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HOFFER REDUX -- LOOKING FOR
SANITY IN A WORLD OF TRUE BELIEVERS
The murderous rampage of Benjamin Nathaniel Smith has become the
latest violence d’jour for the news media. Are we missing the real
lesson, though, behind the story of a young fanatic whose thirst for
identity and rejection of reason is more commonplace than we might
wish to believe?
It started last weekend in the suburbs of Chicago, as he drove his light
blue car slowly, almost casually, through the residential
neighborhoods. His targets were a group of Orthodox Jews, blacks and
Asians. On Saturday, he repeated the pattern, this time near the
University of Illinois; and on the following evening, he was in
Bloomington, Indiana where he killed a Korean-American. It all ended
on Sunday night, as he shot himself after stealing a van and leading
the cops on a deadly chase.
People are still wondering what could have motivated Benjamin
Smith, a 21-year-old college student, to embark on such a bloody
expedition. Smith has been linked to an organization known as the
World Church of the Creator, known for its racist ideology which
characterizes non-whites as “mud people,” and echoes stereotypical
conspiracy theories about a Jewish plot to control the world. While it
promotes itself as anti-Christian and anti-Semitic, the Church of the
Creator espouses a variant of an ideology known as Christian Identity,
the mainstay theological doctrine of many of America’s racist groups
including Aryan Nations. Identity theologians teach that while whites
(Aryans) descended from the line of Adam and Eve, the Jews and
other non-Aryans of the world -- the so-called “mud people” -- arose
from a mating between Eve and a sub-human, ape like creature in the
Garden of Eden. Identity churches and groups share with other racist
movements a call for RAHOWA, or “Racial Holy War.” In public, they
often call for the partitioning of the United States into ethnic enclaves;
one scheme has Jews being confined to the island of Manhattan, while
Aryans move to the Pacific Northwest, and blacks -- if not repatriated
to Africa -- end up in the Southern U.S.
As with the teenage killers in Littleton, Colorado, the country is now
asking itself what attracted Benjamin Smith to an outfit like the World
Church of the Creator and to transmogrify into the latest serial
killer-with-a-cause. Like the shooters at Columbine High, Paduca
Kentucky and elsewhere, Smith grew up in an affluent neighborhood, a
“good kid from a good family.” His father was a doctor, mom a real
estate agent, and there is little indication that his bizarre ideas came
from the family. At the University of Illinois, Smith even lived in what
the New York Times described as an “elite dormitory... known for its
progressive program of visiting authors and artists of many cultures
and points of views.” Smith reportedly told friends that he felt
uncomfortable with so many foreign students and professors around,
though, and began reading neo-Nazi literature. He then met Matthew
F. Hale, the “pontifex maximus” of the World Church of the Creator.
Drinking at Hale’s well of propaganda, Smith immersed himself in
Creator tracts and ideology.
Smith is now the latest member in a growing club of media icons like
Jose Recindez-Ramirez, Andrew Cunanan, John Wayne Gacy and
Charles Manson who remind us that the fabric of everyday reality can
rip at any moment, exposing anyone to the calamitous and
unexpected. Those who manage to avoid the stray bullet or homicidal
attack can still immerse themselves in the macabre madness of it all
from the comfort of the living room, where a steady diet of evening
news, courtroom television, or even a trip to the mall bookstore --
where shelves on True Crime seem to sag under the weight of the
bounty of new offerings -- provides a voyeuristic, yet safe thrill. We lap
it up like hungry, thirsty dogs. For those who believed that we had
enough of O.J. (psychologists mused that there actually existed a
disorder they dubbed “O.J. Addiction”), the Five Year Anniversary
prompted every major network to revisit that ignominious trial where
we could once again relive the events, and even recall our extinct
interest in the future of Kato Kaelin. Remember him?

... Hoffer was
among the first to recognize the central importance of self-esteem to
psychological well being. While most recent writers focus on the
benefits of a positive self-esteem, Hoffer focused on the consequences
of a lack of self-esteem. He finds in self-hatred, self-doubt, and
insecurity the roots of fanaticism and self-righteousness. |
We seem to need, even demand a steady diet of such mental fare.
If new horrors are not coming our way with sufficient regularity, we
revisit the old ones. O.J.’s anniversary was good for a round of prime
time “remember this” documentaries, but why stop there? The
Summer of Sam beckons us gratis the genius of Spike Lee, and yes,
everyone thinks this is “exploitation” of the worst sort but yes, the
lines at the theater will be long and anxious.
What sense is there to make out of all of this?
Hillel Schwartz, the patriarch of those who excavate the edgy
nervousness of American culture at the cusp of the new millennium,
suggests that like clockwork, the end of any century brings forth what
he terms “janiformity,” the “dichotomy or doubling” named for twin
visages of the old Roman god Janus. In his opus “Century’s End,”
Schwartz argues that “certain cultural constellations come to the fore
at the ends of centuries, time and again.” As the calendar prepares to
roll over to another block of 100 years, the end of a century, “we are
inevitably host to an oxymoronic time: the best and the worst, the
most desperate and the most exultant; the most constrained and the
most chaotic.” In his introduction to “The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium,
American Culture on the Bring,” Mark Dery further informs us, “The
belief that we are history’s witness to extreme of social fragmentation
and moral malaise, that we stand at critical junctures and teeter on the
brink of momentous decisions, is part and parcel of the fin-de-siecle;
the fin-de-millennium simply turns up the cultural volume tenfold...”
Our time is one indeed ruled by the spirit of Janus. We have
incarcerated a record number of people in jails and prisons which
cannot be built fast enough, but none of this seem to blunt the
perception that the barbarians are at the gates, inside our houses,
under -- and in -- the bed. We’ve traded in the exultant and carefree
thrill of the convertible for our century’s end personal tank, the Sports
Utility Vehicle, that is marketed for its sense of reliability and
Mussolinian security in these times of chaotic trouble. We have
curfews for teens, drug tests for students and welfare moms, “zero
tolerance” for everything from cigarettes to beer and cursing,
three-strikes laws - a - plenty, neighborhood watch, purse-convenient
pepper spray; and, say, brother, when was the last time you saw
somebody foolish (or dangerous?) enough to be hitchhiking by the side
of the road?
To segue back to Benjamin Nathaniel Smith...
What many people find so worrisome about this latest barbarian who
swaggers forth on our neighborhood lanes and interstate highways
with his battlecry of “RAHOWA!” is that he comes from “good folks and
a good home.” The success of the World Church of the Creator and
groups like it is that they no longer concentrate on the trailer-park
denizens one encounters on The Jerry Springer Show, the
Bubbas-With-An-Attitude whose blue collars can no longer aspire to
the Great American Dream, and whose idea of a good time might
consist of a foray of gay bashing punctuated with a round of shots and
a few beers. Smith is typical of a new breed of warrior, “young,
educated, energetic, articulate,” says the New York Times.
Excise all of the clap-trap about Racial Holy War, the “mud people”
and some kind of arcane religious philosophy, though, and Benjamin
Smith really isn’t all that different from the type of person the late
philosopher Eric Hoffer discussed in his 1951 opus, The True Believer.
The book established Hoffer as one of the prescient observers of our
time; one critics observed: “His work was not only original, it was
completely out of step with dominant academic trends... Hoffer was
among the first to recognize the central importance of self-esteem to
psychological well being. While most recent writers focus on the
benefits of a positive self-esteem, Hoffer focused on the consequences
of a lack of self-esteem. He finds in self-hatred, self-doubt, and
insecurity the roots of fanaticism and self-righteousness. He finds that
a passionate obsession with the outside world or with the private lives
of other people is merely a craven attempt to compensate for a lack
of meaning in one’s own life...”
Hoffer observed that the best within us, what he called “the alchemy
of man’s soul,” those “noble attributes -- courage, honor, love, hope,
faith, duty, loyalty and so on -- can be transmuted into ruthlessness.”
He was both skeptical and critical of the mass movements of our time,
the totalitarian “isms” that, he said, “infect people with a malady and
then offer the movement as a cure.” The worst prone Hoffer labeled
fanatics, that man or women who “embraces a cause not primarily
because of its justness or holiness, but because of his desperate need
for something to hold on to...”
It is thought that Smith was drawn, like a magnet, to the charismatic
person of pontifex maximus Matthew Hale and his World Church of the
Creator; Smith was, as one pundit observed, “a young person who felt
disaffected, who was looking for something to affiliate himself with...”
This too Hoffer understood when he wrote of those “many who find the
burdens, the anxiety, and the isolation of an individual existence
unbearable...” He warned, “Such persons soon or later turn their
backs on an individual existence and strive to acquire a sense of worth
and a purpose by an identification with a holy cause, a leader, or a
movement.” For Hoffer, that movement could be any of the popular
totalitarian “isms” sweeping the world, any political or religious
ideology that promised salvation, either literal or secular, a “place for
everyone,” and for everyone a sense of purpose, order and direction.
The outcome, he warned, was not that people, especially the
oppressed, would fight for freedom. “They fight for pride and power --
power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate
their oppressors; they want to retaliate.” Smith boasted that he was
“more afraid for my race than myself. Nature isn’t concerned with the
individual, but with the species...”
From this vantage point, Benjamin Smith was not altogether that
different from the millions of other human beings whose sense of
self-worth, purpose and place in an otherwise-chaotic and discordant
universe comes from being part of a larger, regimented, organic
movement -- a class, a race, a struggle, a phalanx, all marching as
one to the regular candence of orders. The universe becomes divided
into a Manichean battlefield -- in Smith’s case, one pitting the White
Race (RAHOWA!) against the “mud people,” Jews, and other
ideological vermin. Tweak the quantum flippancy of the universe a bit,
and someone like Benjamin Smith could have been in a gang of
Mau-Mau, or marched with the Condor Legion, or blindly performed the
bidding of an Adolph Hitler or Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria. He could have
been an enthused Inquisitor hunting for witches and doctrinal
heretics, a self-righteous Calvinist autocrat intent on imposing The
Heavenly Kingdom on earth at any cost.
Hoffer is not identified as an Atheist, but he did suggest that we do
not construct God in our own image. The fanatic who struts to the
orders of others and the blind dicta of an ideological or religious faith
creates a god “in the image of his cravings and dreams -- in an image
of what man wants to be.” Hoffer waned, “The ruthless born of
self-seeking is ineffectual compared with the ruthlessness sustained by
dedication to a holy cause. ‘God wishes,’ said Calvin, ‘that one should
put aside all humanity when it is a question of striving for His glory.’”
“Take man’s most fantastic invention,” declared Hoffer, “God. Man
invents God in the image of his longing, in the image of what he wants
to be, then proceeds to imitate that image, vie with it, and strive to
overcome it.” As for religion, to Hoffer it was “not a matter of God,
church, holy cause. etc. These are but accessories. The source of
religious preoccupation is in the self, or rather the rejection of the
self.... Man alone is a religious animal because, as Montaigne points
out, ‘it is a malady confined to man, and not seen in any other
creature, to hate and despise ourselves...’”
For those who look for a Strongman to follow blindly, to obey, to die
for, the cause is not something to be understood and comprehended
on a rational basis. Reason is an enemy, a cumbersome inconvenience
better replaced by faith, belief and obedience. The Cause it is to be
embraced as a blind passion, a holy calling, a higher imperative which
demands that its believers prepare to sacrifice themselves on the altar
of ideology and belief. The critical and skeptical individual, that
annoying person who asks questions and seeks explanations, become
an enemy. “All mass movements avail themselves of action as a
means of unification,” wrote Hoffer. “The conflicts a mass movement
seeks and incites serve not only to down its enemies but also to strip
its followers of their distinct individuality and render them more soluble
in the collective medium.”
The fanatic wants to follow, to be reduced to an instrument of higher
purpose. “There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves
as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the
responsibility for acts which are prompted by our own questionable
inclinations and impulses,” Hoffer wrote. “Both the strong and the
weak grasp at this alibi. The latter hide their malevolence under the
virtue of obedience; they acted dishonorably because they had to obey
orders. The strong, too, claim absolution by proclaiming themselves
the chosen instruments of a higher power -- God, history, fate, nation
or humanity...”
“The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of
human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into
puppets.”
Ironically, Hoffer died in 1983, one year short of Orwell’s distopian
and apocalyptic time line for the human race. He lived through the
waning days of the more blatant manifestation of autocracy and
theocracy, and what some consider to be the last gasps of other
totalitarian ideologies. There is no guarantee, though, that the fear of
genuine freedom and intellectual independence which plagues so many
of the human species is any less diminished in our time than it was
when Hoffer first put word to paper. Our time cries out for a strong
dose of Hoffer’s wisdom and insight. Benjamin Smith, another holy
warrior whose inner troubles and turmoil fueled a desperate battlecry
for demolishing the world and reconstructing it according to his, or
someone else’s image of perfection and unanimity, is sufficient
testament to that fact.
Copyright
© 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 by American Atheists.
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