“I hang on to my prejudices. They are the testicles of my mind.” Eric Hoffer

Ever since finding a quartet of pithy aphoristic quotations from someone called Eric Hoffer on the website of that wonderful right-wing American thinker, Thomas Sowell, I’ve been meaning to find out who he was. I did so last week, and he is – to me, at least – another fascinating American thinker. (I’m wary of writing enthusiastically about thinkers from the past I’ve just stumbled across in case you all go “Oh, him – I was mildly impressed as a teenager, but, really, what a charlatan!” – but I’m willing to risk humiliation this time.)

Hoffer (1902 – 1983) was born and raised in the Bronx by immigrant parents from Alsace. His mother fell down a flight of stairs with Eric in her arms when he was five. She died two years later, and Eric inexplicably lost his sight: equally inexplicably, it returned after eight years. When Eric was 18, his cabinet-maker father died, and with a bit of money from the union, Eric took a bus to Los Angeles, where he spent 10 years on Skid Row, odd-jobbing and reading voraciously. 

After a failed suicide attempt, he became a migrant agricultural worker, using local libraries wherever he found employment. Being holed up one winter while looking for gold with only Montaigne’s Essays for company seems to have been a seminal event in Hoffer’s intellectual development. In 1941 he became a San Francisco longshoreman, and remained one for 26 years.

In 1983, a few months before Hoffer’s death, President Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Hoffer’s first book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements,  was published in 1951. It posits the importance of self-esteem (or lack of it) as explaining the rise of, for instance, Fascism and Bolshevism. He built on this theme in the 1960s to explain the rise of protest movements and civil unrest: the lack of an obvious route to meaningful work, he suggests, leads the very poor (those on welfare) and affluent young middle class people at college to seek meaning in revolt.

It’s hard to slot Hoffer into any particular niche in the political spectrum: the fact that he was completely self-taught and kept doing a proper job until retirement seems to have helped him become that rare thing – an entirely original thinker who isn’t evidently bonkers.

I won’t even attempt to characterize the rest of his central themes: I’m still in the early stages of discovery. Instead, I’ll just share with you some of his pithy and original aphoristic insights, without comment (mainly because the relevance of many of them to Islamofascism, national and local politicians, our education system, the legion of poisonous quangocrat “experts” who have done so much to drain the meaning from people’s lives, and the Arts Establishment – ditto – seems self-evident).

Hoffer quotes:

“Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.” 

“To know a person's religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.”

“Rudeness is a weak imitation of strength.”   

“The greatest weariness comes from work not done.” 

“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.” 

“There is no doubt that in our permissive society the intellectual has far more liberty than he can use; and the more his liberty and the less his capacity to make use of it, the louder his clamor for power—power to deprive other people of liberty.”

“A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.”

“A just society must strive with all its might to right wrongs even if righting wrongs is a highly perilous undertaking. But if it is to survive, a just society must be strong and resolute enough to deal swiftly and relentlessly with those who would mistake its good will for weakness.”

“Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.”

“It is hard to tell what causes the pervasive timidity. One thinks of video-induced stupor, intake of tranquilizers, fear of not living to enjoy the many new possessions and toys, the example of our betters in cities and on campuses who high-mindedly surrender to threats of violence and make cowardice fashionable.”

“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.”

“The hatred and cruelty which have their source in selfishness are ineffectual things compared with the venom and ruthlessness born of selflessness.”

“When cowardice becomes a fashion its adherents are without number, and it masquerades as forbearance, reasonableness and whatnot.”

“The education explosion is producing a vast number of people who want to live significant, important lives but lack the ability to satisfy this craving for importance by individual achievement. The country is being swamped with nobodies who want to be somebodies.”

“To believe that if we could have but this or that we would be happy is to suppress the realization that the cause of our unhappiness is in our inadequate and blemished selves. Excessive desire is thus a means of suppressing our sense of worthlessness.”

“Obviously, what our age has in common with the age of the Reformation is the fallout of disintegrating values. What needs explaining is the presence of a receptive audience. More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle.”

More sources:

The Wikipedia entry on Hoffer is good. There are also many articles about him available on the web, including this one by Thomas Sowell, and  

and this one by Tim Madigan. If you enjoyed the quotes I’ve included, there are many more available here. 

Meanwhile, I must get on with venting my prejudices (or, if you prefer,  my testicles).