Unifying

 

On Pages 89 and 90 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer notes that hatred is a most effective unifying agent for mass movements. If people were basically good, how could hatred unify them? It could not. If collectivism is evil, then it makes sense that hatred is a unifying agent; if that is the case—and it is, then, should we be group-living and pushing group rights over individual rights? Emphatically, no!

 

Here is what Hoffer wrote and I respond to it.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                            XIV

 

                                                        Unifying Agents

 

                                                            Hatred

 

                                                                 65

 

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious to his weal and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass. Heine suggest that what Christian love could not do is effected by a common hatred.”

 

My response: Humans are born evil, and this means they are selfless and hate themselves. Evil is hatred, so if you want to unite and inspire the masses, offer them a scapegoat to rally around and intensely loathe. That people are easier to united by hating in support of a destructive cause to express in action their malice.be

 

It is far harder and often impossible to galvanize people to unite in love for a worthy kind cause. This positivity failure is a sign that people are selfless and self-loathing: uniting them is easier for a destructive cause than a noble cause. We have to differentiate between the two ways of uniting and promote uniting for love and betterment of all but not for uniting to hate and causing fighting war and injury.

 

H: “Mass movements can rise and spread without a belief in God, but never without a belief in a devil.”

 

My response: This is another of Hoffer’s most brilliant insights, and that hatred and a love of a devil shows that people are not born good; that collectivism corrupts more than it uplifts and that the mass movement with all these selfless people need a devil to pay for all of their misery, a scapegoat.

 

H: “Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. When Hitler was whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed he answered: ‘No . . . We should have to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.’ F. A. Voigt tells of a Japanese mission that arrived in Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement. Voigt asked a member of the mission what he thought of the movement. He replied: ‘It is a magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can’t, because we haven’t got any Jews.” It is perhaps true that the insight and shrewdness of the men who know how to set a mass movement in motion, or how to keep one going, manifest themselves as much in knowing how to pick a worthy enemy as in knowing what doctrine to embrace and what program to adopt. The theoreticians of the Kremlin hardly waited for the guns of World War II to cool before they picked the democratic West, and particularly America, as the chosen enemy. It is doubtful whether any gesture of goodwill or any concession from our side will reduce the volume and venom of vilification against us emanating from the Kremlin.

 

One of Chaing Kai-shek’s  most serious shortcomings was his failure to find an appropriate new devil once the Japanese enemy vanished from the scene at the end of the war. The ambitious but simple-minded General was perhaps too self-conceited to realize it was not he but the Japanese devil who generated the enthusiasm, the unity and readiness for self-sacrifice of the Chinese masses."

 

My response: Any group like a mass movement is motivated to unity, enthusiasm, and self-sacrifice more through hatred and competition with a foe as an individual or rival group, nation or tribe, cause, or religion; these foes are useful and sought as the targeted devil or enemy to go after and fight. This need for a devil to scapegoat is an old human weakness and prime fountain of expressing and targeting group malevolence upon external persons or peoples.

 

We cannot morally grow as rational egoists until we, especially as groupists, agree to no longer seek a devil to dump on, and refuse to ever be the devil that a group dumps on; this cruel, inhuman, barbaric pattern must end.