Imitation is so basic to human social life that it tends to get overlooked as a mechanism. We notice charismatic leaders, inflammatory rhetoric, economic grievances. We rarely notice the quiet work of imitation building uniformity across a mass of people. But Hoffer treats imitation as one of the primary load-bearing mechanisms of mass movements — as essential to unification as hatred and more pervasive than doctrine.1
The two key observations: frustrated people are more imitative than self-sufficient people, and unified groups are more imitative than individuals. These combine into a reinforcing loop: frustration drives people into the movement, the movement's unity increases their imitativeness, their increased imitativeness makes them more susceptible to the movement's further directives, which deepens their unity. The loop has no natural exit.
The frustrated person, as Hoffer defines them, is someone whose individual identity feels blemished, inadequate, or superfluous. They have concluded — accurately or not — that their particular self cannot be salvaged. This conviction has a direct behavioral consequence: the less satisfaction they derive from being themselves, the greater is their desire to be like others.1
Imitation serves two distinct purposes for the frustrated:
1. Identity replacement. The frustrated person wants a new identity. Imitation is the fastest route to one. By copying someone who seems to have the identity they want — the committed revolutionary, the righteous believer, the disciplined soldier — they can begin to inhabit that identity before they have genuinely developed it. The copy precedes the original; the performance precedes the conviction.
2. Self-blurring. Even without a specific target identity, the frustrated person wants to reduce the visibility of their own distinct, blemished self. Imitation — becoming as like others as possible — accomplishes this. "The desire to belong is partly a desire to lose oneself." (§78)1 Uniformity is not merely a social requirement imposed from outside; it is something the frustrated person actively seeks as relief.
Both functions are served simultaneously by the mass movement's insistence on uniform dress, speech, behavior, and thought. The movement does not merely demand conformity — it offers conformity as a gift to people who find their own distinctness intolerable.
Once inside the movement, imitativeness increases further — for a different reason. The unified individual has been stripped of the prior self that would otherwise provide resistance to outside influence. "The unified individual is without a distinct self; he is perennially incomplete and immature, and therefore without resistance against influences from without." (§82)1
This creates both an advantage and a danger for the movement:
Advantage: The unified group is plastic. It can adopt new behaviors, new orientations, new directives with extraordinary speed. Japan's rapid industrialization and Turkey's rapid modernization — both driven by mass movement unity — are Hoffer's evidence: a thoroughly unified group can assimilate innovations that would take generations to penetrate a loose aggregation of individuals.1
Danger: The same plasticity that makes the group responsive to the movement's directives also makes it susceptible to outside influence. "The ready imitativeness of a unified following is both an advantage and a peril to a mass movement." (§82)1 A unified group that encounters the enemy's ideas is more susceptible to those ideas than a group of individuals who each have their own prior commitments to push back against. This is why mass movements go to such lengths to insulate their members from contact with outsiders — not primarily because the ideas are dangerous, but because the unified members' heightened imitativeness makes any outside influence disproportionately powerful.
One of Hoffer's most disturbing structural observations about imitation: it is not opposed to hatred. It is entangled with it.1
"The undercurrent of admiration in hatred manifests itself in the inclination to imitate those we hate." (§73)1 Mass movements shape themselves after their specific devil. "Every mass movement shapes itself after its specific devil." Christianity at its authoritarian height reproduced the image of the Antichrist. Soviet Russia became the most complete example of monopolistic capitalism while officially opposing capitalism. Hitler used the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as his guide and textbook.
The mechanism: hatred contains admiration. You cannot hate what you despise; you can only hate what you recognize as powerful, as having something you want, as being a more effective version of something you aspire to be. The powerful enemy is hated and imitated simultaneously. The movement's rhetoric denounces the enemy while its practice copies the enemy's most effective methods.
This is why the opposition to a mass movement, if it sustains itself long enough at sufficient intensity, gradually comes to resemble the movement it opposes. This is not hypocrisy or corruption — it is imitation mechanics operating through hatred.
Beyond the individual psychology, imitation functions as a collective technology. "The one-mindedness and Gleichschaltung prized by every mass movement are achieved as much by imitation as by obedience." (§78)1
Uniformity is achieved not just by commanding conformity but by making conformity feel natural through the imitative mechanism. When everyone around you dresses the same, speaks the same, gestures the same way — imitation produces alignment automatically, without explicit commands. The march, Hoffer notes, is a particularly powerful imitation technology: "Marching diverts men's thoughts. Marching kills thought. Marching makes an end of individuality." (§98)1 Hermann Rauschning initially thought the Nazi marches were a waste of time; he later recognized their subtle effect in producing the psychological uniformity the movement required.
Imitation mechanics operates at the intersection of individual psychology, social conformity dynamics, and deliberate behavioral engineering — each domain revealing a different dimension of the same mechanism.
Psychology — Social Force and Conformity: Social Force and Conformity (Greene/Asch/Milgram) documents how social norms operate below conscious awareness and produce conformity even in individuals who believe they are acting independently — the Asch conformity experiments show subjects denying their own clear perceptions when group consensus contradicts them. Hoffer's imitation mechanics describe the extreme end of the same spectrum, but they are not just a quantitative extension — they describe a qualitatively different condition. Asch's subjects retain their individual identity while conforming against it; they know privately that they are wrong and feel the tension of conformity. Hoffer's unified individual has no distinct remaining self from which to experience that tension. They are not conforming against an internal resistance — they have no internal resistance left to conform against. The imitation at the identity level is not experienced as conformity at all; it is experienced as genuine selfhood. This distinction matters for intervention: Asch-style conformers can be helped by reducing the unanimity of the group pressure (introduce one dissenter and conformity drops dramatically). Hoffer-style unified identities cannot be reached by the same mechanism, because the individual has no separate evaluative self to respond to the dissenting voice.
Psychology — Hatred as Unifying Agent: Hatred as Unifying Agent contains Hoffer's most disturbing structural observation about imitation: it is entangled with hatred, not opposed to it. The undercurrent of admiration in hatred — the recognition that the enemy possesses something powerful, feared, and secretly desired — produces imitation of the enemy through the very act of opposing them. Mass movements shape themselves after their specific devil: the rhetoric denounces the enemy while the practice copies the enemy's most effective methods. This pattern is not hypocrisy — it is imitation mechanics operating through the specific channel of hatred-as-admiration. The practical structural warning: sustained counter-movements against mass movements are not immune to becoming structural versions of what they oppose, because they share the same imitativeness-through-hatred dynamic as any other movement. A counter-movement that achieves high internal unity — to fight the enemy more effectively — also achieves the heightened imitativeness that will gradually reproduce the enemy's methods, even when those methods are explicitly denounced.
Behavioral-Mechanics — PCP Influence Model: The PCP model (Perception → Context → Permission) describes how influence is delivered through resonance with the receiver's existing perceptual frame rather than through explicit argument. Hoffer's imitation mechanics describe the receiver-side conditions that make resonance-based influence maximally effective: the frustrated individual (reduced individual resistance from self-contempt) and the unified individual (dissolved individual identity, no prior self to push back against) are both in states of heightened receptivity to resonant influence. The PCP model explains the transmission mechanism; imitation mechanics explain why the mechanism works differently on different populations. The frustrated and the unified are not just easier to influence — they are specifically available for the kind of identity-level influence that resonance-based transmission produces. Argument-based influence would hit the same wall as rational counter-argument always hits with mass movement members; resonance-based influence bypasses the wall by matching at the identity level rather than contesting at the belief level.
Behavioral-Mechanics — Marching as Technology: The march is Hoffer's most concrete behavioral-mechanics example of imitation engineered at scale. Marching produces psychological uniformity not through explicit commands but through the mechanism of synchronized movement: when your body is moving in exact coordination with thousands of other bodies, the somatic experience of individual distinctness diminishes and the somatic experience of collective unity increases. Hermann Rauschning initially dismissed Nazi marches as waste of time; he later recognized their subtle effect in producing the psychological uniformity that the movement required as its operating condition. The behavioral-mechanics insight: any synchronized collective behavior — shared physical movement, shared attention (mass rallies, synchronized viewing), shared linguistic performance (ritual call-and-response, collective recitation) — produces some version of the imitation effect that marching produces at maximum intensity. Modern attention-synchronization technologies (shared viral content, algorithmic feeds converging millions on the same outrage simultaneously) may be producing diluted versions of the marching effect without the physical co-presence, which raises the question of what the threshold is for imitation-technology effectiveness and whether physical co-presence is necessary or merely sufficient.
The Sharpest Implication
If unified groups are more imitative than individuals — if the very unity that makes a community powerful also strips its members of their resistance to outside influence — then the most unified communities are simultaneously the most vulnerable to exactly the kind of influence they are trying to prevent. A tightly unified movement that insulates itself from outside contact to protect its members from imitation is using one counter-measure (isolation) against a structural vulnerability (heightened imitativeness) that the isolation cannot actually fix. As long as the members remain unified — as long as they are stripped of their individual distinctness — they remain highly susceptible. The insulation is fighting the symptom, not the cause. The actual counter-measure would require restoring individual distinctness, which the movement cannot do without dissolving the unity that gives it its power. There is no way out of this trap from inside the movement.
Generative Questions