The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

by Eric Hoffer

Discontent is likely to be highest when misery is bearable; when conditions have so improved that an ideal state seems almost within reach. A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed. De Tocqueville in his researches into the state of society in France before the revolution was struck by the discovery that “in no one of the periods which have followed the Revolution of 1789 has the national prosperity of France augmented more rapidly than it did in the twenty years preceding that event.”4 He is forced to conclude that “the French found their position the more intolerable the better it became.”5 In both France and Russia the land-hungry peasants owned almost exactly one-third of the agricultural land at the outbreak of revolution, and most of that land was acquired during the generation or two preceding the revolution.6 It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.