From Page 86 through Page 89, in his book The True Believer, Eric Hoffer compares and contrasts, belonging to a mass movement versus serving in an army. I quote him there and respond to his material.
Hoffer (H after this): “ Mass Movements And Armies
64
It is well at this point, before leaving the subject of self-sacrifice, to have a look at the similarities and differences between mass movements and armies—a problem which has already cropped up in Sections 35 and 47.
The similarities are many: both mass movements and armies are collective bodies; both strip the individual of his separateness and distinctness; both demand self-sacrifice, unquestioning obedience and singlehearted allegiance; both make extensive use of make-believe to promote daring and united action (see Section 47); and both can serve as a refuge for the frustrated who cannot endure an autonomous existence. A military body like the Foreign Legion attracts many of the types who usually rush to join a new mass movement. It is also true that the recruiting officer, the Communist agitator and the missionary often fish simultaneously in the cesspools of Skid Row.”
My response: One assumes that Hoffer’s 20 years or so as a wandering fruit tramp and migrant worker, with an intimate, penetrating experience of and analysis of the people populating the fields, trains, hobo camps, Skid Row, brothels, and libraries in dozens of California towns, gave him original and personal insightful experience of how the rootless, discontented tramps could easily become frustrated and seek escape in some passing cause.
Yet, somehow, he was a self-realizer and great soul. His fanatical nature was sublimated by him into creativity and philosophy. He found and lived a contented existence as a blue collar intellectual and writer.
One cannot disagree with the similarities that he points out between mass movements and armies. I am wondering, for the sake of our future nation and its standing army, and for citizens participating in running our constitutional republic, how to balance and juxtapose the coexisting, conflicting pressures of each future citizen to live as an anarchist-individuator supercitizen, on the one hand, and yet as a citizen within our constitutional republic, or when serving in our army, how these people, in these dual roles, can self-sacrifice, give unquestioning obedience, give single-hearted allegiance, and buy into make-believe to heighten united action?
I believe the supercitizen could take orders, self-sacrifice, and obey but not unquestioningly, and unite with others to complete the mission (winning a war and running the country).
The officers in the army and the politicians and bureaucrats running the country would all have to accept and work creatively with supercitizens, who could be quite self-sacrificing, loyal and willing to work together for the common cause, but never as zombies or fanatics, and with the mutual understanding that each supercitizen will remain autonomous and return to his supercitizen lifestyle once his service in collective organizations were complete and terminated.
H: “But the differences are fundamental: an army does not come to fulfill a need for a new way of life; it is not a road to salvation. It can be used as a stick in the hand of a coercer to impose a new way of life and force it down unwilling throats. But the army is mainly an instrument devised for the preservation or expansion of an established order—old or new. It is a temporary instrument that can be assembled and taken apart at will. The mass movement, on the other hand, seems an instrument of eternity, and those who join it do so for life. The ex-soldier is a veteran, even a hero; the ex-true believer is a renegade. The army is an instrument for bolstering, protecting and expanding the present. The mass movement comes to destroy the present. Its preoccupation is with the future, and it derives it vigor and drive from this preoccupation. When a mass movement begins to be preoccupied with the present, it means that it has arrived. It ceases then to be a movement and becomes an institutionalized organization—an established church, a government or an army (of soldiers or workers). The popular army, which is often an end-product of a mass movement, retains many of the trappings of the movement—pious verbiage, slogans, holy symbols; but like any other army it is held together less by faith and enthusiasm than by the unimpassioned mechanism of drill, esprit de corps and coercion. It soon loses the asceticism and unction of a holy congregation and displays the boisterousness and the taste for joys of the present which is characteristic of all armies.”
My response: The mass movement, so to speak is a more radical, more extreme, chaotic, unhinged mass collective entity than is the army, out to preserve the system, to find jo and to live in the present. Hoffer does a fine job explaining how mass movements and armies are alike and unalike. Armies are limited and structure mass movements.
H: “Being an instrument of the present, an army deals mainly with the possible. Its leaders do not rely on miracles. Even when animated by fervent faith, they are open to compromise. They reckon with the possibility of defeat and know how to surrender. On the other hand, the leader of a mass movement has an overwhelming contempt for the present—for all its stubborn facts and perplexities, even those of geography and the weather. He relies on miracles. His hatred of the present (his nihilism) comes to the fore when the situation becomes desperate. He destroys his country and his people rather than surrender.
The spirit of self-sacrifice within an army is fostered by devotion to duty, make-believe, esprit de corps, drill, faith in a leader, sportsmanship, the spirit of adventure and the desire for glory. These factors, unlike those employed by a mass movement, do not spring from a deprecation of the present and a revulsion from an unwanted self. They can unfold therefore in a sober atmosphere. The fanatical soldier is usually a fanatic turned soldier rather than the other way around. An army’s spirit of self-sacrifice is most nobly expressed in the words Sarpedon spoke to Glaucus as they stormed the Grecian wall: ‘O my friend, if we, leaving this war, could escape from age and death, I should not be here fighting in the van; but now, since many are the modes of death impending over us which no man can hope to shun, let us press on and give renown to other men, or win it for ourselves.’
The most striking difference between mass movements and armies is in their attitude to the multitude and the rabble. De Tocqueville observes that soldiers are ‘the men who lose their heads most easily, and who generally show themselves weakest on days of revolution.’ To the typical general the mass is something his army would fall into if it were to fall apart. He is more aware of the inconstancy of the mass and its will to anarchy than its readiness to self-sacrifice. He sees it as the poisonous end-product of a crumbling collective body rather than the raw material of a new world. His attitude is a mixture of fear and contempt. He knows how to suppress the mass but not how to win it. On the other hand, the mass movement leader—from Moses to Hitler—draws his inspiration from the sea of upturned faces, and the roar of the mass is as the voice of God in his ears. He sees an irresistible force within his reach –a force he alone can harness. And with this force he will sweep away empires and armies and all of the mighty present. The face of the mass is as ‘the face of the deep, out of which, like God on the day of creation, he will bring forth a new world.”
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