The True Believer

Although I don't normally think of it in this context, 21st-century Republicanism has a lot in common with mass movements, religious and otherwise. Our conversation along these lines led a friend to recommend to me the book "The True Believer," by Eric Hoffer, published by Harper & Row, New York and Evanston, 1951. Hoffer was known as the "longshoreman philosopher" as he spent the first part of his life, before he decided to be a writer at about age 40, as a blue-collar workman.

Wikipedia says:

Hoffer argues that fanatical and extremist cultural movements, whether religious, social, or national, arise when large numbers of frustrated people, believing their own individual lives to be worthless or spoiled, join a movement demanding radical change. But the real attraction for this population is an escape from the self, not a realization of individual hopes: "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."

Hoffer consequently argues that the appeal of mass movements is interchangeable: in the Germany of the 1920s and the 1930s, for example, the Communists and National Socialists were ostensibly enemies, but sometimes enlisted each other's members, since they competed for the same kind of marginalized, angry, frustrated people. For the "true believer," Hoffer argues that particular beliefs are less important than escaping from the burden of the autonomous self.

Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. said of The True Believer: "This brilliant and original inquiry into the nature of mass movements is a genuine contribution to our social thought."


And the quote from the book that inspired me to post this entry was:

(The true believers) ask to be deceived. What Stresemann said of the Germans is true of the frustrated in general: "[They] pray not only for [their] daily bread, but also for [their] daily illusion." The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led. A peculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture. The association of believing and lying it not characteristic solely of children. The inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism.