The American Spirit According to Eric Hoffer
The American Spirit lives on despite attempts to destroy it.
For Americanization affects mainly the masses, stiffens their backbone, and infects them with a passion to act on their own, get their full share of the good things of life, and dispense with the tutelage of scribes and clerks.1
— Eric Hoffer, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront
Eric Hoffer (1898 – 1983) worked as a migrant farm worker and laborer then later became a longshoreman while he read and wrote. He published his first book, True Believer, in 1951, to critical acclaim. The book I’m focusing on is Working and Thinking on the Waterfront (1967).
Hoffer’s perspective on life is practical, influenced by continuing to work his day job, while he read voraciously and wrote. He has a lot to say about what I’m calling, The American Spirit. At one point he calls it the “American Attitude.” This spirit is not only alive in America, it lives in all countries and includes their own unique attributes, their own unique spirits to be proud of and to celebrate. The elites, the globalists want us to forsake our traditions, our national pride for a watered-down, impotent global ideology that denies us any connection to our past. They’d prefer we forget our past. It’s not The Great Reset, it’s The Great Forget.
We must remember and not forget.
Hoffer has immense respect for the common man, us nobodies, and very little for “intellectuals.”
What strikes me again and again is the number of excellent people, people of gentle character and inner gracefulness, one meets on the waterfront. I spent some time on the last job with Ernie and Mac, two elderly fellows I have known slightly. I found myself thinking what fine persons the two are—generous, competent, and intelligent. I have watched them tackle jobs not only intelligently but with striking originality. And all the time they work as if at play.2
Hoffer was a common man and willing to admit things we common men and women feel. For example he wrote about feeling good wearing new work clothes to the job and wondered why someone hadn’t looked into that good feeling we get when wearing new clothes or shoes. He also mentions a day where he had a lot of errands to accomplish, going to the bank, cleaning and shopping and upon accomplishing those mundane, everyday things felt pretty, damn good about it. Hoffer wrote:
And yet it should be possible to create great works of the spirit in a totally free and equal society where he who writes books need not feel infinitely superior to he who sweeps the streets or prints and binds the books.3
Finding pleasure in the everyday, in the mundane is necessary for a good and rewarding life. That ability to enjoy everyday life is something the elites resent:
A would-be maker of history by the name of Birnbaum [who wrote an article in Nation] vents his irritation with the mass of people in the Western democracies. What riles him is that the common people “consume,” seem to enjoy their private lives, and show no interest in “general political programs.” Here is a mediocre mind throwing its weight around.4
A vigorous society is a society made up of people who set their hearts on toys, and who would work harder for superfluities than for necessities. The self-righteous moralists decry such a society, yet it is well to keep in mind that both children and artists need luxuries more than they need necessities.5
Eric Hoffer photo: Source, CC BY 3.0 License, via Wikimedia Commons.
Being able to enjoy simple pleasures like a good meal, a quiet afternoon, conversation with friends, hobbies, a new dog, a new car, a new piece of furniture, embody the American Spirit. It’s these in between times, between the highs and the lows of life, where most of our living occurs.
After writing True Believer, Hoffer gained some fame and notoriety and often did interviews:
It was a hell of a meeting with a pack of biting, hissing, crummy intellectuals [from Asia]. I rubbed their noses in the dirt. These people came to us to look and learn, but as men-of-words they were contemptuous of our practicalness, and our addiction to acts rather than words.6
There’s that American Spirit: “crummy intellectuals” and “I rubbed their noses in the dirt.” Not that the American Spirit is rude, but that it will only take so much and when needed will callout those who are condescending or evil. We’re seeing that spirit in many people who are calling out Big Pharma and our corrupt government. Trump has that spirit. Steve Kirsch has that spirit. Dr. Peter McCullough has that spirit and there are a host of others we know and millions and millions of others we don’t. We’re not alone.
Not only is the American attitude disdainful of the chattering, posturing intellectual, but by curtailing supervision it robs the intellectual of many opportunities for positions of prestige and power.7
I love that: “chattering, posturing intellectual.” Dependent, that’s how our current governments want their citizens. That’s a worldwide, governmental attitude at the moment. These people want to be in charge and they don’t want anyone questioning their ideas or methods. He goes on to say that this type of person is a person who does not know how to handle freedom:
The significant point is that people unfit for freedom—who cannot do much with it—are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a “have” type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities.8
Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power.9
That is why so many of our politicians are “crummy” people, are “chattering, posturing intellectuals” and experts who know exactly how we should live our lives. It’s the career politician with little experience in the common man’s world, it’s a self-absorbed Nancy Pelosi showing us her ice cream freezer thinking….thinking….what exactly? That we’re a little envious that we have to keep our ice cream freezers in the garage?
They have been predicting the dire things that would happen to art, literature, and culture in general if the lowbrow masses asserted themselves and imposed their tastes on a society. But could anything equal the inanity and imposture spewed by avant-garde cliques and accepted by self-appointed guardians of our culture?10
The intellectual will not leave people alone.11
Imagine Hoffer’s horror if he were alive today. We’re told we have to accept so much crap by these “guardians of our culture,” these “avant-garde cliques” who demand we accept their art, their architecture, their pronouns, their genders and even their transformations into different species. The Great Awakening that Alex Jones and Alexander Dugin write about is a return to the old ways that were better: traditional families, great art, great architecture, great literature and Christian values.
Here’s what Hoffer says about societies as whole with regard to the common man:
In the rest of the world at present there is evidence on every hand that the vigor and health of a society are determined by the quality of the common people rather than that of the cultural elite.12
Both domestic and foreign intellectuals seem to have a vital need for the assumption that the people who built and run this country are stupid. They are not bothered by the mystery of how stupid Americans tamed and mastered a savage continent and made it a cornucopia of plenty. Nor are they bothered by the evidence from every part of the world where intellectuals are in power everything, including the weather, ceases to perform as it should.13
The uniqueness of America is that here for the first time common people could and did make history.14
It is the performance of the common people that made America what it is—the only new thing in the universe.15
I guess I wouldn’t have written, “the only new thing in the universe,” but I think I know his point. America, as others have said, was a grand experiment that was wildly successful, giving people real freedom in a place where they could succeed or fail based on their efforts, not the whims of a government needing to control their citizens for the benefit of the state. Hoffer wrote:
In no other country is it so possible to a man of determination to go ahead, with whatever it is that he sets his heart on, without compromising his integrity.16
It is incredible how easy it is in this country to cut oneself off from what one disapproves—from all vulgarity, mendacity, conformity, subservience, speciousness, and other corrupting influences and infections. 17
This doesn’t ring as true today as when it was in 1958-1959 when Hoffer kept this journal. It is what they are trying to take away from us. That has been one of the biggest revelations for me of the last eight years: societal problems can be easily solved by those who really want to solve them. The problem is current world leaders don’t want to solve problems, they need the problems, the divisions, the chaos in our culture, to maintain their power, to further their agendas.
They promise prosperity, they promise a utopia for all of us, but it’s all lies…one only has to look at the current state of the world to see that. They must have the world in that state, so they can keep promising to fix it.
Was there ever a utopia which visualized society free of planning, regulation and supervision? Utopias are usually visualized by potential planners, organizers, directors, leaders. The envisioned new society is the ideal milieu for bureaucrats.18
That is Totalitarianism. That’s what they want.
The problem the globalists have with America is there are still many, many people living here who have the American Spirit, who not only value Freedom but have experienced it, who are independent in mind, that is what they have been attempting to destroy since they assassinated JFK in 1963.
Hoffer has an interesting take on Moses that I’ve never heard before:
Moses discovered that no migration, no drama, no spectacle, no myth and no miracles could turn slaves into free men. It cannot be done. So he led the slaves back into the desert, and waited forty years until the slave generation died, and a new generation, desert born and bred, was ready to enter the promised land.19
The American Spirit has suffered blows in our universities, in the public education system and via the mainstream culture being pushed through movies, social media, music, gender politics and the constant barrage of intellectuals telling us how terrible America is, how our culture is evil and that we should abandon it for a dominant world culture to be defined by the elites.
Despite all that, the American Spirit is still living and still strong. We see it in our communities, we see it online, we see it in our families. That spirit lives in other countries, where people want to keep their own cultures, their unique Spirits and secure freedom for their citizens. America is a ship that has been heading in a new and better direction for over 200 years and it cannot and will not be stopped or easily turned around.
Regardless of how much money is spent, government and industry can never compete with millions of citizens looking for ways to spread the truth online.
— A Midwestern Doctor, The Forgotten Side of Medicine
So to all the elites, the globalists, the ivy league intellectuals, the Democratic party, the RINOs, to all the current wanna-be despots who want to take away our freedom and kill the American Spirit…
Go to hell.
Notes
Hoffer, Eric, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront, Perennial Library, Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1970. p. 49.
p. 111.
p. 133.
p. 77.
p. 126.
pp. 48-49.
p. 82.
p. 146.
pp. 146-147.
p. 55.
p. 96.
pp. 90-91.
p. 92.
p. 96.
p. 135.
p. 117.
p. 117.
p. 145.
p. 175.
Yes, there are still people like that. That think for themselves, that want to be left alone to their lives. I wish I knew more of them.
“Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power.”
What a revelation! This guy should be required reading at every university in America.… Heck, at every high school in America. And yes, you global elitist “intellectuals”…..GO TO HELL!!