True Believer Violence

 

From Pages 104 to 106 of his book, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer reveals the powerful relationship between true believership and violence: I will quote him and then comment on his content.

 

Hoffer (H after this): “                         85

 

It is probably true that violence breeds fanaticism as that fanaticism begets violence. It is often impossible to tell which came first. Both those who employ violence and those subject to it are likely to develop a fanatic state of mind.”

 

My response: These two sentences, like many of Hoffer’s postulations, are rich with meaning. If the true believer imperialist uses the sword to coerce and terrorize his victims into submission and acceptance of the imperialist’s holy cause, both the attacker/abuser and the victim/abused become fanatics, and proselytized true believers. Violence and fanaticism go together, and so does collectivist ethics and collectivist tyranny and imperialism, for the mass movement is the ultimate large monster group on the make and the prowl.

 

Where groups are not radicalized and utterly hallowed as a movement pushing the one true cause, or where individuals are moderate and independent, and make up their own minds, then they will not be much violent (usually or only in justifiable self-defense); they accept a proposition or push one persuasively or by logical argument, but seek not to use group pressure or the threat of force if the proselytized refuses to capitulate.

 

Notice that the individualist or egoist is rational, moderate, and nonviolent, that is goodness. Notice the collectivist/groupist/joiner/altruist, especially in his passionate mode as a frustrated true believer, is irrational, passionate, fanatical and violent, and that is evil.

 

H: “Ferrero says of the terrorists of the French Revolution that the more blood they ‘shed the more they needed to believe in their principles as absolutes. Only the absolute might still absolve them in their own eyes and sustain their desperate energy. (They) did not spill all that blood because they believed in popular sovereignty as a religious truth; they tried to believe in popular sovereignty as a religious truth because their fear made them spill so much blood.’ The practice of terror serves the true believer not only to cow and crush his opponents but also to invigorate and intensify his own faith. Every lynching in our own South not only intimidates the Negro but also invigorates the fanatical conviction of white supremacy.

 

In the case of the coerced, too, violence can beget fanaticism. There is evidence that the coerced convert is often as fanatical in his adherence to the new faith as the persuaded convert, and sometimes even more so. It is not always true that ‘He who complies against his will is of his own opinion still.’ Islam imposed its faith by force, yet the coerced Muslims displayed a devotion to the new faith more ardent than that of the first Arabs engaged in the movement. According to Renan, Islam obtained from its coerced converts ‘a faith ever tending to grow stronger.’ Fanatical orthodoxy is in all movements a late development. It comes when the movement is in full possession of power and can impose its faith by force as well as by persuasion.

 

Thus coercion when implacable and persistent has an unequaled persuasiveness, and this is not only with simple souls but also with those who pride themselves on the strength and integrity of their intellect. When an arbitrary decree from the Kremlin forces scientists, writers and artists to recant their convictions and confess their errors, the chances are that such recantations and confessions represent genuine conversions rather than lip service. It needs fanatical faith to rationalize our cowardice.”