From longshoreman Eric Hoffer, November 29th, 1974:
I cannot see myself living in a socialist society. My passion is to be left alone and only a capitalist society does so. Capitalism is ideally equipped for mastering things but awkward in mastering men. It hugs the assumption that people will perform tolerably well when left to themselves.
The curious thing is that the reluctance or inability to manage men makes capitalist society uniquely modern. Managing men is a primitive thing. It partakes of magic and is the domain of medicine men and tribal chieftains. Socialist and communist societies are a throwback to the primitive in their passion for managing men.
Idealists never weary of decrying capitalism for its trivial motivation. Yet a discrepancy between trivial motives and weighty consequences is an essential trait of human uniqueness and is particularly pronounced in the creative individual. Not only in the marketplace and on the battlefield but also in the world of thought and imagination, men who set their hearts on toys often accomplish great things. The idealists prize seriousness and weightiness. Let them go to the animal kingdom! Animals are deadly serious.
– Before the Sabbath, p. 4
7 Comments
“It hugs the assumption that people will perform tolerably well when left to themselves.”
Is “hugs” a typo, or does capitalism indeed hold its assumptions so dear?
Jeffery Hodges
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My guess is that “hugs the assumption” is a less formal way of saying “embraces the assumption.”
Eric Hoffer is one of my favorite authors. He has a unique outlook and and unique way of stating it. He does not always use the language in the most accepted ways, but he makes his points very clear.
I first learned of him from an interview he had with Eric Severeid on CBS almost fifty years ago. His output is not large, but there isn’t a wasted word in it. He was happy to write one sentence a day. Until very late in life, when he was made a professor at Berkeley, he was an itinerant worker. Often seasonal agricultural work or most often longshoreman’s work. He said that the first thing he did when he came to a new town was find the library. He read all the “heavies.” There had to be both an amazing mind and a phenomenal will to accomplish what he did with the start he had.
The idea about trivial motives is an interesting take on something that Matt Ridley pointed out many years later. Developments such as GPS, high-speed computers, super markets that have year-round fresh fruit, were invented by people who had fairly trivial motives, and had no idea of what the final output would look like. Even Berners-Lee, if asked to predict what the internet would come to look like, probably had no idea of such things as Amazon, Google, blogs, email, etc. What was needed, in every case, was a price mechanism that floated on supply and demand and sent signals to the inventors.
Not an “Ivory Tower” philosopher, he. Rather, the “On the Waterfront” philosopher.
Yes, Bill, one of my favorites too. I admire autodidacts generally, and what Hoffer achieved is extraordinarily impressive. What a fine mind.
Dom, this is why it’s so ridiculous for the government to be picking, Solyndra-style, winners and losers in the marketplace.