eric hoffer

Misplaced Tycoons

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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

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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)

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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.

Stuck In the Middle With You

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The middle class is the least elitist ruling class we know. Not only is it wide open to all comers, but it aspires to a state of affairs in which things happen of themselves and regulate themselves. Unlike any other ruling class, the middle class has found it convenient to operate on the assumption that if you leave people alone they will perform tolerably well; and under no other ruling class have common people shown such willingness to exert themselves to the utmost. It is this fabulously productive, more or less self-regulating chaos of a society that has given the modern age its singular spirit and set it off from all preceding centuries. Regimentation and minute regulation are as ancient as civilization. Small wonder that elitists of every stripe—aristocrats, Marxists, Fascists, priests, power-hungry intellectuals—have viewed middle class society and the modern age as abominations.

— Eric Hoffer, The Spirit of an Age

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The middle class has an important role to play, and it can side with one faction or the other depending on the circumstances it finds itself in. A typical representative of this group might be a highly successful small business owner living in a suburb of a major metropolitan center. He is alienated from the left because it looks down on him for devoting his life to something as boring and small minded as fixing central heating systems instead of overcoming the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. As with the proles, the middle class does not have the bandwith to keep up with political and artistic fashions. While the lower class can’t because it lacks the inherent intelligence to do so, the member of the middle class might be smart enough, but he is either too busy working and forming a family or not very inclined to chase status through the cultivation of certain opinions and aesthetic preferences rather than making money.

…Yet while the Merchant Right is a major force in elections and even governing, it is not one of the major participants in the culture war. This is because the true antagonism is between the upper and lower classes. The middle class (in many cases, the wealthiest class), has more money than the lower class, but its entire identity does not revolve around feeling morally superior to or lecturing the latter. Not being reformers, they just want to be left alone. This stops them from being too angry at either the urban elite or the proles, which prevents the cycle of mutual hostility from starting. Moreover, the two natural elite classes, being of similar levels of intelligence, have more in common with each other than either has with the proles. They socialize and intermarry, and the boundaries between them are more fluid.

— Richard Hanania, “A Psychological Theory of the Culture War“

Truth Could Be a Game That We Play

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Does not civilized living depend on not seeing things as they are? There can be neither order nor stability and continuity without illusions about authority, about the attainability of desired goals, about the quality of our fellow men, and about our own nature. A confrontation with naked, raw reality shreds the fiber of civilized life.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

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Even if we were mad enough to consider all our opinions true, we should still not want them alone to exist: I cannot see why it should be desirable that truth alone should rule and be omnipotent; it is enough for me that it should possess great power. But it must be able to struggle and have great opponents, and one must be able to find relief from it from time to time in untruth — otherwise, it will become boring, powerless and tasteless to us, and make us the same.

— Nietzsche, Daybreak

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The theme of this book is that, for better or worse, lying, untruth, is not an artificial, deviant, or dispensable feature of life. Nature engages in it, sometimes with remarkable ingenuity. Art, with its “telling of beautiful, untrue things,” has at times so dominated the mind of a period thinkers could seriously argue that life may be understood truthfully only in aesthetic terms. The impulse to transcend mere literal fact occurs throughout nature. Quite humble biological organisms evolve as a semblance, an alias; a pictorial rendering of some other, less vulnerable organism, Might we not say, for example, that species of Cycloptera, insects that resemble leaves, trompe d’oeil masterpieces which might have been painted by a seventeenth-century Dutch master, perfect in color, shape, and size, even complete with imitation veins and fungus spots, are works of art? It is a seductive hypothesis that falsehood is “on the side of life,” is the lubricant that makes society run, while truth can be harsh, dangerous, and destructive; too simple, too naked, for the complexities of twenty-first-century society, inheritor of one of the most brutal hundred years in the history of mankind.

— Jeremy Campbell, The Liar’s Tale: A History of Falsehood

Does a Society Become Senile?

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This might seem flip and ‘too soon’, but the irony highlights the real civilizational difference here: one where combat is via prissy morality and pure spectacle, and one where the battles are literal and deadly. One where elites contest power via spiraling purity and virality contests waged online, and where defeat means ‘cancelation’ or livestreamed ‘struggle sessions’ around often imaginary or minor offenses. And another place where the price of defeat is death, exile, rape, destitution, and fates so grim people die dangling from airplanes in order to escape.

In short, an unserious country mired in the most masturbatory hysterics over bullshit dramas waged war against an insurgency of religious zealots fired by a 7th-century morality, and utterly and totally lost.

And all we can do in the wake of it, with our brains melted like butter in a microwave by four years of Trump and Twitter and everything else, is to once again try and understand in our terms a hyper-violent insurgency of fanatics, guilty of every manner of cultural barbarism, now running a country with the population of Texas.

— Antonio García Martínez, “We Are No Longer a Serious People”

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Senility consists partly in not being able to take things for granted. The old are not sure that their legs will carry them, their arms will lift, their eyes will see, their stomach will digest. Would this also be true of a society? Does a society become senile when it no longer can take familiar practices and attitudes for granted?

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

Obiter Scripta, no. 115

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Machines may make people superfluous, but they cannot make then harmless. No matter how many and how ingenious the machines, there will always be people around to mess things up.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

Today at work, I watched a 30-foot steel support column get repaired. I marveled at the technical skill required for a job of that size and importance — ground radar, pouring a new foundation, using a six-foot wrench to maneuver the column, all while it continued to support a section of the roof. The simple fact that there is a tried-and-true process for something like that impresses a layman like me. The thing is, the reason this repair needed to be done was because someone had driven a forklift into the column at high speed while being distracted by his phone screen, shifting it four feet across the floor, dropping the I-beam one foot, and causing a section of the roof to sag. Heavy machinery, dangerous working environment, ooh, shiny object…

Unhappy Ever After In the Marketplace

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Until I was forty I lived as a true bohemian, considered financial matters beneath me, and never really understood why I was always in debt. As with everything in my life, the shift from that phase was abrupt and total, and a sort of law of conservation of vice that governs my existence ensured that the overcoming of spendthriftness could only be bought by quick transition to an obsessive, all-consuming preoccupation with my ledger-books. I rush to add that I hate capitalism much more than I ever did in my bohemian phase. I hate it because it forced me, finally, to submit to it, though I always believed it never could. Capitalism broke me like a mustang cornered in a pen.

— J.E.H. Smith

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Capitalism’s greatest predicament is that several paradoxes of the human condition combine to turn capitalist successes into failures… Take mass education: it was the capitalists and not the intellectuals who initiated and promoted mass education. In capitalist America every mother’s son can go to college. Most capitalist societies are being swamped with educated people who disdain the triviality and hustle of the marketplace and pray for a new social order that will enable them to live meaningful, weighty lives. The education explosion is now a more immediate threat to capitalist societies than a population explosion.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

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Marx, a Victorian intellectual, predicted that capitalism would be undone by its immiseration of the proletariat. Actually, capitalism has done more to jeopardize itself by annoying intellectuals. Many of them look down their upturned noses at the marketplace, and therefore at those who thrive in it. The intellectuals’ disdain is a manifestation of resentment about the fact that markets generally function nicely without the supervision of intellectuals. Their disdain is, among other unattractive things, ingratitude. The vulgar (as the intellectuals see them) men and women of commerce who make markets productive also make the intellectual class possible. As George Stigler (University of Chicago; winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Economics) said, “Since intellectuals are not inexpensive, until the rise of the modern enterprise system, no society could afford many intellectuals.” So “we professors are much more beholden to Henry Ford than to the foundation which bears his name and spreads his assets.”

— George Will, The Conservative Sensibility

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Strive After Clarity

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Some books seem to have been written, not to teach us anything, but to let us know that the author has known something.

— Goethe, Maxims and Reflections

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Obscurity and vagueness of expression is always and everywhere a very bad sign: for in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it derives from vagueness of thought, which in turn comes from an original incongruity and inconsistency in the thought itself, and thus from its falsity. If a true thought arises in a head it will immediately strive after clarity and will soon achieve it: what is clearly thought, however, easily finds the expression appropriate to it. The thoughts a man is capable of always express themselves in clear, comprehensible, and unambiguous words. Those who put together difficult, obscure, involved, ambiguous discourses do not really know what they want to say: they have no more than a vague consciousness of it which is only struggling towards a thought: often, however, they also want to conceal from themselves and others that they actually have nothing to say.

— Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

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Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

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Those who write obscurely have great luck: they will have commentators. The others will have only readers, and this, it seems, is worthy of scorn.

— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1942-1951

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The man who really thinks he has an idea will always try to explain that idea. The charlatan who has no idea will always confine himself to explaining that it is much too subtle to be explained. The first idea may really be very outrée or specialist, it may really be very difficult to express to ordinary people. But because the man is trying to express it, it is most probable that there is something in it, after all. The honest man is he who is always trying to utter the unutterable, to describe the indescribable; but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing to come out of it.

— G.K. Chesterton, “The Mystagogue,” A Miscellany of Men

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[M]y ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book — what everyone else does not say in a book…

— Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

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You would think that when a man had something worthwhile to say his chief concern would be to make himself understood and he would write as simply as he could. But it is not so. There are not above a score of scholars in this country at present who express themselves in lucid prose.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

Obiter Scripta, no. 85

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A transition from an author’s book to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur and magnificence; but, when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke.

— Samuel Johnson, “The difference between an author’s writings and his conversation“

As the old saying goes, never follow your heroes on social media, unless you’re one of those weirdos with a clay-foot fetish. In his book Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher, Tom Bethell wrote:

After 1965, Hoffer became a public figure. Before 1934, he is a mystery figure. Will more information about Hoffer’s background turn up? That’s doubtful. There are signs that he was more than merely forgetful about his early years. In fact, I believe he was deliberately secretive. When pressed for more detail by journalists he would say he was confused or couldn’t remember much of anything. About later events in his life he had an excellent memory. Were there things he didn’t want us to know? One possibility that comes to mind is that he was an illegal immigrant to this country. But, again, I have no positive evidence. Did he really teach himself botany, chemistry, and Hebrew on skid row in Los Angeles? One can’t help wondering.

I don’t wonder. Honestly, I don’t care. His thoughts are interesting enough, floating free in the noosphere. I don’t need them to be anchored in biography to make them insightful or relevant. In fact, I wish more authors and thinkers today would learn to cultivate an aura of mysterious reticence. Or, at the very least, to seek treatment for their cerebral bulimia.

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