Born in 1902, Eric Hoffer grew up in The Bronx under the care of a household servant after his mother died when he was seven. When his father died in 1920, Eric moved to the west coast, determined to avoid factory work and "stay poor." He educated himself in the libraries of california while he supported himself with odd jobs and migrant labor. He lived his life on the road until 1941.

And...from Wikipedia...
When he was age five, his mother fell down a flight of stairs with Eric in her arms.Hoffer went blind for unknown medical reasons two years later, but later in life he said he thought it might have been due to trauma, commenting "I lost my sight at the age of seven. Two years before, my mother and I fell down a flight of stairs. She did not recover and died in that second year after the fall.I lost my sight and for a time my memory". After his mother's death he was raised by a live-in relative or servant, a German woman named Martha. His eyesight inexplicably returned when he was 15. Fearing he would again go blind, he seized upon the opportunity to read as much as he could for as long as he could. His eyesight remained, and Hoffer never abandoned his habit of voracious reading.

When the war broke out, Hoffer attempted to join the military, but was rejected for health reasons. He joined the longshoreman's union instead and became a stevedore, doing the most difficult work possible in order to help the war effort in whatever way he could. For the next twenty-five years, he both worked the waterfront and actively pursued the knowledge and education that he had pursued all his life, reading, writing, struggling, and playing with the ideas that would be his life's work. He published ten books between 1951 and 1982, and an eleventh was published after his death in 1983.

His first big book was called The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature Of Mass Movements..and the common thread running through it (and much of his work) is the psychology of the individual as it relates to his/her need for purpose in life—and how that need is often met by (righteous/holy) causes, movements or ideologies in order to satisfy the personal need for meaning and self esteem.  For someone raised in a family steeped in idealism and ideology, his voice was a blast of harmonic  simplicity that resonated  strongly since I  always had a strong sense that personal psychological factors played a much larger role in people's attachments to certain views and beliefs than they were often able to recognize or acknowledge--or more pertinently, than they were capable of absorbing and applying to their world view in order to better function and adapt to the less than ideal world they lived in.  


I knew about Hoffer before I ever read him, since he was a certified "Good Guy" to my parents and someone they regarded highly as a "comrade" of sorts. 
But until I read him, I didn't realize that he was far from a loyal member of any movement or ideology.  His entire world view grew out of a wariness of anything that looked or smelled like a holy cause or grand scheme for "changing the world."  Maybe that's why I knew so little about him--because though he had the right pedigree and humanist spirit, to my parents and their activist cohorts, he was probably considered less than dependable and probably even a bit reactionary by dint of his skepticism and philosophical detachment.   But that's a whole other tale...I just wanted to put some of his thinking on my digital papyrus here and let him speak for himself.  I wandered around  In Our Time recently ( a little bit goes a long way--like a poetry anthology) and been dipping into some of the other works included below.

"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."

"We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to attain excellence. To discover what a man truly craves but knows he cannot have we must find the field in which he advocates absolute equality. By this test Communists are frustrated Capitalists."

"They have been predicting the dire things that would happen to art, literature, and culture in general if the lowbrow masses asserted themselves and imposed their tastes on a society. But could anything equal the inanity and imposture spewed by avant-garde cliques and accepted by self-appointed guardians of our culture?"

 "Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, “to be free from freedom."

"Both the revolutionary and the creative individual are perpetual juveniles. The revolutionary does not grow up because he cannot grow, while the creative individual cannot grow up because he keeps growing."

"The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure."

"Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep."

"The awareness of their individual blemishes and shortcomings inclines the frustrated to detect ill will and meanness in their fellow men. Self-contempt, however vague, sharpens our eyes for the imperfections of others. We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves."

"Every era has a currency that buys souls. In some the currency is pride, in others it is hope, in still others it is a holy cause. There are of course times when hard cash will buy souls, and the remarkable thing is that such times are marked by civility, tolerance, and the smooth working of everyday life."

"Add a few drops of malice to a half truth and you have an absolute truth."

"In the alchemy of man’s soul almost all noble attributes—courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty—can be trans-muted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: Where there is com-passion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless. Thus the survival of the species may well depend on the ability to foster a boundless capacity for compassion. ..."