1960s FREEZE-FRAMED IN THE 21st CENTURY

1960s Freeze-framed

In the 21^st Century

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 5, 2020

I am in the process of using quotes from Eric Hoffer books to illustrate another way of looking at THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ when it occurred to me that what I have been insisting in my writing that we created a “spoiled brat” generation after World War Two, also known as “The Baby Boomers,” was also a concern of Eric Hoffer fifty to sixty years ago. 

In this newest treatment of this The Fisher Paradigm, the reference typology PERSONALITY is classified  as a SENSE OF SELF, GEOGRAPHY as a SENSE OF PLACE, and DEMOGRAPHY as a SENSE OF SELF-WORTH. Only “the sense of worth” is covered in this expose.

What follows are quotations (with book and page designations). Remember, Hoffer was writing in the 1950s and 1960s when African Americans were known as Negroes.

DEMOGRAPHY -- SENSE OF SELF-WORTH.

We have over the centuries gone through alienation, self-estrangement, the divided self, the disowned self, the sexual self, a nomenclature that gets increasingly weird without apology.

As a consequence, a SENSE OF SELF-WORTH has lost meaning in terms of personal identity, as it continues to ignore the fact that a biological male or female is determined by distinct sets of chromosomes and not by sex role identities which now number in over 100.

There is probably no better way of gauging the nature of a society than by finding the direction in which ambition and talent flow. In what fields are there to be found the greatest rewards? What achievements does society prize most? In this country until not very long ago the social landscape was steeply tilted toward the marketplace. Most energies and talents flowed toward business. The American businessman, served by lawyers and politicians, ruled the roost. He dominated not only the marketplace but “society.” (The True Believer, p 43).

It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor unions, and so on. But business also corrupts and undermines monolithic totalitarianism. Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalistic environment (The True Believer, Preface, 1951).

It’s disconcerting to realize that businessmen, generals, soldiers, men of action are less corrupted by power than intellectuals. You take a conventional man of action and he’s satisfied if you obey. But not the intellectual. He doesn’t want you just to obey. He wants you to get down on your knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love. In other words, whenever the intellectuals are in power, there’s soul-raping going on (Ibid, Preface).

The successful businessman is often a failure as a communal leader because his mind is attuned to “things as they are” and his heart is set on that which can be accomplished in “our time.” Failure in the management of practical affairs seems to be a qualification for success in the management of public affairs. And it is perhaps fortunate that some proud natures when suffering defeat in the practical world do not feel crushed but are suddenly fired with the apparent absurd conviction that they are eminently competent to direct the fortunes of the community and the nation (Ibid, p 74).

The readiness for self-sacrifice is contingent on an imperviousness to the realities of life . . . For self-sacrifice is an unreasonable act. It cannot be the end-product of a process of probing and deliberating. All active “mob rulers” strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world. They do this by claiming that the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth nor certitude outside it. The facts on which the TRUE BELIEVER bases his conclusions must not be derived from experience or observation but from holy writ . . . To rely on the evidence of senses and of reason is heresy and treason. It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs (Ibid, p 75).

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength. Once we understand a thing, it is as if it had originated in us. And, clearly, those who are asked to renounce the self and sacrifice it cannot see eternal certitude in anything which originates in that self. The fact that they understand a thing fully impairs its validity and certitude in their eyes. They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society. The frustrated, oppressed by their shortcomings, blame their failure on existing restraints. Actually, their innermost desire is for an end to the “free for all.” They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society (Ibid, pp. 76 -77).

The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They ask to be deceived . . . “They pray not only for their daily bread but also for their daily illusion.” The rule seems to be that those who find difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led. A peculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture. The association of believing and lying is not characteristic solely of children. The inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism (Ibid, pp. 78-79). 

Fanaticism

The fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual resources, out of his rejected self, but finds it only in clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace. This passionate attachment is the essence of his blind devotion and religiosity, and he sees in it the source of all virtue and strength (p 80).

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatic atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not. The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion. He is an atheist with devoutness and unction. According to Renan, “The day after that on which the world should no longer believe in God, atheists would be the wretchedness of all men.” So, too, the opposite of the chauvinist is not the traitor but the reasonable citizen who is in love with the present and as no taste for martyrdom and the heroic gesture (Ibid, p 81).

"Mob Rule" and Armies

Both “mob rule” and armies are collective bodies; both strip the individual of his separateness and distinctiveness; both demand self-sacrifice, unquestioning obedience and single-hearted allegiance; both make extensive use of make-belief to promote daring and united action; and both can serve as a refuge for the frustrated who cannot endure an autonomous existence (Ibid, p 83).

Who would have dreamt that an unprecedented improvement in the lot of the Negro would result in burning and looting in cities; that the unprecedented affluence of the young would bring into being adolescent skid rows with adolescent whores, pimps, dope pushers, moochers and derelicts; that unprecedented opportunities for education would bring anarchy to places of learning? Whereas medical doctors when they prescribe a new drug warn the patient against dangerous side effects, our quacks of the body politic assume their prescribed reforms can never go wrong. We know now that in human affairs there is no certainty that good follows from good and evil from evil. As we enter the last third of the century it ought to be self-evident that when a society sets out to purge itself of iniquities and shortcomings it should expect the worst and grid itself for a crisis that will test its stability and stamina. A just society must strive with all its might to right wrongs even if righting wrongs is a highly perilous undertaking. But if it is to survive, a just society must be strong and resolute enough to deal swiftly and relentlessly with those who would mistake its good will for weakness (First Things, Last Things, 1968. pp. 100-101).

It is questionable whether the Negro revolution can do much for the Negro. The Negro’s future in this country will be determined by his ability to compete and excel. If the Negro cannot learn to strive and build on his own he will remain lowest man on the totem pole no matter how explosive his slogans and how extravagant his self-dramatization. Nevertheless, the Negro revolution is a fateful event because of its effect on non-Negro segments of the population. It is an illustration of the fact that the most important revolutions are those other people make for us. The effect of the Negro revolution on the non-Negro young is as unexpected as it is puzzling. Why have the young so whole heartedly adopted the Negro’s way of life? The Negrification of the young will have profound and durable effects on language, sexual mores, work habits and the attitude towards drugs. Even the young white racists are Negrified and do not realize it (Ibid, pp. 101 – 102). 

Unifying Agents – Hatred

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into on flaming mass. Heine suggests that what Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred. “Mob rule” can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil (The True Believer, pp. 85-86).

We do not make people humble and meek when we show them their guilt and cause them to be ashamed of themselves. We are more likely to stir their arrogance and rouse in them a reckless aggressiveness. Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us. There is a guilty conscience behind every brazen word and act and behind every manifestation of self-righteousness (Ibid, p 89).
Imitation

Imitation is an essential unifying agent. The development of a close-knit group is inconceivable without a diffusion of uniformity. The one-mindedness and Gleichschaltung (i.e., synchrony) prized by every “Mob rule” are achieved as much by imitation as by obedience (Ibid, p 94).

What strikes one about the activist young is their lack of zest. Their obscenities are wooden, their insolence without a sparkle, and even their violence is trancelike. They dissipate without pleasure and are vain without a purpose. The revolution of the young is not against regimentation but against effort, against growth and, above all, against apprenticeship. They want to teach before they learn, want to retire before they work, want to rot before they ripen. They equate freedom with effortlessness and power with instant satisfaction. Never have the young taken themselves so seriously, and the calamity is that they are listened to and deferred to by so many adults. A society that takes its solemn adolescents seriously is headed for serious trouble. How humorless and laughable the solemn young! One realizes that one of the chief differences between an adult and a juvenile is that the adult knows when he is an ass while the juvenile never does. There is a lack of seriousness and dehumanization. Is there anything more serious that a cow grazing in the pasture? The nonhuman cosmos is immersed in an ocean of seriousness. Man alone can smile and laugh (First Things, Last Things, pp. 103 – 104).

One has the impression that the young do not want to, or perhaps cannot, grow up. Our campuses have become dour, playless nurseries echoing with doctrinaire baby talk. You see six-foot babies clamoring for power and protesting against universities not having adequate arrangements for child care. Here is San Francisco, as I watch the young with their bedrolls hitching rides and see them sprawled on the grimy sidewalks of Market Street and Haight-Ashbury, I am reminded strong of the Great Depression. That the great affluence of the 1960s should have produced a phenomenon so similar to that produced by the Great Depression, only substituting juveniles for grownups, is one more striking absurdity of an absurd age. Never has youth been face to face with more breathtaking opportunities and more deadly influences, and never before has character been so decisive a fact in the survival of the young. Nowadays a ten-year-old must be possessed of a strong character in order not to get irrevocably flawed and blemished. The road from boyhood to manhood has become sievelike; those without the right size of character slip into pitfalls and taps. The society of the young is at present almost as subject to the laws of sheer survival as an animal society. In the Bay Area you can see the young preyed upon by dope ushers, pimps, perverts and thugs. The supposedly most sheltered generation is actually the most exposed.

The present-day young do not seem to go anywhere yet they are impatient. They cannot hide their time because it is not the time of their growth. It seems doubtful whether a generation that clamors for instant fulfillment and instant solutions is capable of creating anything of enduring value. Instantness is a characteristic of the animal world, where action follows perception with the swiftness of a chemical reaction. In man, because of his rudimentary instincts, there is a pause of faltering and grouping, and this pause is the seedbed of images, longings, forebodings and irritations which are the warp and woof of the creative process. Peter Ulich, in The Human career, underlines the social significance of the pause: “Rarely is anything more important for the rise of civilization than the human capacity to put an interval between stimulus and action. For within this interval grow deliberation, perspective, objectivity, all the higher achievements of the reflective mind” (Ibid, pp. 105 – 106).

One also suspects that the young’s exaggerated faith in spontaneity and inspiration is a characteristic of unstretched minds. Creative people believe in hard work. At the core of every genuine talent there is an awareness of the effort and difficulties inherent in any achievement, and the confidence that by persistence and patience something worthwhile will be realized. It needs great effort to make an achievement seem effortless (Ibid, p 107). 

Intimidation

Thousands of peaceful Americans in city streets and ghettos, in suburbs and on campuses are meekly submitting to muggers, robbers and hoodlums, and to foulmouthed insults and threats. Few hit back or speak out loudly in outrage. The other day, at Berkeley, a class of 250 students was addressed by an intruding Negro student as mother……. and warned not to come to class next day or have their throats slit. The punk was not thrown out. The professor, a famous teacher, begged the intruder to leave the class. Would it have been overreaction had the class rushed the foul-mouthed punk and thrown him out? Was it sheer humanness that kept the famous professor meek in the face of insults and threats? The students and the professor were plainly afraid. When cowardice becomes a fashion its adherents are without number, and it masquerades as forbearance, reasonableness and whatnot. Our sociologist quacks are warning us that violence is a symptom of a deep-seated social disease; that “it is the most dangerous error to treat symptoms and not get to the root causes of the disease itself.” They deprecate the demand for law and order on the grounds that “those who raise it are not intelligent enough to comprehend fully any complex issue or else have something other in mind than the concern for public safety.” In human affairs it is the shallow mind that refuses to deal with symptoms and is not awed by the mystery of the visible. Those who, when probing man’s behavior, brush aside what’s on the surface, and look for “root causes,” are like those who, when peeling an onion, discard scale after scale, and look for an inner kernel (Ibid, pp. 108-109).

The evidence of our eyes tells us that violence is not the outer manifestation of some dark disorder in the cellars of the mind but the perverse highjinks of unruly punks who think they can get away with it. We have here a virulent form of juvenile delinquency on a large scale. Seventy-five percent of crimes in the streets are committed by adolescents under twenty-one, and the odds are five to one they won’t get caught. (The odds are fourteen to one in stealing and nine to one in housebreaking.) The young thugs stalk older people like animals stalking their prey. They not only rob but brutally beat their victims. They do it for money but also for the excitement. It needs swift, unrelenting justice to take the fun out of violence and make willful juveniles think twice before they let themselves go.

The unavoidable conclusion is that the unprecedented meekness of the majority is responsible for the increase in violence. Social stability is the product of an equilibrium between a vigorous majority and violent minorities. Disorder does not come from an increased inner pressure or from the interaction of explosive ingredients. There is no reason to believe that the nature of the violent minorities is not greatly different from what it was in the past. What has changed is the will and the ability of the majority to react.

It is hard to tell what causes the pervasive timidity. One thinks of video-induced stupor, intake of tranquilizers, fear of not living to enjoy the many new possessions and toys, the example of our betters in cities and on campuses who high-mindedly surrender to threats of violence and make cowardice fashionable (Ibid, pp. 110 – 111).

THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ interest is in providing intuitive insight into where we seem to be in this long journey away from self-knowing. Eric Hoffer’s commentary is presented here in that spirit.