Eric Hoffer, on Pages 55 to 60 of his book, The True Believer, starts to lay out his argument for mass movements, how they are organized, and what they consist of. I will quote from those pages and respond to what he wrote.
Millions of people are frustrated, awakened from their collective slumbers, embedded in some sleepy, comforting corporate, social arrangement. Now awakened, they are angry, frustrated, bitterly unhappy, desperately looking for a replacement social order to escape back into, to fall back asleep, to have their decisions made for them in terms of willing surrender of the power to run one’s life as one sees fit. The guru hungry and offering to run their lives does so at a steep cost for each surrendering, eager victim: she must passionately, without reserve, wholly embrace his mass movement, its doctrines, its story line, and excessively hate his enemies as he does, and unreasonably, ardently favor and love his friends as he does.
The holy cause the guru offers the willing victims is a cause that is active, and, it can be active based on noble motives, and bring about socially constructive change if the movement is not active too long, and it does not destroy too much of the existing order, or if the level of violence and cruelty unleashed on the civilian population is restrained.
Where the movement is active too long, and its vicious zealots are too murderous and too destructive, the government will be totalitarian and brutal, and, if the movement took over much of the world, the imperialists running the show will seek to grab and bind as much of the world as they can get away with crushing and holding.
The true believers, the disciples, the followers, the foot soldiers, that propel this cause forward onto victory and conquest, this holy cause has provided them with a most effective way to wipe out any sense of the self that was rejected utterly as they entered into service of the guru: united action and self-sacrifice cement their tie to the guru and holy cause; the self is gone forever. It is this sense of self-sacrifice that is altruism at its most evil phase, and this kind of self-sacrifice horrified and repelled Ayn Rand and Max Stirner.
Here is Hoffer (H after this): “ PART THREE
United Action and Self-Sacrifice
XII Preface
43
The vigor of a mass movement stems from the propensity of its followers for united action and self-sacrifice. When we ascribe the success of a movement to its faith, doctrine, propaganda, leadership, ruthlessness and so on, we are but referring to instruments of unification and means used to inculcate a readiness for self-sacrifice. It is impossible to understand the nature of mass movements unless it is recognized that their chief preoccupation is to foster, perfect and perpetuate a facility for united action and self-sacrifice.”
My response: Here is another Hofferian paradox unfolding: a reasonable observer of a mass movement would not be blamed for assuming the attractiveness of a mass movement and the holy cause that it advances is made attractive to its followers because its doctrines, values, arguments, logic and explanations are just superior to what is offered by advocates of rival holy causes; people go with the best, the majority of them, because it is the best story being told in a given society in a given generation.
Hoffer will argue below that none of this is true: the reason the frustrated join a popular mass movement because it, more than rival movements, offers them a greater, more powerful, more passionately intense vehicle of action and change that gives them the maximum available opportunity, through self-sacrifice and united action, to escape from the freedom of managing one’s own affairs, to wipe out that hated, frustrating self.
Because people are born evil (That is from birth we mostly hate ourselves, prefer group-living and justify our sinful nonindividuating while promoting group rights and collective living; the more we seek sin, group-living and self-sacrificing in united action, the more evil, and the more selfless we become.), they seek that which sickens and corrupts them, and, a mass movement participation by the individual, is exhilarating for in self-sacrifice and united action with millions of other true believers, there self-immolation is most potent, effective and complete.
H: “To know the process by which such a facility is engendered is to grasp the inner logic of most of the characteristic attitudes and practices of an active mass movement. With few exceptions, any group or organization which tries, for one reason or another, to create and maintain a compact unity and a constant readiness for self-sacrifice usually manifest the peculiarities—both noble and base—of a mass movement. On the other hand, a mass movement is bound to lose much which distinguishes it from other types of organization when it relaxes its collective compactness and begins to countenance self-interest as a legitimate motive of activity. In times of peace and prosperity, democratic nation is an institutionalized association of more or less free individuals. On the other hand, in time of crisis, when the nation’s existence is threatened, and it tries to reinforce its unity and generate in its people a readiness for self-sacrifice, it almost always assumes in some degree the character of a mass movement. The same is true of religious and revolutionary organizations: whether or not they develop into mass movements depends less on the doctrines they preach than on the degree of their preoccupation with unity and the readiness for self-sacrifice.”
My response: Hoffer notes that any organization or group that intensely focuses on, emphasizes and reinforces compact group unity, united action and self-sacrifice, is on its way to becoming a mass movement.
On the other hand, when a mass movement relents pressure upon its adherents to maintain the highest level of group unity and self-sacrifice, in the name of united action, then the mass movement is leaving its active phase, and is declining into a groupist or corporate social order, where the glimmer of a return to civilized normalcy (of course the Soviet Russian mass movement settled into 72 years of Communist Revolutionary empire, with no democracy allowed) is conceivable, maybe realizable. This is the country that is a democracy, more or less, with peace and prosperity for its demobilized, ex-frustrated true believers, now or once again a discontented by non-frustrated citizen aggregate of more or less free individuals.
In time of crisis, the government again seeks to imitate a mass movement by spurring and goading its population to self-sacrifice and disappear into a compact national body, geared up for united action in conducting the impending war to repel the foreign assailant.
The Bolsheviks galvanized the Russian people, the most collectivist group of white humans, not with superior doctrine, but with their utter zeal for self-sacrifice and united action, and the people bought it hook, line and sinker.
H: “The important point is that in the poignantly frustrated the propensities for united action and self-sacrifice arise spontaneously. It should be possible, therefore, to gain some clues concerning the nature of these propensities, and the technique to be employed for their deliberate inculcation, by tracing their spontaneous emergence in the frustrated mind. What ails the frustrated? It is the consciousness of an irremediably blemished self. Their chief desire is to escape that self—and it is this desire which manifests itself in a propensity for united action and self-sacrifice. The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one’s individual distinctness in a compact collective whole. Moreover, the estrangement from the self is usually accompanied by a train of diverse and seemingly unrelated attitudes and impulses which a closer probing reveals to be essential factors in the process of unification and self-sacrifice. In other words, frustration not only gives rise to the desire for unity and the readiness for self-sacrifice but also creates a mechanism for their realization. Such diverse phenomena as deprecation of the present, a facility for make-believe, a proneness to hate, a readiness to imitate, credulity, a readiness to attempt the impossible, and many other which crowd the minds of the intensely frustrated are, as we shall see, unifying agents and prompters of recklessness.”
My response: That people can and do become poignantly frustrated, when their social order and social metanarrative fall apart, and they spontaneous seek a replacement holy cause offering them a mass movement with lots of opportunity for self-sacrifice and united action, where they can flee from the blighted self into a temporary social order and its justifying story, that will morph into a new social order and a new governing societal metanarrative, where they can go back to sleep, back into discontented conformity to a new social order and its societal metanarrative, where individual existence, individual self-awareness, and the responsibility to run one’s own life are all duties that are denied and avoided.
They have escaped their consciousness of their personal, irremediably blemished selves by hiding inside collective social structure with all of its justifying excuses for how noble it is to act as a group and to sacrifice oneself to a collective cause, for the common good.
Building and joining a mass movement gives a frustrated people, in times of crisis, a vehicle for journeying away from self-esteem, self-awareness and the duty to handle one’s own affairs.
Were I to offer the American masses a better way forward than this whole destructive, immoral syndrome of sleeping, nonindividuating, group-living masses, I would train the young to live as self-realizing supercitizens. They would be alert to the dangers of gurus and demagogues peddling their holy causes.
The supercitizens would bring change to themselves and for society peacefully and calmly, as individuals and as individuators, by not panicking and being steered into ideology, tyranny, panic and surrender of their independence and liberty and self-rule. By transitioning calmly and cooperatively, as a people through times of crisis, working together and sacrificing the self for the common good or national cause, only as long as necessary, only to the degree necessary, as all agree that the individual will go back to individuating and free living and free willing as soon as the crisis abates, then a people can receive change and chaos without it overwhelming them or the society they live in.
The individuating supercitizen must realize that he is to live in the present, while aware of history and the future, that he will substitute belief in the real, the true, the good and the beautiful instead of settling for make-believe. He will push love over hate, the willingness to originate rather than just imitate, to be idealistic, loyal, and patriotic, but still a critical thinker. He will not attempt the impossible, but he will undertake great tasks in person, and support worthy national goals.
H: “In Sections 44-103 an attempt will be made to show that when we set out to inculcate in people a facility for united action and self-sacrifice, we do all we can, whether we know it or not, to induce and encourage an estrangement from the self, and that we strive to evoke and cultivate in them many of the diverse attitudes and impulses which accompany the spontaneous estrangement of the self in the frustrated. In short, we shall try to show that the technique of an active mass movement consists basically in the inculcation and cultivation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind.”
My response: It seems that people, as individuals ands as group-livers have two ethical ways to go: either we grow individualistic, moral adults that are in harmony and healthy relationship with their own selves—thus are immune to the state or guru call for united action and self-sacrifice—or we encourage an estrangement of people from themselves so they dislike themselves intensely, and these group-loving, self-hating, frustrated, immoral adults are now primed and eager to hide from a ruined self, galloping into the arms of the state or the guru, volunteering to sacrifice themselves, clamoring for united action.
H: “The reader is expected to quarrel with much that is said in this part of the book. He is likely to feel much has been exaggerated and much ignored. But 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. ‘To illustrate a principle, ‘says Bagehot, ‘you must exaggerate much and you must omit much.’”
My response: Hoffer is reminding the reader, with this paragraph, that he is an amateur if brilliant, accurate, articulate philosopher and ethicist. Note that his truth—I think is near to be objective truth about the nature of individuals, how they relate to themselves, and how they relate to themselves and to each other in the two primary modes of existing: individual-living and group-living—exaggerates much and ignores much.
I have written elsewhere that he writes this way across decades, in many books. Many writers, playwrights, and artists, create and write, like Hoffer did, wielding the written word in ways that are approximate and metaphorical, yet precise and zinging, and that non-scientifically expressed communication somehow comes closer to objective truth than the dry, rigorous, concise, formal language from an analytic philosopher.
H: “The capacities for united action and self-sacrifice seem almost always to go together. When we hear of a group that is particularly contemptuous of death, we are usually justified in concluding that the group is closely knit and thoroughly unified. On the other hand, when we face a member of a compact group, we are likely to find him contemptuous of death. Both united action and self-sacrifice require self-diminution. In order to become part of a compact whole, the individual has to forego much. He has to give up privacy, individual judgment and other individual possessions. To school a person to united action is, therefore, to ready him for acts of self-denial. On the other hand, the man who practices self-abnegation, sloughs off the hard shell which keeps him apart from others and is thus made assimilable. Every unifying agent is, therefore, a promoter of self-sacrifice and vice versa. Nevertheless, in the following sections, a division is made for the sake of convenience. But the dual function of each factor is always kept in mind.”
My response: It is key to understand that Hoffer is focusing on the fact that the capacities for united action and self-sacrifice always go together. To awaken, unite and galvanize a civilian population so they will unite for common acting and are willing to self-sacrifice their privacy, their individual judgment, their possession and even their lives for the holy cause, the demagogue, guru or the state has to make people come alive and be roused out of their psychological state of individual discontent with their lives, their situation and their very selves, and their self-regard is transformed into frustration, a powerful loathing of their selves, their lives, their circumstances: at this point they are desperate to run away from the ruined selves, and they are ripe candidates for enlisting into the active mass movement, needful of their united action and willingness to sacrifice themselves to see the cause grow, spread and gain power.
H: It is well to outline here the plan followed in Sections 44-63, which deal with the subject of self-sacrifice.
The technique of fostering the readiness to fight and to die consists in separating the individual from his flesh-and-blood self—in not allowing him to be his real self. This can be achieved by the thorough assimilation of the individual into a compact collective body—Sections 44-46; by endowing him with an imaginary self (make-believe)—Section 47; by implanting in him a deprecating attitude toward the present and riveting his interests on things that are not yet—Sections 48-55; by interposing a fact-proof screen between him and reality (doctrine)—Sections 56-59, by preventing, through the injection of passions, the establishment of a stable equilibrium between the individual and his self (fanaticism)—Section 60-63.”
My response: The true believer, willing to fight and die for a word or cause, is not someone normally in touch with his real, existing self. Under Objectivist ethics, the individual’s moral duty is to himself, living here and now doing what makes him happy, extending, making full, real, rewarding, productive and meaningful, his life. This has nothing to do with dying for one’s cause.
The true believer is passionate, not logical, and reasonable. He becomes an imaginary person, not his real self, an imaginary knight on a steed, charging into battle to defeat evildoers, to rescue the damsel (his ism) in distress.
He is convinced by his handlers in the movement that the present is worthless, that his life will be noble and worthy only if he is willing to give up his life, even being killed fighting for the cause. The doctrines proclaimed by the rulers of his cause, his guru, prophet, or demagogue, make him impervious to sound argument or evidence presented to counter his obsession with service to his ism.
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