"A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed." -- Eric Hoffer
Eric Hoffer (July 25, 1902 – May 21, 1983) was an American social writer and philosopher. He produced ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983 by President of the United States Ronald Reagan. His first book, The True Believer, published in 1951, was widely recognized as a classic, receiving critical acclaim from both scholars and laymen, although Hoffer believed that his book The Ordeal of Change was his finest work. In 2001, the Eric Hoffer Award was established in his honor with permission granted by the Eric Hoffer Estate in 2005.
"A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.""A great man's greatest good luck is to die at the right time.""A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.""A man by himself is in bad company.""A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come.""Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat.""An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.""Animals often strike us as passionate machines.""Call not that man wretched, who whatever ills he suffers, has a child to love.""Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership.""Children are the keys of paradise.""Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.""Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.""Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself.""Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.""Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.""Dissipation is a form of self-sacrifice.""Every intense desire is perhaps a desire to be different from what we are.""Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.""Facts are counterrevolutionary.""Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.""Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.""I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind.""In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.""In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.""It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.""It is a sign of creeping inner death when we can no longer praise the living.""It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.""It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.""It is futile to judge a kind deed by its motives. Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.""It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.""It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.""It is often the failure who is the pioneer in new lands, new undertakings, and new forms of expression.""It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opinion. Our ears, it seems, are wonderfully attuned to sneers and evil reports about our fellow men.""It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate.""It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.""It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities and talents.""It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.""It sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.""It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities.""It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which we are influenced by those we influence.""Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.""Man is the only creature that strives to surpass himself, and yearns for the impossible.""Man was nature's mistake she neglected to finish him and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.""Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners.""Men weary as much of not doing the things they want to do as of doing the things they do not want to do.""Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect.""One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action - the ability to pass directly from thought to action.""Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.""Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.""Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.""Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.""Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.""People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.""Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.""Rudeness is a weak imitation of strength.""Self-esteem and self-contempt have specific odors; they can be smelled.""Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.""Someone who thinks the world is always cheating him is right. He is missing that wonderful feeling of trust in someone or something.""Sometimes we feel the loss of a prejudice as a loss of vigor.""Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.""The beginning of thought is in disagreement - not only with others but also with ourselves.""The best part of the art of living is to know how to grow old gracefully.""The fear of becoming a 'has-been' keeps some people from becoming anything.""The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.""The greatest weariness comes from work not done.""The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.""The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.""The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.""The misery of a child is interesting to a mother, the misery of a young man is interesting to a young woman, the misery of an old man is interesting to nobody.""The only way to predict the future is to have power to shape the future.""The pleasure we derive from doing favors is partly in the feeling it gives us that we are not altogether worthless. It is a pleasant surprise to ourselves.""The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.""The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.""The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.""The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.""The weakness of a soul is proportionate to the number of truths that must be kept from it.""The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.""There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.""There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.""There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.""There is probably an element of malice in our readiness to overestimate people - we are, as it were, laying up for ourselves the pleasure of later cutting them down to size.""There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his.""There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.""Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.""To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.""To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.""To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question.""To the old, the new is usually bad news.""Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous.""We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.""We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.""We are more prone to generalize the bad than the good. We assume that the bad is more potent and contagious.""We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.""We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.""We do not really feel grateful toward those who make our dreams come true; they ruin our dreams.""We feel free when we escape - even if it be but from the frying pan to the fire.""We have perhaps a natural fear of ends. We would rather be always on the way than arrive. Given the means, we hang on to them and often forget the ends.""We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind.""We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.""We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.""What greater reassurance can the weak have than that they are like anyone else?""When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong; it easily becomes a fashion.""When people are bored it is primarily with themselves.""When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.""When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common everyday truths.""Whenever you trace the origin of a skill or practices which played a crucial role in the ascent of man, we usually reach the realm of play.""Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.""Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.""Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.""With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.""You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.""You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.""Youth itself is a talent, a perishable talent."
Hoffer was born in the Bronx, New York City in 1902 (or possibly 1898), the son of Elsa (née Goebel) and Knut Hoffer, a cabinetmaker. His parents were immigrants from Alsace. By the age of five, he could read in both German and English. When he was age five, his mother fell down a flight of stairs with Eric in her arms. Hoffer went blind for unknown medical reasons two years later, but later in life he said he thought it might have been due to trauma. ("I lost my sight at the age of seven. Two years before, my mother and I fell down a flight of stairs. She did not recover and died in that second year after the fall.I lost my sight and for a time my memory"). After his mother's death he was raised by a live-in relative or servant, a German woman named Martha. His eyesight inexplicably returned when he was 15. Fearing he would again go blind, he seized upon the opportunity to read as much as he could for as long as he could. His eyesight remained, and Hoffer never abandoned his habit of voracious reading.
Hoffer was a young man when his father, a cabinetmaker, died. The cabinetmaker's union paid for the funeral and gave Hoffer a little over three hundred dollars. Sensing that warm Los Angeles was the best place for a poor man, Hoffer took a bus there in 1920. He spent the next 10 years on Los Angeles' skid row, reading, occasionally writing, and working odd jobs. On one such job, selling oranges door-to-door, he discovered he was a natural salesman and could easily make good money. Uncomfortable with this discovery, he quit after one day.
In 1931, he attempted suicide by drinking a solution of oxalic acid, but the attempt failed as he could not bring himself to swallow the poison. The experience gave him a new determination to live adventurously. It was then he left skid row and became a migrant worker. Following the harvests along the length of California, he collected library cards for each town near the fields where he worked and, living by preference, "between the books and the brothels." A seminal event for Hoffer occurred in the mountains where he had gone in search of gold. Snowed in for the winter, he read the Essays by Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne's book impressed Hoffer deeply, and he often made reference to its importance for him. He also developed a great respect for America's underclass, which, he declared, was "lumpy with talent."
Hoffer was in San Francisco by 1941. He attempted to enlist in the Armed forces there in 1942 but was rejected because of a hernia Hoover Institution - Hoover Digest - The Longshoreman Philosopher. Wanting to contribute to the war effort, he found ample opportunity as a longshoreman on the docks of The Embarcadero. It was there he felt at home and finally settled down. He continued reading voraciously and soon began to write while earning a living loading and unloading ships. He continued this work until he retired at age 65.
Despite authoring 10 books and a newspaper column, in retirement Hoffer continued his robust life of the mind, thinking and writing alone, in an apartment near San Francisco’s waterfront. A longtime smoker, Hoffer developed emphysema towards the end of his life.
Hoffer's Working Class Roots and "intellectuals"moreless
Hoffer drew confidence and inspiration from his modest roots and working-class surroundings, seeing in it vast human potential. In a letter to Margaret Anderson in 1941, he wrote:
::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.
::Towns are too distracting.
Hoffer also took solace in being an outcast, believing that the outcasts have always been the pioneers of society. He did not consider himself an "intellectual", and scorned the term as descriptive of the allegedly anti-American academics of the Western nations. He believed academics craved power but were denied it in the democratic countries of the West (though not in totalitarian countries, which Hoffer understood to be an intellectual's dream). Instead, Hoffer believed academics chose to bite the hand that fed them in their quest for power and influence.
Though Hoffer did not identify with "liberal intellectuals" and often criticized the radical ideology of many activists of the New Left, it would be wrong to characterize Hoffer's thinking as being "conservative." Similarly, though his writings were often likened to political philosophies of mid 20th century liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., his structural approach to analyzing and understanding mass movements and their ideologies often led Hoffer to consistently nonideological positions. He said, "my writing grows out of my life just as a branch from a tree." When called an intellectual, he insisted that he was a longshoreman. Hoffer has been dubbed by some authors as "longshoreman philosopher."
On the Nature and Origins of Mass Movementsmoreless
Hoffer was among the first to recognize the central importance of self-esteem to psychological well-being. Hoffer focused on the consequences of a lack of self-esteem. Concerned about the rise of totalitarian governments, especially those of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, he tried to find the roots of these "madhouses" in human psychology. He postulated that fanaticism and self-righteousness are rooted in self-hatred, self-doubt, and insecurity. As he describes in The True Believer, he believed a passionate obsession with the outside world or with the private lives of other people is merely a craven attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one's own life.
The mass movements discussed in The True Believer include religious mass movements as well as political, including extensive discussions of Islam and Christianity. They also include seemingly benign mass movements that are neither political nor religious. A core principle in the book is Hoffer's insight that mass movements are interchangeable; he notes fanatical Nazis later becoming fanatical Communists, fanatical Communists later becoming fanatical anti-Communists, and Saul, persecutor of Christians, becoming Paul, a fanatical Christian. For the true believer the substance of the mass movement isn't so important as that they are part of that movement. Hoffer furthermore suggests that it is possible to head off the rise of an undesirable mass movement by substituting a benign mass movement, which will give those prone to joining movements an outlet for their insecurities.
Hoffer's work was original, staking out new ground largely ignored by dominant academic trends of his time. In particular, Hoffer's work was completely non-Freudian, at a time when almost all American psychology was informed by the Freudian paradigm. Many argue Hoffer's lack of a formal college education contributed to his independent thought, with his book remaining an insightful classic today. Hoffer appeared on public television in 1964 and then in two one-hour conversations on CBS with Eric Sevareid in the late 1960s. Both times he drew wide response for his patiently considered but unorthodox views.
Hoffer's best work is considered to be The True Believer, a landmark explanation of fanaticism and mass movements. His 1963 book The Ordeal of Change is also a literary favorite. In 1970 he endowed the Lili Fabilli and Eric Hoffer Laconic Essay Prize for students, faculty, and staff at the University of California, Berkeley.
Hoffer's insights into the consequences of a lack of self-esteem also informed his later writings. The Ordeal of Change discusses change and modernization in society. His 1971 book First Things, Last Things was a collection of essays published at a time in which young middle-class American youth were undergoing an increasing attraction to mass movements, whether political, religious, or subcultural, as well as a rapid increase in youth crime.
In these and other books, Hoffer continued to build upon his earlier insights. In Hoffer's view, rapid change is not a positive thing for a society, and too rapid change can cause a regression in maturity for those who were brought up in a very different society than what that society has become. He noted that in 1960s America, many young adults were still living in extended adolescence. Seeking to explain the attraction of the New Left protest movements, he characterized them as the result of widespread affluence, which, in his words, "is robbing a modern society of whatever it has left of puberty rites to routinize the attainment of manhood." He sees these puberty rites as essential for self-esteem, and notes that mass movements and juvenile mindsets tend to go together to the point that anyone, no matter what age, who joins a mass movement immediately begins to exhibit juvenile behavior.
Hoffer further notes that the reason working-class Americans did not by and large join in the 1960s protest movements and subcultures was they had entry into meaningful labor as an effective rite of passage out of adolescence, while both the very poor who lived on welfare and the affluent were, in his words "prevented from having a share in the world's work and of proving their manhood by doing a man's work and getting a man's pay" and thus remained in a state of extended adolescence, lacking in necessary self-esteem, and prone to joining mass movements as a form of compensation. Hoffer suggested that this need for meaningful work as a rite of passage into adulthood could be fulfilled with a 2-year civilian national service program (not unlike the earlier programs during the Depression such as the Civilian Conservation Corps), in which all young adults would do two years of work in fields such as construction or natural resources work. He writes: "The routinization of the passage from boyhood to manhood would contribute to the solution of many of our pressing problems. I cannot think of any other undertaking that would dovetail so many of our present difficulties into opportunities for growth."
Unpublished writings
Hoffer's papers, including 131 of the notebooks he carried in his pockets, were acquired in 2000 by the Hoover Institution Archives. The papers fill of shelf space. Because Hoffer cultivated an aphoristic style, the unpublished notebooks (dated from 1949 to 1977) contain very significant work. Available for scholarly study since at least 2003, little of their contents has yet been published. A selection of fifty aphorisms, focusing on the development of unrealized human talents through the creative process, appeared in the July 2005 issue of Harper's Magazine.