Not Irreligious

 

I am quoting from Pages xii and xiii of Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer. I will then comment on what I quote.

 

Hoffer (H) after this: “The book concerns itself chiefly with the active, revivalist phase of mass movements. This phase is dominated by the true believer—the man of fanatical faith who is ready to sacrifice his life for a holy cause—and an attempt is made to trace his genesis and outline his nature. As an aid in this effort, use is made of a working hypothesis. Starting out with fact that the frustrated predominate in the early adherents of all mass movement and that they usually join of their own accord, it is assumed: 1) that frustration of itself, without any proselytizing prompting from the outside, can generate most of the peculiar characteristics of the true believer; 2) that an effective technique of conversion consist basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind.”

 

My response: The core of Hoffer’s book revolves around his concept of frustrated people that populate the mass movement. If someone is frustrated, she is upset that she cannot seem to make headway to make things better in her life. Once she reaches the conclusion that it will never be any better for her, her anger, despair and resent turn to self-loathing. If and when it becomes severe enough, she could seek to lose herself, to annihilate her consciousness by fleeing into the open arms of her selected collective cause; there her anonymity of membership is guaranteed inside the holy cause. This makes her a fanatic or true believer, a willing, eager supporter of the mass movement she belongs to.

 

She is willing to die for her adopted holy cause, which she fanatically pushes upon the rest of the world. Note that (my words not Hoffers) her moral motive is altruistic, complete self-rejection and utter dedication to the service of others, especially co-members of the holy cause. She is devoid of healthy self-esteem and wholesome personal pride: her primary drive is to escape her ruined, frustrated self because her internal unhappy and misery are so intolerable. She will wipe out her independent consciousness by joining the collective they, a most appreciated, effective way to kill of her unwelcome personal consciousness of her blemished self.

 

Note that brilliant Hoffer intuits that the effective way to grow the mass movement is to inculcate the proclivities and responses of frustration in the minds and consciousness of those exterior to the cause. If crises, mass hysteria or a radical’s successful deconstruction of the metanarrative that drives a people and keeps the people relatively content and quiet, can be arranged, then an uprooted populace, bereft of purpose and meaning, become frustrated, and likely converts to a mass movement, whose holy cause offers them meaning and a replacement metanarrative to ensconce themselves inside of.

 

H: “To test the validity of these assumptions, it was necessary to inquire into the ills that afflict the frustrated, how they react against them, the degree to which these reactions correspond to the responses of the true believer, and, finally, the manner in which these reactions can facilitate the rise and spread of a mass movement. It was also necessary to examine the practices of contemporary movements, where successful techniques of conversion have been perfected and applied, in order to discover whether they corroborate the view that a proselytizing mass movement deliberately fosters in its adherents a frustrated state of mind, and that it automatically advances its interest when it second the propensities of the frustrated.”

 

My response: Almost no one would deny that certain cultures reinforce the sovereignty of the individual (America) where other cultures press the people to favor group rights and group identity (Russia). It is my contention, though not Hoffer's, that collectivized, group-living people are semi-frustrated, miserable people kept relatively stable and sane in the society in which they are born and live. People that adhere to altruist-collectivist ethics can live quietly in their traditional collective society for generations. But, should that society and its controlling metanarrative rupture and collapse, the people are kicked loose to fend for themselves, and, in that state of panic and discomfort, personal frustration, suffering and unhappiness make the people ripe for being converted to a passing mass movement.

 

In the first place, if these people were not quiet, altruists and groupists in their quiet phase, they would not be oriented to fall apart and seek collective solutions and holy causes to latch onto in time of catastrophe. We can eliminate or at least mitigate the size and influence of mass movements by rearing the young to live as self-realizing individualists.

 

There is also learned, scientific ways to convert people to join mass movements as Hoffer alludes to above.

 

H: “It is necessary for most of us these days to have some insight into the motives and responses of the true believer. For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image. And whether we are to line up with him or against him, it is well that we should know all we can concerning his nature and potentialities.”

 

My response: What I love and admire about Hoffer are two things: his genius is for discovering truth, and, secondly, this self-educated philosopher anticipated that the religious nature of the true believer (I add, in his quiet, law-abiding, middle-class group-living phase as well as his active role as a true believer marching through history with his movement in its active phase of operation). The true believer’s faith in his holy cause is that hyper-enthusiastic fervor of the fundamentalist forwarding his cause by any means, by love or war, by persuasion, by flattery or threats of violence.

 

Not how Hoffer the atheist refers to the mid-20^th century as a godless age of science, technology, urban living, and secular ascendancy. What Jordan Peterson and Karl Jung have pointed out is that a people deprive of their religious roots are a frustrated, lost people, and their innate need to worship God will not long tolerate a meaning vacuum. If they cannot believe in God, they will believe in anything, and replacing God and religion with a holy cause (the new religion) and its ruling demagogue (the new deity), often is the consequence. The affiliation to this new religion and deity is radicalized and the believer is converted into a extremist true believer.

 

These active mass movements are peopled by adherent on the march through history, to shape the world in their own image. The influence of these people upon society is huge and pressing, and I regard neo-Marxist postmodernism or secular Leftism as a mass movement that incrementally has taken over much of America, and it remains to be seen if they can be dislodged, moderated, or otherwise defeated.

 

H: “It is perhaps not superfluous to add a word of caution. When we speak of a family likeness of mass movements, we use the world ‘family’ in a taxonomical sense. The tomato and nightshade are of the same family, the Solonaceae. Though the one is nutritious and the other poisonous, they have many morphological, anatomical and physiological traits in common so that even the non-botanist senses a family likeness. The assumption that mass movements have many traits in common does not imply that all mass movements are equally beneficent or poisonous. The book passes no judgments and expresses no preferences. It merely tries to explain; and the explanations—all of them—are in the nature of suggestions and arguments even when they are stated in what seems to be a categorical tone. I can do no better than quote Montaigne: ‘All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.’”

 

My response: When he offers his social theory of mass movements with the cautionary reminder, his moderate nature comes through as he reminds the reader that his suggestions are there for thought. He is not claiming is view is right or the only take on things. He notes that he writes categorically but that he is in fact more self-qualifying than he first comes across as.