Google Gemini tells me this about the philosopher Eric Hoffer,
"American philosopher and social critic Eric Hoffer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on February 23, 1983, by President Ronald Reagan. The award recognized his life of hard work, his significant contributions as the "longshoreman philosopher," and his embodiment of the American spirit of self-reliance and achievement."
The following statement comes from the ceremony where Ronald Reagan awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Eric Hoffer,
"The son of immigrant parents, Eric Hoffer is an example of both the opportunity and the vitality of the American way of life. After overcoming his loss of sight as a child, Eric Hoffer educated himself in our public libraries. As an adult he has relished hard work and believed in its dignity, spending 23 years in jobs ranging from lumberjack to dockworker. As America's longshoreman philosopher, his books on philosophy have become classics. Mr. Hoffer's spirit, self-reliance and great accomplishments remind us all that the United States remains a land where each of us is free to achieve the best that lies within us."
I've been interested in his work for over fifty years. I liked the fact that he was self-educated and a member of the working class. His work that I am most familiar with, having read it maybe 5 times or so, is the book "The True Believer - Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements". It's a short book, about 160 pages, but full of uncommon wisdom.
The part I wanted to share today is from the section on unifying agents for a mass movement. The specific unifying agent in question is hatred. The following is from the book,
"We do not usually look for allies when we love. Indeed, we often look on those who love with us as rivals and trespassers. But we always look for allies when we hate. It is understandable that we should look to others to side with us when we have a just grievance and crave to retaliate against those who wronged us. The puzzling thing is that when our hatred does not spring from a visible grievance and does not seem justified, the desire for allies becomes more pressing. It is chiefly the unreasonable hatreds that drive us to merge with those who hate as we do, and it is this kind of hatred that serves as one of the most effective cementing agents."
"Whence come these unreasonable hatreds, and why there unifying effect? They are an expression of a desperate effort to suppress an awareness of our inadequacy, worthlessness, guilt and other shortcomings of the self. Self-contempt is here transmuted into hatred of others - and there is a most determined and persistent effort to mask this switch. Obviously the most effective way of doing this is to find others, as many as possible, who hate as we do. Here more than anywhere else we need general consent, and much of our proselytizing consists perhaps in infecting others not with our brand of faith but with our particular brand of unreasonable hatred."
"Even in the case of just grievances, our hatred comes less from a wrong done to us than a consciousness of our helplessness, inadequacy and cowardice - in other words from self-contempt."
Hoffer closes out this section with a quote from Pascal's Pensées,
"Self-contempt produces in man the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable, for he conceives a mortal hatred against that truth that blames him and convinces him of his faults."
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Eric Hoffer's ideas appeal to people who come from many places on the political/socio-economic spectrum. I ran across this Eric Hoffer quote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece from November 2017 explaining why Donald Trump won the 2016 election -
"Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of the common folk"
For some, maybe all, who champion(ed) his ideas I can't help but think of the old Pogo cartoon, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
Of course, it's much easier and much more human to want to believe - it's not me - it's them. Carl Schmitt the Nazi philosopher, and his successors today, understood this human trait in their distillation of the political to a war between friend and enemy. The only way to make that distinction is by refusing to see your own human frailties - making yourself something more and your enemy something less...than human.
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The world is. What we make of it is our choice. Asking forgiveness for the harm we have done others and forgiving those who have harmed us seems like it might be a place to start. Most definitely easier said than done - but the most precious and valuable things take the most effort. Treat yourself as you would your own child - a being here in this place at this time - precious, utterly unique and dearly loved.
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Eric Hoffer 1898-1983
