Conversations with Eric Hoffer; 7; The Growth of a Train of Thought

Isn't that the most shocking? It's all out on paper. How many pounds did you have done this video with? Of course it was drive here. I could have never continuing with this video. BSL We present a conversation between Eric Hofer and James Day. Eric Hofer takes pride in the fact that before he is anything else he is a working man, a man who was thrown overnight so he says from the cradle to Skid Row.

Born in New York City of Alsace and immigrant parents, he was to lose his sight, his memory and his mother at the age of seven. His father at the age of 18, almost without funds but with his sight recovered. He moved to California to work at a variety of jobs as a laborer and a migratory farm worker and for the past 21 years as a longshoreman on the San Francisco waterfront. Deprived of his formal schooling by the eight-year blindness, he taught himself to read both German and English and has satisfied a voracious appetite for books by haunting public libraries wherever he has traveled. From this reading and from his experience among working men and what he calls the misfits of society, he has drawn pungent and perceptive generalizations upon men and their motives. These form the basis of his three widely acclaimed books.

The first of these published in 1951 is the True Believer, a study of mass movements and the role of the fanatic. The second entitled The Passionate State of Mind is a collection of aphorisms, a 17th century style of writing most favored by Mr. Hoffer. His most recent book published in 1963, The Ordeal of Change, continues his studies of man's motivations and examines the crisis of self-esteem which faces each of us when confronted by change. Mr. Hoffer, the True Believer was your first book. It's now been 15 years since it was published. And I suspect that probably the beginnings of this go back still further, do they know it? Well, I actually became interested in mass movements during the Hitlericade. But I started to write The True Believer in 1946 and I finished it, I mean I finished the first draft in 1948.

I remember that because I started it during the Waterfront Strike in 1946, we had three months strike and I finished it during the 1948 strike, another three months. You know Mr. Day, I've never taken off time to write and I've been receiving some letters from people who got the idea that it's easy to work and write. But actually when I look backward, I can see that any time I had to put a book in shape, you know, get really started or wind it up, see. I needed leisure. Now we had these strikes in 1946 and 1948. But the passionate state of mind for instance, I put in shape when I broke a thumb when I was four weeks off and the last book I broke a rib and I was five weeks off. So well anyhow, the first draft was in 1948, then I took over a year, no I didn't take

over a year, but I spent a year, in 1949 reworking the book. Harper accepted it in 1950 and the book was published early in 1951. Do you think that your own thinking on these problems is advanced any in those 15 years since the publication of the book? Well, Mr. Day, I've been thinking all my life seems to be so, yet I really don't know the first thing about the process of thought. All I know is that a train of thought grows, you don't know how it grows, it just grows by itself, and the way things worked out, I'm beginning to believe that I just have one train of thought. One train of thought, maybe this is true of all people, maybe everybody has only a central preoccupation, one train of thought and no matter what we do later on, it's the same train of thought growing, pushing its way out, you know, I think Santajana said that when

that the first book of an intuitive person contains in it all the seeds of later development there. Now when the Tuberliber was published in 1951, I thought that I was done with the mass movements, you know, I became interested in the backward countries. You remember that time there in the 1950s, early 1950s, there were new nations popping up all over the place, and as a naive American, I asked myself a simple question, I said to myself, now these backward countries, what are they trying to do? Well, they're trying to modernize themselves, they're trying to modernize themselves in a hurry. They're trying to build roads, factories, towns, hospitals, schools. Now all these things are sober, practical things, you know, and yet when you look at those

nations there, you see them doing these sober, practical things in an atmosphere of a madhouse, you know, I asked myself why, why is it necessary, why should it be necessary to stage a madhouse in order to produce these simple, simple things, to me it seemed almost simple. I'm convinced, you know, that if you took a group of Americans, you know, when you dropped them anywhere there, they will be able to build a town or build a road and in a matter of fact, without any excitement, without any enthusiasm, and without staging these fantastic spectacles that you see all over Asia, Africa, and Cuba or anywhere else. You know, these micro-inviction, you know, that Americans can do these things, they're

probably exaggerated, and yet it comes from experience. I remember Mr. Day, during the Depression, a construction company, for some reason sent down two trucks on Skidro, and anybody who could climb up on that truck was hired, see, they scooped us out of Skidro and put us on these trucks, and the trucks drove out to the Samaradil mountains, they dumped us on the side of the hill, and here we found all kinds of bundles of equipment. The company had only one man, we were going to build a road, and then we started to sort ourselves out. We had so many electricians, so many carpenters, so many blacksmiths, so many cooks, so many foremen, and before we knew we had the tents up, the meals cooked, we organized ourselves, we went to work, and I was sure that if we had to write a constitution, there would be

one of us who knew all there were officers, we could have rebuilt, we could have recreated America, a whole lot of America, right there on the side of the hill, and we were just this kind of earth, you know, you might say that with a shovelful of slime was scooped of the Skidro there, and so to me, building a town, building a road, building a country seems almost a simple thing. You remember, Mr. Day, some years ago, the labor government, at least labor government tried to raise ground nuts, peanuts, you know, in Africa, and they made an awful mess out of it, and I heard that a bunch of Longshoremen talking, one of them said, for a million dollars, I could raise peanuts on the surface of the ocean there, and he would have, he could have, I mean, there is a tremendous feeling, you know, of competence, of ability to do things, you see it everywhere here in this country, this is the practical sense you spoke.

Yes, the practical sense, and we ought to discuss this, because this is a very fascinating subject, it's not as simple as it sounds, but as I said, I became interested in these backward countries, yes, and I tried to find an answer, or several answers, as you see in the, a deal of change, you know, to this question, why these clamor, why these madness, you know, in order to do simple things, and after trying all kinds of answers, and some of them good there, see, I finally stumbled on the fact that change, change by itself, you know, is a terrible thing, you know, we, and this was very hard for me as an American, to realize, because we take change in our stride, we take change for granted, we think change is easy, we think change is good, see, and it took me some, it took really, as you will see in the, or deal of change, I, I derived my insights from very slight experiences, and I, for instance, I was going to, I was picking peas for three, four months, and then

all of a sudden I had to switch to, to picking string beans, and I remembered how hesitant and, and, and, different, I was that first morning when I was about to address myself to the string bean vines, so that the, the switch from peas to string beans was also a frightening thing there, and by some effort there, see, I could live myself into this experience of change, the frightening thing of it, it, it, I could put it, I mean, you could almost say that broken habits, you know, as disturbing, as upsetting, as broken hearts, broken spirits, see, and I worked, you know, I worked on this, the, or deal of change, developing all these theories there, see, and the theories of change, I tried to show that when a population is subjected to drastic change, you are actually getting a population of misfits, see, because

we cannot prepare ourselves, you know, for the only new, for the unprecedented, so inevitably, see, the moment any country is subjected to drastic change, you have misfits, see, and once you, you have misfits, they will act and perform only in an atmosphere of, of passion, of course, the very fact these nations are unskilled, also, generates heat, generates fever, fervor, generates heat, again, now, in other words, the passionate state of mind Mr. Day is a substitute for skill, it's a substitute for confidence, you can see it on the waterfront, you take, for instance, an experienced longshoreman, he goes about his job as if at play, on the other hand, you take a greenhorn, a man who just comes there, we call him a cherry there, see, he has to move around and do things as he was going

to save the world, if he's going to do anything at all, so this too is a factor, and then again, the countries are poor, you know, in other words, they can't pay people, you know, they can't offer people tangible incentives to make them work, see, and therefore, they have to make them work for words, they have to make them work for hope, for pride, for honor, and all these things there, and all these makes it necessary, you know, that makes it impossible, let's say, for those nations to perform at room temperature, they need enthusiasm, they need fairer, and Mr. Day only after, only after I finished that or deal of change, did I realize that all these time, you know, I was actually developing and amending the true believer, the book on mass phones, imagine, here I wrote a book of mass phones,

I've been thinking about the subject for almost 20 years, and it never occurred to me, it never occurred to me, that change by itself is a cause of mass movement, in the true believer, all I say is that the revolutions are instruments, you know, for the realization of drastic change, it never occurred to me that there cannot be no mass movements, you know, where the hasn't occurred change, where things haven't changed at all, revolutions don't take place at all, change comes first, and the revolution is a byproduct of change, so after all this thing was done, I realized that I was still writing the true believer, well, when all this was done, I became all of a sudden interested in another subject, you see, I'm actually convinced now that no matter what my new interest is going to be, I'll be still working on the true believer, even if I get interested in cooking on astronomy, I'll still, the true believer is pushing out, this is a fantastic thing to me, I mean,

this growth, this train of thought that it's coming out, it's trying to get out there, no matter what I do, now here several years ago I became interested in all things in juveniles, can you pick that, me, a man in his 60s, who is naturally, naturally hostile to juveniles, at least hostile, how they ever meet them, all I know about juveniles, what you read in the papers there, and judging by the papers, the juveniles are awful, and he, all of a sudden I became interested in juveniles, now, how they did happen, it's really fantastic, you know, you remember Mr. Day, several years ago, there was a week during which the newspapers reported an epidemic of student riots, starting in Istanbul, coming over to Tehran, then down to, I think it was Bangkok, then you were Saigon, then you had Siol, Tokyo, and it wound up in Mexico City, I think, and most of these student riots

had an anti-American bias, and I remember one morning, six o'clock in the morning because I was waiting for the bus, I saw the headline in the newspaper announcing one more student riot, and I remember I snorted and I said, I said, history made by juvenile delinquents, the moment the words came out of my mouth, Mr. Day, something clicked in my mind, now this click is not very frequent, but it's often enough that when I hear that click, see, I know that I'm plugged in, you know, that something connected in my mind, so I bought the paper and I got in the bus, but when I sat down in the bus, I didn't look at the paper at all, you know, things were coming to get in my mind, things I've read over the years, great observations and experiences, and even thoughts that I formulated long ago that didn't fit in.

Yeah, but I asked myself, who is making history, is it the old who making history, what role do the young play in making history? And I remembered, like I said, look, when I wrote the passionate state of mind, for some reason I inserted an aphorism which reads like this, history is made by men who have the restlessness, impressionability, credulity, capacity for make believe, ruthlessness, and self-righteousness of children, it's made by men who set their hearts on toys, all leaders strive to turn their followers into children. Now this insight came to me from observing two willful gut children in action, and of course observing the antics of the Nazis and the Communists. But the thought was following my mind, it didn't integrate with any train of thought, but now I had a hunch that it should be almost easy for me, you know, to make out a case that one can hardly know how things happened in history, unless you keep in mind all the

time that it's juveniles, that most of the time it's juveniles that made them happen. And I started to collect the facts. Well, you know, Mr. Day, despite the Salmist three score years and ten, men's span of life until quite recently has been very brief. The truly old are very rare phenomenon in history. I read about the excavation of one of the most ancient cemeteries in the Near East. And the archaeologists found that the people who were buried there were the average age of the people who buried there was 25, 25 years old at death. And there is no reason to believe that the place was particularly unhealthy. What this means, it means that the great inventions of the Neolithic age, you know, the domestic investigation of animals and plants, the invention of the wheels, sail, irrigation,

fermentation, even the calendar and the script was made by almost a childlike population. And you remember in the Odile of Change, I have a whole chapter on the playful wood suggesting that this is actually how those inventions were made. Then I thought to myself these ancient legends too, you know, with their very like, very they like pattern and their heavy sexual symbolism wasn't written by burnt out old men, you know. But even more recent periods could hardly be understood unless you kept in mind that the chief characters, the chief protagonists of those periods were actually juveniles. Now, for instance, any time you go to the young museum and you look at the armor, you know, the suits of male, that came down to us from the middle ages.

Now the thing that strikes you is that how small these things are. And you are convinced that the people who wore them were not grown up persons. And indeed they weren't, you know. These people became men at the age of 13, I mean they married at the age of 13, they became generals and leaders in their teens. And they were old men at 30 and 35, you know. The middle ages were a very poor time for the middle age, the true bad wars and the historians make a tremendous fun, you know, of all the middle age. And unless you keep in mind, you know, unless you know something about juveniles and juvenile and the pattern of juvenile delinquency, you could hardly make sense of those, of the flamboyants, the pageantry, the credulity, the ruthlessness and the manhouse that was the middle ages.

And things didn't change very much in the next period in the 16th century. Montain says that he hardly ever met a man as always 50. And Salvador de Madriaga in his book on Spain's Great Age, that's 1550 to 1650, tells again that the men of that age were just teenagers, you see. And the dramatists of that age, when they say that a man is all they mean a man of about 40, yellow skin, the wrinkle face, and all toothless, you see. I also remembered that towards the end, that in the 16th century, Karl V, Charles V, became emperor 20, Francis I became a king at 22 and I think Henry VIII became a king at 18.

Now just at this point, I began to suspect that I was on the wrong track. You see, it didn't seem to me that I'm going to spend the rest of my life glorifying the juvenile, showing that the juvenile did this and the juvenile did that. And it struck me right away, I said to myself, is the juvenile mentality confined to adolescent? Do people automatically grow up as a grow older? Other not teenagers of every age, and I remembered something really remarkable, you know. You know, in 1502, Cardinal Giuliano de la Rovere became a pope at the age of 62. And he took the name of Julius II, in honor of Julius Caesar, whom he, a pope, considered

the greatest man that ever lived, and whom he was determined to emulate. And so on the threshold of old age, these glorious juvenile, Giuliano of 62, puts on a helmet and a curass gets on a horse and sets out to become a conqueror. So clearly, I saw that where this train of thought is going to take me, I said to myself, clearly, at all times there are people who never grow up, who remain juveniles, perpetual juveniles, all their lives. And there are times in which a whole population becomes a population of juveniles, they're being juvenile, juvenileized, here I came up against something new, you know, juvenileization. And particularly in the 20th century, look around you, Mr. Day.

Look at all the present leaders, Coucher, Castor, Lucruma. What's the name of that fellow in Indonesia? Sukarno. Sukarno, see? Why? How could you understand these people? And as you realize that these are juveniles, you know, and you could, and if you know something about juvenile delinquency, you could almost predict what these people are going to do. And more, more, Nehru is not a juvenile, but Nehru is a schoolmaster, have you seen how he talks to the parliament, he's just like a schoolmaster talking to retarded children? And a schoolmaster is at home, you know, in a world run by juveniles. By the way, today's newspaper will tell you that a new premier in Northern Rhodesia, Kounda. Kounda was elected as schoolmaster again, see? So you actually have here a world run by juveniles and schoolmasters, see? And so here I was getting away from juveniles, I was getting into the concept of juvenileization

and I could see that I was sliding into the subject of mass movements, step by step, see? I was just, I didn't know where I'm going to get in there, but I could see that my mind was still there towards that subject there, see? No matter where I started, I'll go down there, I wind up in mass movements. It begins to come right back to the beginning, then. That's right. See, I ask myself a question. I said to myself, this process of juvenileization, see, if I'm going to know anything about it, I have to find out how the juvenile state of mind rises in the adolescent, see? Now I could not accept any idea that the juvenile state of mind in the adolescent is a function

of anatomical or physiological conditions, there is no evidence at all that the mind of a juvenile is different in structure, you know, from the mile of a mature person. And even if you knew that there are certain differences, how are you going to connect these differences with a, I said myself, no, the juvenile state of mind, see, in the adolescent is the result of the special situation in which the juvenile finds himself, see? And if grown-up persons are placed in somewhat similar situation, they'll behave like juveniles. Now, what is the chief characteristics of the adolescent's existence, see? It is that this existence is a phase of transition, a passage from childhood to manhood. And therefore, anybody, placed in a similar position of drastic change, of drastic transition

will also manifest a juvenile state of mind. Therefore, the juvenile should have something in common with the immigrant who is passing from one, from one country to another, or people of backward countries who are transferred from backwardness to modernization, or subject that people serves, slaves, turning into freemen, and people retiring even. I could see right away, Mr. Day, that I had a new approach to mass movements there, see? But I could actually include now, when I was going to talk, now, if I went right now the true believer, and I was to write the chapter on, I said, no, don't finish sentence. I would know, I would have a new classification, and I would be much easier for me to classify the potential to believers.

I think this is a given as an insight into the whole process of thinking. And perhaps you'll want to discuss this further. Not, I like to bring up another subject, and that is a subject I suspect of maturity. The subject of talent. I'd like to talk to you about that next time. I would thank you very much. Okay. You've just seen a conversation between Eric Hauffer, and James Dage, and role manager of KQED San Francisco. This is NET, National Educational Television.