Washington Rebel

The Leftist Beast, et cetera

Irish Beast Music

Our sentiments exactly, brought on by Harsanyi's article, The Doers vs. Thinkers:

This administration epitomizes this disastrous trend towards governance by those who are only book-smart, life-long politicians, or money-movers. People who never have done anything in their lives to generate the type of sustained, organic economic activity that grows an economy and creates long-term jobs.

The stimulus bill, the pending health care restructuring bills, and the cap-and-tax legislation all are reflective of a mentality that politicians with word-processors and degrees know better than individual Americans what is best for each of us. A fear of what Washington sees as the great unwashed actually making decisions for themselves.

In other words, we have moved towards governance by those who study the people rather than governance by the people.

via Beauty and the Leftist Beast.  Some damn good bloggin', boy.

The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers.  Thomas Sowell, Talkers vs. Doers

WWHD?

What Would Hoffer Do?

It is clear that the presence of an effective, organized opposition is a prerequisite of individual freedom.  A society that in normal times cannot function adequately without unanimity is unfit for freedom.  It is equally clear that the activities of an effective opposition and of free individuals subject the body social to considerable strain.  A society must be in good working order and firmly anchored in a tradition of unity if it is to stand up under the ceaseless tug of parties and the willfullness of free individuals.  Its government, economy and the whole

Crossroads

Crossroads

A constant refrain of our nuanced Left is that we must be "more European", or more "international."  In the last decade or so, Supreme Court justices have looked to the world for legal precedent with the enthusiastic approval of legal activists, as if the Anglo-American jurisprudential evolution was fundamentally lacking.  Behind these sentiments lie not just an insecurity, but a contempt for the Anglo-American experience, which is, when all is said and done, the historical impetus behind democracy, freedom of religion, and the very same economic liberty which has given rise to globalism.  Can you imagine Parisians or natives of St. Petersburg believing in "globalism"?  (See John Jay's Not All Cretins Become Diplomats)  Even now, great cities of Europe are notoriously Xenophobic; the British commonwealth gave rise to your cell phones and blue jeans.  In short, these critics are cowards.  Of course, being "nuanced", they can't admit to that.  Best to attack persons such as myself as being stupid nut jobs. 
The word "patriot" is spat like a curse.

Found my copy of Eric Hoffer's Ordeal of Change today.  Ordeal of Change was published in 1964.  I read it in 1973, when I was 16-years-old.  Thought readers of Washington Rebel would enjoy this quote from chapter VI, the Intellectual and the Masses, in which Hoffer predicts that soft tyranny can lead to real liquidation of us kulaks:

Hating America

"Facts are Counterrevolutionary" Eric Hoffer, Patron Saint of Washington Rebel:

"He seems like a being who had just emerged from unknown depths, startled, overjoyed at what he saw about him: Eric Sevareid, broadcaster, journalist

It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations - past and present - are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hunger, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia. Thus, we are up against the paradox that the individual who is more complex, unpredictable, and mysterious than any communal entity is the one nearest to our understanding; so near that even the interval of millennia cannot weaken our feeling of kinship. If in some manner the voice of an individual reaches us from the remotest distance of time, it is a timeless voice speaking about ourselves.  Reflections on the Human Condition

And speaking of power ...

Even in the freest society power is charged with the impulse to turn men into precise, predictable automata. When watching men of power in action it must be always kept in mind that, whether they know it or not, their main purpose is the elimination or neutralization of the independent individual - the independent voter, consumer, worker, owner, thinker - and that every device they employ aims at turning man into a manipulatable 'animated instrument,' which is Aristotle's definition of a slave.

On the other hand, every device employed to bolster individual freedom must have as its chief purpose the impairment of the absoluteness of power. The indications are that such an impairment is brought about not by strengthening the individual and pitting him against the possessors of power, but by distributing and diversifying power and pitting one category or unit of power against the other. Where power is one, the defeated individual, however strong and resourceful, can have no refuge and no recourse.  Ordeal of Change (1963)

Courtesy of Cooperative Individualism

The Legacy of Eric Hoffer -- Part II

 

A Walking Billboard for a Great Books Education

"There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life."

This is just one of the pungent insights of Eric Hoffer, who died twenty years ago. This particular quote is from his book of short sayings called The Passionate State of Mind. In another such book, Before the Sabbath, he saw the "Nixon tragedy" as that of an "opportunist who missed his greatest opportunity."

Some of Hoffer's books are collections of short, sharp insights, while others -- The True Believer, The Ordeal of Change, and The Temper of Our Times, for example -- offer more extended discussions of particular issues.

Although Eric Hoffer was perhaps at his zenith during the 1960s, he was completely at odds with the pious cant and slippery evasions of that rhetoric-ridden decade, whose tragic consequences are still with us today.

The Legacy of Eric Hoffer -- Part I

 

Eric Hoffer, the Longshoreman Philosopher

Thomas Sowell is a great man on his own, but his remembrances of Eric Hoffer are so good, we at Washington Rebel reprint them for your edification.  The official links -- provided at the end of the reproductions -- are from Townhall.com, a site that would be worth reading if they trimmed down their adds, popups and stupid crap.  Anyway, here's part one:

The twentieth anniversary of the death of Eric Hoffer, in May 1983, passed with very little notice of one of the most incisive thinkers of his time -- a man whose writings continue to have great relevance to our times.

How many people today even know of this remarkable man with no formal schooling, who spent his life in manual labor -- most of it as a longshoreman -- and who wrote some of the most insightful commentary on our society and trends in the world?

You need only read one of his classics like The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements to realize that you are seeing the work of an intellectual giant.

Having spent several years in blindness when most other children were in school, Hoffer could only do manual labor after he recovered his sight, but was determined to educate himself. He began by looking for a big book with small print to take with him as he set out on a job as a migratory farm worker.

Chekists and Merchants

 

Grigory Pasko: The Chekist Palace

The monstrous evils of the twentieth century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women, and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind.  Eric Hoffer

Who Was Eric Hoffer?

There is an episode in the book from the year 1944 when the Vice President of the United Sates, Henry Wallace, made a visit to the death camp of Kolyma. The Russians built the GULAG a stage not seen since “The Potemkin villidge”. The Vice President returned home assuring everyone that everything is all right. People volunteered to work there hard.

Lend-Lease products shipped via Alaska mostly ended up in the GULAG. There is a striking episode in the “The Foresaken” of how the starving prisoners observe NKVD-guards eating American tinned food, and receiving nothing of it.  Edvins Snore and the Soviet Story

Eric Hoffer Sunday

 

Photo

A fateful process is set in motion when the individual is released "to the freedom of his own impotence" and left to justify his existence by his own efforts. The autonomous individual, striving to realize himself and prove his worth, has created all that is great in literature, art, music, science and technology. The autonomous individual, also, when he can neither realize himself nor justify his existence by his own efforts, is a breeding call of frustration, and the seed of the convulsions which shake our world to its foundations.

The individual on his own is stable only so long as he is possessed of self-esteem. The maintenance of self-esteem is a continuous task which taxes all of the individual's powers and inner resources. We have to prove our worth and justify our existence anew each day. When, for whatever reason, self-esteem is unattainable, the autonomous individual becomes a highly explosive entity. He turns away from an unpromising self and plunges into the pursuit of pride -- the explosive substitute for self-esteem. All social disturbances and upheavals have their roots in crises of individual self-esteem, and the great endeavor in which the masses most readily unite is basically a search for pride.

The Passionate State of Mind, aph. 29 (1955)

Who Was Eric Hoffer?

The Legacy of Eric Hoffer

The Legacy of Eric Hoffer II

Lessons from the Great Depression

Hat Tip, the Barrister

Karen Horn: Why Adam Smith Still Matters

A moral philosopher, Smith was a figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, a progressive school of philosophy with members including Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Ferguson. Their approach was inspired by Isaac Newton, perhaps the greatest scientist ever. His deep persuasion was that simply observing reality enables us to discover the underlying natural principles. The Scottish Enlightenment thinkers aimed at shedding light on the laws governing human behaviour, and on their consequences for life in society.

From the Republican Virtue Department: Assistant Village Idiot compares Tribalism to Individualism in Socialism, The Free Market, and Evolotionary Psychology:

Irving Kristol's essay The Capitalist Future, now almost 20 years old, touches on the energy it takes to keep convincing people of the superior prosperity of the free market system. It is quite excellent. But it misses the point that the free market, once it reaches a certain size, also goes against our natural inclinations. Capitalism also requires some investment of society's energy into the circular pursuit of proving that it works. Conservatives rail against this, believing that people should be logical and run the numbers and not have to be told over and over how free exchange benefits both parties, but I think it is inevitable. However logical it may be, it goes against some of our more primitive impulses.

Eric Hoffer on Freedom

Ye Olde Alternate News

 

Washington Rebel Librarian: You Got Authority to Check that Out?

'Round these parts we believe that all true rebels of our time -- all true Mavericks -- are conservative.  You heard me.  That old tripe about Conservatives being racist and homophobic, et cetera is . . . . about 40 years out of date, and that's being charitable.

Who's thinking for themselves these days?

Let me introduce you to a few of our Rebel friends:

The Speech of the Grail

 

Hoh Rain Forest

In 1972 we moved to the Hoh Ranger Station inside Olympic National Park.  I was 15-years-old. 

My father, Bud Hanify, started as a National Park Ranger in 1940; his father went to work for the Olympic National Park when it opened in 1938, building road.  My granddad's folks were from Ireland.  It always struck me as Providential -- ' kismetic' -- that he would be drawn to a place as green, or greener, than Ireland.