Thinking Man

Some months ago Dave Lull, the omnipresent Wisconsin librarian, asked if I remembered Eric Hoffer. An aperture opened and I saw myself, age 15 or 16, seated at the desk in my childhood bedroom, clipping one of Hoffer’s syndicated columns from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, along with those of a local columnist, Don Robertson. I read them, underlined useful passages and pasted them in a scrapbook. They were the first bylines I learned to look for with pleasure and anticipation, the way I later sought Murray Kempton’s. Roughly 10 years later I was hired as editor of a small town weekly in northwestern Ohio – my first newspaper job, and in some attenuated way it is connected with the example set by Hoffer.

The “longshoreman philosopher” had a brief notoriety in the late 1960s, though his first and probably best known and most influential book, The True Believer, had been published in 1951. He worked the docks in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He never went to college. He credited a volume of Montaigne’s essays, found in a second-hand bookstore, with inspiring him to write. This is what appealed to me about Hoffer, I think. I was the first in my family to go to college. My father and his brothers were ironworkers. All of my mother’s brothers were housepainters. I had no models for being a writer, a lover of ideas, an intellectual – a term Hoffer detested. But a working-class guy who read Montaigne and Tolstoy and formulated his thoughts in words made sense to me, and he still does.

Hoffer’s central insight was his insistence on the personal, emotional reasons people – “true believers” -- devote themselves to mass movements, whether political or religious. Fanaticism, for Hoffer, is rooted in self-hatred. A person with genuine self-esteem, not the narcissistic sludge of pop psychology, feels little attraction to the collective. In the politicized late 1960s, Hoffer had something to say to alienate or offend almost everyone. He died in 1983, but his ideas remain pertinent. His work is appealing because his ideas are clear, common-sensical and free of anyone’s ideology. He tended to write aphoristically, to condense his thoughts in balanced, straightforward statements, without pretension or theory. His first loyalty was to the truth and his only subject matter was humanity.

Over the weekend I found a first edition of Hoffer’s second book, The Passionate State of Mind, published in 1955. In 151 pages, Hoffer gives us 280 aphorisms, many consisting of a single sentence. Here’s No. 266:

“The beginning of thought is in disagreement – not only with others but also with ourselves.”

At 16, this would have made no sense to me, at least the part about self-disagreement. It’s a mature thought, rooted in experience and a rare degree of self-honesty. It’s not a bumper sticker. Here’s another, even harsher – No. 269:

“Naivete in grownups is often charming; but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity.”

That’s worthy of La Rochefoucauld. And here’s one to trouble the Left – No. 270:

“Widespread dissipation is the result rather than the cause of social decadence.”

So as not to play favorites, let me cite a longer aphorism to hector the Right. Essentially, Hoffer was not a political thinker. Those were not categories he recognized. No. 197:

“Conservatism is sometimes a symptom of sterility. Those who have nothing in them that can grow and develop must cling to what they have in beliefs, ideas and possessions. The sterile radical, too, is basically conservative. He is afraid to let go of the ideas and beliefs he picked up in his youth lest his life be seen as empty and wasted.”

When I read an aphorism, I immediately test myself against it. In Hoffer’s case, I sometimes find myself stung by the barb that accompanies his insight. He’s one of those writers who, taken in medicinal doses, serves as an inoculation against dishonesty and delusion. Thanks for the second opinion, Dr. Lull.