It is an article of faith in much of the Right that the only way to oppose tyrants and fanatics, whether Nazis, Communists, or ISIS, is with tyranny and fanaticism. Experience shows those willing to learn from it that both sides, indeed multiple sides can be wrong, and that building a just society works better. Science can go further, as we have seen in several areas of study described in the books we have been reading for this series. We know much more than we used to about how such people think and how such movements operate, and also about how to counter them short of war, hot or cold.
It is therefore instructive to go back and look at a seminal work on the subject, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, by Eric Hoffer, from 1951, when the science delving into Hitler and Stalin was in its infancy. (Free PDF) What did Hoffer get right, and what did he get wrong?
This book deals with some peculiarities common to all mass movements, be they religious movements, social revolutions or nationalist movements. It does not maintain that all movements are identical, but that they share certain essential characteristics which give them a family likeness.
All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance.
That lets out Gandhi, for a start, and women's suffrage, and a host of other movements aiming at peaceful social change, not by force of arms but by creating a shift in public opinion among those who are not members of the movement. Hoffer had no idea, of course, about the Civil Rights movement that came after he wrote this book. But let us take this as a definition of Hoffer's intended subject matter, rather than a statement of fact.
The movements Hoffer considers begin, as in all such studies in the last half-century, with the German Nazis. They immediately include Communist fanaticisms and Italian Fascism, but curiously not Spanish Fascism or the Socialist side in the Spanish Civil War. Various nationalist movements, especially Japanese Imperialism, are included. Slave revolts get special analysis. Religion, especially Christianity and Islam, has a prominent place. The revolutions discussed include the Russian and Chinese Communist Revolutions, the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and the Young Turks, but Hoffer has little to say about the numerous colonial revolutions.
In terms of the social science we have been looking at in this Diary series, all of which came after Hoffer wrote this book, the True Believer is primed for
- Cognitive Dissonance, as explained in When Prophecy Fails, by Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter.
- Blind obedience to the movement's leaders, as explained in Obedience to Authority, by Stanley Milgram.
- Right Wing Authoritarianism of followers and Social Dominance Orientation of leaders, with rejection of all other authority, as explained in The Authoritarians, by Robert Altemeyer, with those combining both (Double Highs) by far the worst
- Extreme cooperation with members of the same movement, as in the Prisoner's Dilemma, and extreme non-cooperation with the movement's designated enemies, as explained in The Evolution of Cooperation, by Robert Axelrod
Mass movements can be run by Leisure Class aristocrats or robber barons, or against them, and they can be run by princes of the Church or by those whom the Churches want to suppress as heretics, blasphemers, or worse, as when Martin Luther and Pope Leo X denounced each other as the Antichrist.
The leaders of many of these movements demand blind obedience, but are perfectly willing to sacrifice or turn against members of the movement for any hint or even supposition of disloyalty, or even for any real or supposed advantage that such treachery might bring. See the purges and murders by Hitler and Stalin within their own parties, and within their military or paramilitary organizations, like the Night of the Long Knives against the Nazi SA Brownshirts.
It is Hoffer's thesis that mass movements particularly draw in the frustrated, those deeply unsatisfied not only with external conditions, but with themselves, and that the great attraction of the movement is the opportunity to lose oneself in something greater, preferably with a promised Utopia or Kingdom of God at the end. In fact, he begins with this quotation from Pascal.
Man would fain be great and sees that he is little; would fain be happy and sees that he is miserable; would fain be perfect and sees that he is full of imperfections; would fain be the object of the love and esteem of men, and sees that his faults merit only their aversion and contempt. The embarrassment wherein he finds himself produces in him the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable, for he conceives a mortal hatred against that truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults.
Starting out from the fact that the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements and that they usually join of their own accord, it is assumed: 1) that frustration of itself, without any proselytizing prompting from the outside, can generate most of the peculiar characteristics of the true believer; 2) that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind.
To test the validity of these assumptions, it was necessary to inquire into the ills that afflict the frustrated, how they react against them, the degree to which these reactions correspond to the responses of the true believer, and,finally, the manner in which these reactions can facilitate the rise and spread of a mass movement. It was also necessary to examine the practices of contemporary movements, where successful techniques of conversion had been perfected and applied, in order to discover whether they corroborate the view that a proselytizing mass movement deliberately fosters in its adherents a frustrated state of mind, and that it automatically advances its interest when it seconds the propensities of the frustrated.
The second ingredient is some notion of power sufficient to provide an extravagant hope of overcoming all obstacles not just for oneself but for an entire society, even the entire world. It can be the power of God, or rationality, or science, or pseudoscience, or racial purity, or whatever.
The problem in trying to investigate this notion scientifically is to get hold of the fanatics-to-be before they join their particular movement, that is, either picking them out of the larger population, or doing studies on large enough groups to catch the few who take up one of the enthusiasms of the time, and are not brought up in one.
Hoffer freely admitted that his work was not in any way scientific.
The book passes no judgments, and expresses no preferences. It merely tries to explain; and the explanations—all of them theories—are in the nature of suggestions and arguments even when they are stated in what seems a categorical tone. I can do no better than quote Montaigne: “All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.”
and again later in the book
The reader is expected to quarrel with much that is said in this part of the book. He is likely to feel that much has been exaggerated and much ignored. But this is not an authoritative textbook. It is a book of thoughts, and it does not shy away from half-truths so long as they seem to hint at a new approach and help to formulate new questions. “To illustrate a principle,” says Bagehot, “you must exaggerate much and you must omit much.”
Please state your quarrels in the comments. I have several below.
Mass movements attract those who have some objection to things as they are, whether externally or within themselves. We can call them the disaffected.
Though the disaffected are found in all walks of life, they are most frequent in the following categories: (a) the poor, (b) misfits, (c) outcasts, (d) minorities, (e) adolescent youth, (f) the ambitious (whether facing insurmountable obstacles or unlimited opportunities), (g) those in the grip of some vice or obsession [addicts, we should say for short], (h) the impotent (in body or mind), (i) the inordinately selfish, (j) the bored, (k) the sinners.
Let's try those. I cannot lay out what Hoffer thinks about each of these groups, but I can pick out some key points.
The poor
It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the “new
poor,” who throb with the ferment of frustration.
See, for example, victims of the German hyperinflation after World War I, and of the Great Depression. Victims of Enclosure (throwing farmers off their land and bringing in sheep in walled pastures) became the core of Cromwell's Roundhead army in the English Civil War. But there are counterexamples. The French Revolution followed decades of increasing prosperity, and the Russian Revolution came after the end of serfdom, when peasants increasingly owned their own land. In fact, Hoffer almost immediately contradicts himself.
Discontent is likely to be highest when misery is bearable; when conditions have so improved that an ideal state seems almost within reach…De Tocqueville in his researches into the state of society in France before the revolution was struck by the discovery that “in no one of the periods which have followed the Revolution of 1789 has the national prosperity of France augmented more rapidly than it did in the twenty years preceding that event.”
In the case of slavery, Hoffer claims
In a society with an institution of slavery the troublemakers are the newly enslaved and the freed slaves.
It was the relatively privileged mulatto sons of the slaveowners who led the only successful slave revolt in the Americans, in Haiti.
Misfits
Temporary misfits include young people who have not found a career and a path in life, and ex-soldiers unused to making decisions for themselves. Normally, they find their way.
The permanent misfits are those who because of a lack of talent or some irreparable defect in body or mind cannot do the one thing for which their whole being craves…The most incurably frustrated—and, therefore, the most vehement—among the permanent misfits are those with an unfulfilled craving for creative work.
Thus Hitler being rejected from art school, and then discovering other and far more dangerous talents. It remained one of his greatest frustrations that Nazi tyranny could not inspire great art, other than in propaganda.
Outcasts
No actual discussion. Certainly we can see their grievances, and the fact that they have to struggle against their rejection by the larger society, individually or in a body.
Minorities
A minority which preserves its identity is inevitably a compact whole which shelters the individual, gives him a sense of belonging and immunizes him against frustration. On the other hand, in a minority bent on assimilation, the individual stands alone, pitted against prejudice and discrimination. He is also burdened with the sense of guilt, however vague, of a renegade. The orthodox Jew is less frustrated than the emancipated Jew. The segregated Negro in the South is less frustrated than the nonsegregated Negro in the North.
Again, within a minority bent on assimilation, the least and most successful (economically and culturally) are likely to be more frustrated than those in between.
Adolescent youth
See Misfits.
The ambitious
Unlimited opportunities can be as potent a cause of frustration as a paucity or lack of opportunities.
Thus, apparently, the doctine of Manifest Destiny leading to the war with Mexico and the assorted depredations against Native Americans from the plains to the Pacific.
Addicts
No actual discussion. Apparently this means those addicted to various compulsive behaviors, as well as to substance abuse. While the depravities of many leading Nazis are a matter of record, as well as their obsession with the occult, I have not seen this as a major factor in other mass movements. In the case of religious movements, there are of course those reacting against their own previous depravity, for which many substitute a monstrous self-righteousness.
The impotent
No actual discussion.
The inordinately selfish
The selfish who cannot satisfy their cravings directly can be satisfied by the hypocrisy of pretending unselfish devotion to a cause that requires slavish obedience to their every whim.
The fiercest fanatics are often selfish people who…separate the excellent instrument of their selfishness from their ineffectual selves and attach it to the service of some holy cause.
The bored
There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. In almost all the descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of mass movements there is reference to vast ennui; and in their earliest stages mass movements are more likely to find sympathizers and support among the bored than among the exploited and oppressed.
The most extreme case is societies in which expressing political opinions is forbidden, as in Tsarist Russia, where newspapers were forbidden to praise the Tsar, because that would imply that they could criticize him, or at least withhold praise. Boredom was reportedly highest among students, military officers, and the younger children of the aristocracy.
Hoffer cited the boredom of women not allowed their own careers or even education as a chief spring of the French Revolution, and the claim that the wives of German industrialists supported Hitler fervently before their husbands ever heard of him.
The sinners
This includes actual sinners and those with a morbid sense of sin. Offering criminals plenary indulgences for going on Crusades was very popular in the Medieval Catholic Church.
It sometimes seems that mass movements are custom made to fit the needs of the criminal—not only for the catharsis of his soul but also for the exercise of his inclinations and talents. The technique of a proselytizing mass movement aims to evoke in the faithful the mood and frame of mind of a repentant criminal.
Of course, that is not always possible.
"What a task confronts the American clergy"—laments an American divine—"preaching the good news of a Savior to people who for the most part have no real sense of sin."
Isn't it wonderful? And it is getting more so all the time.
The Methods of Mass Movements
The vigor of a mass movement stems from the propensity of its followers for united action and self-sacrifice.
The methods of training people to fight and die willingly are well known in every effective military organization. The key is what they call "unit cohesion", breaking down individuality and making one's allegiance to one's buddies in the unit all that really matters. The only real difference with churches and with all-encompassing political ideologies is that there is no area of civilian life outside them, as far as they are concerned. The rituals, whether marching or singing hymns, study of the approved selections from the sacred texts, whether the Bible, the Qur'an, or Marx, Lenin, and Mao follows the same course. The multiplicity of rules, some purposeful, some only signifying identity with the movement and rejection of all others, are the same in purpose, regardless of the details. The point is to strip away individuality and personal volition, and substitute the group. It is also by such means that some oppressed minorities, notably Jews and Gypsies, can survive through the ages without even a country to call their own.
Much of united action and self-sacrifice comes under Obedience to Authority, as is typical of Right Wing Authoritarians described in the Milgram book, and in the Altemeyer theory that we looked at last week. According to Hoffer,
What ails the frustrated? It is the consciousness of an irremediably blemished self.
But then when they are unified within their chosen movement, or one that overwhelms the society they live in, they find themselves simultaneously honored members of a perfect or soon-to-be-perfected society, and the subjects of vehement suspicion of the purity of their thoughts and actions, and of possible adherence to the enemies of all that is held to be True and Good in that society. Thus we find that the most dedicated Authoritarian Followers are also most dogmatically and hypocritically assured of their own moral superiority. Even without Altemeyer's research, Hoffer identified many such cognitive deficiencies.
Such diverse phenomena as a deprecation of the present, a facility for make-believe, a proneness to hate, a readiness to imitate, credulity, a readiness to attempt the impossible, and many others which crowd the minds of the intensely frustrated are, as we shall see, unifying agents and prompters of recklessness.
Recklessness being one of the critical factors in the willingness to tear down the established order and set about constructing a new and untested one. Fanatical mass movements have to go to a lot of trouble to keep both of these fires burning at the same time. They do it in religion by requiring confession or some comparable ritual, and in Communism by relentless self-criticism. Their theologies talk about Original Sin (or even Total Depravity) and Redemption (or even the Permanent Elect) in the same breath, or the ideological equivalent.
Where family ties and social order are strong, mass movements have no opening for recruiting followers.
There is hardly an instance of an intact army giving rise to a religious, revolutionary or nationalist movement. On the other hand, a disintegrating army—whether by the orderly process of demobilization or by desertion due to demoralization—is fertile ground for a proselytizing movement.
The Iraqi insurgencies coming out of deBaathification, disbanding the Iraqi army entire, and bringing in an oppressive Shi'a government, anyone? How about ISIS?
On the other hand, the leader of a mass movement has an
overwhelming contempt for the present—for all its stubborn facts
and perplexities, even those of geography and the weather. He
relies on miracles. His hatred of the present (his nihilism) comes to
the fore when the situation becomes desperate. He destroys his
country and his people rather than surrender.
The Goals of Mass Movements
Apart from the question of who might join a mass movement, there is the question of what they hope to gain from it. The usual answers are a Utopian form of government and society, or in some cases the Last Days and the Kingdom of God on Earth and an Eternity in the Heaven of their choice. Utopias vary from complete tyranny to Libertarianism, all of them fantasies. The ideology of a mass movement must of necessity ignore most of reality, particularly how people actually behave, other than as submissive members of the movement.
It is futile to judge the viability of a new movement by the truth of its doctrine and the feasibility of its promises. What has to be judged is its corporate organization for quick and total absorption of the frustrated.
Hoffer cites early Roman Christianity, Bolshevism, and Nazism as successful creators of such communities of fanatics, in contrast with the hundreds of other religions in Rome, and the dozens of other Socialist or Communist and racist/nationalist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. Italian and Spanish Fascism were also quite successful for a time. One can put militant early Islam in the same category. But there are also successful religions that Hoffer ignored which roundly denounce fanaticism, including Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism.
Mass movements, according to Hoffer, have to denigrate everything past and present outside themselves, and push the glorious future far off. Then they can be relentless in demanding the most austere self-sacrifice at all times, and refusing to provide any immediate reward for any action that might be demanded, except perhaps promotion to a level demanding even more dedication and more sacrifice. At the same time, everything is dressed up in pageantry and make-believe, including celebrations of the far-off and actually unattainable Golden Age when the Revolution shall have crushed all of its enemies and all obstacles shall have been overcome. Think of Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda film Triumph of the Will for the Nazis, or the Soviet May Day Parades, or what goes on almost every day in North Korea.
In several previous Diaries in this series we have observed the requirement for believing in utter nonsense in support of mass movements, and correspondingly to disbelieve plain facts from any other source. The phenomena include Cognitive Dissonance, the supposed virtues of the Leisure Class, and the cognitive deficits of Right Wing Authoritarians. Hoffer brings this out particularly in considering the willingness of the True Believer to die for the cause. Clearly one does not die for some obvious material gain that one will not then live to enjoy, but for some glorious future to be shared by all. He also asserts that the doctrine must not be understood, which would again reduce it to the commonplace.
The devout are always urged to seek the absolute truth with their hearts and not their minds. “It is the heart which is conscious of God, not the reason.” Rudolph Hess, when swearing in the entire Nazi party in 1934, exhorted his hearers: “Do not seek Adolph Hitler with your brains; all of you will find him with the strength of your hearts.”
At the same time this incomprehensible principle must seem to provide answers to all possible questions, past, present, or future.
The official history of the Communist party states: “The power of Marxist-Leninist theory lies in the fact that it enables the Party to find the right orientation in any situation, to understand the inner connection of current events, to foresee their course, and to perceive not only how and in what direction they are developing in the present but how and in what direction they are bound to develop in the future.”
How to Unify a Mass Movement
Among the motives of the True Believer that Hoffer brings out as binding forces for a mass movement are an escape from freedom and individuality; make-believe and pageantry (discussed above); hatred; authority, in the various forms of obedience, command, and coercion; action; and suspicion. It is also necessary to break down connections to existing structures of family and society within the individual. If they are breaking down generally, it is so much the easier to recruit followers from the suddenly rootless.
Hoffer was of the opinion that most people do not want freedom to do as they please. Freedom from oppression, yes, but apart from that people want a society that they can fit into, one that gives them rules for belonging and for achieving a decent prosperity and a family. The fanatic goes much further, looking for a movement to sacrifice himself to, for the creation of a glorious future in which others will attain what the Revolution supposedly strives for.
Hatred is the simplest unifying force for a mass movement. Every one has its chosen enemy, often several. For Nazis, it was Jews in the first place, and anybody who could be accused of being non-Aryan after that. Thus Gypsies, who are actually of Indian ancestry, and in a sense more Aryan than the Germans, became one of the secondary targets simply because Europeans already hated, feared, and despised them.
It is convenient to have a ready method of creating more enemies to hate, as in religions that make much of heresy and blasphemy, and especially of apostasy, treating converting away from their teachings as a crime, sometimes punishable by death. At the same time, it is important that all enemies be identified with one archenemy.
We have it from Hitler—the foremost authority on devils—that the genius of a great leader consists in concentrating all hatred on a single foe, making “even adversaries far removed from one another seem to belong to a single category.”
Thus all enemies of the Nazis were either Jews or allies of the Jews or dupes of the Jews. To Communists, all enemies were tools of the Capitalists. To Christians and Muslims of this type, all enemies are allied with Satan/Shaytan under a multitude of names like Beelzebub, Azazel, Mephistopheles, or Iblis, or with the Antichrist. In revolutions, the rulers are often demonized as foreigners: in the English Civil War, Norman French aristocrats; in the French Revolution, barbarian German aristocrats; in the Russian Revolution, Varangian (the original Swedish conquerors of Kiev), Tatar, or European aristocrats; in the American Civil War, evil Yankees of English descent against virtuous Southern Scots-Irish.
Hoffer derives these hatreds from contempt for oneself. That contempt is certainly visible among Nazis, Communists, and religious fanatics, often being erected into a canon of Original Sin or even Total Depravity, as mentioned before. The hatred is then justified on the grounds that the inferior races, the enemies of the people, or the unregenerate sinners are going to drag the rest of us down into some particular Hell on Earth or after if they are not put under sufficient authority or even killed off.
The Americans are poor haters in international affairs because of
their innate feeling of superiority over all foreigners.
Except, Hoffer should have noted, when we are worried that we are not superior.
Hatred is an expression of helplessness (which we will study more deeply in a few weeks), because a feeling of superiority to evildoers and immunity to their works is more likely to evoke pity than hatred, or at worse the feeling of despising them. The helpless can be directed by their oppressors not to hate the oppressors, but someone even more helpless. And then doing someone an injustice inflames hatred against them even more out of guilt and shame that cannot even be admitted, but must be turned into dogmatic, hypocritical moralism and self-righteousness.
Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for him.
In the worst case, hatred turns into emulation, according to Hoffer, or we should say emulation of the darkest fantasy version of the enemy. Virulent anti-Fascism and anti-Communism are as tyrannical and destructive as the originals. Hermann Rauschning reported that Hitler said that he followed the anti-Semitic forgery
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion "down to the veriest detail". Making all of Christianity into a battle with the Devil or the Antichrist makes those who call themselves Christians as bloodthirsty and otherwise evil as those they profess to hate. Hatred thus does not come cheap. In our time, Republican political operatives are taught their craft out of Saul Alinsky's
Rules for Radicals, and anti-terrorism measures can take on the aspect of terrorism (torture and drone rocketing, in particular). The argument is often made that the enemy is so evil that anything is justified to oppose them, even destroying our own society.
There is also this: when we renounce the self and become part of a compact whole, we not only renounce personal advantage but are also rid of personal responsibility. There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and the vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgment.
We saw this in looking into Stanley Milgram's
Obedience to Authority, and in the the various forms of obedience, command, and coercion described in Robert Altemeyer's
The Authoritarians. So I will leave those topics at that.
Imitation
The chief burden of the frustrated is the consciousness of a blemished, ineffectual self, and their chief desire is to slough o the unwanted self and begin a new life. They try to realize this desire either by finding a new identity or by blurring and camouflaging their individual distinctness; and both these ends are reached by imitation.
Thus, for example, Rush Limbaugh's proud Dittohead followers, the rejection of any challenge to their chosen authorities, and a wide range of social, ideological, and religious conformism.
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.
Perhaps this would be part of the readiness of Germany and Japan to adopt democratic institutions after their defeat, and largely reject their prior nationalism and racism.
Every device is used to cut o the faithful from intercourse with unbelievers.
As we saw in considering the
Evolution of Cooperation, from repeated close interactions, and of non-cooperation, by preventing close contact.
Persuasion and Coercion
Were propaganda by itself one-tenth as potent as it is made out to be, the totalitarian regimes of Russia, Germany, Italy and Spain would have been mild affairs…The truth seems to be that propaganda on its own cannot force its way into unwilling minds; neither can it inculcate something wholly new; nor can it keep people persuaded once they have ceased to believe. It penetrates only into minds already open, and rather than instill opinion it articulates and justifies opinions already present in the minds of its recipients…So acknowledged a master of propaganda as Dr. Goebbels admits in an unguarded moment that “A sharp sword must always stand behind propaganda if it is to be really effective.”…Propaganda thus serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others; and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda.
The poisons of racism, bigotry, misogyny, and so on of the Right become ever more concentrated as they toss out the RINOs and their children fall away. Thus they assure themselves of their righteousness in ever louder and more vicious ways, because they can, and because they feel they must.
If free enterprise becomes a proselytizing holy cause, it will be a sign that its workability and advantages have ceased to be self-evident.
He got that one completely right.
It is probably as true that violence breeds fanaticism as that fanaticism begets violence…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 South not only intimidates the Negro but also invigorates the fanatical conviction of white supremacy.
Although, as Hoffer observes, Christianity and Islam spread primarily through conquest and state power, there are exceptions, and this was not true at all of Buddhism. Certainly some Buddhist monarchs ordered their peoples to convert, but Buddhism was able to reach large populations and sustain itself over millennia even against official hostility without becoming fanatical. Hoffer's analysis of the motivations for proselytizing are thus shown to be extremely incomplete.
Action
All mass movements avail themselves of action as a means of unification.
Much of that action consists of actually building a nation, or the fantasy of building a glorious, Utopian future such as the Nazi's Thousand-Year Reich or the supposed Marxist Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Much of it also consists of endless parades and ceremonies, and other mindless mass obedience.
This, however, is nonsense.
Men of thought seldom work well together, whereas between men of action there is usually an easy camaraderie.
Men of ideologies and manifestos are always denouncing each other, but the scientific community has shown the must sustained and widespread cooperation in history. Many churches are much older, and have the cohesion of dogma, but there is no agreement among them.
Men of action can come together on a large scale, but they are as likely to come into conflict when that scale is at the level of nations or political parties within a nation. When a mass movement is based on a sense of inadequacy among its followers, to be relieved by drowning the self in the group, success leads to a sense of self-worth and of progress that wipe out the former inadequacies. In order to persist, a mass movement must seem to make small gains, but fail completely in its larger aims. Thus the cry that the South will rise again, bolstered by the temporary success of the Redeemer Democrats, the Klans and Jim Crow, and then by the Republican Southern Strategy.
But what happens when Whites become a minority, and Republicans become irrelevant, like the Federalists of old? Well, we can see some of the possibilities in the far Right in Europe and Japan and Communists in Russia, as well as the Federalists and Whigs in the US. The passions do not go away, but the followers have to regroup and try to pick battles in which they can pit their fanaticism against apathy on the other side, where the majority is not firm in the law. And then, in general, they lose in the long run.
Suspicion.
The awareness of their individual blemishes and shortcomings inclines the frustrated to detect ill will and meanness in their fellow men.
The consciousness of sin, and the requirement for self-criticism or confession, is a common thread among Nazis, Communists, and religions. In the fanatical mass movements, followers are also required to suspect and criticize everybody else. This is one of the most powerful forces for outward conformity among followers. We will examine this with great snark when we read Walt Kelly's take on the Birchers,
The Jack Acid Society Black Book.
Accusations against innocents, with the most vehement Inquisitorial investigations and the most violent punishments, are considered a feature rather than a bug in such systems. This extended to Klan lynchings, and continues in random police intimidation and homicide.
Leaders of Mass Movements
A mass movement necessarily has a great writer or speaker as its leader. This does not necessarily mean a leader of great intelligence or depth of thought, although that does not hurt, but one who can impress a devoted following with sharp, clear words in an uncompromising, authoritative style, laying out a vision of a path from its current degraded and oppressed state, individually and socially, to a glorious future. A corollary is that preparing the ground for mass movements, wittingly or unwittingly, requires educating people who will not be taken on by the current rulers and who will not find a practical outlet for their passions and their ideas.
In China and in the Medieval Catholic church, to be literate was to be a member of the ruling class. In the Industrial Revolution, to have an education in engineering or finance was to be a member of the Capitalist class. But just after Gutenberg's advances in printing ideas began to spread far and wide, and widespread literacy among factory workers in Europe led to a proliferation of social ideas and revolutionary movements. Colonial education systems in the great empires were meant to produce a complaisant class of functionaries for government, but at the same time the expansion of education beyond that goal created a growing class not co-opted by the rules, from whom the revolutionaries and activists for freedom from Imperial rule and independence eventually arose.
A particularly pernicious version of this problem today is that in Arab oil kingdoms huge numbers of young men without prospects in government or business take degrees in Muslim theology, and then sit in coffee shops discussing how to expel the Crusaders (the Al Qaeda program) and recreate the Caliphate (ISIS).
Where intellectuals have prepared the way, other leaders take over and build the movement. There should still be leaders who can sway the masses, but they are usually not the same men (rarely women) who analyzed the problems and worked out proposed solutions. There must also be organizers who can translate the program and the words of the new leaders into plans of action, whether or not they are in any way practical or have anything to do with the stated goals.
These new fanatical leaders are the type we looked at last week, described by Robert Altemeyer as Double High Authoritarians. They combine an absolute demand for obedience with an absolute belief in inequality, particularly in their own superiority over all others. Unfortunately these are among the most immoral of humans, given to racism and other hatreds, lying, cheating, stealing, ultraviolence, and intense disloyalty.
To hell with reforms! All that already exists is rubbish, and there is no sense in reforming rubbish. He justifies his will to anarchy with the plausible assertion that there can be no new beginning so long as the old clutters the landscape.
Fanatics, of course, can be their own worst enemies, and having fanatics remain in charge of day-to-day government of nations and churches is disastrous for entire populations. This is particularly a problem when multiple fanatics have separate power bases, and each sets out to displace and destroy the others. For a mass movement to survive, it must at some point be taken over by practical men (rarely women) of action, or at least such practicalities must be permitted in some cases even under the ruling fanaticism.
The most critical moment in China recovering from the disastrous fanaticism of Chairman Mao was the replacement of his successors, the Gang of Four, with those who actually understood something of history, political development, and economics, who turned the nation entirely in the direction of economic development and set themselves to learn more. They have gradually embraced anti-corruption campaigns, though only up to a certain level of the leadership, and village democracy, with an absolute prohibition on discussing national democracy. The evolution will continue.
The Soviet Union never successfully made this transition after Stalin's death. The critical turning point was Gorbachev's plan of Glasnost' and Perestroika, undertaken by a Party leadership that had almost no grasp of history, political development, the rule of law, human rights, or economics. Now we have the new fanaticism of Putin's brand of nationalism.
The American Revolution had its intellectuals, of course, and required revolutionary fervor in fighting the war, but it was a war undertaken by practical men of action, most with long experience in government (although Abigail Adams asked them to remember the ladies in doing it). It resulted in several rounds of practical, non-fanatical construction of relatively effective government: The Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, followed in time with extensions of human rights to various excluded classes, once by war, but most often by peaceful amendment to the Constitution, court judgments, and legislation. Mass movements in the US, in contrast to those Hoffer was studying, come under the rubric of
the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
There are also men of action who lead great movements without falling into fanaticism. Hoffer cites Lincoln, Gandhi, F.D.R., Churchill and Nehru.
They do not hesitate to harness man’s hungers and fears to weld a following and make it zealous unto death in the service of a holy cause; but unlike a Hitler, a Stalin, or even a Luther and a Calvin, they are not tempted to use the slime of frustrated souls as mortar in the building of a new world. The self-confidence of these rare leaders is derived from and blended with their faith in humanity, for they know that no one can be honorable unless he honors mankind.
After the time of Luther and Calvin, and the Thirty Years War, the various Protestant churches settled down to working out theology, ritual, church governance, and other such matters of practical religion, and we can point to other such periods in the history of other previously militant churches.
The practical leader nevertheless takes every occasion to remind the faithful of the revolutionary fervor that went before, whether in patriotic parades and speeches, or hymns such as Onward Christian Soldiers.
The active periods of mass movements are marked by violence and intolerance, and by cultural sterility. The great ages of culture commonly follow such ages of violence, as in the periods that produced the Library of Alexandria, the Library of Baghdad, and the Renaissance. The Enlightenment similarly followed a period of wars of religion in Europe. Napoleon and Hitler were both appalled at the low levels of creativity on display under their despotic rules.
Hoffer points out that before the Puritan revolution in the English Civil War, Milton had written a draft of Paradise Lost. During the war and the Cromwell protectorate, he wrote only political pamphlets and the like. After the defeat of the Puritans in the Restoration, he completed his great poem, and followed it with Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.
Hoffer attributes this failure of artistic creativity during revolutions to the distractions provided by events, and to the stultifying ideologies put into place at such times. Appreciating the beauty of the world and indeed anything outside the scope of the revolutionary struggle are taken as treason to the movement, whether political or religious. Besides, the movement provides all the truth needed, all the truth there is, so looking for more is blasphemy.
Contradictions
Some of Hoffer's assertions seem to me ludicrous, such as his claim that Soviet Russia was free from racial bias, or that employers can extract the most from workers by encouraging worker solidarity rather than pitting them against each other. He appears to have taken the word of others on these questions rather than investigating them himself. It is true that partnering with workers increases profits, but obviously not true that it creates the greatest inequality. That requires political power applied to divide and conquer.
This is the silliest statement in the book.
“It is often the fanatics, and not always the delicate spirits, that are found grasping the right thread of the solutions required by the future.”
Fanatics and ideologues are delusional. The pretended solutions of Nazis, Fascists, and Communists have resulted in many tens of millions of deaths, and have caused economic catastrophes, among other problems. Similarly for religiously-motivated violence, such as the Crusades or the Thirty Years War between Catholic and Protestant countries all over Europe.
Renan says that we have never, since the world began, heard of a merciful nation. Nor, one may add, have we heard of a merciful church or a merciful revolutionary party.
To which I counter India under King Ashoka; the American Revolution, the attempts at Reconstruction after the Civil War, the New Deal, and the Marshall Plan; Buddhism; and Gandhian religious nationalism. They had their faults, to be sure, but they are not the unmitigated disasters that the book is devoted to. I could add other particular instances.
All of Hoffer's musings about the futures of nations and churches seem to me ungrounded in anything. In particular, his notion that it might take violent mass movements to move many countries forward has very fortunately turned out not to be the case.
It is probably better for a country that when its government begins to show signs of chronic incompetence it should be overthrown by a mighty mass upheaval—even though such overthrow involves a considerable waste of life and wealth—than that it should be allowed to fall and crumble of itself.
The overthrow of the Gang of Four in China was short and sharp, and its succeeding turn to more-or-less real economics almost entirely peaceful, although suppression of certain ethnic minorities, religions, and political movements continues unabated. With the fall of the Soviet Union, dozens of Communist and anti-Communist tyrannies collapsed almost immediately, and there has been a trickle of relatively peaceful conversions since. No new Civil War was needed in Spain to get rid of Franco. The moment he died, his Fascist state was dismantled. There are a few other tyrants who can hold their supporters together while they live, where the regime is expected to crumble when they die. Zimbabwe is a prominent example.
Remnant Russian Imperialism, internally in Chechnya and externally in Georgia and Ukraine is an exception, as is North Korea.
There are of course other exceptions where tyrannies are opposed by fanatics, especially in some Muslim countries. However, the mass movements in Libya, Egypt, and Syria seem so far to be more part of the problem than part of the solution. What is really needed, as I see it, is space for civil society to grow, and eventually to take power peacefully.
Applications
Do we judge, then, that Republicans are better at embracing racists, misogynists, bigots, hypocrites, science deniers, and such, and inspiring fanaticism, or that Democrats are better at embracing all of the victims of the Republicans and inspiring cooperation? Yes, we do, but not by a wide enough margin yet. Are we aware of the multitude of hate groups trying to become mass movements, but failing? If we pay attention to the reports from the Southern Poverty Law Center, yes, we are.
In terms of militant organization and propaganda Republicans score higher, and are able to achieve many of their short-term goals from time to time, and obstruct everything else much of the time. In terms of creating a stable majority, and achieving long-term goals of Liberty and Justice for All, Democrats have been very gradually winning since the Great Realignment after the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. We have been ratcheting forward at intervals and losing some ground but by no means all of it in between. Separate from this book Diary series, I plan to Diary the various GOTV campaigns aimed at turning a dozen or more states Blue within the next decade, as our numbers increase, Republican numbers shrink, and the demographic trends move decisively against them.
About Eric Hoffer
Eric Hoffer was a rarity in intellectual history, a deep and well-respected thinker who made up his mind to be poor, and who worked as a longshoreman for many years but spent all of his time off the job reading, thinking, arguing, and writing. Spinoza turning down rewards and academic positions, and earning a living as a lens grinder, is the most obvious comparison.
Ike’s Other Warning
By MAX BLUMENTHAL
Published: September 2, 2009
The story began in 1958, when Eisenhower received a letter from Robert Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran. Biggs told the president that he “felt from your recent speeches the feeling of hedging and a little uncertainty.” He added, “We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth.”
Eisenhower could have discarded Biggs’s note or sent a canned response. But he didn’t. He composed a thoughtful reply. After enduring Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who had smeared his old colleague Gen. George C. Marshall as a Communist sympathizer, and having guarded the Republican Party against the newly emergent radical right John Birch Society, which labeled him and much of his cabinet Soviet agents, the president perhaps welcomed the opportunity to expound on his vision of the open society.
“I doubt that citizens like yourself could ever, under our democratic system, be provided with the universal degree of certainty, the confidence in their understanding of our problems, and the clear guidance from higher authority that you believe needed,” Eisenhower wrote on Feb. 10, 1959. “Such unity is not only logical but indeed indispensable in a successful military organization, but in a democracy debate is the breath of life.”
Eisenhower also recommended a short book — “The True Believer” by Eric Hoffer, a self-educated itinerant longshoreman who earned the nickname “the stevedore philosopher.” “Faith in a holy cause,” Hoffer wrote, “is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”
Ronald Reagan awarded Eric Hoffer the Presidential Medal of Freedom with no sense of irony.
In the Next Two Weeks
Walt Kelly's Pogo and the rest of the swamp critters snark on the John Birch Society in The Jack Acid Society Black Book. It is just as relevant to the Koch brothers today as it was to their daddy Fred going back to 1957. Militias and Tea Party tax revolts, too. Pomp pomp a doodle pomp pomp! Look, it's short, and I can't reproduce the cartoons. Please find a copy in a library or actually buy one and read it.
Then we go into the true depths with The Lucifer Effect, by Philip Zimbardo, on the horrific Stanford Prison experiment.
The Grokking Republicans Book List Diary includes links to all of the published Diaries in this series, and notes on upcoming Diaries.