The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

by Eric Hoffer

to the frustrated the present is irremediably spoiled. Comforts and pleasures cannot make it whole. No real content or comfort can ever arise in their minds but from hope.

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.

one curious substitute for mass movements, namely migration.

Release Valve

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

Is this always true?

The reason that the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that they are wholly without reverence toward the present.

This does not explain influence...

It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the “new poor,” who throb with the ferment of frustration.

What of tv in india to the young poor?

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.

Wrong dreams?

The most incurably frustrated—and, therefore, the most vehement—among the permanent misfits are those with an unfulfilled craving for creative work. Both those who try to write, paint, compose, etcetera, and fail decisively,

Hitler... But another would arise.... (Tolstoy)

Though they seem to be at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet.

NI peace required the extremists to talk...

spokesmen of democracy offer no holy cause to cling to and no corporate whole to lose oneself in.

Is this true??

propaganda on its own cannot force its way into unwilling minds; neither can it inculcate something wholly new; nor can it keep people persuaded once they have ceased to believe. It penetrates only into minds already open,

Could the same be said for the truth?

In the case of the French Revolution, “It was the armies of the Revolution, not its ideas, that penetrated throughout the whole of Europe.”

Yet France had influence beyond its armies bounds... Ireland was never invaded, nor Britain...

Mussolini and Hitler the evidence is even more decisive: without them there would have been neither a Fascist nor a Nazi movement.

Really?

audacity and a joy in defiance; an iron will; a fanatical conviction that he is in possession of the one and only truth; faith in his destiny and luck; a capacity for passionate hatred; contempt for the present; a cunning estimate of human nature; a delight in symbols

Grandiose narcissim?

mass ferocity is not always the sum of individual lawlessness. Personal truculence militates against united action. It moves the individual to strike out for himself. It produces the pioneer, adventurer and bandit. The true believer, no matter how rowdy and violent his acts, is basically an obedient and submissive person.

Is obedience and submission part of the problem of mass movements?

“Our zeal works wonders when it seconds our propensity to hatred, cruelty, ambition, avarice, detraction, rebellion.”

Many of the revolutionary leaders in India, China and Indonesia received their training in conservative Western institutions.

Also Cambodia...

Jesus Himself might not have preached a new Gospel had the dominant Pharisees taken Him into the fold, called Him Rabbi, and listened to Him with deference. A bishopric conferred on Luther at the right moment might have cooled his ardor for a Reformation. The young Karl Marx could perhaps have been won

But Karl Marx hardly worked a day... Parental and Engels support ...

grievance which animates him is, with very few exceptions, private and personal. His pity is usually hatched out of his hatred for the powers that be.

Orwell... Not love for the poor, but hatred of the rich...

pampered and flattered men of words in Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia feel no impulsion to side with the persecuted and terrorized against the ruthless leaders and their secret police.

Middle way? Hans Fallada, Solzhenitsyn....

Where all learned men are clergymen, the church is unassailable.

Catholic Ireland...

monopoly of the elite which was to rule his envisioned world empire and keep the anonymous masses barely literate.

Does the west have a similar policy towards financial literacy?

The man who wants to write a great book, paint a great picture, create an architectural masterpiece, become a great scientist, and knows that never in all eternity will he be able to realize this,

Failed creatives?

the sepulcher of Hitler, the founder of a Nazi religion, might perhaps have been a greater evil than all the atrocities,

Surely not??

China was unable to produce a Stalin, a Gandhi or even an Atatürk,

Mao arrived just after publication...

“ethnological intelligence has always been an atrophied function

What about Seneca?