The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (Perennial Classics) Paperback – 19 Jan. 2010

Much like the book by the unmentionable author who figures on the cover of my paperback edition of “The True Believer,” and for all the endnotes and references, this is but a list of largely unsubstantiated assertions and aphorisms. Eric Hoffer admits as much on page 60:“This is not an authoritative textbook. It is a book of thoughts, and it does not shy away from half-truths, so long as they seem to hint at a new approach and help formulate new questions.”With that caveat out of the way, it has to be said that this is a tremendous exploration of the motivations of mass movements and the fanatic in particular. The thoughts described in this book clearly derive from the experiences leading up to the horrors of the first and second world war, as well the wars themselves. They pertain to the conditions that lead to the creation of populist mass movements, the leaders these movements require and the state of mind of the fanatic.I guess that’s why I picked it up in 2017. It’s been in print for a good 60 years, but had not seemed relevant for some time…Fanaticism is built on humiliation. It is himself (most often his humiliated, debased, self, relative to some yardstick set by his own recent or ancient history or the rest of society) that the fanatic is escaping. Indeed, he is renouncing his current self and the present world and is dedicating his existence (including the possibility that it may come to an end) to a cause that will help create a better, utopian, future. Reason and observation do not come into it; the fanatic is a man of faith in the cause to which he has dedicated himself. Faith replaces reason, to the point of overruling empirical observation. The cause becomes the center of the fanatic’s existence. He willingly, gleefully, hands over his free will and (crucially) his responsibility and becomes an instrument of the cause. He experiences relief in doing so and, once inducted in one faith, finds it very difficult to get back his free will. Should his faith disappoint him, he’d sooner join another faith!The hatred that the fanatic sometimes harbors is a hatred of himself. Others having a just grievance against a fanatic therefore fills him with more hate and their elimination actually helps assuage this self-hatred: “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.” (p. 95)The leader is a more complex person than the fanatic. At the first stage of the movement he needs to be a man of ideas. The Rousseau or the Voltaire or the Karl Marx. In the revolutionary stage he needs to be true believer himself, a fanatic. The lucky fanatic who happens to be in charge of the movement when the moment is ripe. The Robespierre, the Lenin or the Mussolini. Finally, when the movement wins out something funky happens: the mass movement becomes the status quo, the “today” that all misfits and downtrodden will hate from now onward and the leader needs to become a consolidator, a “practical man of action,” who will carry on with ritual “permanent revolution,” whose actual cause will be to maintain the status quo. Stalin and Mao spring to mind here, but not Trotsky, for example.Another important point made in the book is that if the source of fanaticism is humiliation, the raw material for the creation of populist mass movements can be channeled in a number of ways, but it will be channeled: “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.” (p. 139)That really floored me. Moving on to our current times, when, mid-financial crisis, the dispossessed and foreclosed-on American people voted in a President of African descent called Barack Hussain Obama, a man casting himself as an outsider, with a mandate to bring about change, very little was achieved when he turned out to be a level-headed member of the establishment. In due course, the humiliation of the dispossessed would merely be channeled into somebody else.Erm, worth the price of purchase, then.In some respects, however, the book is starting to show its years. Sixty years is a long time and I, for one, am observing around me a different world from the one in evidence in 1951:The author claims that the people never clamors for its freedom, that the masses never rebel against authority to reclaim their freedom of conscience and free choice: “They sweep away the old order not to create a society of free and independent men, but to establish uniformity. It is not the wickedness of the old regime they rise against, but its weakness; not its oppression, but its failure to hammer them together into one solid, mighty whole. The persuasiveness of the intellectual demagogue consists not so much in convincing the people of the vileness of the established order as in demonstrating its helpless incompetence. The immediate result of mass movement usually corresponds to what people want. They are not cheated in the process.”This, while perhaps accurate in 1951, is exactly half-right in year 2017.When in 1930 a demagogue would be promising a new world order to the dispossessed, today the demagogue’s audience is very much the bourgeoisie. The depression era utopias were not materialistic. They were idealistic and were offered to the dispossessed: communism, nationalism etc.The utopia our politicians peddle today is that we can maintain in permanence the once-in-many centuries post-WWII growth that the West has recently stopped enjoying. The final salary schemes, healthcare benefits and rising stock markets that came together with a demographic phenomenon called the baby boom, which we know for certain cannot be repeated for a good 25 years, even if we start multiplying like bunnies tonight.When three governments in a row have been elected in Greece with a mandate to fight back the “austerity” allegedly imposed by foreigners, when Monti was shoved out of running Italy within months of announcing entirely sensible measures, when Donald Trump promises to bring back jobs that have either gone to robots or to the cloud and gets elected, you know we’re not in 1951 anymore.The fanatic is no longer the villain in our world. The mass movement that all demagogues have in their sights is that of the entitled. Their promised land is not a utopia that lies in the future. It is a circumstantially contrived abundance that occurred in the past and is not coming back. The redemption the entitled seek is not ideological. It is material.I guess that is a vast improvement. But it means the book, while fun to read, is only relevant from a historical perspective.

A very engaging and insightful work is this, well researched and academic, to the point where it would be dry were it not for the subject matter and Hoffer’s engaging turn of phrase, which gives not only a theoretical view of the world of the fanatic, but a deep analysis of how the fanatic and his world came about.Hoffer is very even-handed in his discussion, drawing examples from the Nazi party, the French Revolution, postwar Palestine, Stalinist Russia, the Crusades and Imperial Japan. No period or aspect of life is left unexamined as he walks through the rise of the mass movement, who is motivated to join them and why, and how each religious, political and revolutionary current transitions through various stages, changing its rhetoric, members and even its aims in the pursuit of-what? Something which they all have in common but claim is unique only to their own race of believers.You could page through it and find multiple parallels with his time and our own, from Nazi Germany to North Korea, and radical Islam to the radical right. Like any good work of history, this shows the reader how parts of the modern world came about and persist today, and how we might be ( or how we have been) led to follow a strange banner and become a True Believer ourselves.

Not an easy book to read. The thesis - that all mass movements- are essentially the same in origin and progress is quite difficult to absorb.But worthwhile and enlightening. Reccomended as a read by Martin Wolfe-the F T columnist.A good reccomendation.

What an amazing book.I found it from a bibliography of a book I had recently read. It is surprising that it was written over 60 years ago. It is relevant today and very perceptive. The writing style is clear, the structure of the book leads the reader on to its conclusions with many sentences that have become regularly quoted. It is not surprising that it has become a classic and I could not put it down.

The author minces no words in this highly perceptive and insightful book. Learn well from his words and allow them to penetrate, for they are just as relevant today as they were when they were written.

This should be on everyone's reading list.For Hoffer, there are two kinds of people - those who stand on their own two feet and those who want to distance themselves from themselves and their feeling of inadequacy or lack of meaning and attach themselves to movements - religion, ideology, or any group where they can derive meaning.

Very well researched and presented look at Mass Movements from a non bias point of view. Especially with what is going on in the world today!

Excellent read, applicable today for sure.