The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

by Eric Hoffer

The fanatical extremist, no matter how eloquent, strikes them as dangerous, traitorous, impractical or even insane.

When the masses are ordered

The emergence of an articulate minority where there was none before is a potential revolutionary step.

men of words are of diverse types. They can be priests, scribes, prophets, writers, artists, professors, students and intellectuals in general.

The conquered Greeks felt that they gave laws and civilization to the conquerors.

Now it is not altogether farfetched to assume that, had the British in India instead of cultivating the Nizams, Maharajas, Nawabs, Gekawars and so on made an effort to win the Indian intellectual; had they treated him as an equal, encouraged him in his work and allowed him a share of the fleshpots, they could perhaps have maintained their rule there indefinitely.

If Britain had won over the colony intellectuals

Christianity made little headway against Judaism because the Jewish religion had the ardent allegiance of the Jewish men of words.

To a degree the nationalist movement which forced the British rulers out of India had its inception in the humiliation of a scrawny and bespectacled Indian man of words in South Africa.

Gandhi

The fanatics and the faith-hungry masses, however, are likely to invest such speculations with the certitude of holy writ, and make them the fountainhead of a new faith. Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist.

the only people cheated in the process are the intellectual precursors.

It is not the wickedness of the old regime they rise against but its weakness; not its oppression,

He alone knows the innermost craving of the masses in action:

The man of words now disbands his group of persuasive intellects as he becomes a demagogue

When the struggle with the old order is bitter and chaotic and victory can be won only by utmost unity and self-sacrifice, the creative man of words is usually shoved aside and the management of affairs falls into the hands of the noncreative men of words—

The creatives and intellects are disbanded when the mass movement is in full swing

most of the Nazi bigwigs had artistic and literary ambitions which they could not realize.

Hatred has become a habit. With no more outside enemies to destroy, the fanatics make enemies of one another.

When the same person or persons (or the same type of person) leads a movement from its inception to maturity, it usually ends in disaster.

no one can be honorable unless he honors mankind.

They gain esteem from their apparent service to people

he cannot help being awed by the tremendous achievements of faith and spontaneity in the early days of the movement when a mighty instrument of power was conjured out of the void.

Words have become law but this creates a need for romance reminiscent of the early movement in the cult leader

The fanatic who personifies this phase is usually an unattractive human type. He is ruthless, self-righteous, credulous, disputatious, petty and rude.

Whenever we find a period of genuine creativeness associated with a mass movement, it is almost always a period which either precedes or, more often, follows the active phase.

Because creativity is unstable and changing whereas activity requires stability. Much the businesses become less flexible as they grow

The active phase itself is sterile. Trotsky knew that “Periods of high tension in social passions leave little room for contemplation and reflection.

Also, the tension produced, as does biologically, puts long term projects on hold Hoffer, earlier mentioned, that creativity produced contentment and perhaps vice versa. A discontent people can't act creatively?

“He who walks in the way … and interrupts his study [of the Torah] saying: ‘How beautiful is this tree’ [or] ‘How beautiful is this ploughed field’ … [has] made himself guilty against his own soul.”

Absoluteness. How can creation be a distraction from the creator?

Nazis and the Communists imitate more than they originate.