Week 18: The Ordeal Of Change

A mid-20th Century book by Eric Hoffer can help us better understand our current instability

Queen Victoria Market, Melbourne

Late last year I came across a mid-20th Century philosopher called Eric Hoffer. In a previous newsletter I discussed reading his book The True Believer on mass movements, authoritarian figures and their followers. It was a book released in 1951, but highly relevant to our current era of fanaticism. Hoffer argues that ideology is often a secondary concern. What actually drives these movements is a hatred of the present and a frustration born from this. The movement best placed to destroy the present is the one fanatics gravitate towards.

Hoffer is especially interesting because he was a self-taught man. He mostly worked as a stevedore and a vegetable picker, and would scribble notes on his breaks. Manual labour gave him time to think. It also gave him a connection to people who other intellectuals ordinarily wouldn’t.

This week I’ve picked up another book by Hoffer, a collection of essays called The Ordeal Of Change. It’s a book that he personally considered to be his most important work. As the title suggests, it is a study of how humans deal with change. And, how this is the primary form of turbulence within societies.

Hoffer argues that drastic change turns populations into misfits – in the literal sense, people unable to reconcile their own understanding of the world with how it is shifting. There are some people who are able to adjust to change and find self-esteem within change, but misfits are those who cannot. These misfits live in a state of passion, and seek substitutes for self-esteem within faith in radical movements. Or submission to them.

We tend to think about revolution as a convulsion for change. Yet Hoffer argues that revolutions are instead reactions to change. These are mass desires to make change stop, or to manage or control change. The promise of revolutionary movements is that they can either return to a past before change, or create a future where change has stopped through utopia being achieved.

Several years ago I wrote an essay called The Failure Of Fusionism seeking to understand why traditionally conservative parties are currently acting so chaotically. My argument was that Fusionism – the ideology that gained hegemony through the presidency of Ronald Reagan and prime ministership of Margaret Thatcher – pulled people in two difficult directions. It advanced the exponential change of ever freer markets, while simultaneously promoting a suspicion of social changes these markets created. It was an ideology in tension with itself. It was a misfit-making machine.

I hadn’t read Hoffer at the time, but through his work I’m getting a better picture of why we are currently in an age of instability. Why this emotional struggle with change is the driver of our current radical movements. We can see this clearly with MAGA and the passionate faith that its Dear Leader can restore the past. But also current progressive movements, which are more complex in their reactions to change, but trying to scrub the past clean is obviously driven by struggling with present-day realities. As is the permanent progressive disposition of trying to centralise and control change – an inability to handle spontaneous order.

I found this clip of an interview with Hoffer about The Ordeal of Change that is worth a watch. It’s dated in terms of context (and terminology), but has some thought-provoking ideas.

Interesting to note, despite being born and raised in the United States, German was Hoffer’s mother tongue and he spoke with a German accent. An indication that formal schooling – where accents usually develop for those with native languages different from public languages – was not something he had much of.

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This Week’s Reading

Violence Against Women Is a Wicked, and Urgent, Problem for Australia

Grant Wyeth - The Diplomat

Women’s education has accelerated past that of men at an astonishing pace, and their economic and political power is rising with it. The state can no longer afford to tolerate a social bargain that doesn’t take women’s safety seriously. It needs to start seeing its own capabilities through the capabilities of women, too. It has to see women’s security as national security. 

Would this kind of shift inflame men’s passions? Most likely. But what other option does the Australian government have? For no other security problem would volume and complexity be deemed acceptable reasons for governments to avoid devising solutions.

What Does It Mean to Defend Australia?

Grant Wyeth - The Diplomat

“[Defence Minister] Marles highlighted that “the optimistic assumptions that guided defence planning after the end of the Cold War are long gone,” yet the NDS [National Defence Strategy] is not only built on a clear-eyed understanding of the geopolitical environment Australia faces. Its platform is one of what Australians expect from their government: the defence not only of Australia’s shores, but its way of life. 

There are, of course, far more powerful states in the region, and a state in China that seeks to build a more hierarchical system. But the kind of submission Beijing expects is a non-starter for most Australians (former Prime Minister Paul Keating aside). It is therefore the duty of the Australian government to find solutions that prevent this from occurring. The NDS makes it clear that developing the power to project is Australia’s only option. 

The Inevitability of Indian Spies in Australia

Grant Wyeth – The Diplomat

“India’s emerging great power status comes with great power behaviour. As its power increases, India’s interests and concerns expand, and its capabilities to reach into areas of the world where it previously couldn’t also expand. Great powers see their interests as more substantive than those of other countries. India is far from unique when engaging in this kind of thinking or activity.  

This is one form of confidence New Delhi has displayed, but there is also another. With countries like Australia seeking to court India due to the wealth of opportunities it provides, New Delhi knows that actions like these won’t come with any significant consequences. This has been proved by Australian ministers seeking to downplay the incident when questioned about it. Alongside opportunities, the far bigger issue is the mutual geopolitical concerns that both New Delhi and Canberra share about China’s belligerence.”

What is Starmerism?

George Eaton – The New Statesman

“In contrast to Rawls, Sandel emphasised those “loyalties and convictions” that are “inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are – as members of this family or community or nation or people”.

There is a similarly communitarian quality to Starmerism, not least in its attitude towards class. While New Labour heralded a post-class era – “I want to make you all middle class,” declared Tony Blair in 1999 – Starmer speaks of working-class pride, and shame. He has lamented the failure of the previous Labour government to “eradicate the snobbery that looks down on vocational education” and to “drain the well of disrespect that this creates”.

When I recently interviewed Sandel, he praised Starmer as part of a wave of centre-left leaders who have broken with the post-class politics of the “third way”, the doctrine championed by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton in the late 1990s.

“Olaf Scholz in Germany, Joe Biden in the United States and Keir Starmer in Britain are all emphasising the dignity of work,” said Sandel. “Not only this, they all seem to be aware of the fact that centre-left leaders in recent decades have lost credibility with working people to a striking degree.”

The Deep, Tangled Roots of American Illiberalism

Steven Hahn – New York Times

“Illiberalism is generally seen as a backlash against modern liberal and progressive ideas and policies, especially those meant to protect the rights and advance the aspirations of groups long pushed to the margins of American political life. But in the United States, illiberalism is better understood as coherent sets of ideas that are related but also change over time.

This illiberalism celebrates hierarchies of gender, race and nationality; cultural homogeneity; Christian religious faith; the marking of internal as well as external enemies; patriarchal families; heterosexuality; the will of the community over the rule of law; and the use of political violence to achieve or maintain power. This illiberalism sank roots from the time of European settlement and spread out from villages and towns to the highest levels of government. In one form or another, it has shaped much of our history. Illiberalism has frequently been a stalking horse, if not in the winner’s circle. Hardly ever has it been roundly defeated.”

India’s Election is Eerily Quiet

Rashmee Roshan Lall – Persuasion

As historian Ramachandra Guha lays out in his magisterial tome India after Gandhi, the country has made a dispiriting journey from post-independence secular idealism to “muscular majoritarianism.” The Indian media is largely cowed, the lower courts (though not the Supreme Court of Chief Justice Dhananjaya Chandrachud) are mostly compliant. Inconvenient lines of academic inquiry in universities are suppressed. Just the other day, a friend who runs one of India’s leading media outlets told me it was best to just sit back and “enjoy the election. Who knows when we might have the next one.”

The Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A.), a group of more than two dozen opposition parties, has no time for such gallows humour. It is dead serious about complaints that federal agencies have been weaponised to intimidate Modi’s political rivals. Their own organisational apparatus is being hobbled: Three opposition politicians have been jailed and the bank accounts of the main opposition Congress Party have been frozen during the campaign period, when they are most needed.”

How The Logic Of Cults Is Taking Over Modern Life

The Gray Area with Sean Illing (Podcast)

“The internet has fractured our world into a million little subcultures catering to the specific identities and habits of everyone online. Writer Derek Thompson believes this has led to a widespread cult-like mentality that has crept into all facets of modern life — pop culture, media, politics, and religion itself. He joins Sean to explain this theory, and why it’s maybe not such a bad thing.”

Why Women Would Prefer To Be Alone In The Woods With A Bear Than A Man

Lisa Sugiura – The Conversation

“Would you rather find yourself alone in the woods with a bear or a man? This is the question currently dividing social media. Based on the responses online, it looks like most women answering the question say they would choose the bear, a decision that is shocking many men.

The reactions show some men don’t understand women’s experiences. The assertion that women would prefer to encounter a bear is based on evidence about the rate of male violence against women, and on a lifetime of learning to fear and anticipate this violence. This is especially true of sexual violence, something which would not be associated with encountering a bear.

Many men are able to move through their daily lives not being worried that they are going to be attacked or raped, can walk alone late at night without taking any safety precautions or even not having such thoughts cross their minds, and do not feel their hearts beat faster if they hear footsteps behind them. It may not be all men, but it is all women, who live smaller lives because of the threat of some men’s violence.”

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The past couple of days I’ve been thinking about this brilliant song and video by New Zealand artist Bachelorette. Something I don’t think could be made in Australia. For two countries that are so culturally similar, there is something about Kiwis that often leads to them producing more interesting and creative music. There’s more freedom to be strange in NZ. Less self-consciousness. The Australian male in particular is far too concerned about what other Australian males might think.

This thinking is part of me digging around to try and find some answers about Australia’s lack of economic complexity, and why most things in the country look pretty shit (I don’t think this is subjective). Maybe I’m over-analysing the implications of a song in my search for what I think is a complacent attitude in Australia? But finding the importance in detail is what I think we should be striving for.