From Page 109 to 113 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer discusses his understanding of how leadership of a mass movement works. I quote him and then comment on his content.
Hoffer (H after this): “ Leadership
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No matter how vital we think the role of leadership in the role of the mass movement, there is no doubt the leader cannot create the conditions which make the rise of the mass movement possible. He cannot conjure a movement out of the void. There has to be an eagerness to follow and obey, and an intense dissatisfaction with things as they are, before movement and leader can make their appearance. When conditions are not ripe, the potential leader, no matter how gifted, and his holy cause, no matter how potent, remain without a following. The First World War and its aftermath readied the ground for the rise of the Bolshevik, Fascist and Nazi movements. Had the war been averted or postponed for a decade or two, the fate of Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler would not have been different from that of the brilliant plotters and agitators of the nineteenth century who never succeeded in ripening the frequent disorders and crises of their time into full-scale mass movements. Something was lacking. The European masses up to the cataclysmic events of the First World War had not utterly despaired of the present and were, therefore, not willing to sacrifice it for a new life and a new world. Even the nationalist leaders, who fared better than the revolutionists, did not succeed in making of nationalism the holy cause it has been since. Militant nationalism and militant revolutionism seem to be contemporaneous.”
My response: Hoffer is right: a demagogue or guru and his holy cause will not take hold and grow into a mass movement, in any given nation, unless discontented masses are now frustrated, so desperate to escape an unbearable present way of living, by leaping recklessly into an unknown, tumultuous, uncertain future introduced to them and through them by the mass movement generated by their leader.
My reform is to train the masses to be individuating supercitizens, so they are so contented most of the time with their personal lives, able to survive calmly and logically whatever happens, so they never need to join a mass movement to seek relief from their unbearable personal lives and ruined personalities.
When individuating supercitizens are living the Dennis Prager moral dictum that it is each person’s moral duty to be happy (Act happy, even if you are not, and eventually you will become stoically happy or as happy as you can be in tough times, because a happy moral agent will feel good about himself, and treat himself (self-care) well; as a result of his self-care, he will feel good about himself, so he can be kind to others (other-care) because he has no internal anger, self-loathing and resentment that he needs to dump on some other defenseless, blameless victim and soul.), then each moral agent is contented, surviving and even flourishing.
This maverizing supercitizen is functioning and keeps going, ever recovering, and bouncing back, and trying harder and anew each day as long as he lives. Despite sometimes devastating, private tragedies endured, and jarring, encountered public chaos, collapsed social order and crumbing belief systems, if the grateful, God-worshiping, upbeat, good-willed individual has heard and accepted that she will live by the Dennis Prager invitation that one must make the moral choice to be happy (or not), and that, as a result, she will be a contented, sane, healthy individual that would never settle for self-abasement by living the degraded life of a true believer in self-surrender to a holy cause. This is how I suggest we protect society from the machinations and power-grabbing schemes of malcontents, people-haters, nihilists, and revolutionaries.
Where a discontented, nonindividuating, group-living joiner, living in sin in accordance with altruist-collectivist ethics, she is ill-equipped to survive the shocking, shattering internally and externally inrushing, private and public hard times that could lead her to become frustrated, to flee the integrated self into the beckoning collective holy cause. She and other frustrated joiners are ideal candidates for seeking a guru and holy cause to join and obey in their frantic ambition to escape from themselves and the free burden to think and fend for themselves. These desperate souls, these disintegrated, anomic individuals are the ones that populate a mass movement.
Without their willing participation, the leader of the holy cause remains a powerless whiner alone, ignored, impotently ranting, and shouting at the fringes of society.
H: “In Britain, too, the leader had to wait for the times to ripen before he could play his role. During the 1930’s the potential leader (Churchill) was prominent in the eyes of the people and made himself heard, day in, day out. But the will to follow was not there. It was only when disaster shook the country to its foundation and made individual autonomous lives untenable and meaningless that the leader came into his own.”
My response: I believe Churchill was a great soul but not seeking to set up a corrupt mass movement. Rather, his political and national aim for the British was to organize homeland resistance, a patriotic, nationalistic resurgence of British pride and willingness to defend itself against Hitler. The British citizens sensed he was a great soul and did not like him (Most citizens, even in individualistic Britain, were nonindividuators and group-livers, so they detest great-souled leaders naturally.) In regular times, they would not vote for him unless the need was dire, which then came about (It could be that this is how the Israelis today feel about Bibi Netanyahu, and he is gone from office as soon as the current war against Hamas is won by Israel—it could be that Abraham Lincoln was a great soul that barely got elected.).
I want the citizens of America—or any country for that matter—to live as individuating supercitizens, so their lives as autonomous individuals is tenable if shaken and painful when society, law and order, their way of life, and the economy collapse. We do not need gurus, holy causes or mass movements like Leftism or cultural neo-Marxism to save us in America today.
H: “There is a period of waiting in the wings—often a very long period—for all the great leaders whose entrance on the scene seems to us a most crucial point in the course of a mass movement. Accidents and the activities of other men have set the stage for them before they can enter and start their performance. ‘The commanding man in a momentous day seems only to be the last accident in a series.
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Once the stage is set, the presence of an outstanding leader is indispensable. Without him there will be no movement. The ripeness of the times does not automatically produce a mass movement, nor can elections, laws and bureaucratic bureaus hatch one. It was Lenin who forced the flow of events into the channels of the Bolshevik revolution. Had he died in Switzerland, or on his way to Russia in 1917, it is almost certain that other Bolsheviks would have joined a coalition government. The result might have been a more or less liberal republic run chiefly by the bourgeoisie. In the case of Mussolini and Hitler the evidence is even more decisive: without them there would have been neither a Fascist nor a Nazi movement.”
My response: The leader of a mass movement cannot take the stage unless the people are ripe to receive his leadership, and without this singular leader, the mass movement very well might not materialize.
H: “Events in England at this moment also demonstrate the indispensability of a gifted leader for the crystallization of a mass movement. A genuine leader (a socialist Churchill) at the head of the Labor government would have initiated the drastic reforms of nationalization in the fervent atmosphere of a mass movement and not in the undramatic drabness of Socialist austerity. He would have cast the British worker in the role of a heroic producer and in that of a pioneer in truly scientific industrialism. He would have made the British feel that their chief task is to show the whole world, and America and Russia in particular, what a truly civilized nation can do with modern methods of production when free alike from the confusion, waste and greed of capitalist management and from the byzantinism, barbarism and ignorance of a Bolshevik bureaucracy. He would have know how to infuse the British people with the same pride and hope which sustained them in the darkest hours of the war.
It needs the iron will, daring and vision of an exceptional leader to concert and mobilize existing attitudes and impulses into the collective drive of a mass movement,”
My response: Just think if we rear up a generation of anarchist-individuator supercitizens: each adult American citizen possessing personally the wisdom and self-restraint, coupled with his willingness to organize, work and united with other maverized supercitizens, to run the country and force gurus, demagogues, judges, politicians, leaders, political parties and bureaucrats to run the country along policy lines laid out for these elites by the united voters. The voters come up with a national agenda beforehand, and then, en masse they tell their elites and leaders what to do and how to run the country. This pre-determined national agenda is crated and updated as need an by the people, whose majority-agreed-upon political agenda is then given to the politicians to enact, largely unchanged, or else these politicians will be voted out of office. The people run things from the bottom up, and make their will known, and make the leaders tow the line all the time.
Where each indivduating supercitizen wields the wisdom, iron will, daring and vision as a near full-time political participant, change can be achieved within democratic setting, without a need to resort to demagogues, great-souled leaders (whether a Lincoln or a Lenin), holy causes and mass movement to make the system function.
Where the supercitizen masses run the country well at room temperature, if they vote in a great-souled Churchill, so much the better, but his presence need not be a reality.
H: "The leader personifies the certitude of the creed and the defiance and grandeur of power. He articulates and justifies the resentment damned up in the souls of the frustrated. He kindles the vision of a breathtaking future so as to justify the sacrifice of a transitory present. He stages the world of make-believe so indispensable for the realization of self-sacrifice and united action. He evokes the enthusiasm of communion—the sense of liberation from a petty and meaningless individual existence.”
My response: People need a story and values to live by and meaning in their lives. We can invite people to self-sacrifice and join together in united action in a calm, civilized way: these millions of stoic but iron-willed individuating supercitizens can work together to run society, and to go to war or whatever is the great, pressing national need, met without losing their autonomous individualism and self-directed lives, significant and meaningful.
We can work together to solve national problems without converting voters into frustrated, true-believing, collectivist and collectivized, self-hating automatons and true-believers that effect social change only as radicalized members of a mass movement.
H: “What are the talents for such a performance? Exceptional intelligence, noble character and originality seem neither indispensable nor perhaps desirable. The main requirement seems to be: audacity and a joy in defiance; an iron will; a fanatical conviction that he is in possession of the one and only truth; faith in his destiny and luck; a capacity for passionate hatred; contempt for the present; a cunning estimate of human nature; a delight in symbols (spectacles and ceremonies); unbounded brazenness which finds expression in a disregard of consistency and fairness; a recognition that innermost craving of a following is for communion and that there can never be too much of it; a capacity for winning and holding the utmost loyalty of a group of able lieutenants. This last faculty is one of the most essential and most elusive. The uncanny powers of a leader manifest themselves not so much in the hold he has on the masses as in his ability to dominate and almost bewitch a small group of able men. These men must be fearless, proud, intelligent and capable of organizing and running large-scale undertakings, and yet they must submit wholly to the will of the leader, draw their inspiration and driving force from him, and glory in this submission.”
My response: This is likely Hoffer’s most original, complete and brilliant description of anything in this masterful book. He lays out the qualities required for the successful leader of a mass movement to possess to hold sway over the masses and his able team of lieutenants. This sure sounds like a description of Adolph Hitler to me.
We must as individuating supercitizens, vow to ourselves and to each other, never to worship or abase ourselves to any great leader, whether a Lincoln or a Stalin. Lincoln, if in office long enough, would be corrupted by total obedience, complete voter submission and god-like reverence for the President for life. A Stalin, so adulated, would become even worse.
H: “Not all the qualities enumerated above are equally essential. The most decisive for the effectiveness of a mass movement leader seems to be audacity, fanatical faith in a holy cause, an awareness of the importance of a close-knit collectivity, and, above all, the ability to evoke fervent devotion in a group of able lieutenants. Trotsky’s failure as a leader came from his neglect, more probably his inability, to create a machine of able and loyal lieutenants. He did not attract personal sympathies, or if he did he could not keep them. An additional shortcoming was his ineradicable respect for the individual, especially a creative individual.”
My response: A guru or demagogue leading the holy cause is not an individualist; he is the most selfless member of the holy cause and the mass movement he leads. He is a pure joiner, a demonic altruist who wields the most concentrated, almost god-like centralized, absolutely corrupting power of powerlessness. He is lies and falsehood incarnate. He is pure murder, pure hatred, unchecked violence, frothing rage, murderous impulses, a preacher of uncompromising doctrinal fanaticism and concentrated self-loathing.
This powerful collectivist hates all individuals and will—if he can pull it off--do all that he can in his power to exterminate or invert any sane, moral individualist into a corrupt, soulless, crazed believer serving the holy cause.
Stalin the collectivist could wipe out individualism among the Soviets, but the relatively humane Trotsky could not be so ruthless and indecent towards individualists in his society.
H: “He was not convinced of the sinfulness and ineffectuality of an autonomous individual existence and did not grasp the overwhelming importance of communion to a mass movement.”
My response: Stalin the radically pure altruist and collectivist told and live a powerful, popular, socially-accepted-in-his-country-lie, that the virtuous, holy, godly, effectual and fulfilling life of autonomous individual or individuating existence was sinful and ineffectual. Stalin also told and was believed by millions that mass movement existence in service to a totalitarian holy cause was the way to experience maximum joy and satisfaction in communion with others, and that this was a moral and political, higher level opportunity or each Soviet citizen.
Communion with other or maximum group-living togetherness as only one single consciousness—that is the collectivist ideal.
Trotsky did not recognize or appreciate this fierce, frenzied, social craving that true-believing Russians experienced and were rewarded with, as they sought after and received group-affirmation by fleeing from their spoiled, private, separate lives as individuals, rushing headlong into personal oblivion as part of the collective unit, their mass movement.
H: “Sun Yat-sen ‘attracted to himself . . . an extraordinary number of able and devoted followers, firing their imaginations with his visions of a new China and compelling loyalty and self-sacrifice.’ Unlike him, Chiang Kai-shek seems to lack every essential quality of a mass movement leader, On the other hand, de Gaulle is certainly a man to watch. The leaders of the Communist parties outside Russia, by their subservience to Stalin and the Politburo cannot attain the status of genuine leaders. They remain able lieutenants. For communism to become an effective mass movement in any Western country, one of two opposites has to happen. Either the personality of Stalin is made so tangible and immediate that it can act as a catalyst, or the local Communist party has to cut loose from Russia and, after the manner of Tito, flaunt its defiance against capitalism and Stalinism. Had Lenin been the emissary of a leader and a politburo sitting in some distant foreign land, it is doubtful whether he could have exercised his fateful influence on the course of events in Russia.”
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