Coalescing Power

 

Eric Hoffer, on Pages 101 and 102 of his book, The True Believer, writes of the enhanced coalescing power that unification releases in its merged true believers:

 

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Unification of itself, whether brought about by persuasion, coercion or spontaneous surrender, tends to intensify the imitative capacity. A civilian drafter into the army and made a member of a close-knit military unit becomes more imitative than he was in civilian life. The unified individual is without a distinct self; he is perennially incomplete and immature, and therefore without resistance against influences without. The marked imitativeness of a primitive people is perhaps due less to their primitiveness than to the fact that they are usually members of compact clans or tribes.”

 

My response: When the individual’s identity and reason for living is wrapped up in his being unified with his group rather than his identity and motive for living being his discovering for himself whom he is and what he plans to do, he will want to imitate his peers to gain rank, popularity, social acceptance from and increase his social capital with those that he lives for. The more distinct is the sense of self fielded by the individual, the more will he be less interested in heeding cues to imitate his clique neighbors.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “The ready imitativeness of a unified following is both an advantage and a peril to a mass movement. The faithful are easily led and molded, but they are also particularly susceptible to foreign influences. One has the impression that a thoroughly unified group is easily seduced and corrupted. The preaching of all mass movements bristles with admonitions against copying foreign models and ‘doing after all their abominations.’ The imitation of outsiders is branded as treason and apostasy. ‘Whoever copies a foreigner is guilty of le’se-nation (an insult to a nation) like a spy who admits an enemy by a secret doorway. Every device is used to cut off the faithful from intercourse with unbelievers. Some mass movements go to the extreme of leading their following into the wilderness in order to allow an undisturbed settling of the new pattern of life.”

 

My response: It seems that the imitativeness of true believers makes them so without personal identity or personal opinion (the fruit of independent thinking) that they are fanatical pro-holy cause doctrine in one instance, but being so copycat prone, they could be seduced into adopting foreign ways. The leader of their holy cause keeps them in complete isolation, controlling all information and rationales that the masses are allowed to hear or entertain. No foreign, or competing ideas are invited or accessible to consider.

 

H: “The imitativeness of its members gives a thoroughly unified group great flexibility and adaptability. It can adopt innovation and change its orientation with astounding ease. The rapid modernization of a united Japan or Turkey contrasts markedly with the slow and painful adaptation to new ways in China, Iran and other countries not animated by a spirit of unity. A thoroughly unified Soviet Russia has a better chance of assimilating new methods and a new way of life than the loosely joined Russia of the Czars. It is also obvious that a primitive people with an intact collective framework can be more readily modernized than one with a crumbling tribal or communal pattern.”

 

My response: Whatever the leaders of the tribe or mass movement decide that the movement will do is what the movement does. If it resists change, it is reactionary; if change is welcome, the transformation will be rapid, drastic, complete, and universal. Where unity of the collective unit is powerful and intact, the mutual imitativeness of the members will make them able to change abruptly when united—note how mass movements have changed history by turning towards progress on a dime.