The True Believer, Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Eric Hoffer

• “All mass movements breed fanaticism, fervent hope, hatred, and intolerance;…all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance.”
• However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing
• The author will attempt to show that any mass movement deliberately fosters in its adherents a frustrated state of mind, and advances its interest by seconding the propensities of the frustrated
• “Regardless of belief in God, the true believer (of a mass movement), by converting and antagonizing, is shaping the world in his own image.”

  Part 1: the appeal of mass movements

  Chapter 1: The desire for change

• We tend to attribute success and failure to the state of things around us. “The unfortunate blame their failures on the world, the fortunate see the outside world as a precariously balanced mechanism that should not be trifled with. Thus, there are those with an ardent desire to change the world, and those with a similar conviction to maintain it.”
• The privileged and destitute both fear change. Discontent does not necessarily create desire for change. Vast change requires one to feel like they hold some insurmountable power, a certainty that supersedes the uncertainty that they fear. See: religious gods, the omnipotency of man’s reason in the French Revolution, Lenin’s blind faith in the Marxist doctrine.
• Power isn’t enough. If power is not joined with extravagant hope, it is mostly used to preserve the status quo. Kindling a fervent faith in the future is a necessity for mass movements.
• “For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented but not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader, or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power.” They must also be radically hopeful, and wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their undertaking.

  Chapter 2: The desire for substitutes

• Mass movements appeal not to those intent on advancing a cherished self, but those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. Mass movements attract followings not to satisfy in its followers self-advancement, but to satisfy the passion of self-renunciation
• The disadvantaged see self interest as something tainted and evil, and mass movements satisfy their craving for a rebirth that promises new elements of pride, confidence, hope, purpose, and worth by identification to a holy cause.
• The frustrated value mass movements as they provide elements that make life bearable that they could not evoke on their own.
• “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”
  • Can you place faith in something larger than yourself without losing faith in yourself? I think so…though, I suppose submitting yourself to something larger than yourself means embracing it with humility and claiming you aren’t everything. (The author isn’t implying anything negative with this statement; it seems to ring true).
• “A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.”

  Chapter 3: The interchangeability of mass movements

• Most movements are some combination of religious, nationalist, and revolutionary nature.
• In pre-war Italy and Germany, businessmen logically encouraged fascist movements to stop communism, but in doing so they promoted their own liquidation.

  Part 2: The potential converts

  Chapter 4: The role of the undesirables in human affairs

• There is a tendency to judge a race, nation, or any distinct group by its least worthy membership. The inferior elements exert the most influence on a group’s course as they are wholly without reverence toward the present. They see their lives and the present as ruined beyond remedy, ready to wreck both. They crave dissolving their meaningless selves in a spectacular communal undertaking and are among the earliest recruits of mass movements.

  Chapter 5: The new poor

• “The newly poor throb most with the ferment of frustration, as their recent disenfranchisement leaves notes of what could have been lodged in their seething skulls,”
• Intensified struggles for existence have more of a static rather than dynamic influence. The abjectly poor are chiefly preoccupied with sustenance. Those who can afford to let their mind wander are those who are poor but not driven to the brink
• Before the French Revolution, prosperity had augmented more rapidly in the twenty years preceding the event. This leads to the observation that grievances are most poignant when “just about” redressed. As De Tocqueville noted: “the French found their position the more intolerable the better it became.”
• “It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.”
  • Notes of Buddhist insight here. Craving is the root of suffering, not suffering itself.
• “Intensity of discontent seems to be in inverse proportion to the distance from the object fervently desired.”
  • Wonderful.
• “We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.”
• Movements shift from immediate hope to distant hope. Immediate hope is the hope around the corner that is used to promote action and urgency. Once a mass movement has “arrived”, we shift to distant hope, prizing obedience and patience as the movement attempts to preserve the present.
• Freedom aggravates, freedom of choice places whole blame of failure on the individual; freedom alleviates, making available action, movement, and protest
• We join a mass movement to be free of personal responsibility. Nazis considered themselves cheated when made to shoulder the responsibility for following orders. “Had they not joined the Nazi movement to be free from responsibility?”
• Mass movements demanding for personal liberty inevitably see their followers denouncing personal liberties on behalf of group cohesion.
• “The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity…no one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.”
• “Equality without freedom creates a more stable social pattern than freedom without equality.”
  • Cohesive and synced versus competitive and messy
• Mass movements do all they can to disrupt the family and discredit national, racial, and religious ties. This is because individuals without a group and greater sense of meaning are much easier to harvest and manipulate
• Almost all contemporary movements attempt to undermine the family, by “undermining parental authority; facilitating divorce; taking over responsibility for feeding, educating, and entertaining the children; and by encouraging illegitimacy.”
• There exists a trade-off, the family unit is sacrificed for the collective success of a nation. Children gain economic independence earlier and leave the home, women gain more freedom which facilitates divorce, the rural are drawn to becoming isolated urbanites, loosening family ties.
• “All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of a communal existence.”
• “The policy of an exploiting colonial power should be to encourage communal cohesion among the natives…the process which transmutes misery into frustration and revolt is checked at the source.”
• Individual bonuses are a great way to break apart a group. Group wide incentives are much more likely to maintain group satisfaction and harmony.
• Rising mass movements attract and hold following not by doctrine and promises, but by the refuge it offers from the anxious and meaningless individual existence. By absorbing followers into a close-knit whole, followers are freed for their ineffectual selves.
• Christianity was exceptional at this. In the Graeco-Roman world, the church offered an unmatched ability to absorb followers into a tight knit community.
• Hitler knew the chief passion of the frustrated is “to belong”, that this passion is satisfied by extreme cementing and binding
• Uprooted from ancestral soil and local allegiance, urbanization created a fleet of individuals prone to demagogic propaganda, socialist or nationalist or both. The villagers outside of Rome were less likely to have a communal pattern that kept them from Christianity, whereas many of the city dwellers were once separated from their hereditary milieu by the Roman Empire.
• “When people revolt on a totalitarian society, they rise not against the wickedness of the regime but its weakness.”
• The man just out of the army, feeling lost in the free-for-all of civilian life and surrounded by incertitude, is an ideal potential convert for a mass movement. He longs for the certitude and camaraderie and freedom from individual responsibility for which he was brought up in.

  Chapter 6: Misfits

• The passage of war to peace is more critical than the inverse, as when veterans return to normality, they find the slow and painful adjustment difficult relative to their previously orderly lives.
• The author suggests the most vehement of misfits are those with unfulfilled cravings for creative work—their creative flow being dried up–as they are in the grips of the most desperate of passions (see Hitler)

  Chapter 7: The inordinately selfish

• Author suggests that the selfish attach themselves to groups, making the subject of their selfishness their group (i.e., becoming groupish). They claim they have faith of love and humility, but can neither be loving or humble (see religious pride)

  Chapter 8: the ambitious feeling unlimited opportunities

• When opportunities abound, there is an inevitable depreciation of the present. What could be outweighs what is. This disorder attracts the unquenchable thirst of get rich quick enthusiasts to orderly mass movements that promise them everything

  Chapter 9: Minorities

• The least and most successful in assimilated minorities are most attracted to mass movements. Failures see themselves as outsiders unable to blend. The successful find themselves unable to gain access to exclusive circles of the majority, and with evidence of their individual superiority they resent the inferiority implied by the assimilation.

  Chapter 10: The bored

• The bored are the most ready and numerous to convert. Those living autonomous lives, living not badly off but lacking abilities to engage in creative work and useful action, lack meaning in their lives, so the meaning inherent in a mass movement is incredibly attractive to them.
• This explains the invariable presence of middle-aged women (Karens who are unsatisfied with their marriage or unable to find a partner) at the birth of all mass movements. (See Madame Khoklakhov in Brothers Karamazov)

  Chapter 11: Sinners

• “A mass movement attempts to infect people with a malady and offer the movement as a cure.”
• The disorder present in the conscience of a sinner attracts him to the order of a collective movement, and an opportunity to wash away his sin—a chance of salvation

  Part 3: United action and self-sacrifice

  Chapter 12: Preface

• Mass movements are characterized by an emphasis on collective unity and self-sacrifice.
• Every unifying agent is a promoter of self-sacrifice and vice versa.

  Chapter 13: Factors promoting self-sacrifice

  Identification with a collective whole

• Those ready to self-sacrifice identify with a whole rather than themselves. When asked “who are you they” answer Canadian, Christian, member of so and so tribe. When they die, their self lives on through the tribe.
• Life itself is all that matters to those without a sense of belonging, the only tangible feeling in an abyss devoid of meaning (see Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment)
• Discouraging emigration is just as important in maintaining a collective whole. The iron curtain is perhaps more to prevent Russians from escaping rather than stopping others from entering. It is a psychological boundary, bolstered by propaganda, to prevent losing valuable members to competing groups.

  Make believe

• Leaders of mass movements mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in followers the illusion that they are participating in a dramatic performance. Think of the costumes and symbols and parades and music present in army marches so common in mass movements.
• The desire to escape into spectacle may come easier to the frustrated than the self-sufficient, as the fiction allows them to escape their unsatisfactory selves

  Deprecation of the present

• A mass movement starts out by reviling the past, insisting that the past taints the pure present. But as the movement gets going, detest shifts onto the present (despite the original aim of salvaging the present) in hopes for a better future.
• Impracticability is a mark of mass movements, because to distance oneself from the present means to distance oneself from the real, the feasible, the tangible. Mass movements thus gravitate towards miracles and mysticism, as these technologies spit in the face of the present
• All mass movements criticize the present by depicting it as a necessary scourge to reach a glorious future (see religious movements and heaven, social revolutions and utopia, nationalist movements and triumph)
• “Those without hope are divided and driven to desperate self-seeking.” The slaves in Hebrew were resentful, but it wasn’t until Moses brought them hope of a promise land that they broke their chains of emancipation.
• “Those who are at war with the present have an eye for the seeds of change and the potentialities of small beginnings.”
  • The frustrated are more likely to prophesize, to search for greener pastures amidst the barren present
• Conservatives want to preserve the present and cherish the past; liberals see the present as an offspring of the past developing towards an improved future. Both see the present favourably.
• Radicals loathe the present, ready to proceed recklessly with the present towards a better tomorrow. Radicals believe in the ability for humans to perfect their nature, being solely a product of their environment, and by changing the environment they can mold humans perfectly. Reactionaries also revile the present but see the past as important and worthy of glorious restoration.
• Those who fail in everyday affairs tend to reach for the impossible, because it is less humiliating to fail in attempting something impossible than the possible. Their ineptitude is dwarfed by the grandiosity of the movement.

  “Things which are not”

• We are more ready to die for that which don’t yet have, than that which have already. “Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself.”
• Even when defending ourselves, our motivation is tied not necessarily to the maintenance of life, but to the maintenance of hope. The hopeless either run away or accept defeat.
• Mass movements thus furnish hope in followers and attempt to drain hope from opponents. See Nazi Germany, where Hitler drained the Jews of all hope. However, in Palestine, those same Jews, fuelled by hope, fought recklessly

  Doctrine

• Mass movements strive to interpose a fact-proof screen between faithful followers and the realities of the world. “It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.”
• The certainty made explicit in doctrines renders followers impervious to the uncertainties present in the world around them.
• To be effective, a doctrine has to be believed in—not understood. Absolute certainty only occurs in things we don’t understand.
• Followers are thus asked not to try and understand a doctrine with their heads, but with their hearts. “It is the heart which is conscious of God, not the reason.” Or, “Do not seek Adolph Hitler with your brains; all of you will find him with the strength of your hearts.”
• “When some part of a doctrine is relatively simple, there is a tendency among the faithful to complicate and obscure it. Simple words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer.”

  Fanaticism

• The fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure, leading him to passionately grasp for a doctrine of certainty. The resulting sense of security is not from the excellence of the cause, but the intoxicating stability provided by having something to hold on to.
• The fanatic can thus not be persuaded by an appeal to reason or morals. The quality of his cause is not what he clings to, but his passionate attachment. We thus find that fanatics are easily converted (not convinced), as they cling to any doctrine that offers refuge in a sea of uncertainty
• “The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not.”

  Mass movements and Armies

• Armies differ from mass movements on the sense that they attempt to preserve or expand an established order. Armies attempt to protect the present; mass movements arise to destroy it.

  Chapter 14: Unifying agents

  Hatred

• “Mass movements can rise and spread without a belief in God, but never without belief in a devil.”
• Strengths of mass movements are typically proportional to the tangibility and atrocities attributed to the enemy. When asked if he went too far with the Jew hatred, Hitler responded “No, no, no!… It is impossible to exaggerate the formidable quality of the Jew as an enemy.”
• Hatred often stems from insufficiency, a desperate effort to “suppress an awareness of our inadequacy, worthlessness, guilt, and other shortcomings of the self.” Self-hatred is transmuted into hatred of others.
• When wronged, we don’t always direct our hatred at those who wronged us. We are not necessarily mad at them, but at the evidence of our inadequacy, helplessness, and cowardice.
• To silence a guilty conscience, we convince ourselves that those we sin against are deserving of it, unworthy of love. To admit otherwise would open the door to self-contempt, which is precisely what we attempt to escape with our venomous hatred
• Hating those who have it worse comes harder because hate shifts into pity. It is much easier to hate those who are advantaged. A nation beginning to hate foreigners wholeheartedly is evidence that they have lost confidence in themselves.
• For this reason, the oppressed invariably shape themselves in the image of their hated oppressors, because they admire them, and that admiration fuels their hatred.
• Surrendering and humbling the self to a larger cause can breed pride and arrogance, the believer seeing himself as chosen and those outside of his faith as evil and perishable
• We relinquish responsibility when absorbed by a collective whole. This offers freedom to hate, bully, lie, and torture without shame or remorse.
• “The hatred and cruelty which have their source in selfishness are ineffectual things compared with the venom and ruthlessness born of selflessness.” o Groupishness>selfishness

  Imitation

• Lack of self-worth generates a proclivity to imitate. The more we mistrust our judgment, the more we are ready to follow the example of others.

  Persuasion and coercion

• Propaganda penetrates only minds already open, and rather than inserting new opinions it justifies and reinforces existing ones
• Coercion when insurmountable has an unequaled persuasiveness and breeds fanatics to similar degrees as those persuaded. “It needs fanatical faith to rationalize our cowardice.”
• Christian historian K.S.Latourette notes “However incompatible the spirit of Jesus and armed force may be…the latter has often made it possible for the former to survive.”
• To exercise coercion requires the stability provided by ardent faith. As Hitler put it “Any violence which does not spring from a firm, spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain.”
• Proselytizing comes not from an expression of having all of the answers but lacking in them. For we only strive for expansion when we feel we’re lacking something.
• Passion for proselytizing is centred around some deficiency, be it an irrational dogma or some distance between what is preached and what is practiced (i.e., guilt)

  Leadership

• Leadership in the context of mass movements requires fertile ground of unsatisfaction and frustration, for without this a movement cannot commence
• The thrust of mass movements, though, requires an exceptional leader at the helm. What makes a leader exceptional in this case is audacity, fanatical faith in a single truth, an awareness of the importance of close-knit cohesion, and, “above all, the ability to evoke fervent devotion in a group of able lieutenants.”
• All mass movements rank blind obedience as the highest virtues. “Obedience is not only the first law of God, but also the first tenet of a revolutionary party and of fervent nationalism.”
• The frustrated are attracted to freedom from responsibility more than freedom from restraint, as when they are burdened with responsibility it has led to failure, evidence of their ineptitude.

  Action

• Successful action can bring premature end to mass movements, as it can feed in the true believer a sense of self-confidence and reconciliation with the present. He can find salvation not in the one and only truth, but in action by proving his worth and individual superiority.
• The taste of continuous action kills the collective spirit. And when the ability to act is stifled, say after a defeat in war, fertile ground is laid for mass movements (see Germany after WW1, a population well-equipped to act but forced to be inactive—Hitler gave them an opportunity to act, and they praised him for it)

  Suspicion

• “We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves. Thus when the frustrated congregate in a mass movement, the air is heavy-laden with suspicion.”
• Abraham sacrificed his only son to prove devotion to Jehovah, and the fanatical Nazis and Communists are ready to sacrifice relatives. Family serves to undermine the collective cohesion of a mass movement, so sacrifice of family is often encouraged. Devotion to family drains devotion to the holy cause.

  The effects of unification

• Once unified, the true believers source of frustration that led them to the group diminishes. But they become dependent on the group for their sense of self worth, dependent on this group that delivered them from meaninglessness autonomous existence to an anonymous whole.
• “The true believer is eternally incomplete, eternally insecure.”

  Part 4: Beginning and End

  Chapter 15: Men of Words

• Excellence in spoken or written word gets mass movements rolling; fanaticism hatches the actual movement; and a practical man of action thrusts the movement forth.
• “There is apparently an irremediable insecurity at the core of every intellectual, be he noncreative or creative.”
• The grievance which animates in the protesting man of words is often really directed at some personal and private insufficiency, not a public one.
• All mass movements are conceived by impractical fault-finding intellectuals, not men of action. German intellectuals generated German nationalism; Jewish intellectuals generated Zionism
• Deep-seated cravings of approval make the man of words hypersensitive to any humiliation imposed on their tribe.
• “The genuine man of words…can get along without faith in absolutes. He values the search for truth as much as truth itself…His vanity, it is true, often prompts him to defend his speculations with savagery and even venom; but his appeal is usually to reason and not to faith.
• “The intellectual’s precursors to mass movements rise against the established order, announcing its incompetence and calling for freedom of expression and self realization.” This is tragic for the intellectuals, because followers too want to see the old order crumble, not to realize their potential but to hide into the whole and relinquish responsibility. The intellectual tragically finds himself swallowed by said whole. The intellectual values the individual, but the masses despise it, and he must then conform or perish.

  Chapter 16: The Fanatics

• “The dissolution of cursed individuality in the majesty and grandeur of a mighty whole.”
• The noncreative men of words are apparently most potent at becoming fanatics. Unable to write a great book, paint a great picture, or become a great scientist, they see themselves as irredeemably spoiled in the current social order. Most Nazi bigwigs were failed artists.
• The creative man of words can find satisfaction from the creative flow within, so isn’t as drawn to the collective source of meaning from a mass movement.

  Chapter 17: The practical men of action

• For they (FDR, Churchill, Ghandi) “are not tempted to use the slime of frustrated souls as mortar in the building of a new world. The self-confidence of these rare leaders is derived from…their faith in humanity, for they know no one can be honorable unless he honours mankind.”
• The chief preoccupation of men of action is to maintain unity and willingness to self-sacrifice. This is normally accomplished through strict law and order.
• While the man of action reveres the early days of the movement, he acts not on faith but on law. He realizes the value of faith and therefore maintain the incessant flow of propaganda and symbolism, but he persuades not by faith but by force.
• Once in charge the men of action, now nearing the end of the dynamic phase and establishing order, need to keep the frustrated from reconciling with the present. They thus dangle the promises of distant hope, a vision, in front of the crawling frustrated to keep them motivated

  Chapter 18: Good and bad mass movements

• When a mass movement dies, it can be followed by a burst of creative energy from the individuals who were once embalmed in the stifling atmosphere of blind faith and disgust of the present.
• Much to the dismay of Hitler or Napoleon, the creative output during their “heroic” age was pathetic. The high tension of their periods leaves little room for the contemplation required to produce art.
• “The fanatic’s disdain for the present blinds him to the complexity and uniqueness of life.” Example given of Rabbi Jacob condemning the appreciation of beauty in sources (trees, fields, etc.) other than the Torah.
• This blindness is a strength, allowing the fanatic to see no obstacles, but causes “intellectual sterility and emotional monotony.”
• The measure of a nation’s strength is as the reservoir of its longing. The more lofty and infinite the goal, the longer it can keep the desires of the masses continually fulfilled. This could be a desire of ever improving standards of living (like in democracies) or holy authority and world domination (like in autocracies)
• “It would not be better for mankind if they were given their desires.” - Heraclitus