More Gullible

 

On Pages 81 and 82 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer asks if the frustrated are more easily indoctrinated than the nonfrustrated? It may be that the frustrated are more easy to indoctrinate if they are predisposed to listen, but they may also be much harder to convert if they and those they are allied with are focused on resisting all attempts to change their minds, for that is how fanatics think.

 

I will quote Hoffer and then react to him.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                                     59

 

Are the frustrated more easily indoctrinated than the nonfrustrated? Pascal was of the opinion that ‘one was well-minded to understand holy writ when one hated oneself.’ There is apparently some connection between dissatisfaction with oneself and a proneness to credulity. The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only through the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They ask to be deceived. What Stresemann said of the Germans is true of the frustrated in general: ‘(They) pray not only for (their) daily bread, but also for their daily illusion.’ The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led.

 

A peculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture. The association of believing and lying is not characteristic solely of children. The inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism.”

 

My response: Hoffer insists that the frustrated are easier to indoctrinate for they flee the self into collective fantasy, the world of the lie, so this facility to be credulous makes the frustrated gullible and likely to believe what is told to them by the charlatans running the mass movement. There is an air of illusion about a mass movement and its ruling doctrine.