The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (Perennial Classics)

This a a great book, highly relevant these days, a classic that everyone should read. History reveals man's shocking capacity for mass madness and insane cruelty. What is the good, the purpose of pain, suffering, decay and so much abject brutality? One answer is simply that in a polarity universe the one extreme of purity and goodness cannot exist without the other extreme, meaning contamination and evil. In the temporal hologram, everything rots. It is simple physics, or rather metaphysics. A more western oriented explanation of the purpose for such brutal and destructive energies is offered by the plain speaking, down-to-earth American philosopher Eric Hoffer in his classic astute and insightful book, `The True Believer, Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements' [1951]: "The discarded and rejected [of any society] are often the raw material of a nation's future. The stone builders reject becomes the cornerstone of a new world. A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, decent, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come. It was not the irony of history that the undesired in the countries of Europe should have crossed an ocean to build a new world on the [North American] continent. Only they could do it." From this pragmatic assessment we may approach the idea that those we consider to be the dregs of society, the losers, and the various forms of eroding contamination, chemical or ideological -- are in fact the seed store of new forms. Bacteria and viruses, which destroy weakened living cells, have been with us forever. In a cyclical universe, there must be energies that decay, dissolve, and destroy. Often these are hidden beyond our sight, decomposing matter under rocks, in putrid slime yucky-goo rubbish, or silently lurking inside our human bodies. Sometimes they are found in the malcontent, the alienated, misfits who in blaming others for their "spoiled lives" [Hoffer's words] overthrow the existing order. Hoffer counts political and religious fanatics such as Hitler and Lenin among these `true believers' who throughout history have murdered thousands in the name of truth. Eric Hoffer worked on the San Francisco docks as a stevedore in the 1940s. He was self-educated and his experiences in the realm of physical labour combined with a lack of ivory tower intellectual conditioning, which so is often removed from any real life, and therefore produced an extraordinary view of the human condition. I first read `The True Believer' back in Texas high school, perhaps 1962, and I admit that I did not and could not have understood it in those days -- but even in my tender green naive teens, I realized that there was something deeply profoundly true in this book. Because of the recent rumours of revolution, I remembered and thus reread this classic, which was reissued in 2010. Hoffer makes it unequivocally clear that what motivates the True Believer into fanaticism is his or her own lack. They are as he says the disaffected, the poor, the unemployed, the misfits, outcasts, minorities, adolescent youth, the ambitious, the obsessed, the impotent in mind or body, the inordinately selfish, the bored and sinners. "...they are wholly without reverence toward the present. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both: hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy...Thus they are among the early recruits of revolutions, mass migrations, and of religious, racial and chauvinist movements, and they imprint their mark upon these upheavals and movements which shape a nations character and history." Hoffer's keen observations are brilliant, timeless, and yet more relevant than ever.

This book likely reached its zenith of popularity 6 decades ago in the midst of the tumultuous 1960’s. Since then its profile as an essential must read has quietly diminished for a whole host of reasons, not least of which is the bare fact that reading itself has also quietly lost its place in the age of smart phones and computers. Now in the middle of the 3rd decade of the 21st century those still committed to reading important books may want to order this classic work. Why? Because what Hoffer analyzes in this piece is the nature of that individual who finds him or herself irretrievably abandoned to a cause whose pull is so beyond resisting that any personal life goal, personal commitment or personal relationship is tossed aside in rapturous self-surrender to a cause. This individual is the Radical- The True Believer. Radicals are a type and they emerge into and man Mass Movements during what Hoffer describes as the dynamic “Active Phase”. To understand the Radical Hoffer illuminates the psychological fear engendered in the infamous dictum by Jean Paul Sartre in his work Being and Nothingness that states “Man is condemned to be Free”. The weight of responsibility to navigate the manifold options and opportunities of total freedom with the corresponding risk of naked, atomistic failure is the driver to escape the responsibility of Freedom. The Radical, according to Hoffer, is one who has had a full taste of Freedom. His or her experience of such freedom was one of failure. Failure both objectively by the standards of the present societal order and subjectively by his or her own personal standards. With failure comes frustration. The radical is, according to Hoffer, first and foremost a frustrated soul. The Radical is looking for an escape. Where does the Radical escape to? Hoffer systematically argues that the only place of refuge from individual freedom and the corresponding risk of personal failure is within the group or the collective. Mass Movements are made up of a group or some form of a collective. Inside a Mass Movement the Radical garners shared anonymity within and with other members of the group. Hoffer’s thesis states that Mass Movements are revolutionary by nature. Mass Movements seek their own version of the promised land where all will be made right. In the Mass Movement the Radical finds his life tied to and imbued with a transcendent purpose. He or she has located within the Mass Movement self-worth that was otherwise unattainable after failing to become an independent self-directed and successful member of the larger society. In this penetrating work the author delineates an entire complex constellation of factors, various conditions and role players (such as the men of words and the men of action) that are essential elements of the Mass Movement. Hoffer provides plenty of historical examples of each found throughout the centuries. Example in case: Hoffer’s profile of the “frustrated” Radical roughly fits the Puritan who arrived on the shore of North America in and around 1630. Puritans challenged the established Church of England, which according to the Puritans maintained too many elements of the Catholic Church and needed to be purified. Seeking to fully express their faith without interference they risked life and limb to cross an ocean after which they faced the daunting task of creating a colony out of what was then wilderness. This was consistent with one of Hoffer’s identified societal reliefs for safely processing an internal mass movement – the relief is simply migration of the group or collective out of the larger society and into a foreign land. In the end, his book may have personal value if you know someone drawn to or you find yourself drawn to the siren song of some political, religious or other mass movement. This book may be the tool to keep you tied to the mast of your own personal life course while others jettison all restraint and throw themselves headlong into the throes of a Mass Movement where many find their fate cast upon the rocks.

Absolutely fascinating and true, Hoffer explains humanity, psychology, and sociology with deft phrases and punchy conclusions. It did nothing short of changing how I view movements and social change

Much like the book by the unmentionable author who figures on the cover of my paperback edition of “The True Believer,” and for all the endnotes and references, this is but a list of largely unsubstantiated assertions and aphorisms. Eric Hoffer admits as much on page 60: “This is not an authoritative textbook. It is a book of thoughts, and it does not shy away from half-truths, so long as they seem to hint at a new approach and help formulate new questions.” With that caveat out of the way, it has to be said that this is a tremendous exploration of the motivations of mass movements and the fanatic in particular. The thoughts described in this book clearly derive from the experiences leading up to the horrors of the first and second world war, as well the wars themselves. They pertain to the conditions that lead to the creation of populist mass movements, the leaders these movements require and the state of mind of the fanatic. I guess that’s why I picked it up in 2017. It’s been in print for a good 60 years, but had not seemed relevant for some time… Fanaticism is built on humiliation. It is himself (most often his humiliated, debased, self, relative to some yardstick set by his own recent or ancient history or the rest of society) that the fanatic is escaping. Indeed, he is renouncing his current self and the present world and is dedicating his existence (including the possibility that it may come to an end) to a cause that will help create a better, utopian, future. Reason and observation do not come into it; the fanatic is a man of faith in the cause to which he has dedicated himself. Faith replaces reason, to the point of overruling empirical observation. The cause becomes the center of the fanatic’s existence. He willingly, gleefully, hands over his free will and (crucially) his responsibility and becomes an instrument of the cause. He experiences relief in doing so and, once inducted in one faith, finds it very difficult to get back his free will. Should his faith disappoint him, he’d sooner join another faith! The hatred that the fanatic sometimes harbors is a hatred of himself. Others having a just grievance against a fanatic therefore fills him with more hate and their elimination actually helps assuage this self-hatred: “The most effective way to silence our guilty conscience is to convince ourselves and others that those we have sinned against are indeed depraved creatures, deserving every punishment, even extermination.” (p. 95) The leader is a more complex person than the fanatic. At the first stage of the movement he needs to be a man of ideas. The Rousseau or the Voltaire or the Karl Marx. In the revolutionary stage he needs to be true believer himself, a fanatic. The lucky fanatic who happens to be in charge of the movement when the moment is ripe. The Robespierre, the Lenin or the Mussolini. Finally, when the movement wins out something funky happens: the mass movement becomes the status quo, the “today” that all misfits and downtrodden will hate from now onward and the leader needs to become a consolidator, a “practical man of action,” who will carry on with ritual “permanent revolution,” whose actual cause will be to maintain the status quo. Stalin and Mao spring to mind here, but not Trotsky, for example. Another important point made in the book is that if the source of fanaticism is humiliation, the raw material for the creation of populist mass movements can be channeled in a number of ways, but it will be channeled: “When we debunk a fanatical faith or prejudice, we do not strike at the root of fanaticism. We merely prevent its leaking out at a certain point, with the likely result that it will leak out at some other point.” (p. 139) That really floored me. Moving on to our current times, when, mid-financial crisis, the dispossessed and foreclosed-on American people voted in a President of African descent called Barack Hussain Obama, a man casting himself as an outsider, with a mandate to bring about change, very little was achieved when he turned out to be a level-headed member of the establishment. In due course, the humiliation of the dispossessed would merely be channeled into somebody else. Erm, worth the price of purchase, then. In some respects, however, the book is starting to show its years. Sixty years is a long time and I, for one, am observing around me a different world from the one in evidence in 1951: The author claims that the people never clamors for its freedom, that the masses never rebel against authority to reclaim their freedom of conscience and free choice: “They sweep away the old order not to create a society of free and independent men, but to establish uniformity. It is not the wickedness of the old regime they rise against, but its weakness; not its oppression, but its failure to hammer them together into one solid, mighty whole. The persuasiveness of the intellectual demagogue consists not so much in convincing the people of the vileness of the established order as in demonstrating its helpless incompetence. The immediate result of mass movement usually corresponds to what people want. They are not cheated in the process.” This, while perhaps accurate in 1951, is exactly half-right in year 2017. When in 1930 a demagogue would be promising a new world order to the dispossessed, today the demagogue’s audience is very much the bourgeoisie. The depression era utopias were not materialistic. They were idealistic and were offered to the dispossessed: communism, nationalism etc. The utopia our politicians peddle today is that we can maintain in permanence the once-in-many centuries post-WWII growth that the West has recently stopped enjoying. The final salary schemes, healthcare benefits and rising stock markets that came together with a demographic phenomenon called the baby boom, which we know for certain cannot be repeated for a good 25 years, even if we start multiplying like bunnies tonight. When three governments in a row have been elected in Greece with a mandate to fight back the “austerity” allegedly imposed by foreigners, when Monti was shoved out of running Italy within months of announcing entirely sensible measures, when Donald Trump promises to bring back jobs that have either gone to robots or to the cloud and gets elected, you know we’re not in 1951 anymore. The fanatic is no longer the villain in our world. The mass movement that all demagogues have in their sights is that of the entitled. Their promised land is not a utopia that lies in the future. It is a circumstantially contrived abundance that occurred in the past and is not coming back. The redemption the entitled seek is not ideological. It is material. I guess that is a vast improvement. But it means the book, while fun to read, is only relevant from a historical perspective.

Eric Hoffer was a once-of-a-kind, yet very insightful political thinker only the United States could have made possible. Like the legendary Horatio Alger, Hoffer started as farm laborer. Later he became longshoreman. But, perhaps not untypical for the time, he became an autodidact. He made learning, reading and thinking his life's passion. "The True Believer" describes his analysis of how people decide to throw their individual freedom and ability to think for themselves away to become willing instruments of autocratic, dictatorial systems of values. This applies equally to religions, political systems and nationalism. Hoffer's writing style is easy to understand. In an interview he once described how much care he put into finding the best way toget his ideas across to the readers. That shows. The True Believer is very enjoyable yet disturbing reading. You want to understand why people became willing, yes, enthusiastic Nazi, Soviet, Maoist mass murderers? You can't imagine why a highly intelligent honors graduate in electronic engineering prepared for months so he could fly an airplane into the World Trade Center and kill thousands of innocent men, women and children? You wonder about ISIS? Eric Hoffer has the answers. While he passed away many years ago, his analysis is more timely today than it ever was.

All the books met my expectations in terms of content

es el libro que os pedí y lo he recibido en el tiempo prometido. os deseo una felices navidades y próspero año 2018 a tod@s