"Sometimes we feel the loss of a prejudice as a loss of vigor"
About this Quote
Prejudice, in Hoffer's framing, isn’t just an ugly belief; it’s a stimulant. The line cuts because it admits something many moral lectures skip: bigotry can feel energizing to the person who carries it. Prejudice offers a ready-made story about who’s to blame, who’s superior, and what side you’re on. It turns confusion into certainty and uncertainty into swagger. When that scaffolding collapses, what disappears isn’t only an opinion but a whole battery pack of borrowed conviction.
Hoffer’s intent is diagnostic, not exculpatory. He’s explaining why people cling to irrational loyalties even when evidence or experience starts prying them loose. The “loss of vigor” signals a withdrawal: without the friction of an enemy, without the simple thrill of contempt, the self can feel oddly unmoored. Prejudice functions like a crude identity engine, outsourcing personal purpose to a tribal narrative. If you’ve been running on that fuel, moral progress can register as fatigue.
The subtext is bleakly pragmatic: persuasion fails when it treats prejudice as merely an intellectual error. If prejudice supplies energy, then “correcting” it can look, emotionally, like castration or decline. That’s why people sometimes mourn their former certainties and romanticize the older, harsher version of themselves as more “alive.”
Context matters: Hoffer wrote in the shadow of mass movements and ideological fever, attentive to how crowds convert grievance into meaning. This sentence is a compact warning about the psychology of fanaticism: the hardest part of shedding a prejudice isn’t admitting you were wrong; it’s learning to live without the adrenaline that wrongness provided.
Hoffer’s intent is diagnostic, not exculpatory. He’s explaining why people cling to irrational loyalties even when evidence or experience starts prying them loose. The “loss of vigor” signals a withdrawal: without the friction of an enemy, without the simple thrill of contempt, the self can feel oddly unmoored. Prejudice functions like a crude identity engine, outsourcing personal purpose to a tribal narrative. If you’ve been running on that fuel, moral progress can register as fatigue.
The subtext is bleakly pragmatic: persuasion fails when it treats prejudice as merely an intellectual error. If prejudice supplies energy, then “correcting” it can look, emotionally, like castration or decline. That’s why people sometimes mourn their former certainties and romanticize the older, harsher version of themselves as more “alive.”
Context matters: Hoffer wrote in the shadow of mass movements and ideological fever, attentive to how crowds convert grievance into meaning. This sentence is a compact warning about the psychology of fanaticism: the hardest part of shedding a prejudice isn’t admitting you were wrong; it’s learning to live without the adrenaline that wrongness provided.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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