From the Waterfront

Illiteracy has never been wordier. Life has never been wordier. Experts say more language is consumed now than ever before. Not read. Not written. Consumed—like burgers and gasoline.

Eric Hoffer, Lyndon Johnson, 1967

Photo Credit: Corbis

“He ran largely on language,” declared the New Yorker, in its wrap of Election 2008. “Last Tuesday night was a very good night for the English language.” So it makes perfect sense that the most prescient prophet of this victory of words turns out to be a man who used fewer than perhaps any other significant American writer. “Words have always been to me accidental, unnatural,” Eric Hoffer reflected, shortly before his death in 1983. “I have spent my life trying to master words, but they never became part of me.” As they become a larger part of us by the moment, anyone seeking to retain autonomy can find a real hope in the long-lost wisdom of the longshoreman philosopher.

When he is remembered at all, Eric Hoffer is most famous for The True Believer (1951), his original study of fanaticism and mass movements that exposed, in a chain of insights spanning 192 pages, the internal carpentry of the much-cited road to hell. Tracing the “alchemy of conviction” by which words can transform guilt into hate, self-contempt into pride, and frustration into wild hope, it speaks as clearly on Internet hysteria and jihadism as on the Nazi and Soviet regimes that inspired it. Reading it is no less jolting today than when it came out six decades ago. Where many saw strange, foreign horrors, Hoffer saw himself, and he was that rare writer who could write about himself and about you at the same time.