The True Believer - Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements
Hi guys! I know that I was not active for a long time. I was posting from time to time, but on my other account in which I am creating posts in my mother language. But I missed writing in english. I like it and among other things consider it also a way to improve my language, while delivering something that might be valuable to you. That's why I decided to reactivate this account and regularly post reviews of books that I read, mainly non-fiction books. Let's start with post that I created for my polish account, about the book called "The True Believer - Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements". Today I will translate the article that I wrote about this book to English. Thanks for all the comments and votes, if you will like it!
I just got in my hands the book called The True Believer - Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements. I tried to hunt it for a long time, not even remembering how it appeared on my "to read" list. But I knew that this book will be interesting too me, considering the topic that it raises, so it was high on my list. When I finished reading it I felt, that even after all these years that passed since releasing this book in 1951, it can still be quite up-to-date and it's easy to find every day examples of observations made in this book. Observations that the author made and the topic that he raises are quite important when it come to understanding out world - and that's what I like the best in non-fiction books. So I thought that I need to create this post, that will discuss a few elements of this book, that maybe will give you an apettite to read it.
Something about the author and the book itself
The author name is Eric Hoffer, he is a philosopher working with such topics as society and morality. The True Believer is his first and most popular book, and can be called a classic of the genre. He is not a person of typically academic type of education. He comes from Bronx, which as we know is not a great place. He comes from family of immigrants. According to him, when he was 7 years old, he lost eyesight and got it back at the age of 15, then worrying that he could lose it again, decided to read as much as he can, while he can. But he never lost eyesight again. It was probably the reason and the beginning of his self-learning.
Eric Hoffer himself. source
His first work is splitted into the parts that analyze for example what is the charm of massive movements like religious groups, political movements, ideological movements et cetera, and where does it come from. "Massive movements" in this book are then understood as a general term for organisations that I mentioned. "The True Believer" also discuss who are the people that could be attracted by this movements, are already participating in them and why they are ready to make sacrifices for the sake of those organisations.
The important part is that the book is trying to be objective, and it achieves it well. It is not focused on pointing the fingers the bad and good massive political movements, it is not moralizing. This publication is analyzing phenomenon of mass movements like a botanists that look at the ant with the magnifier and describes it's legs, antennae and behavior. Of course it implies that we could feel that the author is patronizing members of organistations of many kinds, people sacrificing their whole lifes to these organisations, but it's hard to avoid that while writing about fanatics. As we shall see at the end, the mass movements itself are not demonized.
I could accuse this book that it is not backed by hard evidence, for example some social research - but the author himself admits, that his observations might not be complete and are open to being criticized. We are dealing here with thoughts of the philosopher that is analyzing the topic, and drawing conclusions that are quite accurate if you ask me. Not with the scientific work, that deals with control groups, experiments et cetera. That does not mean that this book lacks footnotes or biblography.
First - why and who are attracted to massive movements?
people with a sense of fulfillment think it's a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change. The tendency to look for all causes outside ourselves persists even when it is clear that our state of being is the product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health and so on. “If anything ail a man,” says Thoreau, “so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even … he forthwith sets about reforming—the world.”
[...]
The remarkable thing is that the successful, too, however much they pride themselves on their foresight, fortitude, thrift and other “sterling qualities,” are at bottom convinced that their success is the result of a fortuitous combination of circumstances.
The average believer-fanatic according to Erif Hoffer is a man that does not fit to the contemporary world. One of the posibilities is the situation in which fanatic choose some mass movement to join it and treat it as escape from his life, because his life is a failure, catastrophy. But as we could see from the quote that I show you above, the argument is that usually we are blaming the world that surrounds us for our successes and failures. So the man that is disappointed in his life will think that the world is to blame, and the world needs to be changed.
So there is a need to change the world in such a man, the world that is bad for him. But there is also a second thing - running away from the world. Not only changing the world, but also running away. Why? Because mass movements often give the alternative to the present life of a dissapointed man. They give him a new meaning, so a man like that will easy become a "thread in the fabric of whole organisation", because he feel that he is a part of something important, something that is the substitute of his life:
Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves. The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.
[...]
to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.
So we have the image of a man frustrated with his life, blaming the world for his failures, a coward wanting to find a shelter from being compared to others, wanting to isolate himself from the world in the ideology that he will give himself to. Just as I said, there is some patronizing in this book But Hoffer does not stop on this humiliating diagnosis - not every man that experienced failure and problems in life join to religious sect or revolutionary movements. Poor people that are poor since generations does not rebel as much as "new poor" who lost their status recently, and remember the taste of better life. Or on the other hand we have different type that likes to rebel - people who saw light of hope, tasted the better life and also believed that they can change something, that they got the power. Such believe that they can change something came from ideology that they subscribe to:
De Tocqueville in his researches into the state of society in France before the revolution was struck by the discovery that “in no one of the periods which have followed the Revolution of 1789 has the national prosperity of France augmented more rapidly than it did in the twenty years preceding that event.” He is forced to conclude that “the French found their position the more intolerable the better it became.” In both France and Russia the land-hungry peastants owned almost exactly one-third of the agricultural land at the outbreak of revolution, and most of that land was acquired during the generation or two preceding the revolution
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The men who rush into undertakings of vast change usually feel they are in possession of some irresistible power. The generation that made the French Revolution had an extravagant conception of the omnipotence of man's reason and the boundless range of his intelligence. [...] And joined with this exaggerated self-confidence was a universal thirst for change
I wanted to discuss one more aspect of people vulnerable to mass movement charms. This is some kind of loneliness and isolating themselves from groups that they can be a part of, for example a family. This aspeckt tells us much about how we could try to prevent revolutionary movements and other situations that steal the mind of people and throwing them into the vortex of ideological movements. People that feel that they are a part of already existing healthy groups and communities, such as family, local patriotism groups et cetera, are more "immune" to things like religious sects:
The poor who are members of a compact group—a tribe, a closely knit family, a compact racial or religious group—are relatively free of frustration and hence almost immune to the appeal of a proselytizing mass movement. The less a person sees himself as an autonomous individual capable of shaping his own course and solely responsible for his station in life, the less likely is he to see his poverty as evidence of his own inferiority.
[...]
The ideal potential convert is the individual who stands alone, who has no collective body he can blend with and lose himself in and so mask the pettiness, meaninglessness and shabbiness of his individual existence. Where a mass movement finds the corporate pattern of family, tribe, country, etcetera, in a state of disruption and decay, it moves in and gathers the harvest.
Man is a social animal and we can see it here. In case of isolating ourselves from a group that we could be close to, like a family, the frustration is even bigger. As Hoffer stresses, attempts to destroy family bonds or other bonds might be an intentional act of "preparing the ground" by massive movements, be it revolutionary or other.
Second - stages of mass movements. After all we sometimes need explosions of passion in a society
To this point main focus was kept on looking at "believers" of some kind of mass movement groups like a psychoanalyst looks at his patient. We have accused them of being a failures that are beguiled by ideology groups. But this book contains many more observations, and says that there are many reasons why someone might be seduced by mass movements. But I will not be able to summarize the whole book here. That's why I wanted to skip to the second proposal that I found in this book - that the mass movements are sometimes needed in a healthy society.
In the book the author distinguish many stages of mass movements. And up to this point, we were talking mainly about first stage, that is, the dynamic, active, romantic stage. Revolutionary stage. This stage is not based on rationality, stability, no, on the contrary. We are dealing here with appealing to the spirit of the nation, emotions, hearth. It can be perfectly seen in nazizm, in this quote:
Rudolph Hess, when swearing in the entire Nazi party in 1934, exhorted his hearers: "Do not seek Adolph Hitler with your brains; all of you will find him with the strength of your hearts."
After this stage there is a stage of stabilization, stage that could be recognized by the fact that doctrine of the mass movement changed and is more rational, understandable, clear. Earlier the doctrine might be some kind of babble even, something based on emotions, not it is formalized. Opportunities to get a career in such a mass movements arise, like in some kind of corporation. This is the clear sign that the movement does not want to shape the new world, not not. Now it want to just own the present world and preserve status quo.
Sometimes we do need a revolution. source
Ok, but I wrote that regardless of this, we sometimes need explosions of passion in a society. So when do we need them and what are the movements that we could acknowledge as movements that fulfilled they role and will not transform into some bloody, drastic movements, as nazism that was mentioned above? The good mass movement is the one that knows when it fulfilled its role and cleared the world, and knows that it needs to let go of "active", "romantic" stage. Leader that cares about people knows how to start a mass movement, but also when to end its active stage - such as Gandhi did. Mass movement that keeps its shape obtained during romantic, active stage, or mass movement which ortodoxy is strenghtened for years, will result in stagnation, dark ages. As a proof of mass movement with short lifespan the book gives the example of Puritans and American Revolution.
Let's quote a part of the book, where it is said why and when do we need mass movements:
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. [...] The inability to produce a full-fledged mass movement can be, therefore, a grave handicap to a social body.
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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—perhaps irremediable decay.
The end
I wanted to use examples from contemporary world, but I did not. Why? I thought that it is better to keep this post apolitical. I don't want to start wars with people of different world views. I don't want to point fingers on so called "Social Justive Warriors" or far right people, highly religious people et cetera. It is not up to this post to judge if they are right in their actions or not.
I also think that it's important to read the whole book and then think about examples in a contemporary world. What I wrote here is only a part of the ideas presented in the book. This is why the post might seem a little boring, maybe. But I invite you, the reader, to make your own opinion after reading the book :)
