“A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence.”
“Mass movements are usually accused of doping their followers with hope of the future while cheating them of the enjoyment of the present. Yet to the frustrated the present is irremediably spoiled. Comforts and pleasures cannot make it whole. No real content or comfort can ever arise in their minds but from hope.”
In a nutshell
People allow themselves to be swept up in larger causes in order to be freed of responsibility for their lives, and to escape the banality or misery of the present.
In a similar vein
Nathaniel Branden The Psychology of Self-Esteem (p 42)
Viktor Frankl The Will to Meaning (p 100)
If you have ever known someone who joined a cult, became a religious convert, or threw themselves into a political movement—and in the process seemed to lose their identity—this book may give you an insight into how that can happen. The work of an amateur—Hoffer’s day job was loading and unloading cargo on San Francisco’s docks—The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements is a compelling foray into mass movements and their power to shape minds, showing us how spiritual hunger leads people to jettison their old selves in order to become part of something apparently greater and more glorious.
The book had special meaning when published in the wake of the Second World War, given the havoc that a single movement—Nazism—wreaked across Europe, but Hoffer’s work is timeless in its observations of the psychology of group identification and why people are so ready and willing to die for a cause. Virtually everything he wrote could be applied to the terrorists and suicide bombers of today. Although a half century old, The True Believer could therefore not be more relevant.
Why are mass movements so powerful? Because they are full of fervor, Hoffer suggested. Powerful political movements always have a religious fervor to them. The French Revolution was really a new religion, replacing all the dogma and rituals of the Church with similar ones devoted to the State. The same goes for the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions: “The hammer and sickle and the swastika,” Hoffer observed, “are in a class with the cross.”
Those who make up the ranks of the early stages of a revolutionary movement are looking for some big and total change in their life. Leaders of mass movements know this, and therefore do all they can to “kindle and fan an extravagant hope.” They do not promise gradual, incremental change but a total change in the believer’s existence.
People normally join an organization for reasons of self-interest—to advance or benefit themselves in some way. Those who join a revolutionary mass movement, in contrast, do so “to be rid of an unwanted self.” If we are not happy with who we are, in a mass movement this no longer matters, as the self is irrelevant in relation to the larger “holy cause” of the movement. Where before people experienced only frustration and meaninglessness in their individual existence, now they have pride, purpose, confidence, and hope. “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves,” Hoffer wrote. Yet this desire to lose a sense of individuality paradoxically brings enormous self-esteem and feelings of worthiness.
Who else is vulnerable to joining a mass movement? In his chapter on potential converts, Hoffer noted that the very poor are not good candidates. They are too satisfied with just surviving to be interested in some grand vision. It is, rather, those who have a bit more, who have had their eyes opened to greater things, who are more likely to get swept up. Hoffer observed: “Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less satisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.”
People join mass movements for a sense of belonging and camaraderie, a feeling so often lacking in an economically free and competitive society. They may simply be very bored. Hitler, Hoffer noted, was financed by the wives of some of Germany’s great industrialists, whose regular amusements or enthusiasms no longer satisfied. The opportunity to get whipped up in a cause and its great leader is intoxicating, supplanting even reliable distractions such as family and work. Indeed, Hoffer remarked on the curious fact that it is often people with unlimited opportunities who are attracted to mass movements.
Finally, a movement will attract those who dislike having to be responsible for their lives. Young Nazis wished to free themselves from the burden of making decisions and slowly constructing an adult existence as their parents had done. Much more alluring were the simple promises of glory in the Third Reich. They were shocked when as losers of the war they were expected to feel responsibility for what had happened, because in their minds it was precisely responsibility that they had given up amid the pageantry of the new regime.
A mass movement’s promise of a dramatically better new world enables it to disregard normal moral inhibitions. The holy or glorious end justifies any means, and believers will do horrible things to other humans in the cause of creating their paradise. Hoffer warned us to be very careful “when hopes and dreams are loose in the streets.” They usually precede some kind of disaster.
To the nonbeliever, the self-sacrifice of a martyr, a kamikaze pilot, or a suicide bomber seems totally irrational. However, if our present life is considered worthless, and our belief in the movement is so great, it will not be such a leap to die for it. Before people reach this watershed, Hoffer said, they will have stripped themselves of a sense of their own individuality. Absorbed fully into the collective body, they are no longer the person friends and family once knew, but only the representative of a people, a party, a tribe.
To the true believer, nonbelievers are weak, corrupt, without backbone, or decadent. The perception of their own purity of intent allows them to do anything in the name of that noble intention—including take their own lives. It is this close-mindedness, blindness even, of the true believer that provides their power. If the world is black and white, then action is clear. It is only the open-minded who have to deal with surprises or contradictions.
One of Hoffer’s insights was that “what is not” is always a more powerful motivating force than “what is.” While to improve their lot the average person will work on what they already have, the true believer is not satisfied unless they are in the process of building a whole new world. Such a hatred of the present has done terrible damage, but on the other hand the overthrow of many kinds of tyrannies would not have been possible without those who dreamed and schemed for something better, who were willing to spark a bloody revolution in the cause of ideals such as liberty and equality. For better or worse, fanatics have made our world.
The True Believer is not just about mass movements. It is a work of philosophy with keen insights into human nature and contains almost no unnecessary words or sentences. The book is also a great example of why questions of human motivation and action should never be left to psychologists alone.
Born in New York City in 1902, the son of an immigrant cabinetmaker, Hoffer grew up speaking German and English. At 7 he was blinded as the result of a head injury, and missed out on most of his schooling. At 15, without any surgery, he miraculously regained his sight.
Both his parents died while he was still in his teens. He inherited $300 and moved to California. Supporting himself as a traveling laborer and gold prospector, Hoffer spent his spare time reading everything from Montaigne to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. For many years he worked as a longshoreman (or stevedore) in San Francisco, and only ceased manual laboring in 1941.
The True Believer brought Hoffer a measure of fame, and he devoted the second half of his life to writing. Other books include The Passionate State of Mind and Other Aphorisms (1954), The Ordeal of Change (1963), The Temper of Our Time (1967), Reflections on the Human Condition (1973), and In Our Time (1976). He also published a journal of life on the waterfront, and an autobiography, Truth Imagined, was released after his death. In the year he died, 1983, Hoffer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan.