LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless. The inordinately selfish are particularly susceptible to frustration... It is the inordinately selfish, therefore, who are likely to be the most persuasive champions of selflessness. They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society... They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society. Freedom aggravates at least as much as it alleviates frustration. Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual... Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. The reason that the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that... [they] crave to dissolve their spoiled, meaningless selves in some soul-stirring spectacular communal undertaking.
The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement. The superior individual, whether in politics, literature, science, commerce or industry, plays a large role in shaping a nation, but so do individuals at the other extreme – the failures, misfits, outcasts, criminals, and all those who have lost their footing, or never had one, in the ranks of respectable humanity. The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle. There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath is passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. Some people called Eric Hoffer an intellectual. He would always reply by saying he was a longshoreman. Think of him as a sort of stevedore of the mind, loading a supertanker of common sense freighted with wisdom and shipped with brilliance.
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American Consequences
9
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