obiter scripta

I love ideas as much as I love women. I derive a sensuous pleasure from playing with ideas. Genuine ideas dance and sing. They sparkle and twinkle with mirth and mischief. They titillate the mind, kindle the imagination, and warm the heart. They have grace and promise.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

Hoffer saw the flirtatious side of ideas. But ideas are not always coquettes at a party. Sometimes they are cold hands pressed against your back just as you were drifting off to sleep. They give you the silent treatment all morning, then want to talk when you are driving, showering, or carrying groceries. They flirt outrageously in the margins of a book, then become prim and distant when you sit down at the keyboard. Sometimes they ask “Does this paragraph make me look fat?” and you must gently suggest that perhaps the second sentence is retaining water, or that possibly it wouldn’t hurt to lose a couple adjectives. Sometimes they keep you in the friendzone for years: intimate enough to haunt you, evasive enough to resist becoming an essay. Others move in after one conversation and begin rearranging the furniture.

Bubbling Thoughts

By in books, bricolage, eric hoffer, writing

Every so often he had to skim off his bubbling thoughts.

— Jules Renard, Journal 1887-1910

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One ruins the mind with too much writing. One rusts it by not writing at all.

— Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert

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With thinking too there is a time for ploughing & a time for harvesting. It gives me satisfaction to write a lot every day. This is childish but that’s how it is.

— Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

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One would like to write just so much that the words give life to another, and just so little that one can still take them seriously oneself.

— Elias Canetti, The Human Province

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Language is an ocean of words. As for me, either I almost drown in it or, when the tide goes out, I look around, walking on what’s left behind. Holes, puddles. Fragmentary writing means these puddles, these marine remnants, these shells, these wet pieces of evidence.

— Georges Perros, Paper Collage

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I must write for the simple reason that writing is vital for any feeling of well-being. I have no marked desire to see my name in print, and I certainly do not owe anything to anybody. I can go on thinking and writing at a steady pace, and let the resulting material take care of itself.

— Eric Hoffer, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront

Holy Blood

By in books, bricolage, eric hoffer

Trotsky sometimes compared mankind’s progress to the barefooted march of pilgrims who advance towards their shrine by moving only a few steps forward at a time, and then retreat or jump sideways in order to advance and deviate or retreat again; zigzagging thus all the time they approach laboriously their destination. He saw his role in prompting the ‘pilgrims’ to advance. Mankind, however, when after some progress it succumbs to a stampede, allows those who urge it forward to be abused, vilified, and trampled to death. Only when it has resumed the forward movement, does it pay rueful tribute to the victims, cherish their memory and piously collect their relics; then it is grateful to them for every drop of blood they gave—for it knows that with their blood they nourished the seed of the future.

— Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet: The Life of Leon Trotsky

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I am reading Trostky’s Diary in Exile. A perpetual juvenile. He values seriousness and dedication above all virtues. An engineer, he says, can build a machine reluctantly, but you cannot write a poem reluctantly. It does not occur to him that you can invent a machine or write a fine poem playfully.

He is convinced that people cannot be decent unless they have a great idea which raises them “above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.” To a Trotsky, the mass of people who do the world’s work without fuss and feathers are morally debased.

I wonder how many there are who share my loathing for self-appointed soul engineers who see it as their sacred duty to operate on mankind with an ax.

— Eric Hoffer, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront

The Alibi Tail

By in aphorisms, books, eric hoffer

Laziness is the sin most willingly confessed to, since it implies talents greater than have yet appeared.

— James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays

Eric Hoffer said something similar in The Passionate State of Mind: And Other Aphorisms:

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. Moreover, when we have an alibi for not writing a book, painting a picture, and so on, we have an alibi for not writing the greatest book and not painting the greatest picture. Small wonder that the effort expended and the punishment endured in obtaining a good alibi often exceed the effort and grief requisite for the attainment of a most marked achievement.

The only weaknesses we confess without being pressed are the ones that serve as alibis. Like a lizard dropping its tail, we shed a painless little fault so the larger, more shameful creature — our vanity — can dart away to safety.

The Human Race vs. This Human Face

By in books, bricolage, eric hoffer

It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one’s neighbor. There may even be a certain antagonism between love of humanity and love of neighbor; a low capacity for getting along with those near us often goes hand in hand with a high receptivity to the idea of the brotherhood of men.

— Eric Hoffer

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Rather than associate with the vulgar and thus induce in yourself the kind of misanthropic fury felt by Timon of Athens, far better to follow the way of the sages of old, to cultivate flowers and herbs in your little plot and spend your days in peaceful coexistence with Nature. People like to speak loftily of “fairness” and “disinterest.” Well, if this means so much to them, surely we would do best to kill a thousand petty criminals and use their corpses to fertilize a world of gardens….

— Natsume Soseki, Kusamakura

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Nobody had appeared belonging to the house except a person in pattens, who had been poking at the child from below with a broom; I don’t know with what object, and I don’t think she did. I therefore supposed that Mrs. Jellyby was not at home, and was quite surprised when the person appeared in the passage without the pattens, and going up to the back room on the first floor before Ada and me, announced us as, “Them two young ladies, Missis Jellyby!” We passed several more children on the way up, whom it was difficult to avoid treading on in the dark; and as we came into Mrs. Jellyby’s presence, one of the poor little things fell downstairs—down a whole flight (as it sounded to me), with a great noise.

Mrs. Jellyby, whose face reflected none of the uneasiness which we could not help showing in our own faces as the dear child’s head recorded its passage with a bump on every stair—Richard afterwards said he counted seven, besides one for the landing—received us with perfect equanimity. She was a pretty, very diminutive, plump woman of from forty to fifty, with handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if—I am quoting Richard again—they could see nothing nearer than Africa!

— Charles Dickens, Bleak House

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Oh, how I love Humanity,
With love so pure and pringlish,
And how I hate the horrid French,
Who never will be English!

The International Idea,
The largest and the clearest,
Is welding all the nations now,
Except the one that’s nearest.

This compromise has long been known,
This scheme of partial pardons,
In ethical societies
And small suburban gardens—

The villas and the chapels where
I learned with little labour
The way to love my fellow-man
And hate my next-door neighbour.

— G.K. Chesterton, “The World State”

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“I must make one confession” Ivan began. “I could never understand how one can love one’s neighbours. It’s just one’s neighbours, to my mind, that one can’t love, though one might love those at a distance. I once read somewhere of John the Merciful, a saint, that when a hungry, frozen beggar came to him, he took him into his bed, held him in his arms, and began breathing into his mouth, which was putrid and loathsome from some awful disease. I am convinced that he did that from ‘self-laceration,’ from the self-laceration of falsity, for the sake of the charity imposed by duty, as a penance laid on him. For anyone to love a man, he must be hidden, for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone.”

— Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

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On the other hand, a man who has a disinterested love for the human race — that is to say, who has got a fixed idea about some way of providing for the management of the concerns of mankind — is an unaccountable person with whom it is difficult to deal upon any well-known and recognized principles, and who is capable of making his love for men in general the ground of all sorts of violence against men in particular.

— James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

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One golden morning of a sunny day, I leant against the low stone wall that guarded a little village church, and I smoked, and drank in deep, calm gladness from the sweet, restful scene—the grey old church with its clustering ivy and its quaint carved wooden porch, the white lane winding down the hill between tall rows of elms, the thatched-roof cottages peeping above their trim-kept hedges, the silver river in the hollow, the wooded hills beyond!

It was a lovely landscape. It was idyllic, poetical, and it inspired me. I felt good and noble. I felt I didn’t want to be sinful and wicked any more. I would come and live here, and never do any more wrong, and lead a blameless, beautiful life, and have silver hair when I got old, and all that sort of thing.

In that moment I forgave all my friends and relations for their wickedness and cussedness, and I blessed them. They did not know that I blessed them. They went their abandoned way all unconscious of what I, far away in that peaceful village, was doing for them; but I did it, and I wished that I could let them know that I had done it, because I wanted to make them happy. I was going on thinking away all these grand, tender thoughts, when my reverie was broken in upon by a shrill piping voice crying out:

“All right, sur, I’m a-coming, I’m a-coming. It’s all right, sur; don’t you be in a hurry.”

I looked up, and saw an old bald-headed man hobbling across the churchyard towards me, carrying a huge bunch of keys in his hand that shook and jingled at every step.

I motioned him away with silent dignity, but he still advanced, screeching out the while:

“I’m a-coming, sur, I’m a-coming. I’m a little lame. I ain’t as spry as I used to be. This way, sur.”

“Go away, you miserable old man,” I said.

“I’ve come as soon as I could, sur,” he replied. “My missis never see you till just this minute. You follow me, sur.”

“Go away,” I repeated; “leave me before I get over the wall, and slay you.”

He seemed surprised.

“Don’t you want to see the tombs?” he said.

“No,” I answered, “I don’t. I want to stop here, leaning up against this gritty old wall. Go away, and don’t disturb me. I am chock full of beautiful and noble thoughts, and I want to stop like it, because it feels nice and good. Don’t you come fooling about, making me mad, chivying away all my better feelings with this silly tombstone nonsense of yours. Go away, and get somebody to bury you cheap, and I’ll pay half the expense.”

— Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

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That all men should be brothers is the dream of people who have no brothers.

— Charles Chincholles, Pensées de tout le monde

Not the Red One! Don’t Ever Push the Red One!

By in eric hoffer, jests japes jokes jollies, non compos mentis

Social scientists dream of situations immune to interference by unpredictable human factors. But it tuns out that in human affairs no situation is manproof. However high the degree of automation and however overpowering the nonhuman factors, the human elements of enterprise, courage, pride, faith, malice, stupidity, sloth, and the capacity for mischief remain decisive.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

Becket Adams:

Elsewhere in her ominously titled book, Noem claimed to have met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. This passage was especially noteworthy to interviewers, given that Noem has almost certainly never met Kim Jong-un.

It’s a shame that this little episode will be quickly forgotten, because in my opinion, this is the sort of sheer, baffling unpredictability that makes social life enjoyable. Conspiracy theorists, as well as cynical observers, are famous for insisting that there are no coincidences. Nothing happens by accident. Someone is always in control, pulling the strings, and plans always seem to roll out exactly as expected. I point to something like this and say, “I refute them thus!” Granted, the dog-killing story was more fatal to her vice-presidential aspirations, but nonetheless, why would a politician with those aspirations tell such easily-disprovable lies? This isn’t a typical politician’s self-serving lie; this is the sort of complete reality-detachment you expect from the senile husk currently moldering in the White House. As far as I’m aware, Noem doesn’t have the excuse of her brain turning to applesauce. There is no rational reason for her to risk her ambitions with such an inconsequential lie. And yet she did. No matter how much we try to suppress chance and impulse under the pavement of technology and rationality, human nature, like grass, will always find a way to poke up through the cracks.

Misplaced Tycoons

By in bricolage, education, eric hoffer

Just as stomach ulcers were belatedly discovered to be caused not by stress but by a humble bacterium, historians of the future may well discover that the real reason campuses erupt in fanaticism is the prosaic fact that the rest of us have started shoveling money at them. The first round in the 1960s took place at a time when the number of college students in America had increased by a factor of five in the space of three decades. Naturally this swollen demographic became conscious of itself as a bloc and wanted to throw its weight around, like new money. The administrators and professors had their heads turned, too, by newfound cultural importance and flush budgets, and so they let them.

— Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

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On October 4, 1957, the Russians placed a medicine-ball-sized satellite in orbit. It needs an effort to remember how stunned we were when we discovered that the clodhopping Russians were technologically ahead of us, and that we would have to catch up to them. We reacted hysterically. We set out to produce scientists and technologists wholesale by shoveling billions into the universities. And where the billions went there went also millions of people who were not primarily interested in learning but wanted a piece of the action. Thus Khrushchev’s Sputnik toy brought about a change in the tilt of America’s social landscape from the marketplace to the universities. After October 1957, many young people who would normally have gone into business ended up climbing academic ladders and throwing their weight around in literary and artistic cliques from Manhattan to Berkeley, California…They were going to wake up the academic world and turn the university into an instrument of power. They were going to make history, which is an acceptable substitute for making and losing millions. It was these misplaced tycoons who set the tone and shaped events in the 1960s.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

Nothing Was Inevitable

By in books, bricolage, eric hoffer

Howe’s prediction rests on a model that at its core is timeless and simple. In fact, it can be summed up by a four-line Internet meme: “hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.” Howe’s version manages to fill most of 500 pages with further nuance, however.

At least in the Anglo-American world that Howe has surveyed, history appears to move in predictable cycles of about 80 to 100 years that, resurrecting a Roman term for the concept, he calls a saeculum. These cycles each have four distinct phases—or “Turnings”—of around 20 to 25 years that always flow in the same order: a “High,” an “Awakening,” an “Unraveling,” and a “Crisis.” Turnings are driven by the changing of generations, or those portions of the population whose collective character was shaped by coming of age amid the societal conditions specific to a previous turning. Each generation’s character, embodied by one of four generational archetypes (“Artists,” “Prophets,” “Nomads,” and “Heroes”) is largely determined by its proximity to the last Crisis. Howe goes into great detail about each generation, but for our purposes all you really need to know is that Prophets, coming of age knowing only the softness of a spring High, begin to dream of utopia during a hotheaded summer Awakening and rebel against the world that their Hero fathers built, seeking to tear it all down during a quarter-century-long autumn Unraveling. This process culminates in a winter of true Crisis (a Fourth Turning), which a new generation of Heroes must struggle to resolve, after which they establish a new order, leading to another High. And yes: the baby boomers of the 1960s counterculture are our most recent Prophets, which means the millennials will have to be our Heroes.

Don’t be (too) alarmed, Howe urges his readers. We’ve been here before, multiple times in fact, and managed not only to survive but also to thrive. Previous Fourth Turning crises (each occurring about a century apart) have included the Great Depression and World War II, the Civil War, and the American Revolution. Before that: England’s Glorious Revolution, the Spanish Armada Crisis, and the War of the Roses. Each was preceded by the same societal trends we’re seeing now, he argues, offering supporting data. But each cyclical crisis, in the end, gave birth to stronger nations.

Howe is grimly adamant, however, that “sometime before the mid-2030s, America will pass through a great gate in history” commensurate with these past crises.

— N.S Lyons, “Present at the Destruction”

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Once events have taken place, a horde of learned commentators demonstrate that the unexpected was inevitable. Actually, chance, stupidity, and cowardice were chief factors. Nothing was inevitable.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

Noteworthies (52)

By in eric hoffer, noteworthies

You’ve seen me quote Eric Hoffer numerous times. You’ve heard me enthuse about his writings. But for some reason, perhaps owing to some inherent cussedness in human nature, you’ve never actually settled down to read one of his books. You say to yourself, “Self, I’m not actually convinced that this will be a rewarding experience.” Well, who can say why we’re led astray in these instances? I’m not here to judge. Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s you. (I’ve thought it over. It’s you.) But if you won’t listen to me, maybe you’ll read Rob Henderson’s review of The True Believer and that will finally break down your recalcitrance.

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