Leo con asombro La Contra de hoy en la que Jeff Rubin, ex economista jefe del CIBC manifiesta que la era del petróleo barato se ha acabado y por tanto, la globalización no sólo no va a continuar, sino que va  a retroceder hasta volver a un verdadero localismo.

Ante esto me vienen dos ideas contrapuestas:

- O este señor ha llegado a una conclusión equivocada (tal vez por haber analizado un sólo factor causal, el petróleo, en un mundo multicausal)

- O son los demás los que están equivocados.

En cualquier caso, ambas posibilidades me remiten a la siguiente idea de Eric Hoffer: En tiempos de crisis los aprendices sobrevivirán, mientras que los que todo lo saben, estarán bien equipados para un mundo que ya no existe.

O dicho de otra manera: la flexibilidad mental de la que tantas veces he hablado en este Blog, no es simplemente una opción, es un equipamiento esencial para un mundo cambiante. Ya no hay certezas. No hay nada seguro. Todo cambia minuto a minuto.

Are you ready? ¿Estás preparado para vivir en perpetuo cambio?

Mertxe Pasamontes

The only constant in advertising is change. To maintain success, you have to keep up. That isn’t easy. Especially with this revolutionary change we’re experiencing in communications.  I try to learn something new every day. I know that to do so is essential for my ability to survive, let alone succeed.

“In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”

Eric Hoffer, American Social Writer

I have great respect for Tim Williams. He is the author of the book Take a Stand for Your Brand, an important read for every small-to mid-size agency CEO. In a recent AdvertisingAge article he writes,

“… we’re at the nexus of the Great Recession and the Great Transformation of Marketing. In circumstances like these, a strategy of “just try harder” won’t take you very far.”

Tim shares 15 things your agency can’t afford to risk during these current times of change:

1. A skill set built mostly around interruption instead of engagement.
2. A digital department in place of a digital competency.
3. Core competencies focused on “one to many” instead of “one to one.”
4. Creating brand-to-consumer communications at the expense of consumer-to-consumer communications.
5. Lack of analytics and tools to measure effectiveness.
6. Production systems that are linear instead of organic.
7. Developing media plans instead of channel plans.
8. Placing media instead of creating media.
9. Creating brand transactions instead of brand relationships.
10. Focusing on “the big idea” instead of “big multichannel ideas.”
11. Traditional production staff instead of “producers.”
12. Expecting account executives to be both strategic leaders and project managers.
13. Continuing to allocate client budgets to media instead of creative.
14. A business strategy that attempts to support high-value offerings (strategy and ideation) as well as increasingly low-value offerings (basic production and execution).
15. Selling hours worked instead of value created.

I would add a 16th risks that agencies can’t afford to take:

Beginning 2010 without a written new business strategy, that includes social media as a primary component, to generate inbound leads.

Read the entire article, Agencies: 15 Risks You Can’t Afford Not to Take

Social Media is also impacting ad agency new business …

• Four Ways Social Media is Changing Advertising Agencies New Business
• Ad agency having explosive new business growth by leading with social media
• Ad Agency Survey Finds Traditional New Business Methods Aren’t Working
• “Social Media ‘Teaches’ Ad Agencies to Promote Themselves the Right Way”

Another exhibit in the Chronicles of Gallic Effusiveness, previously addressed here.  This one comes from Proust’s second volume.  The young narrator has been to see the great Berma performing Racine.  It was the realization of a hotly cherished dream, but he was more impressed with the bit parts played by secondary actresses than by Berma herself.  Until, that is, he reads the following review and revises his memory of the experience accordingly:

The performance of Phedre, given this afternoon before an enthusiastic audience which included the foremost representatives of the artistic and critical world, was for Mme Berma, who played the heroine, the occasion of a triumph as brilliant as any that she has known in the course of her phenomenal career…It constituted the purest and most exalted manifestation of dramatic art which it has been the privilege of our generation to witness.

I was surprised to see that Eric Hoffer in his unpublished notebooks (h/t Patrick Kurp) comments on the phenomenon:

It is the Frenchman’s readiness to exaggerate that is at the root of his intellectual lucidity and also of his capacity for acknowledging merit.  The English were not afraid to exaggerate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and they were then not far behind the French in the lucidity of their thinking… There is hardly a single instance of cultural vigor marked by moderation of expression.

Precisely what Hoffer meant by ‘lucidity,’ I’m not sure.  But if the French have a greater capacity for acknowledging merit it may be because they were relatively less infected by the leprous touch of Calvin, the idolatrous fandoms of whose English disciples were checked by the assurance that even the most accomplished among them were, after all, totally depraved in flesh and spirit.  Hoffer’s date for the decline in English intellectual vigor coincides well enough with the Puritan Revolution.
 
A capacity for sustained enthusiasm may also explain why so many of the English-speaking world’s former celebrities retire to France.  They know that among their Gallic admirers they’ll never have to stoop to touring Indian casinos and small-town community centers for rent money and faint echoes of the adulation they enjoyed in their prime.

Eric Hoffer? I’ll never forget him. An old hero of mine. Truly.

Thanks NeoEx for reminding us.

Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious, it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world. Other nations, when they are defeated, survive and recover but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed.

Hoffer wrote that forty-odd years ago. Plus de changement de choses… eh?

That specific paragraph, incidentally, kinda reminds me of something from Christopher Buckley’s book on his parents. Where, at a friend’s memorial service, his father said he’d waited his whole life to meet the perfect Christian and, when he did, the person turned out to be a non-observant Jew. I’m sure there are many, many Moslems –practicing their faith at various levels– of which the same may potentially be said. It’s past time for all of them to step up.

Anyway –back to Eric Hoffer– do yourself a favor; read the whole thing. Then maybe anything else by the guy that you can get your hands on.

Instead of a lot of dumb blogs. Including this one… which, sometime soon — cat-exits-bag alert– is going bye-bye anyway.

Also –concerning the admonition to not jump away from conclusions (a post or two ago) and its corollary: nothing is what it seems unless it actually is– this article makes an important point. A minor point these days, maybe, but still kinda crucial, one category not excluding the other.

“Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”

— Eric Hoffer

Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world. Other nations, when they are defeated, survive and recover but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June [1967], he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews.
No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on. There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Blacks are executed in Rhodesia. But, when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one remonstrated with him.
The Swedes, who are ready to break off diplomatic relations with America because of what we do in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. They sent Hitler choice iron ore, and ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway.
The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts. And Jewish resources. Yet at this moment, Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer [1967] had the Arabs their Russian backers won the war, to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general.

The Israeli-Palestinian, or more appropriately called the Israeli-Arab, conflict has been ongoing since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.  With Arab states having a population of over 160 million to Israel’s 6 million, it is remarkable that Israel still survives.

Negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians have been ongoing for nearly two decades with no discernible progress being made.  The reason for this is simple; the two sides currently have irreconcilable differences.  Israelis want Israel to remain a Jewish State and the Palestinians demand what is called the “right of return” that would allow any Palestinian whose family left Israel after 1948 the right to settle in Israel.  Given the population of Palestinians, this would result in the end of Israel as a Jewish state for all practical purposes.

Like some of his predecessors, President Barack Obama is trying to intervene in the conflict to bring about a peaceful resolution to the conflict.  While a noble cause, it is naïve to think it will succeed.  Unless the Palestinians are willing to give up its right of return demand, there can be no peace since no Israeli government can accede to this Palestinian demand.

There’s been much published in the media on the issue of the Jewish settlements built in the West Bank.  This argument is a red herring and allows the Palestinians to obfuscate the real issues ,as proven by Palestinian actions in Gaza.  In 2005, the Israelis completely pulled out of Gaza and removed all Jewish settlements, some even by force.  The Palestinians responded by electing the terrorist group, Hamas, to govern Gaza.   Hamas has since fired thousands the rockets into Israel.

President Obama’s repetitive “Groundhog’s Day” approach to the Middle-East is not realistic.  The President would do well for to read the article written over 40 years ago by Eric Hoffer.  This non-Jewish American longshoremen and social philosopher wrote nine books and won that the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  What Hoffer noted in 1968 is still applicable today.

I have posted Hoffer’s article below.  It’s a great read.

ISRAEL‘S PECULIAR POSITION, By Eric Hoffer (LA Times 5/26/68)

The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews.

Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem.  Russian did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it, Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchman. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese-and no one says a word about refugees.  But in the case of Israel the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees.

Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis.

Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.

Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews.

No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on. There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Negroes are executed in Rhodesia. But when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one remonstrated with him.

The Swedes, who are ready to break of diplomatic relations with America because of what we do in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. They sent Hitler choice iron ore, and ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway.

The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts.  And Jewish resources.  Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general.

I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us.

It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.
~ Eric Hoffer

Eric Hoffer (1902 – 1983) foi um filósofo americano.

Bom fim de semana para todos. Sem imitação.

“Quando as pessoas são livres para fazer o que querem, elas geralmente imitam umas as outras.” Eric Hoffer.

You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy.

It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.
-Eric Hoffer

According to Jakob Dylan of the rock band The Wallflowers: “There’s got to be something better than in the middle.”  I can relate.  Being in the middle is exhausting.  It means doing the more difficult thing, which is tolerating the other person’s point of view.  As American hero and President Dwight Eisenhower said, “…in a democracy debate is the breath of life.”

In the 1950’s President Eisenhower often found himself under attack from the extreme right.  In those days it was called McCarthyism, the KKK, and the John Birch Society, but their ideological descendants are alive and well today.  I understand their concerns.  I too consider myself a Christian, but I feel more drawn to the Jesus that can be found delivering the “Sermon on the Mount,” than the fiery, vengeful Jesus found in some of the later writings of Paul and John.  To be sure, we are called on to make a careful reading of all these writings, which forces us metaphorically to “wrestle with God” like the ancient Hebrew patriarch Jacob.  But two things are clear.  First, Jesus does not want us to judge, but rather “turn the other cheek” and be “peace makers.”  Secondly, he had no use for hypocrites who use the name of the Living Father to perpetuate fear and hate.

And so I find the whisper campaign comparing Barack Obama to Nazis, totalitarians, and terrorists despicable.  Obama’s spending plans are way too big, particularly given our debt problem.  But let’s stop the name-calling.

I’m glad to live in a country in which the citizenry has a healthy distrust of government.  This is an American tradition that started even before our revolutionary days, and, for the most part, has served us well.

During this era of “911,” of foriegn wars, of environemental damage, of great technological and social change, and of vast government spending, it is understandable that many Americans are becoming unnerved.  “Distrust of government” and “pessimism about the future” reached historic highs under Bush, and are now growing again under Obama.  Ironically, conspiracy theories from the left are now turning into conspiracy theories from the right.  And so, I would urge the President to make a move to the middle.  But if he doesn’t, elections are barely a year away.

In the meantime, I would urge Republicans to listen to the cool-headed Eisenhower.  His letter to Robert Biggs is as remarkable as anything that has been issued from the modern presidential pulpit and is amazingly pertinent to the issue at hand.  I have excerpted the letter below.  A link to the whole letter can be found at the bottom of the post.

“I think it is undeniably true that the activities of our government have tended to become much more complex, impersonal and remote from the individual…

“In good part this situation is inherent in life in the mid-twentieth century–in a highly developed economy and a highly complex society such as our own…

“Another part of the difficulty undoubtedly comes from the high degree of confusion and uncertainty on major national problems that seems to exist today…

“The mental stress and burden which this form of government imposes has been particularly well recognized in a little book about which I have spoken on several occasions. It is “The True Believer,” by Eric Hoffer; you might find it of interest. In it, he points out that dictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems–freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.

“But while this responsibility is a taxing one to a free people it is their great strength as well–from millions of individual free minds come new ideas, new adjustments to emerging problems, and tremendous vigor, vitality and progress. “

To see all of President Eisenhower’s letter, click below: 

http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/presidential-papers/second-term/documents/1051.cfm

“We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.”

~Eric Hoffer

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time. “

~Abraham Lincoln

Is Barack Obama a Liar…

John Boehner Responds To Obama Care

Brit Hume Comment on Obama Speech 9 2009

President Won’t Back Down From Public Option

SC Congressman Joe Wilson Calls Obama A Liar During Speech

<h4 style=”text-align:centerCoulter defends Obama speech disrupter

Joe Wilson on Hannity: President Obama – You Lie

Joe Wilson Right! Health Care Bill MUST/DOES/WILL cover Illegal Alliens

Joe Wilson Right! Courts Have Spoken – Benefits Must Apply to Illegal Aliens – Obama is a Liar

President Obama’s Speech to Congress on ” Healthcare “-9-9-09.-Part-1

President Obama’s Speech to Congress on ” Healthcare “-9-9-09.-Part-2

President Obama’s Speech to Congress on ” Healthcare “-9-9-09.-Part-3

Rep. McCotter Discussing Health Care on Charlie Rose (Part 1)

Rep. McCotter Discussing Health Care on Charlie Rose (Part 2)

O’Reilly and Rove and Axelrod and “Death Panels”

 Dennis Miller Rings In On Tonights Speech and Van Jones

Eric Cantor “Taken Aback” By Obama’s Address To Congress

Mark Levin – Health care bill to give care to illegal immigrants

Why Obama’s healthcare plan is NOT going to work!!

During the last week more and more Americans calling into to various talk radio shows and their hosts have called President Obama a liar.

Thus when he continues to lie about what he wants for health care, I was not surprised that at least one of our elected Representative called him a liar.

SHOCK UNCOVERED: Obama IN HIS OWN WORDS saying His Health Care Plan will ELIMINATE private insurance

The majority of the American people no longer trust nor believe him.

President Obama hectoring tone is revealing.

I believe he knows the American people have caught on to the fact he habitually lies, does not like people to point this out and thinks he can fool the American people yet again.

President Obama and the progressive radical socialist Democratic Party may not believe it, but they are done for at least the next two elections in 2010 and 2012.

You do not scold, lie and demonize the American people and expect to be re-elected.

President Obama is very quickly losing the independent, older, and white voter.

President Obama is about to lose younger voters when they finally understand that they will be required to buy health care insurance or be taxed and fined by the IRS.

Once he goes under forty percent in his approval ratings, he will be a lame duck president.

This will happen in the next six months as the unemployment rate continues to raise and exceeds 10%.

When between 20,000,000 and 30,000,000 Americans are seeking full time jobs and your economic policies are failing, do not expect to get re-elected.

It is the economy stupid.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.

President Obama and the Democratic Party have lost the confidence of the American people and especially small to medium size business owners that create most if not all of the jobs.

Self-employed and small business owners want to purchase affordable, portable, individual health insurance plans with high deductibles from any insurance company in the United States.

The Democratic Party makes it impossible for them to do so with its proposed mandatory coverages that the government forces them to buy or be fined and taxed by the IRS.

The American people do not want compulsory health insurance with mandatory coverages that will lead slowly and surely to a single payer government monopoly of health care.

Without very specific language in the bill that excludes abortions and illegal aliens, the President is lying about both abortions and illegal aliens being excluded from coverage.

The Republicans submitted several amendments to the various bills specificly doing exactly this and all were voted down by the Democratic Party.

The President knows this and unfortunately for him, more and more Americans know this every day.

Medicare is currently running deficits that are expected to grow larger every year.

I .O.U.S.A. Bonus Reel: Social Security+Medicare Projections

Medicare already cost shifts over 20% of the doctor and hospital bills to private insurance.

The reason why President Obama and the progressive radical socialist Democratic party are insisting upon compulsory health care insurance is simple.

They need millions of healthy people, mostly young people, who currently do no buy health insurance to be covered so they can use these premiums to pay for those who are older and sicker as well as for the treatment of million of illegal aliens.

This would only make the economy and recession worse.

Instead of enforcing the immigration laws and deporting illegal aliens, they want to provide them with government subsidized health care paid by American citizens.

The Democratic Party refuses to address tort reform for the simple reason that one of the largest contributors to their polical party are trial lawyer.

Until tort reform happens, doctors will continue to pay skyrocketing malpractice insurance premiums and practice defensive medicine.

This together with Medicare cost shifting are two of the primary drivers of rising health care costs and health insurance premiums.

Yet both President Obama and the Democratic Party refuses to address these issues

The estimated annual cost of President Obama’s plan when fully implemented is in the 500 billion dollar range.

The most optimist estimate is 250 billion dollars per year which no one believes.

Both the bailout and stimulus packages have resulted in budgetary deficits already approach 1,600 billion dollars—$1,600,000,000,000.

More Perspective – 2010 Budget Deficit – Bloomberg

US Deficit Estimate Jumps by $2 trillion – CNN

Stop Spending Our Future – The Crisis

Jeff Sessions quotes Ron Paul on the Deficit: “We Cannot Borrow our Way to Prosperity” [2~2]

President Obama is by far the most fiscally irresponsible President in the history of the United States.

His economic policies and programs are resuting in the longest and deepest recession in US history and could if his proposed health care and cap and trade energy tax bills are passed  result in an economic depression with double digit unemployment rates.

The President proposed health insurance reform bill would destroy even more jobs, wreck the economy and kill the American dream.

The President refuses to explain exactly how he is going to pay for health care insurance for millions of Americans.

Greta & Tim Pawlenty Discuss Barack Obama’s Health Care Speech to Congress

The main reason President Obama persists with this folly is he is a true believer in a single payer universal health care–socialized medicine–that his union base wants.

The American people simply do not want what the President is selling.

What do the American peoplewant?

The same option that our Representatives and Senators have!

The problem is that this is very expensive and millions simply could not afford it.

Americans Want Congressional Health Coverage

The American people are fed up with both political parties and their arrogance.

The American people want political leaders with humility.

Humility is the acknowledgement of truth.

“You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.”

“”One might equate growing up with a mistrust of words. A mature person trusts his eyes more than his ears. Irrationality often manifests itself in upholding the word against the evidence of the eyes. Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.”

~Eric Hoffer

“Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues hence, in the soul in which this virtue does not exist there cannot be any other virtue except in mere appearance.”

~Saint Augustine

Background Articles and Videos

Cavuto: Will Illegal Immigrants Get Free Health Care with Barack Obama’s Plan? [FOX News]

Health Care for illegal Immigrants?

Barack Obama Health Care Benefits For Illegal Aliens!

Unruly moment, manufactured outrage

By Michelle Malkin

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Public Option = Government Option = Pathway to Single Payer = Single Payer = Socialized Medicine = Blue Pill = Poison Pill

Obama: First We Kill The Babies, Then We Kill The Elderly, Then We Kill The Veterans–Your Life, Your Choices–Your Time Is Up!

This Joker Is A Lost Cause: Keeping President Obama Honest on Health Care–Let’s But A Smile On That Face–Staying Alive

Fact 1. Federal Government Health Insurance Is Compulsory–Kill The Bill–H.R. 3200

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The Dangers Of A Single Payer Health Care System: Ronald Reagan On Socialized Medicine and Friedrich A. Hayek On State Monopoly

The American People Believe The Government Public Option Plan Is The Path To The Single Payer Government Plan–Socialized Medicine–Obama Caught Lying To The American People!

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The Obama Depression Has Arrived: 15,000,000 to 25,000,000 Unemployed Americans–Stimulus Package and Bailouts A Failure–400,000 Leave Labor Force In July!

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Republican Health Care Reform: The Patients’ Choice Act

Medical Doctor and Senator Tom Coburn On Health Care–Videos

The Senate Doctors Show–Videos

Obama’s Waterloo– Government Compulsory Single Payer Socialized Medicine!–Videos

President Obama’s Plan of Massive Deficit Spending Is Destroying The US Economy–The American People Say Stop Socialism BS Now!

The Bum’s Rush of The American People: The Totally Irresponsible Democratic Party Health Care Bill and Obama’s Big Lie Exposed

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The Obama Big Lie and Inconvenient Truth About Health Care–The Public Option Trojan Horse–Leads To A Single Payor Goverment Monopoly of Health Care and The Bankruptcy of USA!

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Government Bureaucracy: Organizational Chart of The House Democrats’ Health Plan

Dr. Robert W. Christensen–Videos

John Stossel–Sick In America–Videos

For many people, an excuse is better than an achievement because an achievement, no matter how great, leaves you having to prove yourself again in the future but an excuse can last for life.

- Eric Hoffer

I have a great challenge for you tonight.  What do you want to give your life for.  No, I’m not talking about dying a noble death.  I’m talking, no, I’m asking you to find something worth living for, not dying for.  I want you to find one or more passions; things worth spending your life doing or learning about.  Something worth dreaming about for hours during the day.  A thing worth planning years ahead, plotting, laying out a trail to lead to a golden end.   I have three.  First, the life of the mind takes center stage.  How do we actually learn.  Why is it that so few of us live exciting intellectual lives when I believe that most of us could live a passionate intellectual life.  And, on the practical side of it.  How do kids best learn.  I am convinced it’s not at school for most kids.  For me, school was a 12 year long prison sentence.  As  a teacher I work everyday of my life to try to make schools – or at least my little corner of the school world into a vibrant place that young people love.  Second, I practice two arts; photography and woodworking.  They are my connections to sanity as well as an extra income stream.  I am fascinated by the beauty of transcendent craft in wood.  The beauty of an artfully produced photograph always stuns me.  I drift from one to the other.  The third is bird watching.  Bird watching is as much a connection to God as the church.  In birds I see the magnificence of His creation.  I see the infinite variety, infinate adaptations, transcendent colors and the thing I dream about most – flight.  The photography, the woodwork, and the bird watching are for me.  The study of the mind as well as how it learns is for the world.  I want you to find something to change the world. 

Egotistic you say?  Not at all.  The field I have set for myself is impossible.  How people learn, how they make knowledge their own, then grow into experts is so hard a mine to explore that I will not live long enough to make a change I fear.  That is probably one of my greatest nightmares; that I know I will die before I have learned it all or made the difference I want to make to kids and other people who are trying to learn.   Not all people do learn.  Some shut down after the 12 year prison sentence that school was for me.   They never want to pick up a pen or pencil again because we have squeezed the guts out of the pleasure.  By the time many kids get out of school they find themselves ready to cast away the vestments of school to run as far away as possible.  To be naked of school is their goal.  But so many never find the joy out of school.  These unfortunates have been so convinced that learning cannot be a thing of transcendent joy that they look upon learning as a child looks upon vomit.  So they run, ridicule and resist any further intellectual life.  They have had enough.  They have fed at the table of knowledge and found it poisonous. 

What I am asking you to do, if you are one of the   many who have started to follow these electronic scribblings, is to find a new passion.  It’s there.   Somewhere in the darkest, cobweb infested mind there is a corner where a dim flame still burns waiting for holy breath to blow it into raging flame.  You had something you wanted to learn to do, or say, or perform at one time.  When you were a little child still resisting the poison of industrial education you still had it.  You looked at it with love.  Perhaps it was a love for a subject or a project that was so deep it went beyond love into obsession. 

You will find something to take out of that corner which can be dusted, made new and shiny, ready to be loved again.  You will find something as beautiful as I find discovering what it is that really, genuinely brings out that passion in a child.  That passion that says I have to do this thing or I will just wilt.  My life will die.  Look around you on your commuter train or look from your car.  Look at the faces of those going to work at jobs where they will labor with a sense of quiet desperation.  Perhaps you are one of those.  Stop it!  At least devote some of your time to the thing that makes your soul soar to the Heavens when you are doing it.  I’m not telling you to quit your job.  No, but, I am telling you to become an independent learner with a purposeful life seeking to add to human knowledge. 

Eric Hoffer discovered his passion.  Hoffer wrote ten books while he labored as a longshoreman.  His “True Believer” which set the standard in the social science study of self-esteem as it effects fanatical movements.  While he labored on the docks he contemplated the rise of totalitarianism and the loss of the self.  His postulate was that fanaticism had its gnarled, arthritic claws firmly planted in self-hatred, self-hate and insecurity.  All of this Hoffer did with little formal education and a labor job on the docks.  Eric Hoffer is now a major figure looked up to in the social sciences.  Had he let himself believe that he was less worthwhile for lacking the college degrees and the paper expertise of the dilettante, he would never have changed the course of American social thought. 

Frans Lanting is a photographer.  He discovered his passion in the Albatross.  These magnificent seabirds of the deep oceans are slowly yielding their secrets to Lanting.  He has made photographing them, documenting their lives his life’s work.  As he developed his photographic skills he came back to them over and over.  He is now the leading photographer of this magnificent species as well as one of the world’s foremost experts on the Albatross.  All through his pursuit of photography he intended to show the world the magnificence of the bird he loves.

Don’t live a life of quiet desperation.  Discover your passion.  Perhaps you left it years ago feeling that I can’t make a living at that.  You were probably wrong.  But, for whatever reason, you left it.  Maybe you wanted to become a premier doctor in some medical field. And maybe the time of medical school has passed you.  But you can still form a foundation to raise money for the field.  You can still write scholarly articles and books to help the laymen understand what it is that you want them to know about your passion in medicine.  You can also help them by writing passionately about the disease from which they may suffer.

In the next while we are going to explore how to do this.  We are going to look for a life project.  This will be something that will be significant to you perhaps to no one else.  It doesn’t matter.  You are going to use your full talents for something that will give life meaning to you.  Give your life a renewed purpose, a new hope, a new direction.  Pick your field, master it and make it your own.  Thousands of men, women and young people such as yourselves have done this without the Ph.D.’s  Don’t be intimidated by the terminal degrees.  Often these degrees take the joy out of the hunt for the people who earn them.  They focus so finely on one small swatch of the fabric of their discipline that soon they may know the most about nothing among all the experts in the world.  Being the master of a cubic  centimeter is not a match for having a broad understanding and feeling for the width and breadth of a whole discipline.  Hang on for the ride is going to be fun and bumpy.   But what a ride it will be. It will be the ride of your lifetime – a lifelong learning project to take you down roadways yet unknown.

A menudo en sus congresos el señor Bob Proctor sita la frase de Eric Hoffer la cual recomiendo leerla hasta que se te quede grabada, habla de la educación y no me refiero a la universitaria sino al desarrollo de las facultades creativas de la mente, eso que sale de tu interior, eso que canalizas y lo devuelves al exterior como una rica enseñanza, ¿como comienzas?, deja el chisme, no escuches a tu besino quejarse de todo y apaga el noticiero, en todo ese ruido que se silencio podrás empezar a escuchar esa voz que viene de adentro, veras tu interior nunca alza la voz, eres tu el que tiene que ganar silencio.

En tiempos de cambio

aquellos que estén dispuestos a

aprender heredarán la tierra,

mientras que los sabios estarán

preparados para vivir en un mundo

que ya no existe.

Eric Hoffer

One of NewsReal’s new friends in the blogosphere, Cynthia Yockey aka A Conservative Lesbian, was excited to find that not only do both she and FrontPage Managing Editor Jamie Glazov support Phyllis Chesler and the rights of Muslim women but they’ve both been influenced by Eric Hoffer’s classic The True Believer:

Since “Jamie” can be either a male or female name, I wanted to find a photo and the Wikipedia biography of Jamie Glazov before responding to David’s generous invitation. What a wonderful revelation to find him! If you truly want to understand the psychological foundation of totalitarian movements, read Eric Hoffer’s books, starting with The True Believer. (In contrast, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is more like a taxonomy of totalitarianism: he tracks who, what and where, but not much why, and the work of Eric Hoffer, which ought to have been his North Star, is not a cloud on his horizon let alone a star in his sky — the magnitude of the omission is stupefying.) After listening to the videos below, I have the sense that Dr. Glazov is a true intellectual heir of Eric Hoffer in his understanding of the Left, especially with his explanation of how the fall of Communism created a vacuum for the Left that they are now filling with their embrace of Islam. I have been mystified about that — I think he explains it perfectly.

Check out her whole post, including the two videos of Glazov which she has embedded. Yockey’s friend Joy McCann aka Little Miss Attila also has additional follow-up and commentary on Glazov’s rebuttal of Naomi Wolf.

Editor’s note: Learn more about Eric Hoffer’s ideas about the Left in Jamie Glazov’s new book, “United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror.”

I often wonder, when I hear demands for credentials – where did you go to school, what do you do for a living, etc. – what kind of reception Eric Hoffer, a common laborer and longshoreman, would get from today’s elites on both the left and the right.

Since Mr. Hoffer has gone on to his reward and we only have his written work by which to judge him, credentials matter little. In fact, he is often praised as the “Longshoreman Philosopher.” Good luck getting an organization like the Hoover Institute or Brookings Institute to give anyone else with those kinds of credentials anything resembling a second look today.

Enough of my ranting. The rest of this post belongs to Prof. Thomas Sowell citing the ultimate non-academic thinker Eric Hoffer.

Eric Hoffer never bought the claims of intellectuals to be for the common man. “A ruling intelligentsia,” he said, “whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed and wasted at will.”

One of the many conceits of contemporary intellectuals that Hoffer deflated was their nature cult. “Almost all the books I read spoke worshipfully of nature,” he said, recalling his own personal experience as a migrant farm worker that was full of painful encounters with nature, which urban intellectuals worshipped from afar.

Hoffer saw in this exaltation of nature another aspect of intellectuals’ elitist “distaste for man.” Implicit in much that they say and do is “the assumption that education readies a person for the task of reforming and reshaping humanity — that is equips him to act as an engineer of souls and manufacturer of desirable human attributes.”

Eric Hoffer called it “soul raping” — an apt term for what goes on in too many schools today, where half-educated teachers treat the classroom as a place for them to shape children’s attitudes and beliefs in a politically correct direction.

– Thomas Sowell, “The Legacy of Eric Hoffer”

Apparently there is.

According to labor scholar Elisabeth S. Clemens, the radical union known as the Knights of Labor ended their struggle of the 1880s-1900s quite poorly, leading to a) a weak labor movement for the next 40 years and b) a future labor movement that was conservative and union “producerist” .

How did it happen?

Well, using newspaper data and biographies of union leaders at the time Clemens suggests that when the union began to fail in its mission for a “workingmen’s democracy”, 1)they did not frame the loss as resulting from an outside force such as the state (police were hired to attack strikers and immigrants were brought in illegally as scabs) or the capitalists (who formed strong associations to counterattack the unionization attempts of the Knights of Labor). 2) The Knights of Labor failed to frame the struggle as a lost battle in an ongoing war that labor has a chance to win. According to Clemens’ chapter for Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements, there were no statement or speeches delivered that gave hope to the workers.

In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer had this to say:

“It is true of course that the hope released by a vivid visualization of a glorious future is a most potent source of daring…more potent than he implied deprecation of the present. A mass movement has to center the hearts and minds of its followers on the future…, when everything is ahead and yet to come, we find it easy to share all we have” (p74, 1963).

So, how do we lose the right way?

Discuss why the loss occurred in a way that blames outside forces and make sure to inspire future hope in the struggle.