Eric Hoffer's The Ordeal of Change (1952)

Notes on an autodidact's essays relating to change and ultimately to the American experience

Hoffer Argues that humans are driven to action out of necessity, a “flailing of the arms.”  People naturally dislike change, requiring us to adjust ourselves, which calls our being and self-esteem into question.  Substitutes for self-confidence (of experience and of skill) are faith and enthusiasm.  “Where there is necessary skill to move mountains there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.”  Substitute for self-esteem is pride, substitute for “individual balance” is fusion in the group.  The individual can only acquire self confidence and self-esteem in environments where achievement, acquisition, action, or development of his capacities are within reach; if these are unavailable, the individual seeks absolute truth and identifies with the collective.  Says that many of the innovations of man have actually come from the weaker elements of society, who sought adaptations and tools to better help them survive.  It is the man who does not succeed in the existing system who seeks to change it.  Man is driven to particularly creative action when he has just enough ability to have time to contemplate.  Weakness can also lead to hatred, malice, intolerance, and suspicion; resentment stemming from a sense of inadequacy and impotence.  Charity to the weak is felt as but further oppression; the “healing gift to the weak is the capacity for self-help,” imparting skills to them.  The scientists and mathematicians who discovered those areas did not know the practical nature of what they sought when they discovered it.  Practicality is thus born out of the impractical; we do not know what we will find.  When people seek to change society, it can have disastrous results (or, it can not).  When people commit to the ideal above all other, they look away from facts that dispute the ideal.  Argues that America is different because it is entirely born of the people who had to work tirelessly to make it, the people who left their home; America is unlike other societies that are ruled by elites, the “scribes”, who wish to order others since they have nothing to themselves order, and values the practical above all.  The backward says De Tocqueville “will go forth in arms to gain knowledge but will not receive it when it comes to them”, a defiance for the illusion of strength and superiority, when in fact what is needed is some form of imitation.  The West seeking to spread democracy seeks to rob people of their right to direct themselves, creating suspicion and antagonism to the West.  Many ideas take hold as heresies, such as Communism, a heresy against capitalism, Christianity against Judaism, coming into being as protest.  In actuality, communism could be envisioned as a super-capitalism, a monolithic company, absolute dominion, turning the population into cogs, the whole planet a holding company – an overfilling of capitalism, with no trivial motivations of humans, be they owners or workers or consumers, making production a deity – capitalism without capitalists.  Protestants separated Catholics from the Catholic hierarchy.  Rapid modernization requires imitation; collectivist biases lend themselves to this if it is composed of no true individuals.  Intellectuals want to tell others what to do out of a fear for their own self-preservation, a lack in confidence that they provide worth in the social order.  The creative classes – writers, artists, scientists – are dissatisfied, but turn it into the creative impulse, where the revolutionary diverts those energies to revolution.  A fading faith in religion has caused more “fervent groping and searching for a heaven on earth.”  The movement of people between places is something which causes economic productivity.  “Scribes” were interested in elitism because it protected their position in society.  The scribe could give voice to grievances.  Education caused a diffusion of knowledge, along with the alphabet and printing; the scribe has routinely sought to separate the wealth creators from their wealth.  As put forth in his other book, argues that around the corner hope prompts people to action, when they can almost taste something better, as opposed to distant hope, which is an opiate.  “If we hope for what we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.” -Romans 8:25.  Soviet Russia and Communist China require mind control to prevent groupings of people to active resistance; the only thing which people can bind themselves to in thought is the past, their ancestors.  Man strives to make and remake himself continually as an evolutionary process – a “striving to overcome and overtake nature and leave it behind.” Power cannot resist the nature to make man a thing again.  “Hence absolute power corrupts even when exercised for human purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep.  The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its antihumanity.” 

-->  “Whether the individual takes the path of self-realization or the easier one of self-justification by action he remains unbalanced and restless.”  
-->  “It is mainly by work that the majority of individuals prove their worth and regain their balance, they must keep at it continuously.  Hence the ceaseless hustling of an individualist society.”  
--> “There is little doubt that the frustration engendered by unemployment is due more to a corrosive sense of worthlessness than to economic hardship.  Unemployment pay, however adequate, cannot mitigate it.  In the Occident it is inaction rather than actual hardship which breeds discontent and disaffection... it is now recognized that men must be conditioned for retirement... Hoover... said that a man who retires from work ’shrivels up into a nuisance to all mankind.’”  
--> “In societies where the Negro race is officially designated as inferior, and every white person can feel himself a member of a superior race, the pressure of individual self-assertion by work is considerably reduced.  The presence of indolent ‘white trash’ is usually a characteristic of such societies”  
--> “The Western workingman actually has the illusion that he can kill work and be done with it. He “attacks” every job he undertakes and feels the ending of a task as a victory.  Those who, like the Negro, know that work is eternal tend to take it easy.”   
--> “You do not go to a free society to find carefree people. When we leave people on their own, we are delivering them into the hands of a ruthless taskmaster from whose bondage there is no escape.  The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.”   
--> “When painting becomes so low that laymen talk about it, it doesn’t interest me. Do we dare to talk about mathematics? No! Painting shouldn’t become a fashionable thing. And money, money, money comes in and it becomes a Wall Street affair.” -Marcel Duchamp, The New Yorker, 1957 characterizes the disdain of artists.   
--> “The deprecators of America usually point to its defects as being those of a business civilization.  Actually they are the defects of the mass: worship of success, the cult of the practical, the identification of quality with quantity, the addiction to sheer action, the fascination with the trivial.  We also know the virtues: a superb dynamism, an unprecedented diffusion of skills, a genius for organization and teamwork, a flexibility which makes possible an easy adjustment to the most drastic change, an ability to get things done with a minimum of tutelage and supervision, and unbounded capacity for fraternization.”   
--> “Nothing has saddened me so much in life as the hardness of heart of educated people”-Gandhi.   
--> “One cannot escape the impression that the intellectual’s most fundamental incompatibility is with the masses.  He has managed to thrive in social orders dominated by kings, nobles, priests, and merchants, but not in societies suffused with the tastes and values of the masses.”   
--> “The intellectual’s concern for the masses is as a rule a symptom of his uncertain status and his lack of an unquestionable sense of social usefulness.” 

--> “The scribe was not interested in the elaboration of a practical script but in keeping writing a prerogative of the privileged few. He had a vested interest in complexity and difficulty.”   

--> “When the scribe comes into power he derives a rare satisfaction from tearing tangible things out of the hands of practical people and harnessing these people to the task of achieving the impossible, and often killing them in the process.” 

--> “In human affairs, the best stimulus for running ahead is to have something we must run from... [when] the wolf and the lamb shall dwell together, [there] will be a stagnant society.” 

--> “Some of the worst tyrannies of our day genuinely are ‘vowed’ to the service of mankind, yet can function only by pitting neighbor against neighbor.”  Thus, interaction with your neighbor is a good antidote to authoritarianism.  “The capacity for getting along with our neighbor depends to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves.  The self-respecting individual will try to be as tolerant of his neighbor’s shortcomings as he if of his own.  Self-righteousness is a manifestation of self-contempt.  When we are conscious of our worthlessness, we naturally expect others to be finer and better than we are.” 

--> ”Nor is it at present easy for the individual to maintain his self-respect in the non-Communist part of the world. In the underdeveloped countries the poignant awareness from backwardness keeps even the exceptional individual from attaining the ‘unbought grace of life’ that is the true expression of an unconscious and unquestioned sense of worth. Similarly, individual self-respect cannot thrive in an atmosphere charged with racial or religious discrimination. Both the oppressors and the oppressed are blemished.  The oppressed are corrupted by an inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against them, while the oppressors are infected with the fear they induce in others.  Finally, even in advanced and wholly egalitarian societies millions of people are ribbed of their sense of worth by unemployment, and by the obsolesce of skills as the result of revolutionary advances in technology. 

--> “In man’s life the lack of an essential component usually leads to the adoption of a substitute.  We have to convince ourselves that what we took as second choice is the best there ever was.  Thus blind faith is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves; insatiable desire a substitute for hope; accumulation a substitute for growth; fervent hustling a substitute for purposeful action; and pride a substitute for unattainable self respect.  The pride that at present pervades the world is the claim that one is a member of a chosen group – be it a nation, race, church, or party.  No other attitude has so impaired the oneness of the human species and contributed so much to the savage strife of our time.”  -“It is not the overworked and underpaid who make up the ranks of the D.A.R., the Dixiecrats... [it is] an indolent population living off the fat of the land, the vital need for an unquestioned sense of worth and usefulness is bound to find expression in an intensified pursuit of explosive substitutes.” 

-”At bottom, a country’s efficiency must be measured by the degree to which it realizes its human potentialities... [serving] as a means for the realization of the intellectual, artistic, and manipulative capacities inherent in a population.”  “Man’s only legitimate end in life is to finish God’s work – to bring to full growth the capacities and talents implanted in us.  A population dedicated to this end will not necessarily overflow with the milk of human kindness, but it will not try to prove its worth by proclaiming the superiority and exclusiveness of its nation, race, or doctrine.” 

--> “It would thus be wholly unreasonable to expect a backward country to modernize itself in a hurry in an atmosphere of freedom. Its poverty, lack of skill, and its need for fervor and unity militate against it.” -- what about Korea?  What about Japan? (“rare cases”) 

--> [The Intellectual] “derives his sense of usefulness mainly from directing, instructing, and planning – from minding other people’s business – and is bound to feel superfluous and neglected where people believe themselves competent to manage individual and communal affairs, and are impatient of supervision and regulation... any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.” 

--> Almost all long-lived social bodies solved the problem by absorbing the educated into bureaucratic hierarchies. Since he is not an actual producer, the scribe needs a clearly marked status to certify his worth” 

-> It is often the descendants of families that have come down in the world who act as a creative ferment 

--> “When he comes into power he creates a social pattern ideally suited to the aspirations and talents of the scribe-a regimented social order planned, managed, and supervised by a horde of clerks” 

--> “To the genuine writer the word is an end in itself and the center of his existence... however imposing and successful his action, he feels... that he is selling his birthright for a message of pottage.”  … “Not so the rebel: to him words remain a means to an end; and the end is action” 

--> “Periods of high tension and social passions leave little room for contemplation and reflection” -Trotsky.  Thus, the writer and the revolutionary are at odds, the time of revolution is not a good time for creativeness.  Those who cannot do or accomplish via action, will write as revolutionaries.   

--> “The explosive component in the contemporary scene is not the clamor of the masses but the self-righteous claims of a multitude of graduates from schools and universities.  This army of scribes is clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated.” 

--> “Thus the most troublesome problem which confronts social engineering is how to provide for the untalented and, what is equally important, how to provide against them” (the untalented being the scribes in his view, but this is applicable to all) … “For there is a tendency in the untalented to divert their energies from their own development into the management, manipulation, and probably frustration of others.  They want to police, instruct, guide, and meddle.  In an adequate social order, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of usefulness and of growth without interfering with the development of talent around them.” 

--> “The sudden illumination and the flash of discovery are not likely to materialize under pressure”. (regarding original thought).  Ornaments preceded clothes, temples and palaces preceded houses, etc. 

--> “The weak’s singular capacity for evolving substitutes for that which they lack suggests that they played a chief role in the evolvement of technology.”  This is a uniquely human characteristic – that our weak can shape our future.  “A familiarity with the mentality of the weak reveals that what seems a path of daring is actually an easy way out: it is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings.  For when we fail in attaining the possible the blame is solely ours, but when we fail in attaining the impossible we are justified in attributing it to the magnitude of the task.” 

--> “To the creative individual, all experience is seminal—all events are equidistant from new ideas and insights—and his inordinate humanness shows itself perhaps mainly in the ability to make the trivial and common reach an enormous way.” 

--> Individual selfhood was first experienced not as something ardently wished for but as a calamity which befell the individual: he was separated from the group.  All creative phases in history were preceded by a shattering or weakening of communal structures, and it was the individual debris who first set the creative act in motion... The severing of the individual from a compact group is an operation from which the individual [people, society] never fully recovers.  The individual on his own remains a chronically incomplete and unbalanced entity.  His creative efforts and passionate pursuits are at bottom a blind striving for wholeness and balance 

--> “We know that words cannot move mountains, but they can move the multitude; and men are more ready to fight and die for a word than for anything else.  Words shape thought, stir feeling, and beget action; they kill and revive, corrupt and cure.  The ‘men of words’ … have played a more decisive role in history than military leaders, statemen, and businessmen.” 

--> “The backward masses clambering up the steep incline of history must see themselves as the vanguard of humanity, the bearers of a one and only truth, the chosen instrument of human destiny.  The march out of their backwardness must be as the march of conquerors.”

--> “But it seemed to me that the intelligence of the men in the [working] camp was certainly not below the average.  And as for character, I found much forbearance and genuine good humor.  I never came across one instance of real viciousness.  Yet, on the whole, one would hardly say that these men were possessed of strong characters.  Resistance, whether to one’s appetites or to the ways of the world, is a chief factor in the shaping of character, and the average tramp is, more or less, a slave of his few appetites.  He generally takes the easiest way out.”

--> “All these people craved change, some probably actuated by the naïve belief that a change in place brings with it a change in luck.  Many wanted to go to a place where they were not known and there make a new beginning.  Certainly they did not go out deliberately in search of hard work and suffering.  If in the end they shouldered enormous tasks, endured unspeakable hardships and accomplished the impossible, it was because they had to.  They became men of action on the run.  They acquired strength and skill in the inescapable struggle for existence.  It was a question of do or die.  And once they tasted the joy of achievement, they craved for more.”

--> “The pressure of responsibility and the heat of battle steel a character.  The inadaptable would perish, and those who survived would be the equal of the successful pioneers.”

--> “The superior individual... plays a major role in the shaping of a nation.  But so do the individuals at the other extreme... [with their] readiness in which they are swayed in any direction... due to their inclination to take risks... and their propensity for united action.  They crave to merge their drab, wasted lives into something grand and complete.  Thus they are the first and most fervent adherents of new religions, political upheavals, patriotic hysteria, gangs, and mass rushes to new lands.”

—> “And the quality of a nation—its innermost worth—is made manifest by its dregs as they rise to the top: by how brave they are, how humane, how orderly, how skilled, how generous, how independent or servile; by the bounds they will not transgress in their dealings with a man’s soul, with truth, and with honor.”

--> “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.”