The True Believer
The True Believer
Eric Hoffer: Copyright 1951
It is very interesting, this collection of books my mother has left me. Some collection of great books was reprinted on cheap paper and cardboard bindings in the early sixties in a Mad Men type marketing campaign, I guess. My mother bought it. I feel as though I’m on some kind of archeological investigation. These are the baseball cards found in your great uncle’s attic. Here are the artifacts from an extinct era; untouched or spoiled by all the time that has passed between their publication and the moment I consumed them. That’s the cool part about books; they’re to be consumed not protected. And then of course you place it back on a shelf for future seasoning and snacking.
Several weeks ago I was listening to my usual dose of midday NPR and an unusual airing of the Worldview. The host had an author on that had published a book on the role people like James Dobson and his ilk had in the rise of the religious right. Good story; corruption, redemption, salvation and lots and lots of money and arrogance. During his narrative, he mentioned a book outlining the pathology of these James Dobson types and the movements they shepherd. I didn’t really catch the name but scribbled the author’s name down. Fast forward to the other day in the basement trying to clean up a bit and I end up back in the shelves amongst my mother’s books. This book came off a shelf and moved onto another and then back off the shelf where in I was drawn to read the cover. It was the book the young author referenced.
There is a complex and dynamic psychology that swirls within the human condition that manifests itself in what might be described as weather patterns. Clouds gather on the horizon and then dissipate. Other clouds gather and winds come up. The clouds build and a storm front emerges. It rolls across the landscape of civilization leaving disruption and sometimes destruction in its wake. At the time of this book’s publication, the Nazis and the Japanese were the storm that had passed and Stalin’s Soviet Union was the emerging storm front. This was a book that tried to find the pattern in the madness that had just ended and the new madness that lurked just beyond the horizon. It was an attempt to understand the mindset of the people that followed those that would establish tyranny in the name of freedom. It is not a critical or logical argument on a thesis but an editorial on what the author has conceived to be the root cause and pattern of a mass movement. The author’s focus is on the mindset of the individual that participates in what is often protest, coercion and violence in hopes of establishing a ‘new order’. He generalizes the traits and stereotypes the people and arrives at a pretty good description of the life cycle of a mass movement. Al Qaeda, the Nazis, the Tea Party, the French, American or Communist Revolutions, all carry a typical arch of evolution and involve the same members of society. It is the members of a frustrated, educated middle class that coalesce into a militant party that produces the fanatics that step forth to introduce the anarchy, through an act of self-sacrifice, that will render the standing government impotent and leave room for the introduction of the brave new order. The author defines the ‘types’ and describes the role they play in the establishment, spread and eventual domination of the mythical ‘brave new world’ at the heart of any mass movement. There is a hierarchy of characters and circumstances that are exploited by the wicked for personal gain and enrichment. There are those that wish to shed the burden of ‘autonomous individuality’ due to the self-loathing they feel and the need to hold someone else responsible for the miserable, meaningless lives they have. They wish to be part of a compact and ordered whole that demands uniformity and obedience. There is no need to argue the facts to the followers of the movement; there is only belief and the assurances of those that lead that their cause is just and righteous. The author explains the coercion, intimidation and the violence in terms of a recipe of flawed ideas and personalities that are taken advantage of by megalomaniacs, narcissists, and flat out bat shit crazies. It also describes the apex of the mass movement structure and its decline into tyranny and calcification as the circumstances that gave rise to the disruption of the existing order settle back in place with a different group of masters at the helm. Hoffer points to the three elements of a successful mass movement; the intellectuals, the fanatics and the men-of-action. The first create an outline, the second burns the present to the ground and the third shuts down the party and institutionalizes what has been established. He points out the irony in the average rank and file members’ reward for participation. Once the new order is firmly in place, they are stripped of the empowerment they had been given and returned to their miserable, unfulfilled existence.
Cynical and rather simplistic, this book puts into words much of the urban myth that has circulated for centuries. I don’t know this for fact, but the content and presentation was all too easy to except as reasonable and true. It’s too much like the television preachers and the seductive simplicity of their sermon. There are odd examples in the book using Jews, communists and women. Even the forward pointed out the anti-Semitic tone of the book. It was published in 1951 at the beginning of everything that has occurred in between and I wonder if I don’t hear the voice of the newly minted class of ‘beatnik’ in the author’s narrative? Hoffer doesn’t live in New York City, but uses some post graduate degree in the trade of a fisherman or boat mechanic out in Oregon or Washington. Got the impression from the forwards that he was one of those free spirit types that lived amongst the common and unwashed but refused to consider himself as one and remained aloof and insulated from their petty views of the world. A next generation Harry Truman or the compatriot of Ernest Hemingway? Who’s to say, I think the truth is dust. What I do think is that the principles expanded upon in this book are universal. Its main point: Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups. What I don’t agree with is his eugenics leaning presentation, the ‘it’s the way things were, back then’ justification for threading racism into poignant observation. It comes across as some kind of elitist ‘they’ description. A means of identifying those elements of our society that might provoke upset in our communities. This is a description of the mechanisms inherent in all of these manias that sweep across our society. There are no cures for these symptoms; he seems to condemn all the mass movements that have used this ‘ground swell of support’ dictum to accomplish a goal good or bad. Perhaps it is written very dark satire. He does use the picture that the institutions created are mortared with the slime that the hatred and violence of a messianic figure and his minions as a description of the foul institutions of Hitler and Stalin, but only in passing points to the huge injustices of race in America that were beginning to boil the tempers of the most tolerant of Americans. Another thought that crosses my mind is whether this was propaganda meant to discredit the nascent civil rights movement as another mass movement with tyranny and violence at its heart.
Wisdom. Perhaps that’s what’s uncomfortable about the general satisfaction I feel in the content. I agreed with many of the author’s observations and could see their example in many of the actions and strategies of the GOP and the Tea Party and in the tactics and propaganda of Al Qaeda. Two diametrically opposing views that mimic each other in word and deed. Hoffer points to this situation as a quality needed for the mass movement to succeed. It provides an enemy for the movement to hate and hold responsible for the horrible state of the present. In the process of defending the movement, it adopts the qualities and practices they abhor in the enemy. I mentioned the beatnik moniker as a means to date the relevance of the content. At the time, the author may have been the source of original thought, but its import and contribution to society has been distilled and incorporated into doctrine. So much so that I hear the author’s tone in the book ‘Fascists’ which I read and praised in a previous review. I feel a little disappointed now, a little cheated. I love to find the source of conventional wisdom. This cheap, reprint edition was collecting dust at beginning of the civil rights era. Hell, for all I know it might have been on a book shelf in my home the day JFK was killed. I’m reminded that while I feel an amount of personal growth, everything I know or perceive is already known. Its hard not to feel manipulated or herded in our interactions with society but it’s a far more disturbing to recognize that your thoughts have been manipulated. You arrive at conclusions after traveling a path constructed by others. I’m starting to understand that there is little difference between being led by the hand or being shown a reading list and taught how to derive the correct answers.
Eric Hoffer: Copyright 1951
It is very interesting, this collection of books my mother has left me. Some collection of great books was reprinted on cheap paper and cardboard bindings in the early sixties in a Mad Men type marketing campaign, I guess. My mother bought it. I feel as though I’m on some kind of archeological investigation. These are the baseball cards found in your great uncle’s attic. Here are the artifacts from an extinct era; untouched or spoiled by all the time that has passed between their publication and the moment I consumed them. That’s the cool part about books; they’re to be consumed not protected. And then of course you place it back on a shelf for future seasoning and snacking.
Several weeks ago I was listening to my usual dose of midday NPR and an unusual airing of the Worldview. The host had an author on that had published a book on the role people like James Dobson and his ilk had in the rise of the religious right. Good story; corruption, redemption, salvation and lots and lots of money and arrogance. During his narrative, he mentioned a book outlining the pathology of these James Dobson types and the movements they shepherd. I didn’t really catch the name but scribbled the author’s name down. Fast forward to the other day in the basement trying to clean up a bit and I end up back in the shelves amongst my mother’s books. This book came off a shelf and moved onto another and then back off the shelf where in I was drawn to read the cover. It was the book the young author referenced.
There is a complex and dynamic psychology that swirls within the human condition that manifests itself in what might be described as weather patterns. Clouds gather on the horizon and then dissipate. Other clouds gather and winds come up. The clouds build and a storm front emerges. It rolls across the landscape of civilization leaving disruption and sometimes destruction in its wake. At the time of this book’s publication, the Nazis and the Japanese were the storm that had passed and Stalin’s Soviet Union was the emerging storm front. This was a book that tried to find the pattern in the madness that had just ended and the new madness that lurked just beyond the horizon. It was an attempt to understand the mindset of the people that followed those that would establish tyranny in the name of freedom. It is not a critical or logical argument on a thesis but an editorial on what the author has conceived to be the root cause and pattern of a mass movement. The author’s focus is on the mindset of the individual that participates in what is often protest, coercion and violence in hopes of establishing a ‘new order’. He generalizes the traits and stereotypes the people and arrives at a pretty good description of the life cycle of a mass movement. Al Qaeda, the Nazis, the Tea Party, the French, American or Communist Revolutions, all carry a typical arch of evolution and involve the same members of society. It is the members of a frustrated, educated middle class that coalesce into a militant party that produces the fanatics that step forth to introduce the anarchy, through an act of self-sacrifice, that will render the standing government impotent and leave room for the introduction of the brave new order. The author defines the ‘types’ and describes the role they play in the establishment, spread and eventual domination of the mythical ‘brave new world’ at the heart of any mass movement. There is a hierarchy of characters and circumstances that are exploited by the wicked for personal gain and enrichment. There are those that wish to shed the burden of ‘autonomous individuality’ due to the self-loathing they feel and the need to hold someone else responsible for the miserable, meaningless lives they have. They wish to be part of a compact and ordered whole that demands uniformity and obedience. There is no need to argue the facts to the followers of the movement; there is only belief and the assurances of those that lead that their cause is just and righteous. The author explains the coercion, intimidation and the violence in terms of a recipe of flawed ideas and personalities that are taken advantage of by megalomaniacs, narcissists, and flat out bat shit crazies. It also describes the apex of the mass movement structure and its decline into tyranny and calcification as the circumstances that gave rise to the disruption of the existing order settle back in place with a different group of masters at the helm. Hoffer points to the three elements of a successful mass movement; the intellectuals, the fanatics and the men-of-action. The first create an outline, the second burns the present to the ground and the third shuts down the party and institutionalizes what has been established. He points out the irony in the average rank and file members’ reward for participation. Once the new order is firmly in place, they are stripped of the empowerment they had been given and returned to their miserable, unfulfilled existence.
Cynical and rather simplistic, this book puts into words much of the urban myth that has circulated for centuries. I don’t know this for fact, but the content and presentation was all too easy to except as reasonable and true. It’s too much like the television preachers and the seductive simplicity of their sermon. There are odd examples in the book using Jews, communists and women. Even the forward pointed out the anti-Semitic tone of the book. It was published in 1951 at the beginning of everything that has occurred in between and I wonder if I don’t hear the voice of the newly minted class of ‘beatnik’ in the author’s narrative? Hoffer doesn’t live in New York City, but uses some post graduate degree in the trade of a fisherman or boat mechanic out in Oregon or Washington. Got the impression from the forwards that he was one of those free spirit types that lived amongst the common and unwashed but refused to consider himself as one and remained aloof and insulated from their petty views of the world. A next generation Harry Truman or the compatriot of Ernest Hemingway? Who’s to say, I think the truth is dust. What I do think is that the principles expanded upon in this book are universal. Its main point: Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups. What I don’t agree with is his eugenics leaning presentation, the ‘it’s the way things were, back then’ justification for threading racism into poignant observation. It comes across as some kind of elitist ‘they’ description. A means of identifying those elements of our society that might provoke upset in our communities. This is a description of the mechanisms inherent in all of these manias that sweep across our society. There are no cures for these symptoms; he seems to condemn all the mass movements that have used this ‘ground swell of support’ dictum to accomplish a goal good or bad. Perhaps it is written very dark satire. He does use the picture that the institutions created are mortared with the slime that the hatred and violence of a messianic figure and his minions as a description of the foul institutions of Hitler and Stalin, but only in passing points to the huge injustices of race in America that were beginning to boil the tempers of the most tolerant of Americans. Another thought that crosses my mind is whether this was propaganda meant to discredit the nascent civil rights movement as another mass movement with tyranny and violence at its heart.
Wisdom. Perhaps that’s what’s uncomfortable about the general satisfaction I feel in the content. I agreed with many of the author’s observations and could see their example in many of the actions and strategies of the GOP and the Tea Party and in the tactics and propaganda of Al Qaeda. Two diametrically opposing views that mimic each other in word and deed. Hoffer points to this situation as a quality needed for the mass movement to succeed. It provides an enemy for the movement to hate and hold responsible for the horrible state of the present. In the process of defending the movement, it adopts the qualities and practices they abhor in the enemy. I mentioned the beatnik moniker as a means to date the relevance of the content. At the time, the author may have been the source of original thought, but its import and contribution to society has been distilled and incorporated into doctrine. So much so that I hear the author’s tone in the book ‘Fascists’ which I read and praised in a previous review. I feel a little disappointed now, a little cheated. I love to find the source of conventional wisdom. This cheap, reprint edition was collecting dust at beginning of the civil rights era. Hell, for all I know it might have been on a book shelf in my home the day JFK was killed. I’m reminded that while I feel an amount of personal growth, everything I know or perceive is already known. Its hard not to feel manipulated or herded in our interactions with society but it’s a far more disturbing to recognize that your thoughts have been manipulated. You arrive at conclusions after traveling a path constructed by others. I’m starting to understand that there is little difference between being led by the hand or being shown a reading list and taught how to derive the correct answers.