The Preface and the three chapters of Part One of Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951) — a tomato and a nightshade sharing a family, a mother in the Russian pale saying she'll be fine whichever of her two sons turns out to be right, Röhm boasting he can turn the reddest Communist into a glowing nationalist in four weeks, and English lords enclosing the commons in a revolution made by rich men. Read from
RAW/books/The True Believer.md. One full archaeology pass per chapter, sweeping all seven dimensions in every run. Hoffer numbers his chapters in roman numerals across four parts; the runs follow his numbering.The second half of this build changes country, class and decade. Le Bon was a French physician of independent means writing in 1895 for a governing class frightened of universal suffrage. Hoffer was an American longshoreman who worked the San Francisco docks, writing in 1951 with the camps and the purges behind him and the Cold War in front. He is not addressing rulers, and he asks the reader to notice that. The 1951 assumptions surface anyway — the godless age, the Communist as the live threat, and one sentence about the American South that the book passes over in a clause.
Siblings: Part 1 — Le Bon, Preface to Book I · Part 2 — Le Bon, Book II · Part 3 — Le Bon, Book III · Part 5 — Hoffer, Part Two · Part 6 — Hoffer, Part Three · Part 7 — Hoffer, Part Four · What Runs Through All of It.
Thread map: Le Bon vs Hoffer on What a Crowd Is Made Of.
Pairs with the Kershaw build and the Meerloo build, which cover the same years from inside the events.
Source ingest: Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
What is real. A family, in the botanist's sense, and the qualifier is the whole preface.1 The book deals with peculiarities common to all mass movements — religious, revolutionary, nationalist — and it doesn't claim they're identical. It claims they share essential characteristics that give them a family likeness.
He then defines the word so nobody can misuse it. The tomato and the nightshade both belong to the Solanaceae. One is nutritious and the other poisonous, and they have so many traits of shape, structure and function in common that even a non-botanist senses the kinship. Saying that mass movements have much in common doesn't imply they're equally beneficial or equally poisonous.
What a person is. A creature whose fanaticism can be studied apart from what he's fanatical about. There are obvious differences between the fanatical Christian, the fanatical Muslim, the fanatical nationalist, the fanatical Communist and the fanatical Nazi — and the fanaticism that drives all of them can be looked at as one thing. So can the force pushing them towards expansion and world dominion. There's a uniformity in every kind of dedication, faith, pursuit of power, unity and self-sacrifice.
The sentence that follows is the book's method in a line. There are vast differences in the contents of holy causes and doctrines, and a certain uniformity in the factors that make them effective. Anyone who, like Pascal, finds precise reasons for the effectiveness of Christian doctrine has also found the reasons for the effectiveness of Communist, Nazi and nationalist doctrine. However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.
What makes things happen. Frustration, working from inside without needing to be organised. The working hypothesis starts from a fact: the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements, and they usually join of their own accord. From that he assumes two things. First, that frustration on its own, with no proselytising from outside, can generate most of the peculiar characteristics of the true believer. Second, that an effective conversion technique consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses already native to the frustrated mind.
That second assumption is what makes the book different from every other one in this build. The technique isn't installing something. It's finding what's there and fixing it in place.
How you know. By testing the hypothesis against two things and saying so in advance. He had to inquire into the ills that afflict the frustrated, how they react against them, how far those reactions match the responses of the true believer, and how they help a movement rise. And he had to examine the practices of contemporary movements, where conversion techniques had been perfected and applied, to see whether they corroborate the view that a proselytising movement deliberately fosters a frustrated state of mind in its adherents.
What is worth having. Insight into the true believer, for people who will have to live near him. He gives the reason in a sentence that reverses what a 1951 reader might expect. Though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and by converting and by antagonising he is shaping the world in his own image. Whether we line up with him or against him, it's well to know what we can about his nature and his potential.
How people should relate. Under two conditions the movements all produce. Every mass movement generates in its adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action. Every one of them, whatever it preaches, breeds fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance. Every one can release a powerful flow of activity in some departments of life. And every one demands blind faith and single-hearted allegiance.
The shape of time. Phased, and he narrows his subject to one phase. The book concerns itself chiefly with the active, revivalist phase, which is dominated by the true believer — the man of fanatical faith ready to sacrifice his life for a holy cause. The genesis and nature of that man is what he's tracing. Everything about the later phases is deferred to the last part of the book.
He closes with a disclaimer worth keeping, because most of the book's later readers ignored it. The book passes no judgments and expresses no preferences; it merely tries to explain, and the explanations are all theories, offered as suggestions and arguments even when the tone sounds categorical. Then Montaigne, whose line he borrows to say that everything here is talk and none of it advice: I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.
Read: lines 100–125.
What makes things happen. Enthusiasm, without which large change doesn't happen at all.2 It's obvious that people join a rising revolutionary movement for the prospect of sudden spectacular change. Less obvious is that religious and nationalist movements are vehicles of change too. Some kind of widespread excitement seems to be needed for vast and rapid change, and it doesn't matter whether the exhilaration comes from an expectation of untold riches or from an active movement. In America the spectacular changes since the Civil War happened in an atmosphere charged with enthusiasm born of fabulous opportunities for self-advancement. Where self-advancement can't serve as the engine, other sources of enthusiasm have to be found.
He puts the point about religion in a phrase worth pausing on. A religion's conservatism — its orthodoxy — is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap. A rising religious movement is all change and experiment, open to new views and techniques from every quarter. Islam when it emerged was an organising and modernising medium. Christianity was a civilising and modernising influence among the savage tribes of Europe. The Crusades and the Reformation both helped shake the Western world out of medieval stagnation.
How people should relate. Through the art he names and calls religiofication — the art of turning practical purposes into holy causes. The case is Peter the Great, and it's the best one in the run because the man had everything except that. He was probably the equal in dedication, power and ruthlessness of many of the most successful revolutionary and nationalist leaders. And he failed at his chief purpose, which was to turn Russia into a Western nation. He failed because he did not infuse the Russian masses with any soul-stirring enthusiasm. He either didn't think it necessary or didn't know how to make his purpose a holy cause.
Which is why Hoffer finds it unsurprising that the Bolsheviks who wiped out the last Romanovs feel kinship with a Czar and a Romanov. Peter's purpose is now theirs, and they hope to succeed where he failed. The Bolshevik revolution may end up figuring in history as much an attempt to modernise a sixth of the world's surface as an attempt to build a Communist economy.
The comparisons run down a list, and the list is the argument. It was a genuine nationalist movement that let Atatürk modernise Turkey almost overnight. Egypt, untouched by any mass movement, modernises slowly and haltingly, though its rulers since Mehmed Ali have welcomed Western ideas and its contacts with the West have been many and intimate. Zionism is an instrument for renovating a backward country and turning shopkeepers and brain workers into farmers, labourers and soldiers. Had Chiang Kai-shek known how to set a genuine mass movement in motion, or even sustain the nationalist feeling the Japanese invasion kindled, he might now be acting as the renovator of China — and because he didn't know how, he was easily shoved aside by masters of the art.
The British case is the control, and Hoffer states it as a live question rather than a finding. The Labour government is trying to change the economy and the way of life of forty-nine million people in an atmosphere singularly free of fervour, exaltation and wild hope, and he wonders whether its difficulties are partly that. The decent leaders of the party are shy of revolutionary enthusiasm out of revulsion at what contemporary movements have looked like.
What a person is. Someone who locates the shaping forces of his life outside himself, and he thinks this holds for the successful as much as the failed. Success and failure get tied in our minds to the state of things around us, so people with a sense of fulfilment think it a good world and want to conserve it while the frustrated want radical change. The tendency persists even when our condition plainly comes from personal qualities — ability, character, appearance, health. Thoreau supplies the picture: let anything ail a man so that he can't perform his functions, even a pain in his bowels, and he forthwith sets about reforming the world.
The surprising half is the successful. However much they pride themselves on foresight, fortitude and thrift, at bottom they're convinced their success came from a fortunate combination of circumstances. Their self-confidence is never absolute, because they're never sure they know all the ingredients that made them. The outside world looks to them like a precariously balanced mechanism, and while it ticks in their favour they're afraid to touch it. So resistance to change and the desire for it spring from the same conviction, and either can be violent.
What is worth having. A sense of power, and then faith in the future, and the second matters more. Discontent alone doesn't produce a desire for change. People awed by their surroundings don't think of change however miserable they are. When life is precarious enough to make it plain we can't control our circumstances, we stick to the proven and the familiar, and counteract insecurity by making existence a fixed routine — which gives us the illusion we've tamed the unpredictable.
The list of people who fear change is the good part, because of who's on it. Fisherfolk, nomads and farmers who contend with wilful weather. The creative worker who depends on inspiration. The savage awed by his surroundings. And the abjectly poor, who also stand in awe of the world and are not hospitable to change, because it's a dangerous life when hunger and cold are at your heels. There is a conservatism of the destitute as deep as the conservatism of the privileged, and it holds a social order together just as firmly.
Against that he sets the men who rush into vast undertakings, who usually feel they possess some irresistible power. The generation that made the French Revolution had an extravagant conception of the omnipotence of human reason; Tocqueville says humanity had never been prouder of itself nor had more faith in its own omnipotence, and joined to that was a universal thirst for change that came unbidden to every mind. Lenin and the Bolsheviks had blind faith in Marxist doctrine. The Nazis had nothing that potent, and had faith in an infallible leader and in a new technique — and Hoffer doubts National Socialism would have moved so fast without the electrifying conviction that blitzkrieg and propaganda had made Germany irresistible.
Then the correction that makes power secondary. You'd expect that having power would produce a cocky attitude and openness to change, and it isn't always so; the powerful can be as timid as the weak. What counts more than instruments of power is faith in the future. Where power isn't joined to that faith it gets used mainly to fend off the new and preserve things as they are. And extravagant hope with no real power behind it produces the most reckless daring, because the hopeful can draw strength from the most ridiculous sources — a slogan, a word, a button. No faith is potent unless it has a millennial component, and an effective doctrine must claim to be a key to the book of the future as well as a source of power.
Which yields the instruction to anyone who wants to change a nation. It can't be done by breeding and captaining discontent, by demonstrating that the changes are reasonable and desirable, or by coercing people into a new way of life. They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope, and it doesn't matter whether it's of a heavenly kingdom, heaven on earth, plunder, fabulous achievement or world dominion. If the Communists win Europe it won't be because they know how to stir discontent or spread hatred. It'll be because they know how to preach hope.
The shape of time. Not a fixed direction but an attitude towards what's ahead, and it sorts people better than class does. Fear of the future makes us cling to the present; faith in it makes us receptive to change. Rich and poor, strong and weak, the accomplished and the unaccomplished can all be afraid. When the present seems so good that the most you can expect is its continuation, change can only mean deterioration — so men of outstanding achievement and people living full happy lives usually set their faces against drastic innovation. The conservatism of invalids and of people past middle age comes from the same place; they're watching for signs of decay and feel any change is likelier to be for the worse. And the abjectly poor are without faith in the future too. It looks to them like a booby trap buried on the road ahead, so one steps gingerly, and to change anything is to ask for trouble.
How people should relate — the hopeful, whoever they are. It makes no difference who is seized with a wild hope. An enthusiastic intellectual, a land-hungry farmer, a get-rich-quick speculator, a sober merchant, a plain workingman, a noble lord — they all proceed recklessly with the present, wreck it if necessary, and make a new world. So there can be revolutions by the privileged as easily as by the underprivileged.
The two English examples are the evidence, and they're chosen to make the reader uncomfortable. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the woollen industry prospered, grazing became more profitable than cropping, and the landowners drove off their tenants and enclosed the commons. The lords and nobles were upsetting the social order and breaking down ancient law and custom, sometimes by violence and often by pressure and intimidation. The second is the Industrial Revolution, where the potential of mechanisation set the minds of manufacturers and merchants on fire and they began a revolution as extreme and radical as ever inflamed the minds of sectarians — and these respectable, God-fearing citizens changed the face of England beyond recognition in a short time.
The warning attached is one of the best sentences in the book. When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it's well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. There is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action that follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
How you know. By a recipe with four items, given at the end of the chapter, and by the fourth item in particular. For men to plunge headlong into vast change they must be intensely discontented and yet not destitute. They must feel that some potent doctrine, infallible leader or new technique gives them access to irresistible power. They must have an extravagant conception of what the future holds.
And finally they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved. Experience is a handicap. The men who started the French Revolution were entirely without political experience, and so were the Bolsheviks, the Nazis and the revolutionaries in Asia. The experienced man of affairs is a latecomer who joins when the movement is already a going concern. Hoffer suspects it's the Englishman's political experience that keeps him shy of mass movements.
Read: lines 130–203.
What a person is. Somebody who wants out of himself, which is the hinge of the whole book.3 There's a fundamental difference between the appeal of a mass movement and the appeal of a practical organisation. The practical organisation offers chances of self-advancement and appeals to self-interest. A mass movement, in its active phase, appeals not to those intent on advancing a cherished self but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. It attracts and holds people not by satisfying the desire for self-advancement but by satisfying the passion for self-renunciation.
The state he's describing is specific. People who see their lives as irremediably spoiled can't find a worthwhile purpose in getting on. The prospect of an individual career can't move them to a mighty effort or evoke single-minded dedication. They regard self-interest as tainted, unclean and unlucky, and anything undertaken under the auspices of the self seems doomed in advance. Nothing rooted in the self can be good or noble.
What they want instead is a new life, a rebirth — or failing that, a chance to acquire new elements of pride, confidence, hope and worth by identifying with a holy cause. A movement supplies both. Full converts are reborn in its close-knit collective body; sympathisers get pride, confidence and purpose by identifying with its efforts and prospects.
What is worth having. Substitutes, and the chapter is a list of them. Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves. The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause. A man is likely to mind his own business when it's worth minding; when it isn't, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's — in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves, he writes, we either fall on our neighbour's shoulder or fly at his throat.
Then the sentence that does the most work in the book. The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and our lives are puny and meaningless. There's no doubt we gain enormously in self-esteem by exchanging a self-centred life for a selfless one — and the vanity of the selfless, even those who practise the utmost humility, is boundless.
The shape of time. The most important substitute is a future, and it hurts most where people expect one. A movement offers a substitute for individual hope, and that's especially effective in a society soaked in the idea of progress, because there tomorrow looms large and having nothing to look forward to is the more painful. Rauschning on pre-Hitler Germany is the evidence: the feeling of having come to the end of all things was one of the worst troubles we endured after that lost war.
In a modern society, he writes, people can live without hope only when kept dazed and out of breath by incessant hustling. The despair of unemployment comes not just from the threat of destitution but from the sudden view of a vast nothingness ahead. So the unemployed are likelier to follow the peddlers of hope than the handers-out of relief. And the usual charge — that movements dope their followers with future hope while cheating them of present enjoyment — misses what the frustrated are like. For them the present is spoiled beyond repair, comforts and pleasures can't make it whole, and no content or comfort can arise in their minds except from hope.
How people should relate. Extravagantly, because a moderate substitute doesn't work. When our own interests and prospects don't seem worth living for, we're in desperate need of something outside us to live for. All dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are at bottom a desperate clinging to something that might give worth to a spoiled life. So the embrace has to be passionate and extreme. We can have qualified confidence in ourselves; the faith we have in a nation, a religion, a race or a holy cause has to be extravagant and uncompromising, because a substitute embraced in moderation can't efface the self we want to forget.
Which gives him the line about dying that the rest of the book turns on. We can't be sure we have something worth living for unless we're ready to die for it. The readiness to die is evidence, to ourselves and to others, that what we took as a substitute for a missed or spoiled first choice is indeed the best there ever was.
How you know. By watching what kind of person a movement starts attracting. Among early adherents there are adventurers hoping the movement will whirl them to fame and power, and some who join corporations and orthodox parties do show selfless dedication. The rule still holds: a practical concern can't survive unless it satisfies self-interest, and a rising movement's growth depends on its capacity to evoke and satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.
So the diagnostic is a change in the intake. When a movement begins attracting people interested in their individual careers, it has passed its vigorous stage and is no longer moulding a new world but possessing and preserving the present. It stops being a movement and becomes an enterprise. Hitler is quoted saying the same thing from inside: the more posts and offices a movement has to hand out, the more inferior stuff it attracts, until the political hangers-on so outnumber the rest that the honest fighter of former days no longer recognises the old movement — and when that happens, the mission of such a movement is done for.
Read: lines 204–249.
What is real. A readiness that exists before any particular doctrine does.4 When people are ripe for a mass movement they're usually ripe for any effective movement, not solely for one with a particular programme. In pre-Hitler Germany it was often a toss-up whether a restless youth would join the Communists or the Nazis. In the overcrowded pale of Czarist Russia the simmering Jewish population was ripe for both revolution and Zionism, and in the same family one son would join the revolutionaries and another the Zionists.
Weizmann's mother supplies the sentence, and it's the cleanest evidence in the chapter because it comes from a kitchen rather than a theory. Whatever happens, I shall be well off. If Shemuel is right, we shall all be happy in Russia; and if Chaim is right, then I shall go to live in Palestine. One son a revolutionary and one a Zionist, and a mother who can see they're answering the same question.
What a person is. Still convertible after conversion, which is the chapter's sharpest claim. The receptivity doesn't always stop once a potential true believer has become an ardent convert. Where movements compete violently, converts — even the most zealous — not infrequently shift allegiance from one to the other. A Saul turning into Paul is neither a rarity nor a miracle.
The competitors knew it about each other. Hitler looked on German Communists as potential National Socialists: the petit bourgeois Social Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, and the Communist always will. Röhm boasted he could turn the reddest Communist into a glowing nationalist in four weeks. And from the other side, Radek looked on the Nazi Brown Shirts as a reserve of future Communist recruits.
What makes things happen. Two consequences follow, and Hoffer numbers them. All mass movements are competitive, so one movement's gain in adherents is every other movement's loss. And all mass movements are interchangeable: a religious movement may develop into a social revolution or a nationalist movement, a social revolution into militant nationalism or a religious movement, a nationalist movement into either of the others.
How people should relate. Under whichever mixture happens to be available, since pure cases are rare. The exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt was a slave revolt, a religious movement and a nationalist movement at once. The militant nationalism of the Japanese is essentially religious. The French Revolution was a new religion with its dogma — the sacred principles, liberté et sainte égalité — its form of worship adapted from Catholic ceremonial for the civic festivals, and its saints, the heroes and martyrs of liberty. It was also a nationalist movement: in 1792 the legislative assembly decreed that altars should be raised everywhere reading the citizen is born, lives and dies for la Patrie.
The Reformation had a revolutionary aspect that came out in peasant risings, and was national as well. Luther supplies the proof in his own voice: in the eyes of the Italians we Germans are merely low Teutonic swine, they exploit us like charlatans and suck the country to the marrow — wake up, Germany. And the religious character of the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions is generally recognised. The hammer and sickle and the swastika are in a class with the cross, the ceremonial of their parades is the ceremonial of a religious procession, and they have articles of faith, saints, martyrs and holy sepulchres.
What is worth having. A way of stopping a movement, and his answer is that you usually have to supply another one. A social revolution can be stopped by promoting a religious or nationalist movement. Where Catholicism has recovered its mass-movement spirit it counteracts the spread of communism. In Japan nationalism canalised every movement of social protest. In our South, he writes, the movement of racial solidarity acts as a preventive of social upheaval — a clause offered in passing as a technical illustration, in a book published in 1951, alongside the French in Canada and the Boers in South Africa.
The method comes with a bill attached, and the warning is aimed at people who thought they were being sensible. Substituting one movement for another isn't safe and doesn't come cheap, and it's well for those who want to preserve the present not to play with mass movements — because it always fares ill with the present when a genuine one is on the march. In pre-war Italy and Germany, practical businessmen acted in an entirely logical manner when they encouraged Fascist and Nazi movements in order to stop communism. In doing so they promoted their own liquidation.
How you know. By what else does the same job, which is how he finds the safer substitutes. In general, any arrangement that discourages atomistic individualism, or makes self-forgetting easier, or offers chances for action and new beginnings, tends to counteract the rise of mass movements. The curious one he stops on is migration.
Emigration offers some of what the frustrated hope to find in a movement — change, and a chance at a new beginning — and the same types who swell the ranks of a rising movement are also likely to take a chance to emigrate. He thinks it plausible that if the United States and the British Empire had welcomed mass migration from Europe after the First World War, there might have been neither a Fascist nor a Nazi revolution. In America, free and easy migration over a vast continent contributed to social stability.
The shape of time. Movement and migration keep turning into each other, and he says it's often hard to tell which came first. Because of the quality of their human material, mass migrations are fertile ground for genuine movements. The migration of the Hebrews from Egypt developed into a religious and nationalist movement. The migrations of the barbarians in the declining days of Rome were more than shifts of population — the barbarians were relatively few, and once they invaded a country they were joined by the oppressed and dissatisfied in every walk of life, which he quotes as a social revolution started and masked by a superficial foreign conquest.
The closing generalisation ties the two together. Every mass movement is in a sense a migration, a movement towards a promised land, and where it's feasible an actual migration takes place — the Puritans, the Anabaptists, the Mormons, the Dukhobors, the Zionists. Migration in the mass strengthens the spirit and unity of a movement, and whether it takes the form of foreign conquest, crusade, pilgrimage or the settlement of new land, most active movements practise it.
Read: lines 250–301.
Everything from here down is speculative by design. Above the line, every claim carries a footnote and a line range. Below it, the writing is allowed to weigh alternatives, run counterfactuals and hand the decision to advisors from other traditions — because that is the job of these sections.
[SPECULATIVE]Paradigm-obvious in 1951.
Communism as the live case. Every general claim gets a Communist illustration alongside the Nazi one, and the reader is assumed to be watching Europe with an interest in whether it goes. The question if the Communists win Europe is asked as an open one.
Modernisation as the thing backward countries need and the only question being how to get it. Turkey, Egypt, China, Zionist Palestine and Russia are all scored against it. The category is not examined once.
The clause about the American South. Racial solidarity is named as a movement that prevents social upheaval, filed next to Canadian and Boer examples, in a book that has already declared it passes no judgments. The botanist's neutrality of the Preface is doing real work here — the tomato-and-nightshade rule licenses listing it without comment, and in 1951 nobody was going to require the comment.
Psychological frustration as a sufficient explanation for political behaviour. The whole hypothesis is that a state of mind produces the movements, and the period's confidence in that move is why it needs no defence.
Paradigm-breaking, and the cost is what marks it.
Refusing to sort movements into good and bad in a book published six years after the camps were opened. He builds the refusal into the Preface with the nightshade, and repeats it with Montaigne. The cost is that his own century's worst case becomes a specimen, and the sentence about businessmen promoting their own liquidation reads as diagnosis where a 1951 reader wanted judgment.
Putting the conservatism of the destitute beside the conservatism of the privileged. This costs him the left's account of who makes revolutions, in the same paragraph where it costs him the right's. The abjectly poor are not revolutionary material in this book, and neither is anybody comfortable.
Saying that experience is a handicap. He needs it for the recipe — the men who start these things must be ignorant of the difficulties — and it disqualifies the class of people who write books about politics, himself included by implication.
Naming the self-renouncer's vanity as boundless. That is aimed at the sincere, not the cynical, and it is the least forgivable sentence in the run for a reader who thinks of himself as devoted to something.
Locating the origin of the true believer in the man himself rather than in the demagogue. Le Bon's crowd is made by a leader; Hoffer's true believer arrives pre-made and goes looking. The cost is that there is nobody to blame and nothing to ban, which is a much less usable finding than the one everyone wanted in 1951.
[SPECULATIVE]Decision type: judging whether a proposed large change will actually happen.
The recipe is four items and the fourth is the interesting one. The people who will carry it through must be intensely discontented and yet not destitute. They must believe some doctrine, leader or technique gives them access to irresistible power. They must hold an extravagant conception of the future. And they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved.
The mechanism behind the fourth item is that accurate estimation and reckless commitment can't sit in the same head. Experience shows a man what a thing costs, and knowing what it costs is what stops him. So the movement's early phase requires people who have never done anything like it — and the experienced man of affairs shows up later, once it's a going concern, which is also roughly when the movement stops being one.
Scope conditions. This describes what's needed to start a vast change, not to complete one. It fails as a test of whether the change is a good idea, and Hoffer never claims otherwise. It also depends on the change being genuinely large: a reform inside an existing arrangement needs none of this, which is why the Labour government could attempt one without fervour and why he thinks that's why it was struggling.
The general form. A large change requires people who cannot estimate its cost, so the presence of competent, experienced leadership early on is evidence that the change will be smaller than announced. Modern equivalent: any transformation programme staffed entirely by people who have done it before. They will deliver something, and it will not be the thing in the announcement.
The uncomfortable corollary is the one Peter the Great pays for. He had power, ruthlessness and a clear correct objective, and he could not make it holy, so it did not take. Competence was not the missing ingredient and neither was authority. What was missing was a story that made a practical purpose into something worth dying for — and Hoffer's word for supplying that, religiofication, is deliberately ugly because the thing is available to anybody.
[SPECULATIVE]Take the man this chapter is about. He is not poor and not desperate. He has decided his own life is spoiled past repair, he finds the thought of his own advancement faintly disgusting, and what he wants is to be rid of himself. A movement is available and will take him. Hoffer's account of what happens next is that he gets a rebirth in a close-knit collective body, and that his new faith has to be extravagant, because a substitute embraced in moderation cannot efface the self he wants to forget.
Hoffer offers him no alternative. The book explains and passes no judgments, so the man is described and left where he stands.
An advisor working from total self-surrender would say the craving is not the error and would refuse to talk him out of it. This tradition has a name for handing over everything from the body to the pure self, and it puts it last on a list of nine practices rather than first. The image it uses is a farmer who has just sold his cow: the buyer leads it away down the road, and what the man feels in his chest, almost against his will, is relief. No more dawn feedings, no more worrying about the vet bill. That is the same relief Hoffer's man is after, and this advisor would say he is right to want it.
The counsel is about what he hands it to, and about the order. Self-surrender comes ninth because the eight before it are what make the ninth safe — and what he hands himself to is not a body of people, a programme or a leader. A movement can take delivery of a self and then spend it, which is the one thing the thing you surrender to must not be able to do. The test this advisor would give him is simple and hard: after the surrender, is my effort still a category that applies? If he is now working harder than ever, he has not been relieved of himself. He has been recruited.
An advisor working from Vivekananda's objection to fanatics would not go near the man's soul and would go straight at his output. The complaint is not moral, it is practical: fanatics cannot work, they waste three-fourths of their energy. Something is wrong in society, and up jumps a man to denounce it, loudly and vindictively, gathering a following around the outrage. He feels like the most committed person in the room. He is burning most of his fuel on noise, and it is the level-headed, calm, practical man who actually works.
Which is a real answer to Hoffer's chapter, because it accepts the diagnosis and disputes the payoff. Yes, the man wants out of himself, and yes, the movement will take him. What he will get is not effectiveness but the sensation of it, and the difference shows up in what has actually changed a year later.
They disagree about whether the wanting is respectable. The first says it is the highest thing in the man and has been mishandled. The second treats it as a fuel leak.
Where they converge is on the point Hoffer treats as settled. He says the substitute has to be extravagant and uncompromising, because moderation cannot efface the self. Both advisors read extravagance as the symptom rather than the cure — one because a surrender that still requires effort has not happened, the other because heat and work are inversely related. Neither would tell him to keep his self. Both would tell him that what the movement is offering is not the thing he came for.
[SPECULATIVE]The road not taken here is one Hoffer names, prices, and hands to the reader as a counterfactual: mass migration instead of mass movement.
The live alternative existed and was refused by particular governments. If the United States and the British Empire had welcomed mass migration from Europe after the First World War, he thinks there might have been neither a Fascist nor a Nazi revolution. The mechanism is that emigration supplies the same two goods a movement supplies — change, and a chance at a new beginning — to the same people. The frustrated man who would join a movement is the frustrated man who would get on a boat.
The counterfactual is worth running properly, because the chapter also supplies its own objection. Mass migrations are fertile ground for genuine movements, because of the quality of their human material, and it is often hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. The Hebrews leaving Egypt became a religious and national movement on the way. The barbarians entering the Empire were joined by the oppressed of every walk of life and turned into a social revolution masked as a conquest. So the counsel is not that migration prevents movements. It is that migration disperses them across an ocean instead of concentrating them in a country that already has a state to capture.
Which sharpens what was actually refused in the 1920s. The receiving countries had quota laws and thought they were declining a population. On Hoffer's reading they were declining a pressure valve, and the pressure stayed where it was and found the only other outlet available. He does not say this and his chapter contains every piece of it.
The second-order consequence is the ugly one, and he half-writes it in the next paragraph. If the goods a movement supplies can also be supplied by a boat, they can be supplied by other things too — by anything that discourages atomistic individualism, makes self-forgetting easier, or offers action and new beginnings. That is a design specification for a society, and it is written in the same register as the specification for a movement. The book that passes no judgments has just told you what to build.