Philosophy from a Working Man

Reverse Gaslighting

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 09:55:43 +0000

It occurs to me that if one is an egoist and loves and esteems oneself, one has no motive or predilection to whisper like Iago into his master’s ear to undermine his happiness, to feed his jealousy, to upend his mind, to ruin his life. If one is a rational egoist and maverizer, then one in action should be practicing in thought, word and deed, reverse gaslighting or reverse Iagosim. What this entails is that with carefully selected, kind but honest words, both whispered or openly declared, he will work to build up the self-confidence and self-worth of every adult, peer, child or pet over who he holds sway over, is able to influence, or even comes into contact with. I can think of no better or efficient means of spreading love and happiness in the world than by not seeking any longer in one’s utterances to tear down whatever modest level of self-esteem another person or creature has managed to cling to. To practice reverse gaslighting in public or in private is to live, act and speak altruistically within an egoist morality. The reverse gaslighter is determined to undermine the psychological health of no one or no creature under his sway, and nor will he allow a malicious gaslighter to attack and undermine his own mental health or sense of well-being.

Altruism At A Glance

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 02:24:58 +0000

Altruism, if properly applied, will be embedded within an egoist ethical code, where I will construe it as productive other-dealing, by verbally and in action working to, establish, build up, reinforce, or uphold and restore another’s legitimate, wholesome self-esteem by providing upbeat, positive feedback to the other in one’s remarks and suggestions to her, to bolster her self-image—this is socially beneficial and proper.

Endless Night

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 01:55:25 +0000

Occasionally I enjoy reading or rereading an Agatha Christie novel, for light entertainment. I recently finished her novel Endless Night where Mike Rogers, the serial killer and psychopath, the villain and narrator who conspires with his lover Greta Anderson for Mike to capture and marry poor, impressionable, credulous little rich girl, Ellie Guteman to murder her for her money. The villains succeed but are caught in the end. The Rogers build their dream mansion on Gypsy’s Acre, a haunted, cursed, evil place where evil long lingered, and it seems to me that Christie believes in demons—as I do--that some spots are cursed and haunted, and unfit for inhabiting lest, the evil spirits there tempt human sinners to commit grave, serious crimes for gain. The Rogers were warned by the gypsy woman not to build there and live there, but they dismissed her dire warning, so their lives ended up being quite tragic. Far too often humans do not heed warnings as to what they should avoid and stay away from. I enjoy Christie’s remarkable character development, and how true is their hunches about human nature. For example, Santonix, the gifted architect who builds the Rogers’s mansion is part evil, so he knows how evil Mike and Greta are and what they plan, so he builds a mansion to reflect the complex relationship between the three main characters. Let me quote from Page 154 where Christie’s characterizes Santonix as a perceptive genius, almost clairvoyant who knows who people are, even better than they know themselves. He is such a developed individuator, that he has learned about himself, and through his deep, vast, wise self-knowledge, based in truth and reality, he thus is able to know others as they are, even when they have not discovered who and what they are: “’What a strange man he is,’ Ellie said thoughtfully. ‘You mean he knows the future.’ ‘No,’said Ellie, ‘I didn’t mean that. He knows people. I said it to you once before. He knows people better than they know themselves. Sometimes he hates them because of that, and sometimes he’s sorry for them. He’s not sorry for me, though,’ she added meditatively.” Then on Page 156 MIke’s mother chides him for rising above his station, that being ambitious is unnatural, accursed and somehow an affront to God who will strike down the conceited and proud, and this too seems to be a trope which Christie mentions again and again. Here is the quote from Page 156: “’Too grand for the likes of me, eh.?’ I said. ‘I didn’t say that lad.’ ‘But you thought it.’ ‘It wasn’t what you were born to, and no good comes from getting out of your station in life.’” My response: Christie the Dame, millionaire and famous individuator also is a British snob who thinks the burghers, workers and poor should accept their lot in life and not seek to better themselves, which is malarcky. Her nature is complicated and self-contradictory too.

Justice Thomas Speaks

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 01:24:13 +0000

I saw an online clip of Justice Clarence Thomas speaking on The Second Amendment, and the videotaped quote was aired on Facebook on 9/17/26 by American Firearms Association, of which I am a member. Here is the tape: “The right to bear arms shall not be infringed. It assumes the right. It does not grant the right. Yes. And then so you go First Amendment, etc., etc., etc. Where does that come from? And that’s what I was interested in. What establishes this whole notion of liberty? What establishes this order of right? And so it matters if you think the government is the primary giver of, a granter of rights. And you receive rights and benefits from the government versus you have the right and the government receives its authority from you.” My response: Thomas is brilliant and wise for rights come from God to the individual, therefore the government receives its authority from us, the governed, and as individuating supercitizens united in focus and action, we can and should impose our rule upon the government and politicians. I also have a short but rather related quote from Marco Rubio on 9/18/26: “Our rights come from God, not from our government.” I could not agree more.

Natural Gifts

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:59:37 +0000

It has long been my contention that all humans are viable candidates to self-realize, that a successful career and life plan of self-realization is much less about one’s natural gifts—yes, geniuses are a bit ahead of the average person—than it is about one choices, one character traits: if one loves and esteems the self so that only life lived as an individuator will suffice; whether one has a vision and is imaginatively creative (aptitudes which develop as one uses them); if one is willing to put in the time and hard work to get ahead; if one has the perseverance, patience to see it through, a willingness to sacrifice short term pleasures for long-term gain

To Be Great Is To Be Misunderstood

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 02:55:02 +0000

I can imagine my friends, neighbors and family have been so standoffish for decades due to what hey regard as my megalomaniac sense of self, and my profoundly shocking bragging about my own superiority. If I am lying, mistaken or out of touch with reality, if I am not the great soul and prophet from God that I claim to be, then they are correct and God smiles upon them for opposing my overweening pride, my bald assertions, my outrageous claims. If I am telling the truth and am what I claim to be (I am and know I am.), then God does not smile upon them for rejecting De’s prophet. I am almost 72 & ½ years old, and I am as isolated, unknown, unrecognized and marginalized as ever I have been since I started writing Mavellonialist philosophy in 1974. It occurred to me several days ago that I am a one-man band and that will not change. I will not necessarily die alone, but I will likely go on ignored, not acknowledged or receiving the attention and respect which I have earned and deserve. So be it, the people have spoken. I forgive them and wish them all the best and pray for them. I am not an exceptionally gifted person—I have just done what any human being can do and is to do, answer affirmatively, with one’s whole heart and soul, the divine invitation and commandment to self-realize for a lifetime as a living angel. The paradox is this: as a person grows into his personal great-souledness while alive, his singularity, his individual soul becomes proportionately unattractive and repulsive in social circles to popular, mediocre nonindividuators, the vast social majority of humans. The consequence is the more one individuates, the more the wisdom and advice which one has gleaned and is willing to convey to the masses, to that extent necessarily a sleeping people will ignore, repel and tune out advice beneficial to these persons and their communities, their nation. The masses listen to whom they should run from, and are suspicious of and are hostile to who their real friends and benefactors are. It is the way of the world, and all I can do is get my works published for posterity. That is the best possibility.

Objective Morality

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 21:49:02 +0000

I am a moderate and yet I am mostly an objective moral realist. This may seem fuzzy, contradictory or muddled-thinking, but it really is not. God exists and God is love. God is a moderate too so the divine moral code and natural law which God constructed and bestowed upon us earthlings as our code to guide our thoughts, decisions and actions. This code mostly is objective and yet it is also intrinsic (like Platonic Forms) and subjective and conventional. Moderation is not equivalent to relativism or the stance that anything goes. Still, a clear, crisp, effable moral code to live by is a must for human survival, for human happiness, for humans to be allowed by God to enter the kingdom of heaven after death.

The State Of Yale University

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 01:18:31 +0000

I get a free electronic newsletter sent to my gmail account from The Washington Free Beacon. Below enclosed is their article which was written on 9/18/26 by Eliana Johnson. I copied and pasted it below and will comment on it. Here it is: “ Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more An F for Yale University President Maurie McInnis Eliana Johnson Sep 18 Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more An F for Yale University President Maurie McInnis Eliana Johnson Sep 18 READ IN APP (American Enterprise Institute YouTube) Yale University president Maurie McInnis released a report in late April from a committee on trust in higher education that acknowledged the issues afflicting the Ivy League, from exploding tuition to runaway grade inflation and theatrically intolerant student activists. But the question remained: What would Yale do about it?” My response: Exploding tuition, runaway grade inflation, and theatrically intolerant student activists (woke true believers for their cherished cause of cultural Marxism). Academia is barely functioning, and Dennis Prager warns that it is near impossible for our youth to be sent their and not be culturally and morally corrupted by the conformist insanity which they are inundated with. Johnson: “ McInnis appeared at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday afternoon to answer that question. “And yet she couldn’t quite say how Yale is going to tackle this problem,” our editors write. On admissions, McInnis defended Yale’s holistic approach against a “test-based system” because Yale doesn’t want undergraduate classes in which “maybe everybody’s going to want to be a physics major.” (We would like to see the meritocratic, test-based system that produces an entire class of physics majors as opposed to a class of students with diverse academic interests.)” My response: Yes, we need to return to a meritocratic, test-based system which all have to compete inside of. Johnson: “Rather, she said, “I want to be sure that we both have physics majors and arts majors, that we have people who play on 1 of our 35 Division I athletic teams or play in our Yale Symphony Orchestra.” Yale has furtively brought back the requirement, starting this fall, that all applicants must submit ACT or SAT scores. But informed observers aren’t buying that Yale has truly reformed its ways. … McInnis’s response to how Yale will tackle grade inflation was similarly dispiriting. While we might think it’s “easy to fix grade inflation,” she said, it actually requires “multiple institutions,” as well as “K-12,” because Yale students arrive on campus so fragile they are actually incapable of receiving anything but an A. Students “have never seen anything other than an A their entire lives, and it can be really challenging for the faculty who are the first trying to give that student that grade that is not an A,” she said. Maybe it’s time for a committee on faculty fragility?” My response: If professors or students are too psychologically or emotionally fragile to not be given an A when the student doesn’t earn it or deserve it, it is time to kick that student and professor out of college. Johnson: “ Were Yale to implement an honest grading regime, she added, “What you would hear from the students are [sic] ‘Well then, you’re putting me at a disadvantage when I apply to medical school. You’re putting me at a disadvantage when I apply for other sorts of graduate and professional schools.’ So that’s why it kind of needs to be a collective conversation.”” My response: The school is not putting an underachiever or low performer at a disadvantage: by their own laziness, they have put themselves at a disadvantage and cannot be coddled, though they are young adults—it is time to grow up and quickly, taking responsibility for one’s poor choices and lackluster academic effort. Johnson: “ We don’t believe for a moment that graduate and professional schools wouldn’t take into account what a Yale GPA really means were the institution to chart its own course, just as Yale itself takes into account what GPAs really mean from more and less rigorous high schools across the country. But that would mean standing up to activist and entitled students, something McInnis evidently isn’t yet prepared to do. Don’t worry, though, there is a committee, and “we will see what comes out of this committee.”” My response: Student activists and entitled students need to grow up and mature, and earn the grade or flunk, full stop. Johnson: “ The Washington Free Beacon awards this performance no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

The Duty

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 02:40:06 +0000

I read many things, and I enjoy Agatha Christie novels. I will quote from her book, Murder Is Easy, and then comment on and develop the theme of her quote.

The murdered doctor’s wife, Mrs. Humbleby warned amateur detect Fitzwilliam that great danger was afoot: “She said, rather unexpectedly, ‘The world is a very wicked place, Mr. Fitzwilliam. Do you know that?’”

My response: Being a Christian and a Victorian, Mrs. Humble by firmly believes in good and evil as real forces at work in the world, at work spiritually, morally, socially, naturally—and that is my view too.

Christie: “Luke was a little surprised. ‘Yes, perhaps that may be.’

She insisted, ‘No, but do you know it? It’s important, that. There’s a lot of wickedness about. One must be prepared – to fight it. John was. He knew. He was on the side of right..’

Luke said gently, ‘I’m sure he was.”

‘He knew the wickedness there was in this place,’ said Mrs. Humbleby.’”

My response: She lays out a moral program which the good Christian is to practice in this Vale Of Tears. She is to believe that evil exists, and that Jesus, God and the good deities lay a moral duty on us to believe such, know such, and to fight such. One is to fight evil, one must be a soldier of God on the side of right, pushing back the darkness and cruelty of evil, for this is the Devil’s world, and we are born sinners. We run in packs, and Satan owns our groups, our group-living, our altruist ethics, so this wickedness is entrenched and institutionalized, widespread, enduring, persistent, almost impossible to dislodge.

Dennis Prager, our wise, decent Jewish elder and mentor, had made a claim nearly identical to the one made by Mrs. Humbleby: That we are not just to be good and loving, but are here to fight evil openly, officially and relentlessly, that is what it means to be good and that may be the primary route to heaven.

I agree with all these views and conclusions and I have incorporated these points within developing my moral system, Mavellonialism.

Now let me point out how clever Satan is: I believe he is most effective when his most ardent followers do not know they are working for him, whose motive is selfless love of humanity, operating and acting to make the world a better place, all for humanity which they do and avow that they love.

The fanatical idealist is cable of utter viciousness and murderous, genocidal violence against those standing in the way of the implementation of his program. This true believer is a lethal, living demon who would be shocked to realize what he is, and how his efforts fail miserably at making the world a much better place.

My conclusion: Yes, fight wickedness, but remain modest, humble and detached as to one’s own capacity to be violent even to kill In the 20^th century, historically unprecedented killing was done in the name of idealism and reform, so this motive to fight evil and do good is easily inverted and one serve Satan rather than fights Satan.

Hoffer's Working And Thinking On The Waterfront June 1958--May 1959, Pages 31-36

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 12:51:20 +0000

I am writing out each paragraph in Eric Hoffer’s book, Working And Thinking On the Waterfront June 1958—May 1959, Pages 31-36. I will comment as I go. Here it is: Hoffer (H after this): “August 27

Eight hours on the same ship. Steady grind all day long, and I had neither the time or the inclination to write a line.

August 27

In the morning on the bus I heard a Negro longshoreman argue that the ‘No Smoking’ signs are put up by the fire insurance companies. Pretty soon they will have ‘No Smoking’ signs inside the house, even in the bedroom. In other countries people smoke wherever they please but here the insurance companies are running things.

I haven’t had a good look at the bay all day. The feeling of being rushed drains the capacity for enjoying things.”

My response: Ever the intuitive genius and philosopher, Hoffer seems right that being rushed drains the capacity for enjoying things. I much endorse and favor our capitalist American economic system, bustling and hard work, but a civilized people, a maverizing people, need to stop and smell the roses some once in awhile too.

H: “In the morning I read an article by Max Nomad ‘Masters Old and New.’ Writing in 1937, he clearly discerns the intelligentsia as the coming elite in both capitalist and non-capitalist countries. But the article is without a hint of the intellectual’s role in history, and the significance of his dramatic comeback in the twentieth century.”

My response: Both Nomad and Hoffer, both Jews (Hoffer an illegal Jewish immigrant from Bavaria to America?), both very isolated intellectuals, separately and independently concluded that intellectuals were dangerous participants in and often rulers of elites controlling society or out to overthrow the existing elite. They love power and dominance and their cruelty corresponds to how far they must go to get and keep accumulated power.

Hoffer the original thinker goes beyond Nomad and suggests that intellectuals paid an unrecognized role in history, and that they coming to the fore in the 20^th century poses real

hazardous conditions, if left unchecked, for the masses everywhere.

I looked up Max Nomad in Wikipedia, and they quote this paragraph which he wrote and which I would like to, as an aside, comment on. Here it is: “I remain a lone-wolf philosophical anarchist whose sympathies go out to the poorest of the poor struggling for more and more of the good things of life. But I feel akin only to those rebellious but politically unattached intellectuals who dream of justice and an equal chance for everybody, but know, as I do, that, given the eternal recurrence of predatory elites, and the incurable ignorance and gullibility of the masses, a privileged and educated minority will always rule and exploit the uneducated majority.[4]”

My response: Note that Nomad is a lone wolf like Hoffer, though he is a reformer and Hoffer is not, at least not politically though he is a moralist.

Nomad is a reformer for bettering the living conditions of the poor and downtrodden, but accurately has appraised wicked, fatalistic human nature as dooming people to the eternal recurrence of predatory elites of all stripes everywhere and always running things and running rough shod over the incurably gullible, ignorance, compliant, masochistic, prideless (lacking the positive pride of self-esteeming) masses. Thus a privileged and educated minority will always rule and exploit the uneducated majoirty.

Actually the masses as individuating anarchists supercitizens will break the recurring, unjust pattern.

H: “August 28

Eight hours on the same ship. We follow the ship tomorrow to Alaneda. The hard work during the last three days is affecting my stomach. Something gets tied up in a knot when I strain my guts. I shall try to straighten it out tonight by drinking hot tee and relaxing.

August 29

Finally finished the ship. Eight and a half hours in Alameda. I am weary and on edge. I must slow down or even stop work for a week.

I must get hold of a biography of Bentham. His transition from a preoccupation with the all-seeing eye (panopticon0 to the promotion of the general welfare is an instance of the intimate connection between the intimate connection between the intellectual’s idealism and his innermost craving for a role of supervision (Vision and Supervision).”

My response: We are to beware of and always oppose idealists promoting their program or cause for through its acceptance in society, they seek to grab concentrated power to rule the masses. Same old story.

H: “September 1

I just read the introduction to Men of Words. It is not bad. I also copied Sections 8 to 11. I have so far 40 pages of manuscript. The things is crude and fragmented, bit it is a beginning.

September 3

Eight hours on the Arizona Maru at Pier 24. An easy day, and I am off tomorrow. My head worked in spasms. The beginning of Part 2 must tackle the problem of the optical milieu for literature. I shall trace the chain of events which led to the appearance of written literature in Egypt, Sumer, Palestine, Greece, and China. But the main thing is to outline the conditions optimal for literary creativeness.

After all, the chief value of history is not that it helps us understand the present or decipher the future but that it furnishes us with clues concerning the manner in which man is affected by his natural and social environment. We cannot experiment with humanity, but history is a record of how man reacted to variety of conditions.”

My response: I approve of and concur with Hoffer that history can offer us clues and perhaps a record of how human should react to change and not react to change.

H: “September 4

I have said it again and again. The only thing that will cure the Negro’s ills is that the Negro community perform something that will win it the admiration of the world. Yet it is difficult to see what this something might be. A Negro revolt in Mississippi; a desperate battle to the last man, a Negro Alamo. Or an excellent negro school for song and dance. Or an excellent trade school. Or a model organization for mutual help. It is the slow, hard way, and the indications are that the Negro will not take it.”

My response: Is it not that blacks cannot collectively or individually step up their game: they can if they will and I hope all people of all races and ethnic groups collectively and individually step up their game even more so, choosing to foster individuation among the young.

H: “He would rather derive pride from an identification with the achievement of colored races elsewhere. Yet I doubt whether even a triumphant Ghana could ever be to the Negro in America what Israel has been to the Jews.

The crucial question is whether the Negro will ever give up his alibi of discrimination.”

My response: Alibis hold all down and back, not just blacks. The individualist is one who shreds all of his alibis along the path of discovering and realizing his identity and talents. This blacks must do to of they will be made whole.

H: “

You do not give up the imperishable advantage of an alibi for the short-lived exhilaration of achievement. (Our successes only buoy us for a short time and then we must evolve further to remain self-esteeming, Ed Says.) There is trouble ahead. For the less justified the Negro’s alibi the more passionately will he cling to it, and the louder he will voice his grievances.

Were I a genuine American I would believe in the possibility of the automatic absorption of twenty million Negroes into the body of American life; that almost overnight, without special effort or an intermediate phase, the Negro in America can become a human being first and only secondly a Negro.”

My response: Over thirty million blacks will not be fully absorbed into the body of American life until the black in America can be a human being first (As a human being a person is a unique person who could maverize if she willed to be a person separate and distinct from their racial and ethnic identification.

H: “September 16

Seven and a half hours discharging cargo at Pier 17. It was very hot but work did not seem irksome. One of the reasons is that I got a good night’s sleep, and my partner (Juan Gonzales) though not much of a worker is a pleasant person to be with.

In the morning while eating breakfast, it occurred to me that the equivalent of a Khrushchev in the West is to be found not among the politicians but among the businessmen. A Communist regime is capitalism gone berserk. It is incredible how many insights one obtains while viewing a ruling Communist party as a company of merchant adventurers lodge in the body of a backward country.

During the day a winch driver I knew only by sight came over to talk. He started out with the union but immediately passed over to his own affairs. He must have been married for a long time since he has two grandchildren. His wife now is partly paralyzed, and as he talked I could sense the despair and bitterness simmering inside him. The must have been slovenly, lazy and self-centered even while she was well, and now paralyzed she is a millstone around his neck.”

My response: It is often observed and commented that we never know the private hell and suffering another person is enduring or struggling against, or perhaps is being defeated by. All we can do is commiserate, be a good friend, and pray for them, maverick to make sure we don’t make a mess of our lives, so we are then a burden to our family, friends, loved ones and the taxpayer.

H: “September 29

What is the optimal milieu for creativeness in literature, art, music, etc.? It is a milieu that rewards excellence. Cosmo the Elder reverenced talent the way the pious revere saints.”

My response: My version of what would be the optimal milieu for creativeness being fostered, rewarded, encouraged and promoted would be a milieu, familial, cultural and social, which identifies the self-realizing individual as the primary locus and vehicle for the creation of excellence, brilliance and originality in society. A society which bolsters the individuating individual as its norm, its mode of behaving and acting for its average, typical citizen, that is a society which rewards and reveres excellence, and the people mostly will live up to high high, noble standard of expected behavior and performance.

H: “When the Arab civilization was at its height, the Ommiad caliphs gave poets and scholars precedence over officials, and some of them were governors of provinces. To Louis XIV a good sentence was a major achievement.

In an optimal milieu there is considerable leisure. When the people are engrossed in some feverish pursuit so that they are neither bored, nor dream dreams, nor nurse grievances, creativeness will be anemic.”

My response: I believe Hoffer is an authority and expert of the first rank as to setting up a milieu optimum for fostering creativeness, but I believe a deeper motive would lead each of the masses, if they learn to esteem themselves, think for themselves and choose to maverize, then they are optimally motivated for internal reasons to take advantage of the ideal milieu Hoffer has discovered.

Finally, an optimal milieu is one in which the creative are in close intercourse with each other—hating, loving, envying, admiring; where faces flush, hearts flutter, and minds swell with the passion to rival and emulate.

September 30

The Embarcadero Freeway is building rapidly, yet one rarely sees more than three workingmen on the job. There are, of course, more than three, but the organization of the work is such that no one stands around. The same holds true on other jobs. Though it would be difficult to prove that the American workingman is the best in the world, it is nevertheless true that the American way of doing things is determined largely by the American workingman’s attitude toward work.’

My response: America, with its capitalist economy, its individualism, its love of working and its vitality for life, fostered a work culture of being organized, resourceful, innovative and productive working men and working women. That was California in 1958, not in 2026. See what the wrong values have wrought there, and everywhere in America.

H: “I do not know how it is with workingmen elsewhere, but I cannot see an American workingman fitting in and feeling at home anywhere outside this country.

I am beginning to believe that I shall never finish the book on the intellectuals. I am making no headway and the outline I have done does not help much. It is a peculiar situation: the material I have collected on the intellectual can be used in connection with all manner of topics but not with the intellectual as such.”

The Balance

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 02:39:42 +0000

I think the individuator, on average, would be a person of solid common sense, and moderate judgment. One way to construe this would be that he would be idealistic, ever out to improve things, all while living in the world, allowing his practical sense and material needs to be bet without guilt or flinching or refusing to work for his daily bread.

They Go Together

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 01:40:53 +0000

There are lots of interesting Prager U interviews now in late 2026, and with Dennis at reduced capacity, Marissa Streit has come to the fore. She was interviewing someone recently, and one of them repeated a comment from the late, great Charlie Kirk that hit me like a ton of bricks, as original and profound,. Kirk had said that faith and freedom go together, and that just intuitively seems correct to me.

God is a God of love, and gave us free will to worship De if we will, as we will—though there are consequences for our choices. God had made it a metaphysical axiom for reality, likely for all eternity that faith and freedom are connected, and go intimately together, that we cannot have one without the other. I would throw in love and reasoning as well for good measure.

It seems to me that if faith, freedom, love and reasoning go together, then adding egoist-altruist ethics together should bind them together even more tightly.

Imagine how free and healthy and equalizing it would be if this togetherness principle guided our political relations, informal and formal, ad hoc and structural.

Where Values Take Root

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 18:30:56 +0000

Where do values take root? Where do they come from? The answer may be complex and multifaceted, and it probably is, but I am supplying three answers, rather a simple response at that.

God is the great deity, A Being whose near perfect nature is love and spiritual and moral goodness, all in one and all that the same time. Humans being born sinful and fragile, but still of free will empowerment and endowment, lack the instincts to know what to value, what to choose, and how to act, based on their feelings, their intuition, their instincts. These rational beings require a moral code—preferably egoism—s standard against which to measure, to compare and contrast potential moral choices to realize the right choices to make and how to act. God is the first and primary source of these moral codes like the Ten Commandments.

Nature is the second source and of secondary importance to providing people with instinctual or hunch-engendered preference as to how to carry on, how to choose.

Nature can also serve as a moral laboratory for humans to study to know how to live. For example in Switzerland, if a squirrel gathers and stores or hides nuts so it has food to survive the winter, the farmer could observe these behavior and conclude that he should set aside farm foodstuffs so his family will not starve to death in the pending winter on his doorstep.

Third, from society and/or history we can observe how our ancestors lived, and if we were smart, we could learn what to do and how to live to flourish and be happy, and what is the outcome of ignoring or flouting these wise practices by ancestors.

Hoffer's Working And Thining On The Waterfront, June 1958-May 1959, Pages 25-30

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 14:56:40 +0000

I am writing out and comment Eric Hoffer’s entire book, Working And Thinking On The Waterfront June 1958 May 1959. Here I write out and comment on Pages 25-30. Here it is: Hoffer (H after this): “July 15

5 A.M. It is wonderfully good that I don’t have to go to work. A four-day stretch of work gives a special flavor to a free morning. Come to think of it: no particular place or particular day has ever had a special flavor for me. No homesickness for a place, and no looking forward to a holiday.”

My response: It saddens me that a genius and great soul like Hoffer had no place to go for holidays, belonging everywhere and nowhere like other fellow loner-giants (like I am). It causes great pain to such a great soul, and it is a longing for companionship that never subsides and is a gnawing emptiness which he must abide.

Still, if he can handle it, it spurs him to self-realize, and the more he individuates, the greater is his expressed genius and singularity, and the greater is his unpopularity and complete loss of social standing but we all pay a price for the choices we make.

H: “The situation in Iraq is not yet clear. Yesterday five thousand marines landed near Beirut. No one knows how the Russians will react. The idea occurred to me that the present confused goings-on in the Near East made good sense to members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. According to them, all that is happening in the world at present is a prelude tot he battle of Armageddon which will take place on the plain of Jezreeel. The return of the Jews to Israel has for its chief purpose the readying of the battlefield. The kibbutzim which now dot the plain of Jezreel are clearing and leveling the ground, and draining the swamps. Movements of troops, whether in the frozen expanse of Russia or in the heart of America, are preliminary stages in the unfolding of the drama. Yesterday’s landing of five thousand marines is a meaningful development. I wonder how many hypotheses which make sense in nuclear physics are more valid than the meaningful hypothesis of Jehovah Witnesses.”

My response: Intellectuals have noted elsewhere that Hoffer was no neoconservative about Americans policing the world or engaging in foreign wars. He approved of fighting Communism abroad, but also was ambivalent about our foreign wars, as witnessed by his uneasiness about the wisdom of sending thousands of Marines to Beirut in the summer of 1958.

He also was afraid of Russia and America stumbling into World War II and a nuclear holocaust, thus his wry remark as to whether the absurd hypothesis given by the Jehovah Witnesses was any more absurd than the shaky, reckless, wildly optimistic expectations of nuclear arsenal scientists and technicians.

H: “July 22

Seven and a half hours on the Lurline at Pier 35. The depression of spirit which weighed on me last night continues. I slept badly and felt sleepy all day.

It is questionable whether total integration and removal of discrimination would cure the American Negro of that which ails him, and leave him without a grievance.”

My response: Hoffer wants blacks and all Americans to set aside all alibis, most of which are socially constructed with iron-clad linking of the individual’s identity and prospects to grouped others characterized as victimizers and victims, all made plausible by crying about social justice spouting altruistic-collectivistic morality, and seeing all people and problems based upon each and every person’s group identities. Such views are not only lies and unrealistic, they offer no solutions to the suffering of blacks or of any human being.

Deep down, the Good Spirits are self-actualized individualists, and they expect the same from us if we would be successful in this world and the next. Blacks or anyone else, on their own, have the innate capacity and must internally assemble and gather as an integrated whole, the self-esteem, will, confidence, courage, energy and perseverance to bootstrap themselves out of any quagmire they happen to be mired in, were born into, or stumbled into. Crawl out of the swamp on your own and get moving, or die in the cesspit. At bottom it is that simple, and that difficult. If you refuse to crawl out of the pit, your immortal soul may be in danger, and you have laid a moral and spiritual curse upon your children too, but exposing them to an immoral, demonic or irreligious upbringing.

One must repudiate all justifications for not succeeding in decent, minimally discriminatory, fair, equal America where hard work and educating the self can lead to one become prosperous if not rich if one will work smart, long and hard of equal, fantastic opportunity.

Hoffer knew the bulk of the blame and responsibility for black under-performance in America lay with blacks themselves and the victimization-peddling others using blacks to get and keep political and social power (the power of powerlessness); blacks and their Progressive, racist handlers are the ones holding them back, not whitey, American societal laws or injustice.

For his hurling the truth at Leftists bigots all those years ago, Hoffer was smeared as a racist, a lie and a despicable stain upon the reputation of this fine, wise man.

H: “A Negro minority in a white world could perhaps never become wholesome.”

My response: The only way blacks or anyone in America to become wholesome is to embrace Mavellonialism and the American Way full stop. With the right culture and values, the ascendancy of most blacks in America would zoom into the stratosphere.

H: “In our union the Negro has total equality. There is no discrimination in the assignment of jobs, in earnings, in election to office. There are many Negro dispatchers, and a Negro business agent. There are Negroes in the interunion leadership. Considering that most of them are recent arrivals, and hence low in seniority, they have achieved much without having to fight for it. Yet when you hear them talk at our meetings you would think that our union is the darkest South. The Negro living in a white world hates his black skin, and probably agrees with the prevailing prejudice against him.”

My response: Hoffer elsewhere has often pointed out that when a people suffer from racism and discrimination, they often secretly agree with their attackers and accusers that they should hate their black skin or whatever. Then the haters get rewarded perversely for their blood libel-level lies against their victims: when their victims, in the way they act and self-identify, agree with the slanderous attacks upon them and live down to the low standard of performance their detractors accuse them of being and doing.

Their self-esteem plummets to new lows, and the victims then refuse to assimilate, and to adopt often better cultural and moral valuers of the majority/haters culture and moral code. They then mimic in non-action and under-performing the stereotypical caricature of themselves that the lying bigots assigned to them. Then the bad behavior becomes endemic and epidemic in the targeted group, a lived reality, that never had to be, and never needs to be perpetuated into the future, but probably will be. For it is now that group’s traditional way of life. People are lazy and basically evil, so once a bad way of life infects a community, an ethnic or racial group, it is the bad way of life that is carried forth by the people being destroyed by it, generation after generation. Never underestimate people’s refusal to reform themselves, to accept wise guidance, or to ignore God’s ministrations.

This lousy kind of conservatism is near impossible to eradicate because its victims cling to it, their cultural addiction to poisonous, ruinous values. People do not like themselves, and secretly seek to punish themselves and maximize their personal suffering, and it works well too. By poor choices and ignoring God’s moral laws about how to conduct their lives, people sin and suffer and their lives are a living hell because they will to continue to sin.

We need to tear up no one and allow no one to tear us up, and this way we can feel good about ourselves, and borrow superior cultural values from wherever because we do not care what the holders of those values say about us, for we just objectively weigh and scrutinize their values, and adapt what is useful or beneficial for ourselves. I think this approach would help blacks, native Americans and other minorities to assimilate into the wonderful, superior white culture, benefiting themselves and no longer being a drag on the entire country, holding us down and back.

H: “But there are remarkable exceptions. I know several Negroes on the waterfront who as workers and human beings have no match. They are gentle, quiet, conscientious, and highly competent. I would give much to have their life histories—how they managed to go through life without being tainted and blemished.

August 4

Five hours on the Mikagesan Maru at Pier 23. I did some composing during the short shift. The reason for today’s composing was partly that we had hardly anything to do, since it was all heavy lifts, and partly that I had nothing to read.

It is important that I should note the difficulty and pain I experience in writing. It is incredible how vague is my memory of past difficulties. It is only now, when I am beginning to go through it again, that there is a revival of faded memories. Since the publishing of a couple of books I have been cast in the role of a writer and without being aware of the utter absurdity of it. I have come to expect things to flow out of my finger tips. The truth is I have to hammer out each sentence, and must hang on to an idea for ages if aught worthwhile is to be written.

Last evening I sat down at the table to write and could make no headway at all. The irritation was such that I had to dress and get out of my room. I drifted to a cheap movie and saw an old Western (The Far Horizon). It was eleven before I went to bed and I was up at four-thirty.

August 15

Nine hours on the Dutch ship Batjan. As easy a day as one could wish and no sort of unpleasantness. Still the depression this evening is as black as yesterday. I must face the fact that the chief reason for the depression is that I cannot compose.”

My response: When one is as successful and ingenious of a writer and philosopher as Hoffer had become by 1958, he had dedicated his whole life to writing philosophy, so for such an ambitious intellectual, suffering severe writer’s block, would or could very depressing indeed.

H: “August 16

Still on the Batjan at Pier 23. Today I somehow managed to compose and make some progress on ‘Intellectuals as Schoolmasters.’ In Jewish history between the return from the Babylonian captivity and the destruction of the second temple the schoolmasters prevailed against kings, nobles, and priests. The result was a school possessing a nation rather than a nation possessing a school. In China, too, during the period of the contending states, the schoolmen were on the march. Confucius, Mo Ti, and their disciples felt themselves qualified as rulers. The schoolmaster Mo Ti organized his disciples into an army of experts in all departments of government. In Greece, schoolmaster Plato maintained that cities will never have rest until schoolmasters become kings. All through the ages schoolmasters seem to have had the delusion that they could order society as readily as they could a classroom. But it is probably the twentieth century that will be seen in retrospect as the golden age of the schoolmaster.

In all contemporary mass movements schoolmasters played a vital and leading role. I am willing to bet that more than half of the leaders in Africa are ex-schoolmasters. In the Nazi movement grammar-school teachers played a prominent and fateful role. Now and then I am inclined to think that the passion to teach, which is far more primitive and powerful than the passion to learn, is a factor in the rise of mass movements. For what do we see in the Communist world. Half of the globe has been turned into a vast schoolroom with a thousand million pupils at the mercy of a band of maniacal schoolmasters.”

My response: These two paragraphs are Eric Hoffer at his best. It seems that these nouns schoolmaster and intellectual are interchangeable. There are several salient points raised here by Hoffer, all excellent, all that should make the masses afraid. First, schoolmasters have a bottomless taste for power, to instruct, to control their subjects or students as part of the elite running the government. Conclusion: Never allow intellectuals or schoolmasters to run society.

Second, Intellectuals actually believe they are superior to the masses, thus justifying as compassionate their sick, twisted power-addiction to rule others as demonstrated by their insatiable desire to lecture and think they have all the answers.

We cannot be individuators unless we seek to learn humbly knowing we do not know it all while remaining curious to learn more. The desire to teach is seductive a powerful inducement, tool and rationalization for elitists to grab and maintain control and direction of the masses. Conclusion: The masses need to be intellectual as individuating individuals, and to maverize, to learn, allowing almost no one for very long to instruct them, or they will take up arms and cast of their schoolmasters and schoolmistresses.

Third, Hoffer has aptly identified that schoolmasters are fanatical and deeply entrenched in all mass movements. Another reason woke classrooms and institutions, run by schoolmasters, become factories for rearing millions of selfless, true-believing little zombies is that they have been broken and brainwashed by the intellectuals running the educational hierarchy.

Parents need to heed Dennis Prager by pulling these kids out of schools and colleges which are postmodernist Marxist child-wreckers and home school the kids, or send them to private schools which parents control. Conclusion: Deinstitutionalize society and education bureaucracies, and if a schoolmaster is part of a mass movement, head the other way.

Fourth, as fanatics the schoolmasters are cruel utterly vicious maniacs Conclusion: Fight them to the death and never let them run things, and never obey if they do.

Fifth, it chills me to think of how, since about 2010 intellectuals and professors plotted to take over the institutions—especially if huger learning—and then take over all institutions. Schoolmasters and or intellectuals wish to rule, teach and prescribe—such is their totalitarian mindset.

Conclusion: Neither America or the West is out of the woods, and the cultural Marxists may yet carry the day.

H: “August 17

Still at Pier 23. Nine hours. Fishing fever has seized many of the people working on this ship. The striped bass are running, and they have been catching real big ones. The result was that half of the time we were short-handed on a big pile of drums. The strain and irradiation combined to make it an unpleasant day. Of course I didn’t write a line.

August 24

Finished loading the Hawaiian Packer. The remarkable thing is that I am less tired after a s0x-day retch of fairly hard work than after I have often been after a one-day job.

What bothers me is that for the first time in my life I am becoming a regular worker, and what’s more I am beginning to feel like one. I wonder whether my preoccupation with the role of the intellectual, and my antagonism towards him, have driven me to act the typical workingman.

During the day I got to thinking about the dovetailing and mutuality of inclinations. This came up in connection with the intellectual’s need for pride. Being without an unequivocal sense of usefulness and worth, the intellectual has a vital need for pride, which he usually derives from an identification with some compact group, be it a nation, a church, or a party.”

My recommendation for intellectuals—or anyone for that matter—that has a desperate need for pride or a sense of self-worth, which they lack and cannot stand to be conscious without, lacking it because they do not individuate, do not work with their hands, are not commercially active out in the world creating wealth, products and services of need and demand; they do not feel a healthy pride int themselves for accomplishment and creativity--is that they work some with their hands and maverize—then they could genuinely feel good about themselves, and no need to chase after the empty tainted substituent of facile collective pride.

H: “The idea of a chosen people has been an invention of intellectuals rather than of domineering men of action. But the promotion of a compact, centralized social body not only satisfies the intellectual’s need for pride but also offers him opportunities for leading, directing, supervising, managing, and planning—pursuits tailored to the needs and talents of the scribe from the first invention of writing.

August 25

Eight hours on the Norwegian ship Evanger at Pier 41. The cargo was cocoa beans and coffee. It was hard work part of the time, but I had a good partner. I began to write the introduction to Men of Words. It should be brief.

Just now I’m stuck with the beginning of Part 2. I need information about the earliest examples of written literature in Sumer, Egypt and China.”

An Updated Defintion

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 02:49:41 +0000

Here is a definition for egoism, which I came up with yesterday, 9/8/26: an egoist is a person inisting that you keep your cotton-pickin hands off of his power, his wealth, his property, his life, his mind, his freedom of expression, and his liberty.

He also promises to so treat you in return.

Dolly Parton

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:43:09 +0000

Today on Facebook (9-7-26), I saw a posting about Dolly Parton that she knew even as a child that Jesus loved her and that through God all things are possible.

Jesus does love all humans, and this fine woman just knew it by intuition, and yes through God all things are possible. Miracles occur all the time, though what we pray for is never guaranteed to come about as we demand, for that is magic (coercing supernatural outcomes which we dictate). If God wills that our prayers will be answered as we wish and expect, it can occur, no guarantees ever, though.

I Believe I Was rRght

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:04:40 +0000

I have been warning the public for about five years that woke Leftists/Democrats/Progressives were the political expression of a deeper, older, more sinister and revolutionary ideology, Marxist Postmodernism. Below I will copy and paste an article from 9/7/26 Townhall.com, which I believes proves I was right. If one studies cultural Marxism as a mass movement on the march in America in 2026 it explains why Democrats think, choose and act as they do.

This article today is written by Rachel Alexander, and is called How The Left Turned Into A Cult. She refers to it as a cult, which is nearly equivalent or synonymous with my identifying Leftism as an ideological mass movement.

Here is Rachel (R after this): “Years ago, no one would have imagined the Democrats weakening laws against child molesters, promoting men to compete against women in biological sports and putting conservatives behind bars for their political views. Now they blindly accept it, with their only defense turning the debate around and bashing President Donald Trump (TDS).”

My response: These true believers no longer hide their fanaticism, and are proud of themselves.

R: “Cults are defined as top-down, with high control, us-versus-them thinking, and punishment of doubt. Democrats who disagree are considered heretics and purged from the party. A classic example is the ostracism of Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA). Because he opposed the Democrat Party on some issues, he is now shunned and has almost been pushed out of the party. A poll from Quinnipiac found that most Pennsylvania Democrats want him out. He is not up for reelection until 2028, but three Democratic members of Congress — Brendan Boyle, Chris Deluzio, Summer Lee — and others are already floated as challengers.

Even though Fetterman votes with Democrats 88 percent of the time, that’s not enough because they are policing beliefs, not votes.

How did they get to this stage? It’s like heating up a frog slowly in water; it happened so gradually Democrats didn’t realize it. With the mainstream media covering for them every step of the way (only 3.7 percent of journalists are Republicans), Democrats saw only positive spin, which ignored how crazy their party was becoming.

Consequently, there is very little division within the Democrat Party, unlike the Republican Party. They cleverly line up candidates for races that rarely have viable primary opponents, unlike Republicans who think individually and don’t tell each other what to do. So the Republicans end up wasting massive amounts of money against each other during the primaries, leaving them with less money for the general election opposing Democrats.”

My response: She describes the behaviors of ideological-cultural true believers eloquently with examples. Notice how she praises Republicans for thinking individually and not telling each other what to do. That is generally true, but there are RNOS who need to grow a pair and hang tight with a program that conservatives agree to unite on and back to hold back the Democrats who are utterly united and speak with one voice, one mind.

R: “The Democratic Socialists are taking over the party, increasing the authoritarian tilt. Avowed communists are running for office and winning. A hispanic gay Democrat friend of mine told me he is unwelcome at Democrat events in Arizona because he is perceived as too moderate; he doesn’t use the jargon of the Democratic Socialists, adopting stylistic lingo like talking with a barrio accent. Several far-left Democrats attempting to win offices in the Arizona Legislature this year ran on a platform of “No Safe Seats,” primarying moderate Democrats.

The left now conducts violent riots everywhere, especially on college campuses, inner cities and ICE facilities. They celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They want violent criminals released from prison, including illegal aliens.

The Democrat elite culture enforces their package of “sacred silence” — systemic racism, “gender-affirming” care as settled, “climate change” as a moral emergency that ends tradeoffs, Jan. 6 as the only serious threat to the republic — that is non-negotiable. Data that cuts the other way, such as crime spikes, the dangers of medical-transition evidence, pandemic school-closure costs, and the atrocities of illegal immigration, is not weighed; it is labeled as bigotry or “misinformation.”

Like cults, they use loaded language and exclude anyone who diverges from this Orwellian groupthink. They have changed the language to force their viewpoints into it: Latinx, “birthing persons,” “equity” (not equality), “undocumented,” “gender-affirming,” and “mostly peaceful” are now common. This is how cults shrink thought, because if you cannot say “woman,” you cannot argue about women’s sports.”

My response: With their loaded language enforced on all members, they guarantee totally internal conformity and unity. The free will and independent thinking and strong personality of each of these submitting, enthusiastic true believers have vanished and these empty souls, these breathing flesh-and-blood ghouls are a formidable monster speaking with one voice.

R: “Similar to Maoist “struggle sessions,” Democrats demand public apologies for old jokes or votes, known as “ritual confessions.” The point is not truth; it is submission.

They control who you may read and talk to, through big tech blocking and shadowbanning conservative points of view (thank goodness Elon Musk bought Twitter, so there is now one big tech platform that doesn’t ensure one monolithic political view).

Manichean cosmology justifies using radical language to discredit the opposing side. To Democrats, Republicans are considered evil and illegitimate, fascists, a “threat to democracy” and racists by structure.

The end justifies the means to today’s Democrats. They pressure big tech and large corporations, treat courts as illegitimate when they lose and utilized COVID-19 emergency powers that outlasted the era.

They sit around in secret meetings plotting how to take Republicans down with lawfare, concocting legal schemes that don’t follow the law — but by judge-shopping, they can ensure sympathetic rulings. They pretend the targeted Republicans are being prosecuted for odd violations of the law, not their politics, in order to fool the public. The mainstream media dutifully reports this spin.

The few Democrats who have left the party now understand that they were in a cult. Some became red-pilled due to COVID-19; the lockdowns and vaccine mandates opened their eyes. I’ll never forget the huge number of nurses who started following me on X during COVID. Fetterman says his values did not change; the party did.

This should come as no surprise since Democrats are the party of groups — minorities, LGBTQ, unions, etc. — whereas Republicans are the party of individual rights. Republicans value free thought and debate. Democrats treat everyone collectively, with their special interest groups making the decisions for all. “

My response: Rachel writes that the Democrats are the party of groups whereas Republicans are the party of individual rights. They are a mass movement, and there are no individuals inside their cult, and their cause is run by the elite with totalitarian clout.

R: “Democrats used to claim to be the party of free thinking years ago. The ACLU was formed to protect fringe viewpoints. But all of that has disappeared, and the left doesn’t even use that type of language anymore. The ACLU only defends fringe left-wing views now, with rare, minor exceptions. Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz was the epitome of the old-style classical liberal. He’s since seen the light and left the Democrat Party.

How far will it go? The left now openly acknowledges they want to destroy the country and tear it all down to be rebuilt from scratch. Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won her Democrat primary and now faces a Nov. 3, 2026 general election for New York’s 13th congressional district, is co-founder of a group that called for “nothing short of the total collapse” of the “American empire,” with the goal to “eradicate America” and “Western civilization.”

This is how communists come into power: total allegiance to the cult, with any dissent swiftly and brutally punished. It will be terrifying to see how far they get.”

My response: God bless and save America, the greatest country in the world. If the Democrats destroy America as they fervently plan to do if they can get enough power and control to complete their Communist revolution here, then humanity might go down too. It seems as if an evil spirit is controlling the Progressives now.

A New Definition

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 22:20:14 +0000

Here is a new or latests definition of moderation which I offer the reader, though it need not contradict or negate any previous definition.

There is an old saw the perfect is the enemy of good, and that is a definition of moderation or is quite tautological as to its meaning.

We never want to strive for perfection because that it is godly gift or status, and it might even be blasphemous to strive to be perfect, to rival or compete with, let alone match or surpass the benevolent deities.

Nonetheless, the good deities and the Good Spirits want all of us to self-realize or constantly self-perfect every day until we die. We are self-perfecting when we do our divinely designated job and self-perfect, both God and each us knowing full well that aiming for or attaining perfection is never the goal for a human being of limited talent, mortal and finite. Seeking self-improvement will be a level of excellent performance that will suffice for us mere mortals. That we can do and do well if we will to so live and stay at it.

Still, we should avoid being nothing, or destroying and spreading chaos, poverty, hatred and unnecessary suffering in the world, never seeking or spreading imperfection in the world.

We should seek to make ourselves, others and the world better, and a life of heroic self-improvement is just the ticket: it is a high standard, but not an unreasonably high standard, and it is a moderate goal, a moderated level of achievement for any individuator.

Hoffer's Working And Thinking On The Waterfront, Pages 19-24

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 03:03:06 +0000

I am typing out and commenting on Eric Hoffer’s journal, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront, June, 1958-Nay, 1959, Pages 19-24’ Here it is:

Hoffer (H after this): “July 3

Worked the same ship the same place. A cold gale is just now blowing outside and the world is lost in a fog.

More talk with the Slavonians. As I said, they are extremely competent people. I found that most of them built their own houses, have small vegetable gardens, and each has a well-appointed workshop in the basement. I cannot see how people of their kind back in the Old Country need a totalitarian government to tell them what to do.”

My response: Amen.

H: “Even the most perfect central planning could not achieve anything approaching what these people manage to do on their own.

Returning to talk of the Old Country, I remarked that there is nothing to prevent them from getting together and re-creating somewhere in California a replica of the village they came from. They are all of them well off, and it should not be impossible to obtain the required financing from a bank or even a government agency. One of them said: ‘It can’t be done. The air here is not clear. Even in the mountains there is gas and smoke. In the Old Country the air is sweet.

July 6

Nine hours of the Chilean ship Almagro in Encinal. Quite a number of people on the Chile ship look like intellectuals. I don’t think they are passengers. In several Latin-American countries the intellectuals go not only into teaching and civil service but also into the army. This is probably one reason why army officers are meddling in government. It could be that a lack of employment prompted some intellectuals to become sailors on merchant ships.

I am reading An American in India by Saunders Redding. The author is a Negro American sent by the State Department to India. It is a perplexing and depressing book. A sick man writing about sick people. When facing the most preposterous questions and defamatory insinuations, he remains speechless. He tells us that he identifies himself with America, yet here is a man of words without words. The whole performance leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I suspect that for an American audience this is probably the most anti-Indian book they could read.

July 7

Same ship, same place. Six hours. In the morning I took the key-system bus to Encinal. As I walked down the several blocks from the bus stop to the docks I was impressed by the gardens in front of the houses. The houses, of average size, are fairly old, yet in excellent shape. The people living here are mostly workingmen. The sight of the gardens and houses turned my mind to the question of maintenance. It is the capacity for maintenance which is the best test for the vigor and stamina of a society.”

My response: Hoffer the genius and truth-finder is especially prescient in predicting that a people that take care of their houses and gardens might well represent a society of vigorous citizens with stamina and staying power. Maintenance is a Western habit or skill, and somehow it is intertwined with individualism, moral moderation, self-discipline and industriousness, perhaps even fostering creativity, as well as complementing the creative urge.

H: “Any society can be galvanized for awhile to build something, but the will and skill to keep things in good repair day in, day out is fairly rare. At present, neither in the Communist countries nor in the newly created nations is there a pronounced capacity for maintenance. I wonder how true it is that after the Second World War the countries with the best maintenance were the first to recover. I am thinking of Holland, Belgium, and Western Germany. I don’t know how it is in Japan. The Incas had an intense awareness of maintenance. They assigned whole villages and tribes to keep roads, bridges and buildings in good repair. I read somewhere that in ancient Rome a man was disqualified as a candidate for office because his garden showed neglect.”

My response: What is precious and refreshing about Hoffer is he highlights was is vitally important, a concept like maintenance as a prime moral value.

H: “Saunder Redding’s book os worth reading for its detailed recording of the talk of the Indian intellectuals both young and old. He reproduces minutely their arguments, rudeness, sarcasm, and self-righteousness. Since he seldom essayed a rebuttal his recording comes out sharp and forceful.”

My response: Hoffer is mad at Redding for failing to defend America, the America Hoffer loved and was proud of.

H: “July 8

Finished the job on the Chilean ship Almagro at Pier 19. Ten hours. The work was easy but I felt quite weary at the end of the day. My weariness generates in me bad temper, but this shows itself only when I return to my room. After a glass of hot tea and some fruit, and particularly after writing a few lines, the irritation fades more or less.

Saunder Redding’s book is a fascinating puzzle. His tongue-tiedness in the face of the crudest slanders and insults might be merely a continuation of the technique he perfected in the face of slights and insults in his own America. I doubt whether the ability to identify oneself with America is proportionate to one’s acceptance by fellow Americans. There is an intense patriotism among the rejected—inmates of prisons, and migratory workers living on the edge of subsistence.”

My response: It occurred to me that if it is true that the rejected might exhibit an intense patriotism, but their motive would be to demonstrate to the in-crowd slighting and debasing them, that they, the rejected are still loyal, intensely patriotic, longing to fit in and belong.

H: “The question is whether a Negro intellectual can feel himself truly and wholly an American. I don’t know. The Negroes I know can be fiercely American. I once heard a Negro longshoreman, while observing a Hindu crew on a British ship, pour forth his scorn on the way poor people are treated in the cold world outside America.

As I said that fact that Redding rarely hit back or even argued enabled him to record faithfully all that the Indian intellectuals threw at him, and by doing so he has produced the most anti-Indian book I know of.”

My response: Notice how Hoffer emphasizes the hypocrisy and double-standards evinced by the Hindu intellectuals so sneeringly anti-American, feeling so superior—all the while the Hindu crew of sailors were mistreated aboard their ship by their British masters.

H: “July 9

I had several good hours with Lili and the boy. He is growing up fast and becoming reasonable. He ate a frozen boysenberry tart which he greatly enjoyed. For the first time I saw him attack food methodically—eating first the loose berries on the plate and, after cleaning them up, tackling the tart. I savor being with him the way I savor food and drink. Lili is still herself and nothing can go wrong. Everything we do is adequate, everything we say meaningful, everything we see memorable,

July 10

There is something in the air. You come to expect America to fail whether it be in the launching of a satellite, the exhibition of the Brussels Fair, the interventions in the Near East, the revival of the slumping economy. We are not in the van, and we are not going anywhere in a hurry. To those in the van much is forgiven, their blemishes and shortcomings are temporary, since they are growing and rushing into the future. But to those that are not going anywhere, the present (made up of vulgarity, senseless haste, juvenility, dishonesty) is all there is. You are aware all of a sudden that the country is in dire need of an exceptional leader. The need is an unhealthy symptom.”

My response: Hoffer never believed in the need for an exceptional leader, nor did I, having arrived at this same conclusion on my own, I rather see as exceptional common people, most or all individuators.

H: “July 12

Pier 38. One o’clock start. The five-hour shift (1-6)passed without the least strain. Reading Ivan Bunin’s little book Memories and Portraits reinforced my conviction that life with writers, artists, and intellectuals in general is most likely charged with envy and malice. It could be that the air thus charged stimulates the creative flow. Yet what a strained and miserable life it would be.”

My response: My interpretation of the small Hofferian paragraph above is that if intellectuals run in a pack, their originality and creativity will be stymied or less than it could otherwise be. Rudeness, vicious competing, ugly struggling for rank and prestige, backed by and riddled with malice, envy and ill-will. My conclusion is that such vying, miserable, vicious, second-rate intellectuals and artists (2nd rate not because they have gone as far as they can go but because they choose to quit growing and developing as intellectuals and artists, settling for running in a pack because they are joiners and nonindiviudators with little self-esteem; they are so rude to each others because they have been so internally self-discourteous first and foremostly.

It seems to me that Hoffer is highlighting that the creative, the intellectuals, the elites, at least as classically defined are more cliquish, mean and cruel on average to even each other than they are to the masses whom they live off of, direct and rule.

Hoffer also believes the masses, especially burghers and blue collars workers in the prosperous, free, decent, happy America which he knew was populated by the masses who were not so vicious, sniping, quarreling and my clique versus your cliquish intellectuals in the ruling class.

I agree but wish to emphasize that their ideology and their hyper-collectivism robs them of all self-esteem, any residual sense of decency and kindness, thus they can and will do whatever to others and themselves and each other. Their is nothing wrong with heir intellects though they are ideologically lazy and generally not very intellectual curious and ambitious by choice. Their power of powerlessness power mode makes them cruel. Their high rank corrupts them some, but I believe their hyper-collectivism as mobists, and their ideology are what truly make them malevolent, oppressive, violent and dangerous for the whole society: their lifestyle and policies are not models to be followed.

H: “July 14

Finished the job at Pier 38. Nine hours. Though the same work and company, I felt less weary this evening than last. The reason: eight hour’s sleep last night and a good hot lunch today. Yesterday (Sunday) all the restaurants were closed and I had two sandwiches and a piece of pie for lunch.

This morning, some item in the paper started me thinking on the cause of British defeatism. Quite a number of people in Britain seem to envisage the defeat of the West and even the occupation of Britain by Soviet troops. I wonder whether this defeatist prognostication is born of a secret wish to see the defeat and decline of the whole West.”

My response: Yes, Westerners, like other peoples and nations in history, become demoralized, defeatist and ready to surrender their hegemony, their superior cultural story and their cultural excellence when they are tired and have lost faith and hope, but these attitudes are largely a matter of choice. Why should the West decline, unless we give in first, thus making it inevitable? Why cannot we allow Mavellonialists and the Good Spirits to build a new West a world cultural of hope, strength, peace, freedom and prosperity, so the American Way becomes the World Way and we Westernize culturally, politically, economically people all over the globe?

H: “The decline of the British Empire seems to be having a more demoralizing effect on British intellectuals (who were supposedly anti-imperialist) than on businessmen. One wonders how much of ‘the unbought grace of life’ of the British intellectual was derived from the fact that British red covered half of the map of the world. They have seen this map from childhood and known the axiom that the British are natural rulers. They wish to see their own decline as part of a general, natural process.”

My response: I don’t deny that Hoffer is right that British intellectuals in the late 1950s were culturally gloomy and defeatist not just because the Empire was winding down, collapsing even. Rather they missed their divine right to rule the Third World..

I think if the individual is self-realizing, that is the best antidote to feeling gloomy, defeatist and despairing. If one self-realizes, loves the self and loves and serves the Good Spirits, there is no room for silly thoughts of despair, cultural suicide, cultural waning and death, Each individuator that takes action refutes that whole sorry worldview.

One Thing (Thought) Might Lead To Another idea

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 22:42:11 +0000

I am a follower of Ayn Rand and I like her epistemological and/or metaphysical trichotomy between the subjective, the intrinsic and the objective.

Still, I am not a true believer in subscribing to her views. For example, I am for metaphysical moderation, which allows me to assume that she is mostly right that we are born tabula rasa, but that our innate ideas and the makeup of our human natures strongly color and bend what genetics and environment hand us.

At least five intrinsic ideas which I feel but cannot prove are foundational ontologically in my thinking. First, God exists. Second, we are born more depraved than morally neutral or basically good. Third, the truth about the world is moderate more than extremist, too much or too little, and Rand is absolutist and totalist too much. Fourth, egoist morality is the most benevolent code of morality under which a human can make choices. Fifth, I do agree with Rand that as rational beings with free will, we must choose how to live.

Now, I want to highlight but two of these premises as having helped me reach some original conclusions about the nature of the Father and Mother, major deities and minor deities, all spiritually and morally good.

If moderate morality or moderate truth is the rubric that runs the universe, and God created the world, then God loves moderation more than extremism. Thus when Christians (or any other denominational backers) claim to be the one, true faith, that Jesus is the only way to heaven, and that all unbelievers and other-believers will burn in hell, they verge over into lying and extremism, which are demonic traits, proclamations and practices, alien too and resolutely repudiated by Jesus and all other good deities.

My ethics is rational egoism. If rational egoism is the preferred and promoted morality of all the good deities, then such a moral system informs the believer, or offers him a glimpse into God’s perfect or near perfect nature. If egoism is the divine moral code, then the good deities are egoists more than altruists, loners more than joiners, individuals more than collectivists

It was, over many decades, my latching onto foundational beliefs about moderation being the way to live and detect what is true and what is false, and that egoism is the finest moral standard available, then I somehow concluded that these two ontological realities inform us profoundly and substantively as to the nature and personality of the good deities.

I wish to hasten to reassure altruists, who conclude that egoism is selfishness and that God is pure love and pure self-sacrifice, that the divine egoists are the shepherds that guide their flocks, so the needs of the many and the lowly are provided for, and there is no contradiction inhering here, nor is the paradox of egoistic divinities caring for their flock, a problem at all. It is a pattern to emulate, an opportunity for growth, joy and love, and it is what the good divinities call us to do and live as, as living angels.

Summer Of 69

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 22:11:43 +0000

I was driving home alone from the lake on Sunday, 8/31/26, and I was listening to a classical rock station when the song, Summer of 69, cam on, the nostalgic song about love and lost youth, being the best days of the singer’s life. This great pop tune, by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance, and sung by Adams, got me to thinking.

Are the glory days of high school and one’s late teens and early twenties typically the best day of a young person’s life? Likely so, since the vast majority of adults of any race, any generation, are groupist and nonindividuators.

My take is that, if one would self-realize for a lifetime, then the day before one died would be the best day of one’s life. Just a thought.

Darlene Graham

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:36:01 +0000

Yesterday, 8/30/26, I was driving back to the Twin Cities from our lake cabin in Hubbard County. I was listening to a weekend roundup with Clay Travis and Buck Sexton on a Fox News radio station. I usually do not have a bone to pick with them but what they said about Darlene Graham, dismissing her scornfully as being wholly unfit, unworthy to serve as the new US Senator from South Carolina; their foolish remarks really irked me.

One of them depreciated her worth severely as unworthy to serve as South Carolina’s future US Senator.. They said she knew nothing, and implied she is not very bright, and that smart candidates make the best politicians.

It is true that she is under-informed, but I do not know that she is smart or not. Chuck Schumer likely is quite smart and politically very savvy, but few Senators have done some much to destroy America.

She is loyal to Trump, and that is valuable in a Senator. She should just admit she is an amateur but that she will hire excellent advisors, and that she will grow into the job, which she will if elected. She should reassure the voters disarmingly that her judgment is sound and wise, and that she will be a loyal backbencher for the Trump agenda. That is what she will do if elected, and that is precisely what we need.

Far more important to me than a political expert and being a Washingtonian insider is if she is a principled conservative who will vote as she promised the voters, that she will listen and often obey voter wishes, and that she will vote as she promised as a principled conservative.

There are many wicked but clever politicians who hate and hurt America once elected.

Psychic Pain

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 01:38:26 +0000

I recently hurt my lower back at work and now am undergoing treatment and physical therapy to restore my ability to work and live pain-free as I have usually enjoyed. When that pulled set of lumbar muscles were raging the pain was near unbearable.

Physical pain, chronic and ever less bearable when very intense, can wreck a person’s life. I have never much subscribed to the outlook that suffering and pain are ennobling beyond a certain point.

Chronic or severe pain is something I would like medical science, God or folk medicine to eradicate or lessen considerably.

This all got me considering that it is an oversight, a mistake not to contemplate that spiritual or psychic pain, chronic and mild or chronic and severe, might make people as much or even more unhappy than those suffering physical pain.

Spiritual or psychic pain, even endured long enough, for most people, especially nonindividuators, will deplete their self-esteem to such a low level, that resentful, grievance-mongering, self-loathing and loathing of others and the world is all that is left of that shattered self.

If that person does not get therapy, or get exorcised, or discipline the self in a strong, integrated, full mode, that person may become a living demon and act out accordingly.

Only a sense of gratitude, and a positive attitude, accompanied by love of God, the self, others and creation itself can reverse and reduce whatever level of psychic or spiritual pain afflicting that person.

Hoffer's Working And Thinking On The Waterfront, Pages 13-18

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 23:12:08 +0000

his blog entry is my writing out and commenting on Eric Hoffer’s content from Page 13 to through Page 18 of his book, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront, June 1958—May 1959. Here it is:

Hoffer (H after this): “

June 22

Nine and three-quarter hours on the Hawaiian Wholesaler in Encinal. Steady grind but the loads moved slowly. A good bunch. I felt better at 6 P.M. than I did in the morning.

I spoke with a tall Montenegrin whom I call Negus. He is Communist in his sympathies, bitter about this country, chock-full of grievances, but we get along. I asked him how many years ago Stephen Dushan lived. He answered correctly: about six hundred years ago. I felt I could discuss with this barely literate Montenegrin some of the things I had learned from Diehl’s Byzantium. I pointed out that the Bible was translated into Serbian, Bulgarian, and Russian before it was translated into German, French, and English. How come? Because in the West the Catholic Church was an independent power, an imperial power, and it did not want to see the formation of national churches which might be promoted by a translation of the Bible into common speech.”

My response: Notice how the Catholic Church in the West had a totalitarian grip on all nations under its auspices, in ecclesiastical as well as in political arena. Centralized power kept the people down and controlled. Very corrupt and not from Jesus at all, though it was done in His name.

H: “On the other hand, the Byzantine church, being under the thumb of the Emperor, was interested solely in the Christianization of the warlike barbarians, and this could be effected most readily by the formation of national churches.

Eventually, national churches came into being also in the West, and nations crystallized around these churches. This is a significant point. The compact churchly organization of Christianity promoted nation formation, while Islam, being without a church organization, could not supply a nucleus for national crystallization. This suggests that compact Communist parties rather than promote internationalism may in the long run foster nationalist separation.”

My response: Hoffer may have been right to declare that compact Communist organizations within a subjugated nations could serve as a local nucleus for the rise of nationalist fervor and aspiration for local people to have their own country, their own identity.

H: “He was listening attentively and shaking his head, but I had no way of telling whether he got the hang of what I said. When I finished he shook my hand and said: ‘It is always wonderful to talk with you.’ Of one thing I am sure. He will always remember, and brag about it, that the Bible was translated into Serbian long before it was translated in English—that Serbian literature is more ancient than English literature.

Lili and the boy have been on my mind all these days. I am following a policy of restraint: to see them only once a week. I must not acquire the habit of seeing them too often. I am going to die alone, and it is too late in life to start feeling lonely.:

My response: It seems that Hoffer the great soul knew he needed mostly to live alone to keep his independence and creativity alive: he loved Lili and little Eric, but he may not have been able to live with them each day.

H: “The kink in my back is gone. Yesterday’s work did it. The world looks clean and fresh after last night’s rain. I have a long list of chores to do, and I am just getting ready to clean my room. Before starting I read the last few pages of Byzantium. I cannot tell as yet what I got out of the book. It needs vigor to last a thousand years.

5 P.M. Spent a hectic day getting things done. Now I am caught up. After a meal of lettuce salad and pea soup I sit down to drink a glass of tea and read. I happened to read the latest issue of the nation. Suddenly I threw it away as a distasteful thing (whining, self-righteous, carping, petulant) and turned to a new travel book by Lord Kinross. This is a continuation of his book on the interior of Asia Minor.

7 P.M. The second Kinross book, as far as I read, is inferior to the first. Since I am in the mood to make it easy for myself I switched to another book—a delightful one. It is a book of letters written by an American woman who lived in Jerusalem 1953-54. It is a warm, sensitive, honest book. My first reaction is: What delightful people Americans are. I ought perhaps to say fine people.”

My response: Yes, Americans over all are delightful and fine.

H: “And saying this I reflect that I certainly am not an American (hinting that he is an illegal immigrant, Ed Says?). Under similar circumstances I would have been neither delightful nor fine. Here she is among total strangers and she does not carp or criticize (Unlike the carping, foreign intellectuals visiting here, Ed Says), or betray the least trace of bad temper. The American’s capacity for fraternization is a noble feature, a true foretaste of the brotherhood of man.”

My response: Here is another Hofferian paradox which somehow is a true statement about Americans: on one hand Americans masses are capable of fraternizing and brotherhood as part of an enormous working class and middle class, and on the other hand, America’s capitalistic, individualistic culture offers an authentic brotherhood, only reachable and true as individualists cooperate and compete but not viciously or to set up strict social pecking orders, not as hierarchical and rigid as elsewhere in the world. The book is Letters from Jerusalem by Mary Clawson. I shall probably sit up all night reading it.

H; I spent 5 hours (8-1) with Lili and the boy. Lili is wholly herself and a joy to be with. The boy is of absorbing interest to me. Though almost three years old he is yet to me a stranger—someone from another world come to live among us. He is tireless, fairly clumsy, and can be wonderfully affectionate.

In the afternoon the doorbell rang and a young man came up. He is working for the U.S. Information Office, and seemed intelligent and alert. We talked about the backward countries and how terribly handicapped an American is when dealing with them. It is hopeless to try to win the weak over to our side.”

My response: The weak are groupist generally, fanatical and sadomasochistic, either those richer and more powerful beat and oppress them, or are cowering and defeated, ready and deserving to be overthrow and deprived of power, position, wealth and perhaps their lives. The weak see the world as a power struggle, either one is abject and defeated, or ascendant and ready to take over.

H: “We have no ideology to impart, no faith to propagate, and no pride we can share with others. We have much to give in skills and tangible things. We can teach backward people how to work and how to be efficient. But no backward country could ever identify itself with America and be won over completely to our side. How strange it is! The whole world is imitating us, is becoming Americanized, yet the countries that become like us tend to resent us. And the reason is that we cannot win the intellectuals, the men of words, the self-appointed spokesmen who stand between us and the millions we try to help. All the rudeness and biting comes from the intellectuals, and we must have the dossier of the intellectual from way back at our finger tips—from his first appearance as a scribe with the invention of writing. An American is more truly of the masses than any intellectual anywhere, and he can benefit the masses more than any intellectual can do.”

My response: What a rich paragraph, true and representative of Offer; he is correct that we cannot reach the masses of the Third World the American Way, the land of individualism, moral egoism-altruism, the land of capitalism, fabulous opportunity and much personal liberty.

When Hoffer write than an American is more truly of the masses everywhere than any intellectual anywhere, and that he can benefit the masses everywhere more than any intellectual can do, this is the case but those masses must become, each of them or most of them, individuating anarchist supercitizens in their own constitutional republic, bless with riches, capitalism and liberty—this updated version of the American Way as the global culture, political and economic system, locally blended by the natives with their way of life as they see fit—this is the world that Hoffer anticipated coming about after his death, as he sensed it come about eventually sensed it decades ago.

H: “June 25

Nine hours on the Pope & Talbot Leader at Howard Street. Nothing much to do all day, but the last hour was hectic—sewer pipe. Since I didn’t sleep enough last night I feel tired.

I saw today a gentle-spoken longshoreman whom I have not seen for over a year. He works most o the time on the Oakland side of the bay. He is afflicted with an eruption around his nose. It has become much worse now. The flesh of his face is being eaten away, and his eyes are lusterless and lost amidst the expanse of decomposition. I told him how glad I was to see him. It is difficult to visualize the suffering of the man, particularly his thoughts as he rises in the morning.

July 1

Nine hours on the Flying Enterprise at Pier 34. A busy day but not unpleasant. The work though steady was not rushed.

But morning and evening are now cold and wet, but the middle of the day has a warm brilliance. The bay as seen through the huge open door in the back of the dock seemed a fairyland. I don’t think a landscape can come into a room through a window. It can come in only through a door.

The fact that I accomplish little when I take time off disqualifies me as a writer. I do have an original idea now and then. If I hang on with all of my might, I eventually put together a few thousand words. The most crucial words are never at my service. I have to search and recruit them anew each time.

July 2

Followed the Flying Enterprise to Oakland. An easy day in warm weather. A discussion with several Slavonians on the relative merits of America and the Old Country. What it comes to is that this is not a country for the old. After twenty years in America, these Slavonians are still homesick for their native village. They are excellent workers—skilled and conscientious. They look healthy, and young for their age. But the American tempo grates on them. They talk of the ease and the slowness back home, and how men over fifty no longer work but sit around talking and sipping coffee, letting their children take care of things, and remain hale until they are eighty or more. Actually, none of these Slavonians would be happy if they went back. A few tried and rushed back to America. I mentioned the fact. One of them said: ‘It may be so, but it will be our greed that will drag us back.:

My response: The way of life is faster in America, but wealth and opportunity can help one rise economically if one will hustle here.

H: “Early this morning on my way to work I felt a burning pain in the arms. It seemed to me for a moment that had I been without this pain I would have been wholly happy. In a moment like this I realize how lucky we are when nothing at all—good or bad—happens to us.”

My response: It may be that Hoffer’s philosophical worldview is revealed here: Hoffer the Stoic suggests we are happiest when nothing at all good or bad happens to us on a given day, and this seems evidence of the Stoic outlook brought to my attention in a 2024 article by Philosopher Pedro Gonzalez.

Hoffer's Working And Thinking On The Waterfront, Pages 7-12

noreply@blogger.com (Working Man and Philosopher) — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 22:22:53 +0000

Hoffer (H after this): “June 10

Didn’t do a thing. Took Lili and the child to lunch and then to the Indian exhibition at the Palace of the Legion of Honor.

I was roused by an article in the latest Nation. It was written by a fellow named Halevy who is obviously an American writer living in Mexico. He has recently paid a visit to the U.S., and his article deals with Disneyland and Las Vegas. My impression is as follows: The man is some sort of radical, and is extremely money-conscious. He is contemptuous of people who throw away their money. Chances are he made some money in real estate, and went to Mexico, where living is cheap, to write. His contempt for America is standard. In one sentence he says we worship the almighty buck, and in the next sentence he grinds his teeth at the levity and stupidity with which we throw away our money. He resolves the paradox by saying that our wasting is a way of punishing our idols.”

My response: Americans work hard and play hard, and are generous and produce wealth so if they have some fun with what they have earned why not. This writer needs to butt out and leave the masses to run their own lives as they see fit.

H: “The article tells little about this country but a lot about the writer. I am often struck by the money-consciousness of many radicals, and their skill in business, particularly in real estate. The radicals on the waterfront have left-wing principles and right-wing bank accounts.”

My response: It seems to me that they are not anti-wealth so much as they are jealous of the masses for having wealth, and living high: the radicals, intellectuals and other elites should have money and live high but the masses rise above their place when they have wealth and enjoy it. What fraudulent, misanthropic hypocrities.

H: “June 11

Eight hours on the sorting pile at Pier 29. As hard a day as I have had in a long time. The company has finally figured out how to keep people going without a pause. No sooner is one row of loads started than another row is all lined up waiting for you. I run up a sweat all day long partly because of the heat and partly because of the rushing.

The Manchester Guardian Weekly is suggesting De Gaulle, if not a fool, is a weak sister. Some letter writer sees De Gaulle as Hindenburg who unknowingly prepares the ground for a Hitler. My feeling is that whatever authoritarian regime may arise in France it will be tempered by rationality and good sense.

June 12

The whole morning I fought the impulse to meet Little Eric as he comes out of the nursery school. My attachment to the boy is being reinforced by a sense of loneliness. Men feel lonely when they do not do the one thing they ought to do. It is only when we fully exercise our capacities—when we grow—that we have roots in the world and feel at home in it.”

My response: What Hoffer writes above is true not just of men but all humans more ore less. Individuating is the one thing we should be doing, in our unique way with one of our special interests serving to express our creative talent—that is when we feel at home in the world and not strangers in it, neither estranged from God the Ultimate Creator and Individuator, nor refusing to live as God had destined us to fulfill.

H: “I have been reading a couple of articles on Russian science (one in the Nation and the other in Commentary). They confirmed my suspicion that freedom is not indispensable for cultural creativeness. A despotism that respects and subsidizes science, literature, and art can be a good milieu for creativeness in those fields.”

My response: That may be so, but I still maintain that all the people are lumpy with gifts, talents and ability, and the most optimum milieu form them to wax great as creators is in a free society.

H: “9 P.M. Just returned from seeing a French picture—a crime story, The Girl on the Third Floor. It was a civilized picture. The criminals seemed humane, and everyone is rational. Not too exciting, but it kept me fully interested for 1 ½ hours.

June 13

Seven hours on the Norwegian ship Hoegh Silverstream. Rubber wrapped in burlap or paper. Partner one of the laziest men on the waterfront, yet he worked well and was pleasant. He is, however, a total, pathological liar, hence conversation with him is meaningless. For a moment it seemed to me that only conversation about ideas can be honest. Most other talk is nine-tenths make-believe.”

My response: Hoffer is likely correct that intellectual conversation is the most interesting, meaningful, honest and true. The fluffy conversation is more meaningless, more fruitless, dishonest and a waste of breath.

H: “At noon I heard a Sicilian proverb: “The tongue has not bones but it can break bones.”

In the afternoon a young clerk came over to talk with me. He is a graduate of the University of San Francisco, fairly intelligent, pious and superficial. I talked a lot and it did me good. Yesterday I spent twenty-four hours without talking to anyone, so I needed talking.”

My response: It seems likely that the longshoreman knew that Hoffer was famous as a writer and thinker, so they did not seem especially bothered by that fact and his presence, though intellectuals like that young clerk would occasionally seek Hoffer out.

June 14

Pier 26, British ship. Discharging meat and apples from New Zealand. The apples, Rome Beauties, are as fine as any I have seen.

The British crew on the ship make an excellent impression. Compared with average-run Americans, these British sailors have a freshness about them and an individual distinctness. These people have not spent their lives running, and they have not been run over by life. One wonders whether American could continue to exist when we stop running. There is a streak of extremism us: we either run or do not move at all. To stop running might edge most of toward inertness and stagnation.

My response: Hoffer could well be right that there is extremism built into the American way of life.

H: June 15

Danish ship at Pier 31. More meat from New Zealand. I have been feeling quite well the last couple of days—light of heart and alert.

Diehl’s book on Byzantium is pleasant and sometimes stimulating. Here and there Byzantium reminded me of today’s America. He quotes a sixth-century writer about the popular preoccupation with chariot races in the Hippodrome which inflamed men’s souls to inordinate heights of passion: ‘Should the green charioteer take the lead, someone are in despair; should the blur overtake him half the city is in mourning. People with no personal interest in the matter utter frantic imprecations; those who have suffered nothing feel grievously wounded.’ He adds, ‘The most serious men declared that without theatre and Hippodrome life would have virtually joyless.’ The Emperor himself took sides in the contest as passionately as anyone.

I have always wondered whether it is vital for a society that all its members should have some common subjects which they all are equally interested in and in which they all have some expertise.”

My response: To the sentence above, I assent enthusiastically—it could be that some common subjects of universal following and interest among all members of the community serves as something like a metaphysical or social glue or metanarrative, holding to people together as a people.

H: “In Byzantium the common subjects were theology and chariot races. In this country they are machines and sports.

On the way home, in the bus, it struck me that Little Eric is the only human being I have grown onto—that the relation between us is that of a graft. Many elements went into the making of this graft, not the least of which is that he is my namesake. The fact is also important that he is still to me, after 2 ½ years, a new human being. Now and then I feel like asking him how he likes this country.

June 16

In this morning’s Chronicle Tito is quoted as saying of the Chinese Communists that in attacking Jugoslavia they are using ‘such insulting language that even Marx and Lenin, if they could hear it, would turn over in their graves.’ Unintentionally, Tito is here pointing at Marx and Lenin as paragons of rudeness. Good manners are inconceivable without a degree of objectivity, and the give and take of compromise.”

My response: I do not think anyone would deny that anyone would deny that Hoffer was a man he thought, wrote and lived paradoxes, or that he was a cultural and political moderate, but that is strongly reinforced by the sentence above where he writes that good manners are inconceivable without a degree of objectivity, and the give and take of compromise.

The fanatics, revolutionaries and ideologues who hate America and seek for it to be destroyed and overthrown, are often loud, angry, rude even violent people, and they mean what they say, and will be much worse, more violent, intolerant and vicious, once they hold the reins of power.

H: “He who clings with all his might to an absolute truth fears compromise more than the devil. He throttles the soft amenities which would dovetail him with others, and blur his uncompromising stance. Thus it happens when a faith loses it potency rudeness often serves as a substitute.

June 17

To Stockton with Lili and the boy. The child is utterly charming and obnoxious by turns. It was a good day and a long one. We started at seven in the morning and came back at seven-thirty in the evening. Lili is herself again, which means that she is genuine, and incredibly forbearing. The boy was hard to handle—he spites or humors me as the spirit moves him. On the way back Lili turned, on the spur of the moment, into a road which goes to the top of Mount Diablo. My fear was that we had not gas enough. I shall remember vividly the drive up because of my unceasing alarm until we returned to the main highway.

I spent about $25, and they were well spent. It was the first time in months that I have gotten out of the city. The country, though scorched by summer, was pleasing to the eye. The yellows were satin, and the greens of a metallic quality and a dozen shades.”