"Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident"
About this Quote
Utopian abundance has a hidden cost: it makes awe cheap and certainty slippery. Hoffer’s line lands like a warning label on modern life, where “everything is possible” isn’t liberation so much as a solvent. When miracles become routine, they stop functioning as miracles; they become background noise. The deeper twist is the second clause: not only do we lose wonder, we lose the quiet confidence that ordinary reality is stable, trustworthy, and shared.
Hoffer, a longshoreman-philosopher who wrote about mass movements and the psychology of true believers, is allergic to societies intoxicated by limitless promises. The subtext here is political as much as existential. If the world feels infinitely malleable, then nothing feels anchored: customs, institutions, even basic facts. That vacuum invites the pitchmen of certainty, the ideologues who offer a single story in exchange for the exhausting burden of possibility.
The sentence works because it flips the usual fantasy. We assume more options equals more freedom; Hoffer shows how too much possibility can corrode the “self-evident” - the unspoken agreements that let people live without constant negotiation over what’s real and what matters. Read it against the 20th century’s grand projects and catastrophic “new orders,” and it becomes a compact critique of revolutions that promise miracles on demand. Read it now, in an era of technological magic and epistemic chaos, and it’s eerily current: when the extraordinary is habitual, the ordinary becomes suspect.
Hoffer, a longshoreman-philosopher who wrote about mass movements and the psychology of true believers, is allergic to societies intoxicated by limitless promises. The subtext here is political as much as existential. If the world feels infinitely malleable, then nothing feels anchored: customs, institutions, even basic facts. That vacuum invites the pitchmen of certainty, the ideologues who offer a single story in exchange for the exhausting burden of possibility.
The sentence works because it flips the usual fantasy. We assume more options equals more freedom; Hoffer shows how too much possibility can corrode the “self-evident” - the unspoken agreements that let people live without constant negotiation over what’s real and what matters. Read it against the 20th century’s grand projects and catastrophic “new orders,” and it becomes a compact critique of revolutions that promise miracles on demand. Read it now, in an era of technological magic and epistemic chaos, and it’s eerily current: when the extraordinary is habitual, the ordinary becomes suspect.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|
More Quotes by Eric
Add to List
