Library tour. Today I came to the Siheung City Central Library. Since I was here, I'm planning to head to Anmyeondo. Or — I stopped by on my way to Anmyeondo.
Walking past the shelves, I happened upon 'Eric Hoffer, the Philosopher on the Road.' It seemed to be on the same axis as Moral Man and Immoral Society, which I read recently, so I'm leaving here some passages and illustrations that struck me.
In 1951, Eric Hoffer's first book, The True Believer : Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements — from a humanistic tradition, one might have expected the appearance of a proletarian philosopher. Yet Hoffer's insight, illuminating the hidden causes of the frenzy that nearly destroyed the world, begins from the folk wisdom of a drifter laborer.
Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. We join a mass movement to escape from individual responsibility, or, in the words of an ardent young Nazi, 'to be free from freedom'. It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?
The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.
The true believer in a mass movement is a frustrated person caught in guilt, failure, and self-loathing — someone who buries his identity in a motive directed at some future goal. He throws himself fanatically into a movement that seems likely to give meaning to his meaningless life. Hoffer's writings are a psychology of those frustrated people. Traditionally, the masses have been quick to forgive the disastrous harm caused by coercive utopians, because they felt their intentions were right. As for the socialism that ended in Stalinism, too, it is common to acknowledge that the motives at least were noble. But Hoffer smashes that myth and sees them as driven by a desire to destroy others, rather than seeking peace with themselves.
The earth is overflowing with people. You see them in villages, in fields, on roads, but you almost never pay attention to them. Then your eyes meet one face and you marvel. Suddenly you become aware of a sublime singularity in the human being unlike anything else on earth. A person makes himself in his own image. In such an encounter there is loneliness, and something as if it had come from another star.
Unlike other philosophers, Hoffer arranged his philosophy not from the desk, the lecture podium, or the front of the room, but in the course of manual labor and wandering the streets, reading whenever he could squeeze in a moment. Learning. His learning was that distinct.
For reference, a confession that isn't really a confession: the reason I was able to read the entire book in one short visit to the library… may have had less to do with the lines I noted above and more to do with his even more dramatic love life. That heart-wrenching content is so personal(?) that I've decided to leave it out, but if you have time, I recommend taking the chance to peek at it on some appropriate day at a bookstore or library.
