Eric Hoffer: product of dissatisfaction

No. 17

There is perhaps no better way of measuring the natural endowment of a soul than by its ability to transmute dissatisfaction into a creative impulse.  The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary, yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction.

--  Eric Hoffer --
from The Passionate State of Mind


While I can see how dissatisfaction can move a revolutionary to act, I'm not sure how dissatisfaction can move an artist to create.

Do you think Hoffer is neutral here--showing no preference for either the products of a genuine artist or that of a revolutionary?

Does "creative impulse" refer only to the product of a genuine artist or to the products of both the artist and the revolutionary?


I lean towards the position that Hoffer prefers the products of the genuine artist, but I have nothing to support that "lean."  Perhaps it's my own rather distrustful attitude towards revolutionaries and the results of their actions:  that revolutionaries seldom produce real change--that only the names of the rulers are changed and little else.