We should not be surprised by fanaticism and terrorism in
recent years. For the last few decades, we've been going
through
Eric Hoffer's analysis of how to produce fanatics as if it
were a checklist; violent mass movements may be next.
— Rich Erlich, kvetching, late 20th century
Reference:
Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. 1951.
New York: HarperPerennial, 1966/1989.
A
2010 reissue and other editions of TB
are conveniently available from Amazon.com
<https://www.amazon.com/True-Believer-Thoughts-Movements-Perennial/dp/0060505915>.
My
collection of essays, Views from a Jagged Orbit opens
with "Introduction: The
True Believer," and I tell there the story of my first teaching Eric Hoffer's
long essay; but that's not, of course, the whole story.
When
Aristotle said that a story has "a beginning, middle, and an end,"
I'm sure a couple or more wise-asses in his audience responded with the ancient
Greek for "Well, duh!" — although it's actually a pretty profound,
and certainly important, observation. With history, one can always ask,
"What came before that? What came after that" — until you get a more
or less linked series of episodes from Creation to the Twilight of the Gods or
the Big Bang to Big Crunch or the Heat Death of the Universe … or whatever. The
art of story-telling requires that you start at a place that feels right for a
beginning and end where you get "the sense of an
ending."
In
terms of images in my mind, my coming to The
True Believer starts in the kitchen of the Pi Lambda Phi Fraternity house
at the U of I in Champaign, Illinois, in the late-ish 1960s, talking politics with
the cook. She was a Black woman who supported Robert Kennedy and argued that he
was no longer the callow young opportunist who'd worked for Joe
McCarthy but the one hope for racial peace in the US.
She
convinced me, and I became a Kennedy supporter.
My
next memory from the period is being waked up in a hide-a-bed in a living room
in Brooklyn so my hosts could watch and listen to the news of Bobby Kennedy's
assassination (5/6 June 1968). And soon after
that, I followed other Kennedy supporters into the campaign of George McGovern,
and the following August found myself working as a driver for the press corps with
McGovern at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
And
so I found myself driving through Grant Park on or about 28 August 1968 chauffeuring
members of Senator McGovern's family and intimidating/bullshitting Illinois
National Guardsmen so the McGoverns and I could get the hell out of the sealed Park;
and so, a bit later, I found myself at Michigan and Balbo trying to locate a
McGovern campaign car and driver — and McGovern delegate — in the midst of a riot.
And
so I got very interested — personally, viscerally interested — in political
violence and read or re-read very seriously Hoffer's study of fanaticism.
And
so I ended up teaching The True Believer
my first semester "at the big desk" in a classroom, and every few
years thereafter for forty years.
And
having taught The True Believer so
frequently, I sold a lot of books for Hoffer and (later) the Hoffer estate and
feel no guilt for this posting following at least the temporary disappearance
of Hoffer's 1951 flawed mini-classic from the Adobe
Cloud. I give below some important excerpts, with commentary. Page numbers are from
the cited hard copy of the HarperPerennial edition of 1966, reset 1989.
* * *
Title: Hoffer's title points at one of the deep and
inevitable flaws in The True Believer;
"the True Believer" is a type, an abstraction.
Types can
devolve into stereotypes and even at their best are useful the way a diagram of
An Ideal Mammal/Vertebrate/Arthropod/Whatever is useful: as a teaching device
to illustrate a basic design, not a photo of something you'll ever find in
nature.
Note on "Frustrated":
Hoffer's one discursive note is to the Preface, noting "The word 'frustrated' is not used in this book as a clinical term. It
denotes here people who, for one reason or another, feel that their lives are
spoiled or wasted" (p. 169).
From the Preface
Starting out from the fact that the frustrated
"predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements and that they
usually join of their own accord, it is assumed: 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" (p. xii).
In 1951 Hitler was dead and Fascism apparently smashed, but
the memory was still alive. Communism in the Russian Empire in its USSR form
was long out of its activist phase (see below), but Stalin was still alive and
there remained fanatical Communists in the USSR and elsewhere — forming mass
movements when combined in a revisionist sort of way with nationalism. (Classic
Marxism had identities other than class as the products of "false
consciousness.) So:
It is necessary for most of us these days to
have some insight into the motives and responses of the true believer. For
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. And whether we are to line up with him
or against him, it is well that we should know all we can concerning his nature
and potentialities. (xiii)
PART 1: The Appeal of Mass Movements
I.II
Revolutionary,
Religious and Nationalist Movements:
It is a truism that many who join a rising
revolutionary movement are attracted by the prospect of sudden and spectacular
change in their conditions of life. A revolutionary movement is a conspicuous
instrument of change. Not so obvious is the fact that religious and nationalist
movements too can be vehicles of change. […] Where self-advancement cannot, or
is not allowed to, serve as a driving force, other sources of enthusiasm have
to be found if momentous changes, such as the awakening and renovation of a
stagnant society or radical reforms in the character and pattern of life of a
community, are to be realized and perpetuated. Religious, revolutionary and nationalist
movements are such generating plants of general enthusiasm. (§1; p. 3)
"In modern times, the mass movements involved in the
realization of vast and rapid change are revolutionary and nationalist—singly
or in combination." But Hoffer reminds us of the past power of religious
movements, and notes that had Chiang Kai-shek "known how to set in motion a genuine mass movement, or at least sustain the
nationalist enthusiasm kindled by the Japanese invasion, he might have been
acting now as the renovator of China. Since he did not know how, he was easily
shoved aside by the masters of the art of 'religiofication' — the art of
turning practical purposes into holy causes" under Mao and the Chinese
communists (§1; p. 5).
The West
and Nationalist Movements in "the Orient" ca. 1951 (to our time):
It is not difficult to see why America and
Britain (or any Western democracy) could not play a direct and leading role in
rousing the Asiatic countries from their backwardness and stagnation: the
democracies are neither inclined nor perhaps able to kindle a revivalist spirit
in Asia’s millions. The contribution of the Western democracies to the
awakening of the East has been indirect and certainly unintended. They have
kindled an enthusiasm of resentment against the West; and it is this
anti-Western fervor which is at present rousing the Orient from its stagnation
of centuries. §1; p. 5)
Discontent
and Hope:
Discontent by itself does not invariably create
a desire for change. Other factors have to be present before discontent turns into
disaffection. One of these is a sense of power. * * * There is […] 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. [***] Offhand one would expect
that the mere possession of power would automatically result in a cocky
attitude toward the world and a receptivity to change. But it is not always so.
The powerful can be as timid as the weak. What seems to count more than
possession of instruments of power is faith in the future. Where power is not
joined with faith in the future, it is used mainly to ward off the new and
preserve the status quo. On the other hand, extravagant hope, even when not
backed by actual power, is likely to generate a most reckless daring. For the
hopeful can draw strength from the most ridiculous sources of power—a slogan, a
word, a button. No faith is potent unless it is also faith in the future;
unless it has a millennial component. So, too, an effective doctrine: as well
as being a source of power, it must also claim to be a key to the book of the
future. 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. [***] When hopes and dreams are
loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors. (§3-4, §5; pp.
8-9, 11)
No
Experience Necessary (Indeed, "Experience is a handicap.")
For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking
of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they
must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible
leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible
power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and
potentialities of the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties
involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap. The men who
started the French Revolution were wholly without political experience. The
same is true of the Bolsheviks, Nazis and the revolutionaries in Asia. The
experienced man of affairs is a latecomer. He enters the movement when it is
already a going concern. (§6; p. 11)
I.II: The Desire for Self-Renunciation in a Holy Cause
There is a fundamental difference between the
appeal of a mass movement and the appeal of a practical organization. The
practical organization offers opportunities for self-advancement, and its
appeal is mainly to self-interest. On the other hand, a mass movement,
particularly in its active, revivalist phase, appeals not to those intent on
bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of
an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it
can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the
passion for self-renunciation. People who see their lives as irremediably
spoiled cannot find a worthwhile purpose in self-advancement. The prospect of
an individual career cannot stir them to a mighty effort, nor can it evoke in
them faith and a single-minded dedication. They look on self-interest as on
something tainted and evil; something unclean and unlucky. Anything undertaken
under the auspices of the self seems to them foredoomed. Nothing that has its
roots and reasons in the self can be good and noble. Their innermost craving is
for a new life—a rebirth—or, failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of
pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identification with
a holy cause. (§7; p. 12)
I.III: "The Interchangeability of Mass Movements"
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. In the
overcrowded pale of Czarist Russia the simmering Jewish population was ripe
both for revolution and Zionism. […] This receptivity to all movements does not
always cease even after the potential true believer has become the ardent
convert of a specific movement. Where mass movements are in violent competition
with each other, there are not infrequent instances of converts—even the most
zealous—shifting their allegiance from one to the other. A Saul turning into
Paul is neither a rarity nor a miracle. (§14; pp. 16-17)
PART 2: The Potential Converts
IV. "The Role of the Undesirables in Human
Affairs"
There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation
or any distinct group by its least worthy members. Though manifestly unfair,
this tendency has some justification. For the character and destiny of a group
are often determined by its inferior elements. The inert mass of a nation, for
instance, is in its middle section. The decent, average people who do the
nation’s work in cities and on the land are worked upon and shaped by
minorities at both ends—the best and the worst. […] The game of history is usually played by the
best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle. 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. They see
their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to
waste and wreck both: hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and
anarchy. They also crave to dissolve their spoiled, meaningless selves in some
soul-stirring spectacular communal undertaking—hence their proclivity for
united action. Thus they are among the early recruits of revolutions, mass
migrations and of religious, racial and chauvinist movements, and they imprint
their mark upon these upheavals and movements which shape a nation’s character
and history. §18, p.
24)
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. (§19; p. 25)
V. "The Poor"
The New
Poor
Not all who are poor are frustrated. Some of
the poor stagnating in the slums of the cities are smug in their decay. […]
Even the respectable poor, when their poverty is of long standing, remain
inert. They are awed by the immutability of the order of things. It takes a
cataclysm […] to open their eyes to the transitoriness of the “eternal order.”
It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the “new poor,” who
throb with the ferment of frustration. The memory of better things is as fire
in their veins. They are the disinherited and dispossessed who respond to every
rising mass movement.
(§20; p. 26)
Moment
of Most Threat to Soviet Russia (and an Aphorism)
The most dangerous moment for the regime of the
Politburo will be when a considerable improvement in the economic conditions of
the Russian masses has been achieved and the iron totalitarian rule somewhat
relaxed. (§22; p. 29) // Our frustration is greater when we have much and want
more than when we have nothing and want some. (§23; p. 29)
"The
Free Poor" (and some problems with Hoffer's attitude toward people)
Slaves are poor; yet where
slavery is widespread and long established, there is little likelihood for the
rise of a mass movement. The absolute equality among
the slaves, and the intimate communal life in slave quarters, preclude
individual frustration. In a society with an institution of slavery the
troublemakers are the newly enslaved and the freed slaves. In the case of the
latter it is the burden of freedom which is at the root of their discontent.
Freedom
aggravates at least as much as it alleviates frustration. Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the
shoulders of the individual. And as freedom encourages a multiplicity of
attempts, it unavoidably multiplies failure and frustration. Freedom alleviates
frustration by making available the palliatives of action, movement, change and
protest. Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is
an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual?
(§26; p. 31)
Slaves in various cultures were also kept in line by terror and, in some
systems, hope of gaining freedom. Slaves may've experienced
"absolute equality" insofar as they were all equally chattel (under chattel
slavery), but there were blatant inequalities of conditions, and undoubtedly
"internal" social hierarchies, as in prisons. "Freedom of choice
places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual" only
if the individual has been conditioned to accept some myth of absolute freedom
of choice: E.g., "You can be anything you want to be," when I'd like
to be a porpoise.
Freedom
from Responsibility
We join a mass movement to escape individual
responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, “to be free from
freedom.” It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared
themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered
themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for
obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?
(§26; p. 31)
Freedom/Equality,
and a Nicely Cynical (and Snobbish) Aphorism: "Where freedom is
real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is
the passion of a small minority." (§29; p. 33)
Something
of a Digression Here on Movement Hostility to "The Family"
The attitude of rising mass movements toward
the family is of considerable interest. Almost all our contemporary movements
showed in their early stages a hostile attitude toward the family, and did all
they could to discredit and disrupt it. […] Still, not one of our contemporary
movements was so outspoken in its antagonism toward the family as was early
Christianity. Jesus minced no words: “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. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own
household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me:
and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me.” [***] As
one would expect, a disruption of the family, whatever its causes, fosters automatically a collective
spirit and creates a responsiveness to the appeal of mass movements. (§32; pp.
36, 37)
Snobbish
Analysis of Discontent among the Colonized, but With a Valid Point (and One
Hoffer Applies Also to Us)
The discontent generated in backward countries
by their contact with Western civilization is not primarily resentment against
exploitation by domineering foreigners. It is rather the result of a crumbling
or weakening of tribal solidarity and communal life. The ideal of self-advancement
which the civilizing West offers to backward populations brings with it the
plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are
ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of a communal
existence. Even when the Westernized native attains personal success—becomes
rich, or masters a respected profession— he is not happy. He feels naked and
orphaned. The nationalist movements in the colonial countries are partly a
striving after group existence and an escape from Western individualism. The
Western colonizing powers offer the native the gift of individual freedom and
independence. They try to teach him self-reliance. What it all actually amounts
to is individual isolation. It means the cutting off of an immature and poorly
furnished individual from the corporate whole and releasing him, in the words
of Khomiakov, “to the freedom of his own impotence.” The feverish desire
to band together and coalesce into marching masses so manifest both in our
homelands and in the countries we colonize is the expression of a desperate
effort to escape this ineffectual, purposeless individual existence. (§33; pp.
38-39)
Again, the use of Types here slides into stereotypes. It
would be useful to have some statistics to refine the generalizations and give
some "texture" and nuance. But that was a job for later students,
with different training and agendas from Hoffer's.
Divide et Impera (Divide and
Rule)
The device of “divide and rule” is ineffective
when it aims at a weakening of all forms of cohesion among the ruled. The
breaking up of a village community, a tribe or a nation into autonomous
individuals does not eliminate or stifle the spirit of rebellion against the
ruling power. An effective division is one that fosters a multiplicity of
compact bodies—racial, religious or economic—vying with and suspicious of each
other. ¶ 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. (§33; p. 39)
Armies
and/vs. Mass Movements || Intact vs. Crumbling Collective Bodies
Another and final illustration of the thesis
that effective collective bodies are immune to the appeal of mass movements but
that a crumbling collective pattern is the most favorable milieu for their rise
is found in the relation between the collective body we know as an army and
mass movements. There is hardly an instance of an intact army giving rise to a
religious, revolutionary or nationalist movement. On the other hand, a
disintegrating army—whether by the orderly process of demobilization or by
desertion due to demoralization—is fertile ground for a proselytizing movement.
The man just out of the army is an ideal potential convert, and we find him
among the early adherents of all contemporary mass movements. He feels alone
and lost in the free-for-all of civilian life. The responsibilities and
uncertainties of an autonomous existence weigh and prey upon him. He longs for
certitude, camaraderie, freedom from individual responsibility, and a vision of
something altogether different from the competitive free society around him—and
he finds all this in the brotherhood and the revivalist atmosphere of a rising
movement. (§35; p. 45)
Earlier in
the book, Hoffer points to a complexity on armies and movements: "It was the new poor in seventeenth century England who
ensured the success of the Puritan Revolution. […] It was this mass of the
dispossessed who furnished the recruits for [Oliver] Cromwell’s new-model army" (§20; p.
26), with Cromwell's army the strong arm of the Puritan Revolution and a source
of radical thinkers.
Hoffer's
habit of typological thinking gets him into trouble here (and elsewhere):
"The man just out
of the army" is an abstraction; for Hoffer's point we'd need statistics on
actual men who had been demobilized
and discharged, most of whom don't end up in mass movements (or drug addicts or
suicides or failures).
Corporate
Disintegration —> Rise of Mass Movements
Enlightenment
—> Mass Movements that are Socialist, Nationalist, or Racist
The milieu most favorable for the rise and
propagation of mass movements is one in which a once compact corporate
structure is, for one reason or another, in a state of disintegration. The age in
which Christianity rose and spread “was one when large numbers of men were
uprooted. The compact city states had been partly merged into one vast empire …
and the old social and political groupings had been weakened or dissolved.” Christianity
made its greatest headway in the large cities where lived “thousands of
deracinated individuals, some of them slaves, some freedmen, and some
merchants, who had been separated by force or voluntarily from their hereditary
milieu.” In the countryside where the communal pattern was least disturbed,
the new religion found the ground less favorable. The villagers (pagani) and
the heath-dwellers (heathen) clung longest to the ancient cults. […]
The
general rule seems to be that as one pattern of corporate cohesion weakens,
conditions become ripe for the rise of a mass movement and the eventual
establishment of a new and more vigorous form of compact unity. […] If the
religious mood is undermined by enlightenment, the rising movements will be
socialist, nationalist or racist. The French Revolution, which was also a
nationalist movement, came as abreaction not against the vigorous tyranny of
the Catholic Church and the ancient regime but against their weakness and ineffectuality.
When people revolt in a totalitarian society, they rise not against the
wickedness of the regime but its weakness. (§35; pp. 42-43)
VI. "Misfits"
Temporary
Misfits: Unemployed Youth, College Grads, Veterans, Immigrants
The frustration of misfits can vary in
intensity. There are first the temporary misfits: people who have not found
their place in life but still hope to find it. Adolescent youth, unemployed
college graduates, veterans, new immigrants and the like are of this category.
They are restless, dissatisfied and haunted by the fear that their best years
will be wasted before they reach their goal. They are receptive to the
preaching of a proselytizing movement and yet do not always make staunch
converts. For they are not irrevocably estranged from the self; they do not see
it as irremediably spoiled. It is easy for them to conceive an autonomous
existence that is purposeful and hopeful. The slightest evidence of progress
and success reconciles them with the world and their selves. (§36; p. 46)
"Permanent Misfits,"
Especially Failures in Creative Fields
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. No achievement, however spectacular,
in other fields can give them a sense of fulfillment. Whatever they undertake
becomes a passionate pursuit; but they never arrive, never pause. […] ¶ 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 [sic], and fail decisively, and those
who after tasting the elation of creativeness feel a drying up of the creative
flow within and know that never again will they produce aught worthwhile, are
alike in the grip of a desperate passion. Neither fame nor power nor riches nor
even monumental achievements in other fields can still their hunger. Even the
wholehearted dedication to a holy cause does not always cure them. Their
unappeased hunger persists, and they are likely to become the most violent extremists
in the service of their holy cause. (§37; pp. 47-48)
We might want to dial back a bit the reference to failed or
failing artists, but Hoffer had in mind Hitler and a number of other
high-ranking Nazis.
VII. "The Inordinately Selfish"
The inordinately selfish are particularly
susceptible to frustration. The more selfish a person, the more poignant his
disappointments. It is the inordinately selfish, therefore, who are likely to
be the most persuasive champions of selflessness. The fiercest fanatics are
often selfish people who were forced, by innate shortcomings or external
circumstances, to lose faith in their own selves. They separate the excellent
instrument of their selfishness from their ineffectual selves and attach it to
the service of some holy cause. And though it be a faith of love and humility
they adopt, they can be neither loving nor humble. (§38; p. 48)
VIII. "The Ambitious Facing Unlimited
Opportunities":
"Unlimited
opportunities can be as potent a cause of frustration as a paucity or lack of
opportunities. When opportunities are apparently unlimited, there is an
inevitable deprecation of the present. The attitude is: 'All that I am doing or
possibly can do is chicken feed compared with what is left undone'" (§39; p.
49)
IX "Minorities"
A minority which preserves its identity is
inevitably a compact whole which shelters the individual, gives him a sense of
belonging and immunizes him against frustration. On the other hand, in a
minority bent on assimilation, the individual stands alone, pitted against
prejudice and discrimination. He is also burdened with the sense of guilt,
however vague, of a renegade. 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. ¶Again, within a minority bent on assimilation, the least
and most successful (economically and culturally) are likely to be more
frustrated than those in between.
X "The Bored"
There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of
a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved
boredom. In almost all the descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of
mass movements there is reference to vast ennui; and in their earliest stages
mass movements are more likely to find sympathizers and support among the bored
than among the exploited and oppressed. To a deliberate fomenter of mass
upheavals, the report that people are bored stiff should be at least as
encouraging as that they are suffering from intolerable economic or political
abuses. (§41; pp. 51-52)
No feminist, Hoffer has it that "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" (§41; p. 52). Especially
given Hoffer's definition of "frustrated" and his emphasis on
frustration, boredom would be only part of the explanation for why talented
women would involve themselves in movements in sexist societies. Hoffer cites
"society ladies" providing early finance for the Nazis and
"bored wives of businessmen before the French Revolution." Contemporary
scholars of religious history would point to the Prophet (sic) Miriam and her role
in the Exodus — which Hoffer notes as a particularly literal mass movement —
and women in the early Christian church.
XI "The Sinners"
Fervent patriotism as well as religious and
revolutionary enthusiasm often serves as a refuge from a guilty conscience. It
is a strange thing that both the injurer and the injured, the sinner and he who
is sinned against, should find in the mass movement an escape from a blemished
life. Remorse and a sense of grievance seem to drive people in the same
direction. It sometimes seems that mass movements are custom-made to fit the
needs of the criminal—not only for the catharsis of his soul but also for the
exercise of his inclinations and talents. The technique of a proselytizing mass
movement aims to evoke in the faithful the mood and frame of mind of a
repentant criminal. (§42; p. 53)
PART 3: United Action and Self-Sacrifice
XII "Preface" (to Part 3)
"Frustration,"
"self-sacrifice," and Other Aspects of Fanaticism
The vigor of a mass movement stems from the
propensity of its followers for united action and self-sacrifice. […]With few
exceptions, any group or organization which tries, for one reason or another,
to create and maintain compact unity and a constant readiness for
self-sacrifice usually manifests the peculiarities—both noble and base—of a
mass movement. On the other hand, a mass movement is bound to lose much which
distinguishes it from other types of organization when it relaxes its
collective compactness and begins to countenance self-interest as a legitimate
motive of activity. In times of peace and prosperity, a democratic nation is an
institutionalized association of more or less free individuals. On the other
hand, in time of crisis, when the nation's existence is threatened, and it
tries to reinforce its unity and generate in its people a readiness for
self-sacrifice, it almost always assumes in some degree the character of a mass
movement. The same is true of religious and revolutionary organizations: whether
or not they develop into mass movements depends less on the doctrine they
preach and the program they project than on the degree of their preoccupation with
unity and the readiness for self-sacrifice. [§43; p. 58]
The
important point is that in the poignantly frustrated the propensities for
united action and self-sacrifice arise spontaneously. It should be possible,
therefore, to gain some clues concerning the nature of these propensities, and
the technique to be employed for their deliberate inculcation, by tracing their
spontaneous emergence in the frustrated mind. What ails the frustrated? It is
the consciousness of an irremediably blemished self. Their chief desire is to
escape that self—and it is this desire which manifests itself in a propensity
for united action and self-sacrifice. The revulsion from an unwanted self, and
the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness
to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one’s
individual distinctness in a compact collective whole. Moreover, the
estrangement from the self is usually accompanied by a train of diverse and
seemingly unrelated attitudes and impulses which a closer probing reveals to be
essential factors in the process of unification and of self-sacrifice. In other
words, frustration not only gives rise to the desire for unity and the
readiness for self-sacrifice but also creates a mechanism for their
realization. Such diverse phenomena as a
deprecation of the present, a facility for make-believe, a proneness to hate, a
readiness to imitate, credulity, a readiness to attempt the impossible, and
many others which crowd the minds of the intensely frustrated are, as we shall
see, unifying agents and prompters of recklessness. (§43; p.59, Erlich's
emphasis) * * *
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.2 On the other hand, when we face a member of a compact
group, we are likely to find him contemptuous of death. Both united action and
self-sacrifice require self-diminution. In order to become part of a compact
whole, the individual has to forego much. He has to give up privacy, individual
judgment and often individual possessions. To school a person to united action
is, therefore, to ready him for acts of self-denial. On the other hand, the man
who practices self-abnegation sloughs off the hard shell which keeps him apart
from others and is thus made assimilable. Every unifying agent is, therefore, a
promoter of self-sacrifice and vice versa. (§43; pp. 60-61)
It is well to outline here the plan followed in
Sections 44–63,which deal with the subject of self-sacrifice. The technique of fostering a readiness to
fight and to die consists in separating the individual from his flesh-and-blood
self—in not allowing him to be his real self. This can be achieved by the
thorough assimilation of the individual
into a compact collective body—Sections 44–46; by endowing him with an imaginary self (make-believe)—Section 47; by
implanting in him a deprecating attitude
toward the present and riveting his interest on things that are not
yet—Sections 48–55; by interposing a
fact-proof screen between him and reality (doctrine)—Sections 56–59; by
preventing, through the injection of passions, the establishment of a stable
equilibrium between the individual and his self (fanaticism)—Sections 60–63.
(§43; p. 61, Erlich's emphasis)
XIII "Factors Promoting Self-Sacrifice"
"Identification with a Collective Whole"
Taking Self-Sacrifice Literally: The Individual
and the Group
To ripen a person for self-sacrifice he must be
stripped of his individual identity and distinctness. He must cease to be
George, Hans, Ivan, or Tadao—a human atom with an existence bounded by birth
and death. The most drastic way to achieve this end is by the complete
assimilation of the individual into a collective body. The fully assimilated
individual does not see himself and others as human beings. When asked who he
is, his automatic response is that he is a German, a Russian, a Japanese, a
Christian, a Moslem, a member of a certain tribe or family. He has no purpose,
worth and destiny apart from his collective body; and as long as that body lives
he cannot really die.
To
a man utterly without a sense of belonging, mere life is all that matters. (§44;
p. 62)
Cf. O'Brien to Winston Smith in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four on the sense of
power and even immortality that comes with total surrender to, and
identification with, the Party, which O'Brien thinks immortal.
Above all, he [the True Believer] must never
feel alone. Though stranded on a desert island, he must still feel that he is
under the eyes of the group. To be cast out from the group should be equivalent
to being cut off from life.
This
is undoubtedly a primitive state of being, and its most perfect examples are
found among primitive tribes. Mass movements strive to approximate this
primitive perfection, and we are not imagining things when the
anti-individualist bias of contemporary mass movements strikes us as a
throwback to the primitive. (§45; p. 63)
On the other hand, note hypermodern civilized people in
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
(1931/32), who must never feel alone, contrasted with John, the Savage, who
understands the virtues of solitude.
The
Positive Power of Identification
The capacity to resist coercion stems partly
from the individual’s identification with a group. The people who stood up best
in the Nazi concentration camps were those who felt themselves members of a
compact party (the Communists), of a church (priests and ministers), or of a
close-knit national group. The individualists, whatever their nationality,
caved in. [***]
The
unavoidable conclusion seems to be that when the individual faces torture or
annihilation, he cannot rely on the resources of his own individuality. His
only source of strength is in not being himself but part of something mighty,
glorious and indestructible. Faith here is primarily a process of identification;
the process by which the individual ceases to be himself and becomes part of something
eternal. (§45; pp. 63-64)
Hoffer gives examples from Russian individuals "who
cringe and crawl before Stalin's secret police" and those who identified
with Mother Russia in fighting the Nazi invaders. Similarly with the Jews in
Hitler's Europe as opposed to those fighting in and for Palestine, the creation
of the State of Israel (§45; p, 65).
"MAKE-BELIEVE"
Dying and killing seem easy when they are part
of a ritual, ceremonial, dramatic performance or game. There is need for some
kind of make-believe in order to face death unflinchingly. […] It is one of the
main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by
evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a
grandiose spectacle, a solemn or light-hearted dramatic performance.
Hitler
dressed eighty million Germans in costumes and made them perform in a
grandiose, heroic and bloody opera. In Russia, where even the building of a
latrine involves some self-sacrifice, life has been an uninterrupted
soul-stirring drama going on for thirty years, and its end is not yet. The
people of London acted heroically under a hail of bombs because Churchill cast
them in the role of heroes. […] It is doubtful whether in our contemporary
world, with its widespread individual differentiation, any measure of general
self-sacrifice can be realized without theatrical hocus-pocus and fireworks.
[***]
The
indispensability of play-acting in the grim business of dying and killing is
particularly evident in the case of armies. Their uniforms, flags, emblems,
parades, music, and elaborate etiquette and ritual are designed to separate the
soldier from his flesh-and-blood self and mask the overwhelming reality of life
and death. We speak of the theater of war and of battle scenes. […]
Glory
is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid
awareness of an audience. (§47; pp. 66-68)
"DEPRECATION OF THE PRESENT"
At its inception a mass movement seems to
champion the present against the past. It sees in the established institutions
and privileges an encroachment of a senile, vile past on a virginal present.
But, to pry loose the stranglehold of the past, there is need for utmost unity
and unlimited self-sacrifice. This means that the people called upon to attack
the past in order to liberate the present must be willing to give up
enthusiastically any chance of ever tasting or inheriting the present. The
absurdity of the proposition is obvious. Hence the inevitable shift in emphasis
once the movement starts rolling. The present—the original objective—is shoved
off the stage and its place taken by posterity—the future. More still: the
present is driven back as if it were an unclean thing and lumped with the
detested past. The battle line is now drawn between things that are and have
been, and the things that are not yet. To lose one’s life is but to lose the
present; and, clearly, to lose a defiled, worthless present is not to lose
much. (§48; p. 69)
Not only does a mass movement depict the present
as mean and miserable—it deliberately makes it so. […]. It views ordinary
enjoyment as trivial or even discreditable, and represents the pursuit of
personal happiness as immoral. To enjoy oneself is to have truck with the
enemy—the present. The prime objective of the ascetic ideal preached by most
movements is to breed contempt for the present. The campaign against the
appetites is an effort to pry loose tenacious tentacles holding on to the
present. That this cheerless individual life runs its course against a colorful
and dramatic background of collective pageantry serves to accentuate its
worthlessness.
The
very impracticability of many of the goals which a mass movement sets itself is
part of the campaign against the present. (§48; pp. 68-69)
Magical
Thinking:
Faith in miracles, too, implies a rejection and
a defiance of the present. When [the Church Father] Tertullian proclaimed, “And
He was buried and rose again; it is certain because it is impossible,” he was
snapping his fingers at the present. Finally, the mysticism of a movement is
also a means of deprecating the present. It sees the present as the faded and
distorted reflection of a vast unknown throbbing underneath and beyond us. The
present is a shadow and an illusion. (§48; p. 70)
Magical thinking is widespread, including in the USA, but much
of the discussion above is immediately relevant more for a hard-core
puritanical religious movement such as the Taliban or the would-be Islamic
State. For those in the US and Europe, and the, so to speak, "kinder,
gentler" successor to ISIS et al., this:
A glorification of the past can serve as a
means to belittle the present. But unless joined with sanguine expectations of
the future, an exaggerated view of the past results in an attitude of caution
and not in the reckless strivings of a mass movement. On the other hand, there is no more potent dwarfing of the
present than by viewing it as a mere link between a glorious past and a
glorious future. Thus, though a mass movement at first turns its back on
the past, it eventually develops a vivid awareness, often specious, of a
distant glorious past. (§50; pp. 71-72, Erlich's emphasis)
The Taliban, ISIS, et al. have a strong advantage over 20th-c.
mass movements who had to invent glorious pasts. Europe's Dark Ages — and
helping them into those Dark Ages — was the start of the great Islamic
conquests; Europe's Medieval Period was the era of the great Muslim
civilizations. Islam has a
"glorious past" and Muslims can be promised an even more
"glorious future." US history is still too short to compete, but
Hoffer's analysis suggests a truly charismatic leader — see below — could
organize a movement around "Make
America Great Again."
Making
Predictions: "A deprecating attitude toward the
present fosters a capacity for prognostication. The well-adjusted make poor
prophets. On the other hand, those who are at war with the present have an eye
for the seeds of change and the potentialities of small beginnings" (§51; pp.
72-73).
Digression
on World-Views Around the Political Horse Shoe or Omega (Ω)
It is of interest to compare here the attitudes
toward present, future and past shown by the conservative, the liberal,
the skeptic, the radical and the reactionary. The conservative doubts that the present can be bettered,
and he tries to shape the future in the image of the present. […] To the skeptic the present is the sum of all that has been
and shall be. [Quoting Koheleth, "Ecclesiastes"] “The thing that hath
been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be
done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
The liberal sees the present as the legitimate
oô€€°spring of the past and as constantly growing and developing toward an
improved future: to damage the present is to maim the future. All three then
cherish the present, and, as one would expect, they do not take willingly to
the idea of self-sacrifice. Their attitude toward self-sacrifice is best
expressed by the skeptic: “for a living dog is better than a dead lion"
[Koheleth].
The
radical and the reactionary loathe the present. They see it as an aberration
and a deformity. Both are ready to proceed ruthlessly and recklessly with the
present, and both are hospitable to the idea of self-sacrifice. Wherein do they
differ? Primarily in their view of the malleability of man’s nature. The
radical has a passionate faith in the infinite perfectibility of human nature.
[…]. The reactionary does not believe that man has unfathomed potentialities
for good in him. If a stable and healthy society is to be established, it must
be patterned after the proven models of the past. He sees the future as a
glorious restoration rather than an unprecedented innovation.
In
reality the boundary line between
radical and reactionary is not always distinct [and both are areas for Hoffer's
True Believers — RDE]. The reactionary manifests radicalism when he comes
to recreate his ideal past. His image of the past is based less on what it
actually was than on what he wants the future to be. He innovates more than he
reconstructs. A somewhat similar shift occurs in the case of the radical when
he goes about building his new world. He feels the need for practical guidance,
and since he has rejected and destroyed the present he is compelled to link the
new world with some point in the past. If he has to employ violence in shaping
the new, his view of man’s nature darkens and approaches closer to that of the
reactionary.
The
blending of the reactionary and the radical is particularly evident in those
engaged in a nationalist revival. The followers of Gandhi in India and the
Zionists in Palestine would revive a glorified past and simultaneously create
an unprecedented Utopia. The prophets, too, were a blend of the reactionary and
the radical. They preached a return to the ancient faith and also envisaged a
new world and a new life. (§52; pp. 73-74, Erlich's emphasis)
"THINGS WHICH ARE NOT"
One of the rules that emerges from a
consideration of the factors that promote self-sacrifice is that we are less
ready to die for what we have or are than for what we wish to have and to be.
It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have “something
worth fighting for,” they do not feel like fighting. (§54; pp. 76-77)
It is not altogether absurd that people should
be ready to die for a button, a flag, a word, an opinion, a myth and so on. It
is on the contrary the least reasonable thing to give one’s life for something palpably
worth having. For, surely, one’s life is the most real of all things real, and
without it there can be no having of things worth having. Self-sacrifice cannot
be a manifestation of tangible self-interest. Even when we are ready to die in
order not to get killed, the impulse to fight springs less from self-interest
than from intangibles such as tradition, honor (a word), and, above all, hope.
(§55; p. 76)
"DOCTRINE" v.
Facts
The readiness for self-sacrifice is contingent
on an imperviousness to the realities of life. He who is free to draw
conclusions from his individual experience and observation is not usually
hospitable to the idea of martyrdom. For self-sacrifice is an unreasonable act.
[…] All active mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a factproof screen between the
faithful and the realities of the world. They do this by claiming that the
ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine and that
there is no truth nor certitude outside it. […] To rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and
treason. It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make
belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable
unbeliefs. […]
It
is the true believer’s ability to “shut his eyes and stop his ears” to facts that do not deserve to be either
seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy. He
cannot be frightened by danger nor disheartened by obstacles nor baffed by
contradictions because he denies their existence. (§56; p. 79, Erlich's
emphasis)
The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come
from its meaning but from its certitude. No doctrine however profound and
sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the embodiment of the one
andonly truth. […] Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense and sublime truths are
equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as
the sole, eternal truth.
It
is obvious, therefore, that in order to be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but has rather to be believed in.
We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. […]
The
devout are always urged to seek the absolute truth with their hearts and not
their minds. […] When a movement begins to rationalize its doctrine and make it
intelligible, it is a sign that its dynamic span is over […]. For […] the
stability of a regime requires the allegiance of the intellectuals, and it is
to win them rather than to foster self-sacrifice in the masses that a doctrine
is made intelligible. If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague;
and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable. One has to
get to heaven or the distant future to determine the truth of an effective doctrine. When some part of a doctrine is relatively simple, there is a
tendency among the faithful to complicate and obscure it. Simple words are made
pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most
literate true believer. He seems to use words as if he were ignorant of their
true meaning. (§57; pp. 80-81, Erlich's emphasis)
The American President Donald J. Trump may just be bad with
words or have issues of brain aging, but it should be becoming clear why
Timothy Snyder and other people familiar with the nastier 20th-c.
mass movements became quickly nervous about Trumpism (and why Nineteen Eighty-Four spiked in sales).
"FANATICISM"
[…M]ass movements are often necessary for the
realization of drastic and abrupt changes. It seems necessary for the
realization of drastic and abrupt changes. It seems strange that even practical
and desirable changes, such as the renovation of stagnant societies, should
require for their realization an atmosphere of intense passion and should have
to be accompanied by all the faults and follies of an active mass movement.
(§60; p. 83)
The fanatic cannot be weaned away from his
cause by an appeal to his reason or moral sense. He fears compromise and cannot be persuaded to qualify the
certitude and righteousness of his holy cause. But he fnds no diffculty in
swinging suddenly and wildly from one holy cause to another. He cannot be convinced but only converted.
(§61; pp. 85-86, Erlich's emphasis)
Again, there is a problem with a typological approach:
"The fanatic" is a Platonic ideal we shouldn't expect to find in
nature — but like the ideal butterfly or "Representative Vertebrate"
in an introductory biology book, it's a useful model.
On
Faith, Conversion, Treason, and the Political Omega (Ω)
The opposite of the religious fanatic is not
the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God
or not. The atheist is a religious person. […] He is an atheist with devoutness and unction. […] So, too,
the opposite of the chauvinist is not the traitor but the reasonable citizen
who is in love with the present and has no taste for martyrdom and the heroic
gesture. The traitor is usually a fanatic—radical or reactionary—who goes over
to the enemy in order to hasten the downfall of a world he loathes. Most of the
traitors in the Second World War came from the extreme right. “There seems to
be a thin line between violent, extreme nationalism and treason.”
The
kinship between the reactionary and the radical has been dealt with in Section
52. All of us who lived through the Hitler decade know that the reactionary and
the radical have more in common than either has with the liberal or the conservative.
(§62, p. 86)
He ["the fanatic] sees in
tolerance a sign of weakness, frivolity and ignorance" (§68; p. 87)
XIV "Unifying Agents"
"Hatred"
Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive
of all unifying agents. […] Heine suggests that what Christian love cannot do
is effected by a common hatred.
Mass
movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief
in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the
vividness and tangibility of its devil. (§65; p. 91)
It seems that, like the ideal deity, the ideal
devil is one. We have it from Hitler—the foremost authority on devils—that the
genius of a great leader consists in concentrating all hatred on a single foe,
making “even adversaries far removed from one another seem to belong to a
single category.” When Hitler picked the Jew as his devil, he peopled practically the
whole world outside Germany with Jews or those who worked for them. […] Stalin,
too, adheres to the monotheistic principle when picking a devil. Formerly this
devil was a fascist; now he is an American plutocrat. […]
Finally,
it seems, the ideal devil is a foreigner. To qualify as a devil, a domestic
enemy must be given a foreign ancestry. (§67; pp. 92-93)
Injuries
and Hatred / Making Opponents Feel Guilty
There is perhaps no surer way of infecting
ourselves with virulent hatred toward a person than by doing him a grave
injustice. That others have a just grievance against us is a more potent reason
for hating them than that we have a just grievance against them. We do not make people humble and meek when
we show them their guilt and cause them to be ashamed of themselves. We are
more likely to stir their arrogance and rouse in them a reckless aggressiveness.
(§69; p. 95, Erlich's emphasis)
The most effective way to silence our guilty
conscience is to convince ourselves and others that those we have sinned
against are indeed depraved creatures, deserving every punishment, even extermination.
We cannot pity those we have wronged, nor can we be indifferent toward them. We
must hate and persecute them or else leave the door open to self-contempt.
(§71; pp. 95-96)
Intolerance
and Violence Among the Righteous and Self-Righteous
Unity and self-sacrifice, of themselves, even
when fostered by the most noble means, produce a facility for hating. Even when
men league themselves mightily together to promote tolerance and peace on
earth, they are likely to be violently intolerant toward those not of a like
mind.
There is also this: when we renounce the self
and become part of a compact whole, we not only renounce personal advantage but
are also rid of personal responsibility. There is no telling to what extremes
of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears,
hesitations, doubts and the vague stirrings of decency that go with individual
judgment. When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a
mass movement, we find a new freedom—freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture,
murder and betray without shame and remorse. Herein undoubtedly lies part of
the attractiveness of a mass movement. […] Hitler had a contemptuous opinion of
the brutality of the autonomous individual. “Any violence which does not spring
from a firm, spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the
stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook.” [***]
The
deindividualization which is a prerequisite for thorough integration and selfless
dedication is also, to a considerable extent, a process of dehumanization. The
torture chamber is a corporate institution. (§77; pp. 100-01)
"IMITATION"
Imitation
and Obedience / Self-Sacrifice as Loss of Self
Obedience itself consists as much in the
imitation of an example as in the following of a precept. […]
The
chief burden of the frustrated is the consciousness of a blemished, ineffectual
self, and their chief desire is to slough off the unwanted self and begin a new
life. They try to realize this desire either by finding a new identity or by
blurring and camouflaging their individual distinctness; and both these ends
are reached by imitation. (§78; p. 101)
Immigrants
to US: Rebirth
A feeling of superiority counteracts imitation.
Had the millions of immigrants who came to this country been superior
people—the cream of the countries they came from—there would have been not one
U.S.A. but a mosaic of lingual and cultural groups. It was due to the fact that
the majority of the immigrants were of the lowest and the poorest, the despised
and the rejected, that the heterogeneous millions blended so rapidly and
thoroughly. They came here with the ardent desire to shed their old world
identity and be reborn to a new life; and they were automatically equipped with
an unbounded capacity to imitate and adopt the new. The strangeness of the new
country attracted rather than repelled them. They craved a new identity and a
new life—and the stranger the new world the more it suited their inclination.
Perhaps, to the non-Anglo-Saxons, the strangeness of the language was an added
attraction. To have to learn to speak enhanced the illusion of being born anew.
Contempt/Hatred
of Outsiders
Contempt for the outside world is of course the
most effective defense against disruptive imitation. However, an active mass movement
prizes hatred above passive contempt; and hatred does not stiflee imitation but
often stimulates it […]. (§82; p. 104)
"PERSUASION AND COERCION"
Propaganda
and Its Limits
[… P]ropaganda 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, and rather than instill opinion it articulates and justifies
opinions already present in the minds of its recipients. The gifted propagandist
brings to a boil ideas and passions already simmering in the minds of his
hearers. He echoes their innermost feelings. Where opinion is not coerced,
people can be made to believe only in what they already “know.” (§83; p. 105)
Both they who convert and they who are
converted by coercion need the fervent conviction that the faith they impose or
are forced to adopt is the only true one. Without this conviction, the
proselytizing terrorist, if he is not vicious to begin with, is likely to feel
a criminal, and the coerced convert see himself as a coward who prostituted his
soul to live.
Propaganda thus serves more to justify
ourselves than to convince others; and the more reason we have to feel
guilty, the more fervent our propaganda. (§84; pp. 106-7)
Violence
and Fanaticism, Terrorism (Including US Terrorism)
It is
probably as true that violence breeds fanaticism as that fanaticism begets
violence. It is often impossible to tell which came
first. Both those who employ violence and those subject to it are likely to
develop a fanatical state of mind. Ferrero says of the terrorists of the French
Revolution that the more blood they “shed the more they needed to believe in
their principles as absolutes. Only the absolute might still absolve them in
their own eyes and sustain their desperate energy. [They] did not spill all
that blood because they believed in popular sovereignty as a religious truth;
they tried to believe in popular sovereignty as a religious truth because their
fear made them spill so much blood.” The practice of terror serves the true believer not only to cow and
crush his opponents but also to invigorate and intensify his own faith. Every lynching in our South not only intimidates the Negro but also
invigorates the fanatical conviction of white supremacy. In the case of the
coerced, too, violence can beget fanaticism. There is evidence that the coerced
convert is often as fanatical in his adherence to the new faith as the
persuaded convert, and sometimes even more so. […]
Thus
coercion when implacable and persistent
has an unequaled persuasiveness, and this not only with simple souls but
also with those who pride themselves on the strength and integrity of their intellect.
When an arbitrary decree from the Kremlin forces scientists, writers, and
artists to recant their convictions and confess their errors, the chances are
that such recantations and confessions represent genuine conversions rather
than lip service. It needs fanatical
faith to rationalize our cowardice. (§85; 107-08, Erlich's emphasis)
Hoffer may be too optimistic here about the level of
violence needed to get people to submit enthusiastically. The Nazis and
Stalinists (and enthusiasts under Lenin as well) were thugs and were enforcing
policies that killed people. Threats to employment and status may be enough to
force conformity when less is at stake. (Alternatively, Americans knuckle under
to much less force than used many other places.)
Christian
Persuasion and Coercion
There is hardly an example of a mass movement
achieving vast proportions and a durable organization solely by persuasion.
Professor K. S. Latourette, a very Christian historian, has to admit that
“However incompatible the spirit of Jesus and armed force may be, and however
unpleasant it may be to acknowledge the fact, as a matter of plain history the
latter has often made it possible for the former to survive.” It was
the temporal sword that made Christianity a world religion. Conquest and
conversion went hand in hand, the latter often serving as a justification and a
tool for the former. Where Christianity failed to gain or retain the backing of
state power, it achieved neither a wide nor a permanent hold. (§86, p. 108)
Force and
Faith — to Crush or Extend a Mass Movement
The assertion that a mass movement cannot be
stopped by force is not literally true. Force can stop and crush even the most
vigorous movement. But to do so the force must be ruthless and persistent. And
here is where faith enters as an indispensable factor. For a persecution that
is ruthless and persistent can come only from fanatical conviction. [Quoting
Hitler,] “Any violence which does not spring from a firm, spiritual base, will
be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a
fanatical outlook.” The terrorism which emanates from individual brutality neither goes
far enough nor lasts long enough. It is spasmodic, subject to moods and hesitations.
“But as soon as force wavers and alternates with forbearance, not only will the
doctrine to be repressed recover again and again, but it will also be in a
position to draw new benefit from every persecution.” The holy terror
only knows no limit and never flags.
Thus
it seems that we need ardent faith not only to be able to resist coercion, but also
to be able to exercise it effectively.
"LEADERSHIP"
No matter how vital we think the role of
leadership in the rise of a mass movement [and Hoffer thinks the Leader
definitely vital], there is no doubt that the leader cannot create the
conditions which make the rise of a movement possible. He cannot conjure a
movement out of the void. There has to be an eagerness to follow and obey, and
an intense dissatisfaction with things as they are, before movement and leader
can make their appearance. When conditions are not ripe, the potential leader,
no matter how gifted, and his holy cause, no matter how potent, remain without
a following. The First World War and its aftermath readied the ground for the
rise of the Bolshevik, Fascist and Nazi movements. Had the war been averted or
postponed a decade or two, the fate of Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler would not
have been different from that of the brilliant plotters and agitators of the
nineteenth century who never succeeded in ripening the frequent disorders and
crises of their time into full-scale mass movements. (§89; p. 112)
Once the
stage is set, the presence of an outstanding leader is indispensable. Without him there will be no movement. The ripeness of the times
does not automatically produce a mass movement, nor can elections, laws and
administrative bureaus hatch one. It was Lenin who forced the flow of events
into the channels of the Bolshevik revolution. Had he died in Switzerland, or
on his way to Russia in 1917, it is almost certain that the other prominent
Bolsheviks would have joined a coalition government. The result might have been
a more or less liberal republic run chiefly by the bourgeoisie. In the case of
Mussolini and Hitler the evidence is even more decisive: without them there
would have been neither a Fascist nor a Nazi movement. (§90; p. 112, Erlich's
emphasis)
Qualifications for the Leader
Exceptional
intelligence, noble character and originality seem neither indispensable nor
perhaps desirable. The main requirements seem to be: 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 (spectacles and ceremonials); unbounded brazenness which finds expression
in a disregard of consistency and fairness; a recognition that the
innermost craving of a following is for communion and that there can never be
too much of it; a capacity for winning and holding the utmost loyalty of a group
of able lieutenants. This last faculty is one of the most essential and
elusive. The uncanny powers of a leader manifest themselves not so much in the
hold he has on the masses as in his ability to dominate and almost bewitch a small group of able men. These men
must be fearless, proud, intelligent and capable of organizing and running
large-scale undertakings, and yet they
must submit wholly to the will of the leader, draw their inspiration and driving
force from him, and glory in this submission.
Not
all the qualities enumerated above are equally essential. The most decisive for
the effectiveness of a mass movement leader seem to be audacity, fanatical
faith in a holy cause, an awareness of the importance of a close-knit
collectivity, and, above all, the ability to evoke fervent devotion in a group
of able lieutenants. Trotsky’s failure as a leader came from his neglect, or
more probably his inability, to create a machine of able and loyal lieutenants.
He did not attract personal sympathies, or if he did he could not keep them.
(§90; 114-15, Erlich's emphasis)
If you're
following the Donald J. Trump analogies, and would just as soon Mr. Trump did not lead an effective mass movement,
what is hopeful here is his apparent inability so far (June of 2017) to recruit
new lieutenants of high ability. He certainly can recruit a cabinet that will
glory in submission, but maybe not consistently enough to prevent leaks and
other evidence of palace intrigue.
Leadership
and Ideas (crude is okay) / Facts (optional)
The
crude ideas advanced by many of the successful mass movement leaders of our
time incline one to assume that a certain coarseness and immaturity of mind is
an asset to leadership. However, it was not the
intellectual crudity of an Aimee McPherson or a Hitler which won and held their
following but the boundless
self-confidence which prompted these leaders to give full rein to their
preposterous ideas. A genuinely wise leader who dared to follow out the course
of his wisdom would have an equal chance of success. The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement
leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the
opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.
Charlatanism
of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership. There can be no mass movement without some deliberate misrepresentation
of facts. (§91; p. 116, Erlich's emphasis)
Obedience
of Followers, Centrality Thereof
The total surrender of a distinct self is a
prerequisite for the attainment of both unity and self-sacrifice; and there is
probably no more direct way of realizing this surrender than by inculcating and
extolling the habit of blind obedience. When Stalin forces scientists, writers
and artists to crawl on their bellies and deny their individual intelligence,
sense of beauty and moral sense, he is not indulging a sadistic impulse but is
solemnizing, in a most impressive way, the supreme virtue of blind obedience.
All mass movements rank obedience with the highest virtues and put it on a
level with faith […].
Obedience is not only the first law of God, but also
the first tenet of a revolutionary party and of fervent nationalism. “Not to
reason why” is considered by all mass movements the mark of a strong and generous
spirit. […]
The true believer, no matter how rowdy and
violent his acts, is basically an obedient and submissive person. (§92; 117,
Erlich's emphasis)
The frustrated follow a leader less because of
their faith that he is leading them to a promised land than because of their
immediate feeling that he is leading them away from their unwanted selves. Surrender to a leader is not a means to an
end but a fulfillment. Whither they are led is of secondary importance.
(§94; p. 119)
"ACTION" AND FAITH/TRUTH
All mass movements avail themselves of action
as a means of unification. The conflicts a mass movement seeks and incites
serve not only to down its enemies but also to strip its followers of their
distinct individuality and render them more soluble in the collective medium.
Clearing of land, building of cities, exploration and large-scale industrial
undertakings serve a similar purpose. Even mere marching can serve as a
unifier. The Nazis made vast use of this preposterous variant of action.
Hermann Rauschning, who at first thought this eternal marching a senseless
waste of time and energy, recognized later its subtle effect. “Marching diverts
men’s thoughts. Marching kills thought. Marching makes an end of
individuality.” (§98; p. 121)
Faith organizes and equips man’s soul for
action. To be in possession of the one
and only truth and never doubt one’s righteousness; to feel that one is backed
by a mysterious power whether it be God, destiny or the law of history; to be
convinced that one’s opponents are the incarnation of evil and must be crushed;
to exult in self-denial and devotion to duty—these are admirable qualifications
for resolute and ruthless action in any field. (§99; p. 122, Erlich's
ephasis)
"SUSPICION"
Mass movements make extensive use of suspicion
in their machinery of domination. […] Fear of one’s neighbors, one’s
friends and even one’s relatives seems to be the rule within all mass
movements. Now and then innocent people are deliberately accused and sacrificed
in order to keep suspicion alive. Suspicion is given a sharp edge by
associating all opposition within the ranks with the enemy threatening the
movement from without. This enemy—the indispensable devil of every mass
movement—is omnipresent. […] It is the sacred duty of the true believer to be
suspicious. He must be constantly on the lookout for saboteurs, spies and
traitors. (§100; p. 124)
"THE EFFECTS OF UNIFICATION"
The exaltation of the true believer does not
flow from reserves of strength and wisdom but from a sense of deliverance: he
has been delivered from the meaningless burdens of an autonomous existence. “We Germans are so happy. We are free from
freedom.” (§102; p. 127, Erlich's emphasis on what became a well-known
quotation)
PART 4: Beginning and End
XV. "MEN OF WORDS"
Mass
movements do not usually rise until the prevailing order has been discredited.
The discrediting is not an automatic result of the blunders and abuses of those
in power, but the deliberate work of men of words with a grievance. Where the
articulate are absent or without a grievance, the prevailing dispensation,
though incompetent and corrupt, may continue in power until it falls and
crumbles of itself. On the other hand, a dispensation of undoubted merit and
vigor may be swept away if it fails to win the allegiance of the articulate
minority. (§104; p. 130)
The division between men of words, fanatics and
practical men of action, as outlined in the following sections, is not meant to
be categorical. Men like Gandhi and Trotsky start out as apparently ineffectual
men of words and later display exceptional talents as administrators or
generals. A man like Mohammed starts out as a man of words, develops into an
implacable fanatic and finally reveals a superb practical sense. A fanatic like
Lenin is a master of the spoken word and unequaled as a man of action. What the
classification attempts to suggest is that
the readying of the ground for a mass movement is done best by men whose chief
claim to excellence is their skill in the use of the spoken or written word;
that the hatching of an actual movement requires the temperament and the
talents of the fanatic; and that the final consolidation of the movement is
largely the work of practical men of action. The emergence of an articulate
minority where there was none before is a potential revolutionary step. The
Western powers were indirect and unknowing fomenters of mass movements in Asia
not only by kindling resentment [...] but also by creating articulate
minorities through educational work which was largely philanthropic. (§104; p.
131, Erlich's emphasis)
The rapid spread of Christianity in the Roman
world was partly due to the fact that the pagan cults it sought to supplant
were already thoroughly discredited. The discrediting was done, before and
after the birth of Christianity, by the Greek philosophers who were bored with
the puerility of the cults and denounced and ridiculed them in schools and city
streets. Christianity made little headway against Judaism because the Jewish
religion had the ardent allegiance of the Jewish men of words. The rabbis and
their disciples enjoyed an exalted status in Jewish life of that day, where the
school and the book supplanted the temple and the fatherland. In any social
order where the reign of men of words is so supreme, no opposition can develop
within and no foreign mass movement can gain a foothold.
The
mass movements of modern time, whether socialist or nationalist, were
invariably pioneered by poets, writers, historians, scholars, philosophers and
the like. The connection between intellectual theoreticians and revolutionary
movements needs no emphasis. But it is equally true that all nationalist
movements— from the cult of la patrie
in revolutionary France to the latest nationalist rising in Indonesia—were
conceived not by men of action but by faultfinding intellectuals. (§107; p.
138)
When we debunk a fanatical faith or prejudice,
we do not strike at the root of fanaticism. We merely prevent its leaking out
at a certain point, with the likely result that it will leak out at some other
point. Thus by denigrating prevailing beliefs and loyalties, the militant man
of words unwittingly creates in the disillusioned masses a hunger for faith.
For the majority of people cannot endure the barrenness and futility of their lives
unless they have some ardent dedication, or some passionate pursuit in which
they can lose themselves. Thus, in spite of himself, the scoffing man of words
becomes the precursor of a new faith.
The
genuine man of words himself can get along without faith in absolutes. […] 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. (§107; p. 139-40)
Hoffer notes the
"irreverence of the Renaissance" preparing the ground for the
revival/fanaticism of the Reformation and Counter Reformation. We can add today
the scientific breakthroughs of the 19th century and the development
of Biblical textual studies and archeology — eliciting the Fundamentalisms of
the 20th century into the 21st.
To sum up, the militant man of words prepares
the ground for the rise of a mass movement: 1) by discrediting prevailing
creeds and institutions and detaching from them the allegiance of the people;
2) by indirectly creating a hunger for faith in the hearts of those who cannot
live without it, so that when the new faith is preached it finds an eager
response among the disillusioned masses; 3) by furnishing the doctrine and the
slogans of the new faith; 4) by undermining the convictions of the “better
people"— those who can get along without faith—so that when the new
fanaticism makes its appearance they are without the capacity to resist it. They
see no sense in dying for convictions and principles, and yield to the new order
without a fight.
Thus
when the irreverent intellectual has done his work:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand,
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. [W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming," 1919/1920]
The stage is now set for the fanatics. (§108;
pp. 140-41)
XVI. "The Fanatics"
When the
moment is ripe, only the fanatic can hatch a genuine mass movement. Without him the disaffection engendered by militant men of words
remains undirected and can vent itself only in pointless and easily suppressed
disorders. Without him the initiated reforms, even when drastic, leave the old
way of life unchanged, and any change in government usually amounts to no more
than a transfer of power from one set of men of action to another. Without him
there can perhaps be no new beginning. When the old order begins to fall apart,
many of the vociferous men of words, who prayed so long for the day, are in a
funk. The first glimpse of the face of anarchy frightens them out of their
wits. They forget all they said about the “poor simple folk” and run for help
to strong men of action—princes, generals, administrators, bankers,
landowners—who know how to deal with the rabble and how to stem the tide of
chaos.
Not so the fanatic. Chaos is his element.
(§110; p. 143, Erlich's emphasis)
Whence
come the fanatics? Mostly from the ranks of the noncreative men of words. The most significant division between men of words is between those
who can find fulfillment in creative work and those who cannot. The creative
man of words, no matter how bitterly he may criticize and deride the existing
order, is actually attached to the present. His passion is to reform and not to
destroy. […] 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 a􀀟airs falls into the
hands of the noncreative men of words—the eternal misfits and the fanatical
contemners of the present.
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, his innermost desire, can find no
peace in a stable social order—old or new. He sees his life as irrevocably
spoiled and the world perpetually out of joint. He feels at home only in a state of chaos.
The
creative man of words is ill at ease in the atmosphere of an active movement.
He feels that its whirl and passion sap his creative energies. […] The result
is that, once the movement starts rolling, he either retires voluntarily or is
pushed aside. Moreover, since the genuine man of words can never wholeheartedly
and for long suppress his critical faculty, he is inevitably cast in the role
of the heretic. Thus unless the creative man of words stifles the newborn
movement by allying himself with practical men of action or unless he dies at
the right moment, he is likely to end up either a shunned recluse or in exile
or facing a firing squad. (§ 111; p. 144-45)
The
danger of the fanatic to the development of a movement is that he cannot settle
down. Once victory has been won and the new order
begins to crystallize, the fanatic becomes an element of strain and disruption.
[…] Hatred has become a habit. With no more outside
enemies to destroy, the fanatics make enemies of one another. Hitler—himself a
fanatic—could diagnose with precision the state of mind of the fanatics who
plotted against him within the ranks of the National Socialist party. In his
order to the newly appointed chief of the SA after the purge of Röhm in 1934 he
speaks of those who will not settle down: “… without realizing it, [they] have
found in nihilism their ultimate confession of faith … their unrest and
disquietude can find satisfaction only in some conspiratorial activity of the
mind, in perpetually plotting the disintegration of whatever the set-up of the moment
happens to be.” (§112; p. 146,
Erlich's emphasis)
If allowed to have their way, the fanatics may
split a movement into schism and heresies which threaten its existence. Even
when the fanatics do not breed dissension, they can still wreck the movement by
driving it to attempt the impossible. Only the entrance of a practical man of
action can save the achievements of the movement. (§112; p. 147)
XVII. "The
Practical Men of Action"
A
movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated
by men of action.
It
is usually an advantage to a movement, and perhaps a prerequisite for its
endurance, that these roles should be played by different men succeeding each
other as conditions require. 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. […] There is of course the possibility of a change in character. A
man of words might change into a genuine fanatic or into a practical man of
action. Yet the evidence points that such metamorphoses are usually temporary,
and that sooner or later there is a reversion to the original type. (§113; pp.
147-48)
On rare leaders who can use elements of mass movements and
fanaticism without becoming The Leader for a mass movement.
There
are, of course, rare leaders such as Lincoln, Gandhi, even F.D.R., Churchill
and Nehru. They do not hesitate to harness man’s
hungers and fears to weld a following and make it zealous unto death in the
service of a holy cause; but unlike a Hitler, a Stalin, or even a Luther and a
Calvin, they are not tempted to use the slime of frustrated souls as mortar
in the building of a new world. The self-confidence of these rare leaders is
derived from and blended with their faith in humanity […]. (§113; p. 148,
Erlich's emphasis)
The man
of action saves the movement from the suicidal dissensions and the recklessness
of the fanatics. But his appearance usually marks the end of the dynamic phase
of the movement. The war with the present is over.
The genuine man of action is intent not on renovating the world but on
possessing it. Whereas the life breath of the dynamic phase was protest and a
desire for drastic change, the final phase is chiefly preoccupied with
administering and perpetuating the power won.
With
the appearance of the man of action the explosive vigor of the movement is
embalmed and sealed in sanctified institutions. A religious movement
crystallizes in a hierarchy and a ritual; a revolutionary movement, in organs
of vigilance and administration; a nationalist movement, in governmental and
patriotic institutions. (§114; p. 149, Erlich's emphasis)
The chief preoccupation of a man of action when
he takes over an “arrived” movement is to fix and perpetuate its unity and
readiness for self-sacrifice. His ideal is a compact, invincible whole that
functions automatically. To achieve this he cannot rely on enthusiasm, for
enthusiasm is ephemeral. Persuasion, too, is unpredictable. He inclines,
therefore, to rely mainly on drill and coercion. He finds the assertion that
all men are cowards less debatable than that all men are fools, and, in the
words of Sir John Maynard, inclines to found the new order on the necks of the
people rather than in their hearts. The genuine man of action is not a man of faith but a man of law. (§115; p. 150)
On a Mature,
Settled-Down Mass Movement:
In the hands of a man of action the mass
movement ceases to be a refuge from the agonies and burdens of an individual
existence and becomes a means of self-realization for the ambitious. [***]The movement at this stage still concerns itself with the
frustrated—not to harness their discontent in a deadly struggle with the
present, but to reconcile them with it; to make them patient and meek. To them
it offers the distant hope, the dream and the vision. Thus at the end of its vigorous
span the movement is an instrument of power for the successful and an opiate
for the frustrated. (§116; p.
152, Erlich's emphasis)
XVIII. "Good and Bad Mass Movements"
"THE UNATTRACTIVENESS AND STERILITY OF
THE ACTIVE PHASE"
[… N]o matter how noble the original purpose of
a movement and however beneficent the end result, its active phase is bound to
strike us as unpleasant if not evil. The fanatic who personifies this phase is
usually an unattractive human type. He is ruthless, self-righteous, credulous,
disputatious, petty and rude. He is often ready to sacrifice relatives and
friends for his holy cause. The absolute unity and the readiness for
self-sacrifice which give an active movement its irresistible drive and enable
it to undertake the impossible are usually achieved at a sacrifice of much that
is pleasant and precious in the autonomous individual. No mass movement,
however sublime its faith and worthy its purpose, can be good if its active
phase is overlong, and, particularly, if it is continued after the movement is
in undisputed possession of power. Such mass movements as we consider more or
less beneficent—the Reformation, the Puritan, French and American Revolutions,
and many of the nationalist movements of the past hundred years—had active
phases which were relatively short, though while they lasted they bore, to a
greater or lesser degree, the imprint of the fanatic. (§117; p. 153, Erlich's
emphasis)
Creativity following the end of the active phase of a movement,
The mass
movement leader who benefits his people and humanity knows not only how to
start a movement, but, like Gandhi, when to end its active phase.
Where
a mass movement preserves for generations the pattern shaped by its active
phase (as in the case of the militant church through the Middle Ages), or where
by a successive accession of fanatical proselytes its orthodoxy is continually
strengthened (as in the case of Islam), the result is an era of stagnation—a dark
age. 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. Provided the active phase of the movement is not too
long and does not involve excessive bloodletting and destruction, its
termination, particularly when it is abrupt, often releases a burst of
creativeness.(§117; p. 154, Erlich's emphasis)
Stengths of the Movement can be weaknesses
in a context for creativity.
The interference of an active mass movement
with the creative process is deep-reaching and manifold: 1) The fervor it
generates drains the energies which would have flowed into creative work. […]
2) It subordinates creative work to the advancement of the movement. Literature,
art and science must be propagandistic and they must be “practical.” […] 3)
Where a mass movement opens vast fields of action (war, colonization,
industrialization), there is an additional drain of creative energy. 4) The fanatical state of mind by itself can
stifle all forms of creative work. The fanatic’s disdain for the present blinds
him to the complexity and uniqueness of life. The things which stir the
creative worker seem to him either trivial or corrupt. […] St. Bernard of
Clerveaux could walk all day by the lake of Geneva and never see the lake. […] The blindness of the fanatic is a source of
strength (he sees no obstacles), but it is the cause of intellectual sterility
and emotional monotony. The fanatic is also mentally cocky, and hence barren
of new beginnings. At the root of his
cockiness is the conviction that life and the universe conform to a simple
formula—his formula. He is thus without the fruitful intervals of groping, when
the mind is as it thus without the fruitful intervals of groping, when the mind
is as it were in solution—ready for all manner of new reactions, new
combinations and new beginnings. (§118; pp. 155-56, Erlich's emphasi)
"SOME FACTORS WHICH DETERMINE THE
LENGTH OF THE ACTIVE PHASE"
A mass
movement with a concrete, limited objective is likely to have a shorter active
phase than a movement with a nebulous, indefinite objective. The vague objective is perhaps indispensable for the development of
chronic extremism. […] When a mass movement is set in motion to free a nation
from tyranny, either domestic or foreign, or to resist an aggressor, or to
renovate a backward society, there is a natural point of termination once the
struggle with the enemy is over or the process of reorganization is nearing
completion. On the other hand, when the objective is an ideal society of
perfect unity and selflessness whether it be the City of God, a Communist
heaven on earth, or Hitler's warrior state-the active phase is without an
automatic end. (§120; p. 157, Erlich's emphasis)
Modest recommendation for limiting big
social experiments to small states.
The promising communal settlements in the small
state of Israel and the successful programs of socialization in the small
Scandinavian states indicate perhaps that when the attempt to realize an ideal
society is undertaken by a small nation with a more or less homogeneous
population it can proceed and succeed in an atmosphere which is neither hectic
nor coercive. […] It would probably be
fortunate for the Occident if the working out of all extreme social experiments
were left wholly to small states with homogeneous, civilized populations.
The principle of a pilot plant, practiced in the large mass-production
industries, could thus perhaps be employed in the realization of social
progress. (§121; p. 159, Erlich's emphasis)
On the question, Could it happen here — fanatical, mass-movement authoritarianism in the
USA:
One cannot maintain with certitude that it
would be impossible for a Hitler or a Stalin to rise in a country with an
established tradition of freedom. What can be asserted with some plausibility
is that in a traditionally free country
a Hitler or a Stalin might not find it too difficult to gain power but
extremely hard to maintain himself indefinitely. Any marked improvement in
economic conditions would almost certainly activate the tradition of freedom
which is a tradition of revolt. In Russia, as pointed out in Section 45, the
individual who pitted himself against Stalin had nothing to identify himself
with, and his capacity to resist coercion was nil. But in a traditionally free
country the individual who pits himself against coercion does not feel an
isolated human atom but one of a mighty race—his rebellious ancestors. (§121;
p. 160)
After some 160 pages of saying some pretty
hard things about The True Believer (fanatic!) and the sterility and bloodiness
of the active phase of Mass Movements, Hoffer looks, a bit, on the bright side.
When we see the Reformation, the Puritan,
American and French revolutions and many of the nationalist uprisings
terminate, after a relatively short active phase, in a social order marked by
increased individual liberty, we are witnessing the realization of moods and
examples which characterized the earliest days of these movements. All of them
started out by defying and overthrowing a long-established authority. The more
clear-cut this initial act of defiance and the more vivid its memory in the
minds of the people, the more likely is the eventual emergence of individual
liberty. There was no such clear-cut act of defiance in the rise of
Christianity. It did not start by overthrowing a king, a hierarchy, a state or
a church. […] The eventual emancipation of the Christian mind at the time of
the Renaissance in Italy drew its inspiration not from the history of early in
Italy drew its inspiration not from the history of early Christianity but from
the stirring examples of individual independence and defiance in the
Graeco-Roman past. There is a similar lack of a dramatic act of defiance at the
birth of Islam and of the Japanese collective body, and in neither are there
even now signs of genuine individual emancipation. German nationalism, too,
unlike the nationalism of most Western countries, did not start with a
spectacular act of defiance against established authority. It was taken under
the wing from its beginning by the Prussian army.5 The seed of
individual liberty in Germany is in its Protestantism and not its nationalism.
The Reformation, the American, French and Russian revolutions and most of the
nationalist movements opened with a grandiose overture of individual defiance,
and the memory of it is kept green.
By
this test, the eventual emergence of individual liberty in Russia is perhaps
not entirely hopeless.
"USEFUL MASS MOVEMENTS"
All the true believers of our time—whether
Communist, Nazi, Fascist, Japanese or Catholic—declaimed volubly (and the
Communists still do) on the decadence of the Western democracies. The burden of
their talk is that in the democracies people are too soft, too pleasure-loving
and too selfish to die for a nation, a God or a holy cause. This lack of a
readiness to die, we are told, is indicative of an inner rot—a moral and
biological decay. The democracies are
old, corrupt and decadent. They are no match for the virile congregations of
the faithful who are about to inherit the earth. There is a grain of sense
and more than a grain of nonsense in these declamations. […]
According
to the Nazis, Germany was decadent in the 1920's and wholly virile in the
1930's. Surely a decade is too short a time to work significant biological or
even cultural changes in a population of millions. It is nevertheless true that
in times like the Hitler decade the
ability to produce a mass movement in short order is of vital importance to a nation.
The mastery of the art of religiofication is an essential requirement in the
leader of a democratic nation, even though the need to practice it might not
arise. And it is perhaps true that
extreme intellectual fastidiousness or a businessman’s practical-mindedness
disqualifies a man for national leadership. (§124; p. 163, Erlich's
emphasis)
Though it cannot be maintained that mass
movements are the only effective instrument of renascence, it seems yet to be
true that in large and heterogeneous
social bodies such as Russia, India, China, the Arabic world and even
Spain, the process of awakening and
renovation depends on the presence of some widespread fervent enthusiasm which
perhaps only a mass movement can generate and maintain. When the process of
renovation has to be realized in short order, mass movements may be
indispensable even in small homogeneous societies. The inability to produce
a full-fledged mass movement can be, therefore, a grave handicap to a social
body. It has probably been one of China’s great misfortunes during the past
hundred years that its mass movements (the Taiping rebellion and the Sun
Yat-sen revolution) deteriorated or were stifled too soon. […]
It is probably better for a country that when its
government begins to show signs of chronic incompetence it should be overthrown
by a mighty mass upheaval—even though such overthrow involves a considerable
waste of life and wealth—than that it should be allowed to fall and crumble of
itself. A genuine popular upheaval is often an invigorating, renovating and
integrating process. Where governments are allowed to die a lingering death,
the result is often stagnation and decay […]. And since men of words usually
play a crucial role in the rise of mass movements, it is obvious that the
presence of an educated and articulate minority is probably indispensable for
the continued vigor of a social body. It is necessary, of course, that the men
of words should not be in intimate alliance with the established government.
The long social stagnation of the Orient has many causes, but there is no doubt
that one of the most important is the fact that for centuries the educated were
not only few but almost always part of the government—either as officials or
priests. (§125; pp. 165-66, Erlich's emphasis)
Indirectly, foreign influences are
important for mass movements, and rebirths.
Foreign influence seems to be a prevailing
factor in the process of social renascence. Jewish and Christian influences
were active in the awakening of Arabia at the time of Mohammed. In the
awakening of Europe from the stagnation of the Middle Ages we also find foreign
influences—Graeco-Roman and Arabic. Western influences were active in the
awakening of Russia, Japan and several Asiatic countries. The important point
is that the foreign influence does not act in a direct way. […] The foreign
influence acts mainly by creating an educated minority where there was none
before or by alienating an existing articulate minority from the prevailing
dispensation; and it is this articulate minority which accomplishes the work of
renascence by setting in motion a mass movement. In other words, the foreign
influence is merely the first link in a chain of processes, the last link of
which is usually a mass movement; and it is the mass movement which shakes the
social body out of its stagnation. In the case of Arabia, the foreign
influences alienated the man of words, Mohammed, from the prevailing
dispensation in Mecca. Mohammed started a mass movement (Islam) which shook and
integrated Arabia for a time. In the time of the Renaissance, the foreign
influences (Graeco-Roman and Arabic) facilitated the emergence of men of words
who had no connection with the church, and also alienated many traditional men
of words from the prevailing Catholic dispensation. The resulting movement of
the Reformation shook Europe out of its torpor. In Russia, European influence
(including Marxism) detached the allegiance of the intelligentsia from the
Romanovs, and the eventual Bolshevik revolution is still at work renovating the
vast Muscovite Empire. §125; pp. 166-67)
Hoffer concludes his text with an
impressive if somewhat odd choice of sources to cite: "J. B. S. Haldane
counts fanaticism among the only four really important inventions made between
3000 B.C. and 1400 A.D. It was a Judaic-Christian invention. And it is strange
to think that in receiving this malady of the soul the world also received a miraculous
instrument for raising societies and nations from the dead—an instrument of
resurrection" (p. 168).
* *
* * *
In a in
another period of global warming, a world still heavily armed with nuclear and
thermonuclear weapons, in a world in which ISIS awaits its Saladin and the
Muscuvite Emperire and the rulers in Bejing are reasserting themselves — in our
world, a Trumpist mass movement might be useful for getting America moving
again, but risks disaster.
