In The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer describes people who irrationally commit to an ideology. The ideologies vary – religious, political, economic… it doesn’t matter. The members all fall victim to the same pathological psychological forces.
TIME Magazine
March 14, 1955
THE PASSIONATE STATE OF MIND (151 pp.)—Eric Hoffer—Harper ($2.50).
Eric Hoffer is a pink-faced, hornyhanded San Francisco dock worker who pays his dues to Harry Bridges’ longshoremen’s union and preaches self-reliance more stalwartly than Emerson.
He gets up at 4:45 in the morning and spends his days working on the piers of San Francisco’s Embarcadero. Evenings he spends in his room in a shabby McAllister Street lodging-house, bent over a plank desk, writing.
Although written almost three quarters of a century ago, it is just as true today.
There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.
Passions usually have their roots in that which is blemished, crippled, incomplete and insecure within us. The passionate attitude is less a response to stimuli from without than an emanation of an inner dissatisfaction.
The Passionate State of Mind, Aphorism #1, by Eric Hoffer
