Hoffer came to know human reality by living among the people he wrote about. His immersion in the reality of work and the people who perform it allowed Hoffer to check his idealism. In the process, he discovered that a self-conscious age leaves no stone unturned; no form of imagination can be left standing. A self-conscious age politicizes culture, vital life, friendship, love, language, beauty, religious belief, art, and sex ad nauseam.
See also Ike’s Other Warning.
Eisenhower also recommended a short book — “The True Believer” by Eric Hoffer, a self-educated itinerant longshoreman who earned the nickname “the stevedore philosopher.” “Faith in a holy cause,” Hoffer wrote, “is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”
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