The True Believer
according to Eric Hoffer
According to Marc Andreessen, a billionaire founder of Netscape, Eric Hoffer's book provides a better understanding of the irrationality of current political developments.
Eric Hoffer is an American from modest Alsacian immigrants who learned to read German and English at the age of 5, then became blind for seven years after an accident. He reads avidly fearing to go blind again. He lost his parents in the 1920s, moved to California, and led a precarious existence there until 1950. At 40, the army refused to list him to go to war in 1940 because of a hernia, he then became a docker and unloaded boats despite his health problems, and still frequented libraries. In 1951, he made a major contribution to political sociology by publishing The True Believer, which is an analysis of fanaticism. His book was a well-deserved success and Hoffer became an assistant professor at Berkeley.
Mass Movement and Fanaticism
As Hoffer explains, "Self-sacrifice is an unreasonable act." Men are willing to die for a vague and unattainable goal like the salvation of souls, for a clear and measurable goal like a 10% increase in agricultural production subsidies in their region.
Movements that have changed the face of the world such as Christianity, Islam, Puritanism in England, Jacobinism in France, Bolchevism, or Nazism more recently are driven by fanaticism and irrationality.
The author presents the common mechanisms that fuel these mass movements. The three phases of the Mass Movement require three types of men:
men of words: before the arrival of fanatics, articulate men of words, theoreticians, delegitimize the existing order. Under the Roman Empire, it was the Epicureans and Stoics who denounced the gods of the city as superstition, making way for Christianity. In the 15th century, the humanists castigate superstition and religious pomp. They are preparing the fanaticism of reform. In the 18th century, the Encyclopedists theorized about good government. They are followed by the bloodthirsty Jacobins. In the 19th century, harmless anarchists like Prince Kropotkin of the Royal Academy of Science were allowed to speak freely. They would inspire Ravachol's first terrorist acts.
Fanatics: they are men ready to fight, whose certainties are tested by facts, who hate the present and the real, even if they sometimes refer to an imagined past. They project into a vague future a common salvation in which the individual, his faults, and weaknesses are drowned in the mass. The leaders of fanatical movements are successful because they offer the absolution of the individual and plan grandiose projects that correspond to the desires for domination of the masses.
Men of action: it is the administrators who consolidate the movement and sustain it. They may be fanatical like Stalin and Hitler or more opportunistic like Krushchev or Goebbels.
Some individuals excel in one of these three categories while others have been able to move from one to the other: Most men of words stop before falling into fanaticism. The humanist critical of the Catholic superstition Bracciolini of 1450 has nothing to do with the fanaticism of the reformer John Calvin of 1550 who forbade the population of Geneva to dance and then laugh. The most revolutionary of the encyclopedists, Condorcet was convicted of treason for his opposition to Robespierre's terror. The fanatic Robespierre is replaced by the man of action Napoleon. Some men of words know how to become fanatics: Trotsky and Lenin are men of words who become fanatics. Others are fanatics who become men of action, Stalin and Hitler for example.
Quotes
When men already have "something worth fighting for, they don't want to fight".
Satan said, "Whatever a man has, he will give for his life." Everything he owns, yes. But he dies sooner than giving up what he does not yet have.
The successful businessman is often a failure as a community leader because his mind is attuned to the "things that are" and his heart is fixed on what can be accomplished in "our time."
All active mass movements strive to put a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world. It is the certainty of His infallible doctrine that makes the true believer impervious to the uncertainties, surprises, and unpleasant realities of the world around him.
The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certainty. To be effective, a doctrine must not be understood but rather must be believed. We can only be absolutely certain of things we do not understand. When a movement begins to rationalize its doctrine and make it intelligible is a sign that its dynamic duration is over; that it is primarily interested in stability.
For, as shall be seen below, the stability of a regime requires the allegiance of intellectuals, If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it must be vague; And if it is neither unintelligible nor vague, it must be unverifiable.
The association of belief and falsehood is not unique to children. The inability or unwillingness to see things as they are fosters both credulity and quackery. Although they appear to be at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crammed at one end. It is the fanatics and the moderates who are poles apart and never meet.
Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. When Hitler was asked if he did not attach too much importance to Jews, he exclaimed, "No, no, no... It is impossible to exaggerate the formidable quality of the Jew as an enemy.
It is easier to hate an enemy with much good in him than someone who is all evil. We cannot hate those we despise. According to Hoffer, when Japanese people visit Nazi Germany, they are amazed and recommend a similar policy to Japan. But they worry that Japan does not have an ethnic minority like the Jews that could be used as emissaries and fix the hatred and envy of the most frustrated ethnic majority. The Japanese at the time, however, were not anti-Semitic.
When we see the bloodshed, terror, and destruction born of such generous enthusiasms as the love of God, the love of Christ, the love of a nation, compassion for the oppressed, and so on, we usually blame this shameful perversion on a cynical and power-hungry leadership. In fact, it is the unification set in motion by these enthusiasms, rather than the manipulations of an intriguing leadership, which transmutes noble impulses into a reality of hatred and violence.
Propaganda by itself succeeds mainly with the frustrated. Their thrilling fears, hopes and passions crowd at the gates of their senses and stand between them and the outside world. They can only see what they have already imagined, and it is the music of their own soul that they hear in the passionate words of the propagandist. Indeed, it is easier for the frustrated to detect their own imaginations and to hear the echo of their own daydreams in a passionate double language and sound refrains than in precise words brought together with irreproachable logic.
Goebbels admits in an unattended moment that "a sharp sword must always stand behind propaganda if it is to be truly effective." In fact, mass ferocity is not always the sum of individual anarchy. Personal truculence militates against united action. This causes the individual to strike for himself. It produces the pioneer, the adventurer, and the bandit.
The true believer, no matter how loud and violent his actions are, is fundamentally an obedient and submissive person. People whose lives are barren and precarious seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are autonomous and confident. For the frustrated, the absence of responsibility is more attractive than the freedom not to be subjected to coercion. The exaltation of the true believer does not arise from reserves of strength and wisdom, but from a feeling of deliverance: he has been delivered from the insignificant burdens of an autonomous existence.
A full-fledged mass movement is a ruthless affair, and its management is in the hands of ruthless fanatics who use words only to give an appearance of spontaneity. consent is obtained by coercion. But these fanatics can only settle down and take matters into their own hands after the dominant order has been discredited and lost the allegiance of the masses.
The British who ruled India were of a type totally devoid of the ability to get along with intellectuals in any country, let alone India. They were men of action, imbued with a faith in the innate superiority of the British. The educational institutions they created produced men of words and theoreticians; And it is ironic that this system, instead of safeguarding British rule, hastened its end.
The fact that mass movements, as they arise, often manifest less individual freedom than the order they supplant, is usually attributed to the cunning of a power-hungry clique that hijacks the movement at a critical stage and deceives the masses of freedom that was about to emerge, In fact, the only people deceived in the process are the intellectual precursors. However, the liberation to which the masses aspire is not freedom of expression and self-realization, but liberation from the intolerable burden of an autonomous existence. They do not want freedom of conscience, but faith, a blind and authoritarian faith.
Oliver Cromwell: "A man never goes as far as when he doesn't know where he's going.
Hitler regarded the Bolsheviks as his equals and ordered that former communists be immediately admitted into the Nazi Party. Stalin, in turn, saw the Nazis and the Japanese as the only nations worthy of respect.
During the Renaissance, foreign influences (Greco-Roman and Arab) facilitated the emergence of men of their word who had no connection to the Church and also alienated many traditional men of the mouth from the dominant Catholic dispensation. The movement of reformation shook Europe from its torpor.
Conclusion
Unlike army officers who are always worried about the risk of a mutiny of their troops, the fanatical leader is comfortable in the mass. It allows itself to be led because the leaders project the impulses of fanatics who have abandoned their individuality to join the movement. They are always inspired by what she wants.
According to Hoffer: "Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority. Equality without freedom creates a more stable social model than freedom without equality."
This explains why the socialists replaced the liberals as the party of progress against the conservatives once the franchise was extended between 1850 and 1900, and the lack of impact of Titus Gebel (2010) or Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1940) in their project to revalue freedom in the face of equality and avoid inept policies that have been observed since 1914.
If the students who participated in the Arab Spring in Egypt in 2011 were fighting for freedom and did not get it in 2016, it is not because an elite stole their revolution, it is because the population did not want this freedom.
In his final chapter Hoffer states that "J. B. S. Haldane counts fanaticism among the only four truly important inventions made between 3000 B.C. and 1400 B.C." (The author cited in 1932 proposed iron, paved roads, voting, and religious intolerance as the four important inventions). This author is a moderate eugenicist proclaiming the diversity of the species, a Marxist-Leninist, an admirer of Stalin and Trotsky, who obtained statistical results concerning natural selection. He left England to emigrate to India for ideological reasons. The work cited by Hoffer is "The Inequality of Man", published by Haldane in 1932. While the Enlightenment presented a rational vision of society and its political evolution, Hoffer explained the psychological springs and the irrationality of mass movements made it possible to create an impact at the civilizational level.
He thus explains the formidable potential of nationalism, socialism, and religion, beyond what was described by Gustave Lebon in his Psychology of Crowds.
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