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All movements, however different in doctrine and aspiration, draw their early adherents from the same types of humanity; they all appeal to the same types of mind.
“All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.”
There is thus a conservatism of the destitute as profound as the conservatism of the privileged, and the former is as much a factor in the perpetuation of a social order as the latter.
What seems to count more than possession of instruments of power is faith in the future.
They are on the lookout for signs of decay, and feel that any change is more likely to be for the worse than for the better
The landowners drove off their tenants, enclosed the commons and wrought profound changes in the social and economic texture of the country.
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.
The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.
pre-Hitlerian Germany it was often a toss up whether a restless youth would join the Communists or the Nazis.
In the same family, one member would join the revolutionaries and the other the Zionists.
A Saul turning into Paul is neither a rarity nor a miracle.
Captain Röhm boasted that he could turn the reddest Communist into a glowing nationalist in four weeks.
Karl Radek looked on the Nazi Brown Shirts (S.A.) as a reserve for future Communist recruits.
(a) all mass movements are competitive, and the gain of one in adherents is the loss of all the others; (b) all mass movements are interchangeable.
Said Luther: “In the eyes of the Italians we Germans are merely low Teutonic swine. They exploit us like charlatans and suck the country to the marrow. Wake up Germany!”
The hammer and sickle and the swastika are in a class with the cross.
nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, decent, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come.
It was the new poor in seventeenth century England who ensured the success of the Puritan Revolution.
To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility.
He is forced to conclude that “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.
Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual. And
The decline of handicrafts in modern times is perhaps one of the causes for the rise of frustration and the increased susceptibility of the individual to mass movements.
“The European who ‘dies for his country’ has behaved in a manner that is unintelligible to a Chinaman [sic], because his family is not directly benefited—is, indeed, damaged by the loss of one of its members.”
“For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
When St. Bernard preached, his influence was such that “mothers are said to have hid their sons from him, and wives their husbands, lest he should lure them away. He actually broke up so many homes that the abandoned
“No one of its rivals possessed so powerful and coherent a structure as did the church. No other gave its adherents quite the same feeling of coming into a closely knit community.”
The villagers (pagani) and the heath-dwellers (heathen) clung longest to the ancient cults.
When people revolt in a totalitarian society, they rise not against the wickedness of the regime but its weakness.
What de Tocqueville says of a tyrannical government is true of all totalitarian orders—their moment of greatest danger is when they begin to reform, that is to say, when they begin to show liberal tendencies.
The fiercest fanatics are often selfish people who were forced, by innate shortcomings or external circumstances, to lose faith in their own selves.
Patriotism, racial solidarity, and even the preaching of revolution find a more ready response among people who see limitless opportunities spread out before them than among those who move within the fixed limits of a familiar, orderly and predictable pattern of existence.
The segregated Negro in the South is less frustrated than the nonsegregated Negro in the North.
The least and most successful among the Italian Americans were the most ardent admirers of Mussolini’s revolution; the least and most successful among the Irish Americans were the most responsive to De Valera’s call; the least and most successful among the Jews are the most responsive to Zionism; the least and most successful among the Blacks are the most race conscious.
When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored. The consciousness of a barren, meaningless existence is the main fountainhead of boredom. People who are not conscious of their individual separateness, as is the case with those who are members of a compact tribe, church, party, etcetera, are not accessible to boredom.
Boredom accounts for the almost invariable presence of spinsters and middle-aged women at the birth of mass movements. Even in the case of Islam and the Nazi movement, which frowned upon feminine activity outside the home, we find women of a certain type playing an important role in the early stage of their development.
1 He was financed by the wives of some of the great industrialists long before their husbands had heard of him.
Remorse and a sense of grievance seem to drive people in the same direction.
The technique of a proselytizing mass movement aims to evoke in the faithful the mood and frame of mind of a repentant criminal.
clearly no atonement is called for unless there is a poignant sense of sin.
“What a task confronts the American clergy"—laments an American divine—"preaching the good news of a Savior to people who for the most part have no real sense of sin.”
An effective mass movement cultivates the idea of sin. It depicts the autonomous self not only as barren and helpless but also as vile.
It has been observed that in the exaltation of mass movements (whether patriotic, religious or revolutionary) common crime declines.
The capacities for united action and self-sacrifice seem almost always to go together. When we hear of a group that is particularly contemptuous of death, we are usually justified in concluding that the group is closely knit and thoroughly unified.
One realizes now that the ghetto of the Middle Ages was for the Jews more a fortress than a prison.
When the Middle Ages returned for a brief decade in our day, they caught the Jew without his ancient defenses and crushed him.
They felt themselves, in the words of Bukharin, “isolated from everything that constitutes the essence of life.” So they confessed. By humbling themselves before the congregation of the faithful they broke out of their isolation. They renewed their communion with the eternal whole by reviling the self, accusing it of monstrous and spectacular crimes and sloughing it off in public.
The same Russians who cringe and crawl before Stalin’s secret police displayed unsurpassed courage when facing—singly or in a group—the invading Nazis.
They reasoned that since Hitler had managed to exterminate six million Jews without meeting serious resistance, it should not be too difficult to handle the 600,000 Jews in Palestine. Yet they found that the Jews in Palestine, however recently arrived, were a formidable enemy: reckless, stubborn and resourceful.
