Such a strange hypothesis: we need a “beyond”, so we chase a good career, a good spouse and nice kids, success in art and other pursuits. Don’t these things bring their own rewards, like physical comfort and social status and nurturing instinct and so on? Do we really need an extra philosophical reason to chase them?
It seems simpler to consider these mundane rewards as primary, and when someone is deprived of them by some equally mundane circumstance, that person is likely to go looking for “beyond”. They feel that one side of the explore-exploit tradeoff isn’t working out for them, so they switch to the other side for awhile. Hoffer makes the same point: mass movements recruit from those who are materially discontent. There seems no reason to bring Freudian mortality fears into any of this.
Exploration-exploitation is a good model, but it doesn’t tell me the personality differences I can expect to see between people who do exploration A vs. exploration B. And, exploitation is a business term and doesn’t match up very well with what people are getting psychologically out of setting up comfortable limitations for themselves.
I saw Hoffer’s ideas as basically true but needing nuance, because not everybody who’s discontent in exactly the way he described will actually join a mass movement. And there’s also tremendous variety in “individualists” that he didn’t talk much about.
Setting up comfortable limitations might be partly explained by self-handicapping:
So they chose the harmful drug as an excuse: “Oh, I would have passed the test, only the drug was making me stupid.” As the study points out, this is a win-win situation: if they fail, the drug excuses their failure, and if they succeed it’s doubly impressive that they passed even with a handicap.
Such a strange hypothesis: we need a “beyond”, so we chase a good career, a good spouse and nice kids, success in art and other pursuits. Don’t these things bring their own rewards, like physical comfort and social status and nurturing instinct and so on? Do we really need an extra philosophical reason to chase them?
It seems simpler to consider these mundane rewards as primary, and when someone is deprived of them by some equally mundane circumstance, that person is likely to go looking for “beyond”. They feel that one side of the explore-exploit tradeoff isn’t working out for them, so they switch to the other side for awhile. Hoffer makes the same point: mass movements recruit from those who are materially discontent. There seems no reason to bring Freudian mortality fears into any of this.
Exploration-exploitation is a good model, but it doesn’t tell me the personality differences I can expect to see between people who do exploration A vs. exploration B. And, exploitation is a business term and doesn’t match up very well with what people are getting psychologically out of setting up comfortable limitations for themselves.
I saw Hoffer’s ideas as basically true but needing nuance, because not everybody who’s discontent in exactly the way he described will actually join a mass movement. And there’s also tremendous variety in “individualists” that he didn’t talk much about.
Setting up comfortable limitations might be partly explained by self-handicapping: