Some Factors

 

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Hoffer C

 

Some Factors

 

From Pages 155 to 157 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer writes of some factors that prolong or shorten the life span of a mass movement in its active phase. I quote him and then comment on his content.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “ 

 

                        Some Factors Which Determine The Length Of The Active Phase

 

A mass movement with a concrete, limited objective is likely to have a shorter active phase than a movement with a nebulous, indefinite objective. The vague objective is perhaps indispensable for the development of chronic extremism. Said Oliver Cromwell: ‘A man never goes so far as when he does not know whether he is going.’”

 

My response: It seem that a particular, limited objective is a moderating influence on a fanatical, destructive mass movement. It seems that limited chaos, or disciplined liberty, or lawful personal liberty are really individual controls of unleashed chaos, whereby the individual creates cosmos by rationally and sentimentally managed the clash between his chaotic and structure-imposing predilections and urges.

 

The mass movement lasts longest, is the most destructive and demonically unleashed upon suffering humanity, when its handlers have no limiting objective to shut it down after reaching that objective. Pure chaos, which a prolonged mass movement is, is a collectivity of true believers and fanatic, pure altruists, is their objective, and burning down the world is their aim, and they will reach it if not prevented from carrying out this holocaust.

 

H: “When a mass movement is set in motion to free a nation from tyranny, either domestic or foreign, or to resist an aggressor, or to renovate a backward society, there is a natural point of termination once the struggle with the enemy is over or the process of reorganization is nearing completion. On the other hand, when the objective is an ideal society of perfect unity and selflessness—whether it be the City of God, a Communist heaven on earth, or Hitler’s warrior state—the active phase is without an automatic end. Where unity and self-sacrifice are indispensable for the normal functioning of society, everyday life is likely either to be religiofied (common tasks turn into holy causes) or militarized. In either case, the pattern developed by the active phase is likely to be fixed and perpetuated.”

 

My response: What Hoffer describes in the paragraph above sounds like what is going on in North Korea even today. Where the active phase of a mass movement is the dispensation of an established society, pure unity of all members of society into a mass movement is a socially, culturally, legally and institutionalized going and ongoing concern. Here is where self-sacrifice is purest, and the evil ethics of altruism-collectivism is exemplified at its totalitarian worst. The future of humanity is the North Koreanization of life across the globe should the Leftists or cultural Marxism establish their world government of global reach.

 

H: “Jacob Burckhardt and Ernest Renan were among the very few in the hopeful second half of the nineteenth century who sensed the ominous implications lurking in the coming millennium.”

 

My response: Jordan Peterson has repeatedly shown how prophetic Friedrich Nietzsche was too in anticipating the rise of totalitarianism, mass movements and world war in the 20^th century, now that he thought God was dead, and people would worship any deadly replacement, any empty but beguiling secular ideology or religious substitute that arose, because they need some ism to worship, to provide some kind of meaning for them.

 

H: “Burckhardt saw the militarized society: ‘I have a premonition that sounds like utter folly, and yet which positively will not leave me: the military state must become one great factory . . . What must logically come is a definite and supervised stint of misery, with promotions and n uniform, daily begun and ended to the sound of drums.’ Renan’s insight went deeper. He felt that socialism was the coming religion of the Occident, and that being a secular religion it would lead to a religiofication of politics and economics.”

 

My response: Dennis Prager has referred to Leftism or socialism as the most powerful, pervasive secular religion or creed of the last 100 years.

 

H: “He also feared a revival of Catholicism as a reaction against the new religion: ‘Let us tremble. At this very moment, perchance, the religion of the future is in the making; and we have no part in it! . . . Credulity has deep roots. Socialism may bring back by complicity of Catholicism a new Middle Age, with barbarians, churches, eclipses of liberty and individuality—in a word, of civilization.’”

 

My response: I suspect that Ernest Renan deeply influenced Hoffer’s interest in and deep comprehension of the fanatical state of mind that compels people to flee their despised private selves into the arms of awaiting demagogues and gurus pedaling a mass movement.

 

If I have time one day—I likely never will—it would be interesting and revealing to compare and contrast Hoffer with Renan, Gustave LeBon and other psychologists, thinkers and philosophers that study and reflect upon the competition between and among humans as individualists and as their being and living as joiners in various groups.