The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

by Eric Hoffer

the fanaticism which animates them may be viewed and treated as one.

1) that frustration of itself, without any proselytizing prompting from the outside, can generate most of the peculiar characteristics of the true believer; 2) that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind.

Traits of mass movement is to channel frustration into repeated action to alleviate frustration?

though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image.

attracted by the prospect of sudden and spectacular change in their conditions of life.

The promise

There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

The outside world seems to them a precariously balanced mechanism, and so long as it ticks in their favor they are afraid to tinker with it. Thus the resistance to change and the ardent desire for it spring from the same conviction, and the one can be as vehement as the other.

Other factors have to be present before discontent turns into disaffection. One of these is a sense of power.

abjectly poor, too, stand in awe of the world around them and are not hospitable to change.

The poor fear worsening

Those who would transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding and captaining discontent or by demonstrating the reasonableness and desirability of the intended changes or by coercing people into a new way of life. They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope.

Same as Bernays on pr; one cannot control the public, only guide them

Experience is a handicap. The men who started the French Revolution were wholly without political experience.

People who see their lives as irremediably spoiled cannot find a worth-while purpose in self-advancement.

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

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. This minding of other people’s business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs.

The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft.

The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.

despair brought by unemployment comes not only from the threat of destitution, but from the sudden view of a vast nothingness ahead.

When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need of something apart from us to live for.

We cannot be sure that we have something worth living for unless we are ready to die for it.

When people are ripe for a mass movement, they are usually ripe for any effective movement, and not solely for one with a particular doctrine or program. In pre-Hitlerian Germany it was often a toss up whether a restless youth would join the Communists or the Nazis.

all mass movements are competitive,

migration can serve as a substitute for a mass movement.

plausible, for instance, that had the United States and the British Empire welcomed mass migration from Europe after the First World War, there might have been neither a Fascist nor a Nazi revolution.

Mass fight or flight

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

Though the disaffected are found in all walks of life, they are most frequent in the following categories: (a) the poor, (b) misfits, (c) outcasts, (d) minorities, (e) adolescent youth, (f) the ambitious (whether facing insurmountable obstacles or unlimited opportunities), (g) those in the grip of some vice or obsession, (h) the impotent (in body or mind), (i) the inordinately selfish, (j) the bored, (k) the sinners. Sections 20–42 deal with some of these types.

Lumpy with talent

It was the new poor in seventeenth century England who ensured the success of the Puritan Revolution.

I wonder if Toussaint fits this mould

Where people toil from sunrise to sunset for a bare living, they nurse no grievances and dream no dreams.

It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt. A

Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.

There is a hope that acts as an explosive, and a hope that disciplines and infuses patience.

Christianity preached the immediate end of the world and the kingdom of heaven around the corner; Mohammed dangled loot before the faithful; the Jacobins promised immediate liberty and equality; the early Bolsheviki promised bread and land; Hitler promised an immediate end to Versailles’ bondage and work and action for all. Later, as the movement comes into possession of power, the emphasis is shifted to the distant hope—the dream and the vision.

Focused, singular hope

In a society with an institution of slavery the troublemakers are the newly enslaved and the freed slaves.

They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society.

Why? The condition is frustration itself?

They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society.

In capable people don't want competition. They want to maintain the status quo

Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority. Equality without freedom creates a more stable social pattern than freedom without equality.

Poverty when coupled with creativeness is usually free of frustration.

Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves as the continuous ability to create; to see things grow and develop under our hand, day in, day out.

escape from an ineffectual self

Economic independence for women facilitates divorce. Economic independence for the young weakens parental authority and also hastens an early splitting up of the family group.

Even when the Westernized native attains personal success—becomes rich, or masters a respected profession—he is not happy. He feels naked and orphaned.

Even when a colonial power is wholly philanthropic and its sole aim is to bring prosperity and progress to a backward people, it must do all it can to preserve and reinforce the corporate pattern. It must not concentrate on the individual but inject the innovations and reforms into tribal or communal channels and let the tribe or the community progress as a whole.

Very imperial perspective

A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence.

When people revolt in a totalitarian society, they rise not against the wickedness of the regime but its weakness.

The permanent misfits are those who because of a lack of talent or some irreparable defect in body or mind cannot do the one thing for which their whole being craves.

we can never have enough of that which we really do not want, and that we run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.

When opportunities are apparently unlimited, there is an inevitable deprecation of the present.

“All that I am doing or possibly can do is chicken feed compared with what is left undone.”

The orthodox Jew is less frustrated than the emancipated Jew. The segregated Negro in the South is less frustrated than the nonsegregated Negro in the North.

Those of a minority who attain fortune and fame often find it difficult to gain entrance into the exclusive circles of the majority. They are thus made conscious of their foreignness.

The glass ceiling builds rebelliousness

When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored.