The eight chapters of Part Two of Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (1951) — a man just out of the army who cannot find the rhythm of his old life, radicals arriving in Moscow to build a new world and finding themselves absorbed by the problem of hunger and cold, society ladies financing Hitler years before their husbands had heard of him, and St Bernard breaking up so many homes that the abandoned wives founded a nunnery. Read from
RAW/books/The True Believer.md. One full archaeology pass per chapter, sweeping all seven dimensions in every run.⚠ This is the part of the book that has aged hardest, and the runs report it rather than route around it. Two passages in particular: a sentence about segregation in the American South offered as an illustration of minority psychology, and a page of advice to colonial powers on how to keep the ruled contented. Both are stated as findings, in a book that declares it passes no judgments. They are in the runs because the job is to record what a source took for granted.
Siblings: Part 1 — Le Bon, Preface to Book I · Part 2 — Le Bon, Book II · Part 3 — Le Bon, Book III · Part 4 — Hoffer, Preface and Part One · 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.
Source ingest: Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
What a person is. A member of one of three layers, and the middle one doesn't decide anything.1 There's a tendency to judge a race, a nation or any group by its least worthy members, and Hoffer says that though it's manifestly unfair it has some justification, because the character and destiny of a group are often set by its inferior elements.
The inert mass of a nation is its middle section — the decent, average people who do the nation's work in the cities and on the land. They are worked on and shaped by minorities at both ends. The superior individual in politics, literature, science, commerce or industry plays a large part in shaping a nation, and so do the people at the other extreme: the failures, misfits, outcasts, criminals, and everyone who has lost their footing in respectable humanity, or never had one. The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.
What makes things happen. An absence of reverence for the present. That's his explanation for why the inferior elements can swing a nation's course. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and are ready to waste and wreck both, which is where the recklessness and the will to chaos come from. They also crave to dissolve their spoiled, meaningless selves in some soul-stirring communal undertaking, which is where the proclivity for united action comes from. So they're among the early recruits of revolutions, mass migrations and religious, racial and chauvinist movements, and they stamp their mark on the upheavals that shape a nation's history.
What is worth having. The dregs, on his account, and he says so in the language of the builders and the stone. The discarded and rejected are often the raw material of a nation's future. A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, decent, peaceful and pleasant, and perhaps without the seed of things to come. And then the sentence a longshoreman in San Francisco writes about his own country: it was not the irony of history that the undesired of Europe should have crossed an ocean to build a new world on this continent. Only they could do it.
How you know. By a list, given in advance, of where the disaffected are most frequent. The poor. Misfits. Outcasts. Minorities. Adolescent youth. The ambitious, whether facing insurmountable obstacles or unlimited opportunities. Those in the grip of a vice or an obsession. The impotent in body or mind. The inordinately selfish. The bored. The sinners. Everything from here to the end of Part Two works through that list in order, which makes this short chapter the table of contents for the whole section.
How people should relate. Not addressed directly here beyond the three-layer picture. The shape of time is likewise implicit: a nation's future is being made now, at its edges, by people the middle would rather not have. What is real gets no separate treatment in the run — the chapter is a claim about who acts, not about what exists.
Read: lines 305–327.
What a person is. Poor in one of five different ways, and only some of them are dangerous.2 The chapter is the longest in the book and it exists to break a single category apart.
Not all who are poor are frustrated. Some of the poor stagnating in city slums are smug in their decay and shudder at the thought of life outside the familiar cesspool. Even the respectable poor, where the poverty is long-standing, stay inert, awed by the immutability of the order of things. It takes a cataclysm — an invasion, a plague, some communal disaster — to open their eyes to the transitoriness of the eternal order.
The dangerous ones are the new poor, whose poverty is recent, and in whom the memory of better things works like fire in the veins. They're the disinherited who respond to every rising movement. The new poor of seventeenth-century England made the Puritan Revolution succeed: during the enclosures, thousands of landlords drove off their tenants and turned fields into pasture, so that strong active peasants who loved the soil that fed them became wage-workers or sturdy beggars and the city streets filled with paupers. That mass of dispossessed men supplied the recruits for Cromwell's new-model army.
The modern versions follow the same rule. In Germany and Italy the new poor from a ruined middle class were the chief support of the Nazi and Fascist revolutions. The potential revolutionaries in present-day England, he says, are not the workers but the disinherited civil servants and businessmen, a class with a vivid memory of affluence and dominion that won't reconcile itself to straitened circumstances and political impotence.
And then a change he thinks is new in history. Until recently the new poor came from the propertied classes; lately the plain workingman appears in the role. While the people who did the world's work lived at bare subsistence they were the traditionally poor and felt poor in good times and bad, so depressions weren't seen as enormities. With a high standard of living widely spread, unemployment becomes a degradation, and the workingman sees himself disinherited by an unjust order and is willing to listen to anyone calling for a new deal.
What is worth having. A concrete goal, which the very poorest have and nobody else does. The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives, because a desperate struggle for food and shelter leaves no room for a sense of futility. The goals are concrete and immediate: every meal is a fulfilment, going to sleep on a full stomach is a triumph, every windfall a miracle. What need would they have of an inspiring super-individual goal to give their lives meaning? They are immune to the appeal of a mass movement.
Balabanoff supplies the observation from inside the Bolshevik revolution, and it's the sharpest evidence in the chapter. She watched the famous radicals who flocked to Moscow in the early days — men and women who had lived all their lives for ideas, who had voluntarily given up material advantage, liberty, happiness and family for their ideals — become completely absorbed by the problem of hunger and cold. Where people toil from sunrise to sunset for a bare living, Hoffer writes, they nurse no grievances and dream no dreams.
What makes things happen. Improvement, and this is the chapter's most quoted finding. Misery doesn't automatically generate discontent, and the intensity of discontent isn't proportional to the degree of misery. Discontent is highest when misery is bearable, when conditions have improved enough that an ideal state seems almost within reach. A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed.
Tocqueville is the evidence, and Hoffer keeps his exact surprise. In none of the periods following 1789 did French national prosperity grow faster than in the twenty years before it, which forced Tocqueville to conclude that the French found their position the more intolerable the better it became. The land figures make the same point twice: in both France and Russia the land-hungry peasants owned almost exactly a third of the agricultural land when revolution broke out, and most of it had been acquired in the preceding generation or two.
His prediction from that rule is the one worth marking, because it's testable and he makes it in 1951. A popular upheaval in Soviet Russia is unlikely before people get a real taste of the good life. The most dangerous moment for the Politburo will be when a considerable improvement in economic conditions has been achieved and the iron rule somewhat relaxed. He notes that Kirov was assassinated in December 1934, not long after Stalin had announced the successful end of the first Five-Year Plan and the start of a prosperous, joyous era.
The general form he gives it is a rule of distance. The intensity of discontent is in inverse proportion to the distance from the object fervently desired, and it holds whether we're moving toward the thing or away from it. It's true of those who have just come within sight of the promised land and of the disinherited who are still within sight of it. Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some, and we're less dissatisfied lacking many things than seeming to lack one. We dare more striving for superfluities than for necessities — and often, when we renounce superfluities, we end up lacking necessities.
The shape of time. Two kinds of hope, and which one a movement preaches tells you what stage it's at. There's a hope that acts as an explosive and a hope that disciplines and infuses patience, and the difference is between the immediate and the distant.
A rising movement preaches the immediate hope, because the around-the-corner kind is what prompts people to act. Rising Christianity preached the immediate end of the world and the kingdom of heaven around the corner. Mohammed dangled loot. The Jacobins promised immediate liberty and equality, the early Bolsheviks bread and land, and Hitler an immediate end to the bondage of Versailles with work and action for all. Later, in possession of power, the emphasis shifts to the distant hope, the dream and the vision — because an arrived movement is preoccupied with preserving the present and prizes obedience and patience above spontaneous action. Every established movement has its distant hope, its brand of dope to dull impatience, and Stalinism is as much an opium of the people as the established religions.
How people should relate. In compact bodies, or not at all, and the run's whole second half is about what happens when the bodies break. Slaves are poor, and where slavery is widespread and long-established a movement is unlikely to rise, because absolute equality among slaves and the intimate communal life of the quarters preclude individual frustration. In a slave society the troublemakers are the newly enslaved and the freed — and for the freed, it's the burden of freedom that's at the root of it.
Freedom aggravates frustration at least as much as it relieves it. Freedom of choice puts the whole blame for failure on the individual, and by encouraging a multiplicity of attempts it unavoidably multiplies failure. It relieves frustration by making available the palliatives of action, movement, change and protest. But unless a man has the talent to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden — of what avail is freedom to choose if the self is ineffectual? We join a movement to escape individual responsibility, or in the words of the young Nazi he quotes, to be free from freedom.
The application of that to the Nuremberg defence is stated flatly. It was not sheer hypocrisy when rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of the enormities they'd committed. They felt cheated and maligned at being made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the movement in order to be free of responsibility?
So the most fertile ground for a movement is a society with considerable freedom that lacks the palliatives of frustration. The eighteenth-century French peasants, unlike the German and Austrian peasants, were no longer serfs and already owned land, and that is precisely why they were receptive. Nor, he thinks, would there have been a Bolshevik revolution if the Russian peasant hadn't been free for a generation and had a taste of owning land.
And movements that rise in the name of freedom don't deliver it while they're rolling. While a movement is fighting the prevailing order or defending itself, its chief preoccupation is unity and self-sacrifice, which require surrendering the individual's will, judgment and advantage. Robespierre called the revolutionary government the despotism of liberty against tyranny. The important point is that postponing individual liberty doesn't run counter to the inclinations of a zealous following. Renan's line is that fanatics fear liberty more than they fear persecution. Adherents do feel liberated while living in strict adherence to tenets and commands, and the feeling is real: it comes from having escaped the burdens and hopelessness of an untenable individual existence.
The passage that follows is the coldest thing in the chapter. Those who see their lives as spoiled crave equality and fraternity more than freedom, and if they clamour for freedom it's freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity. It is a wish to be one thread of the many that make up a tunic, not distinguishable from the others. Then no one can point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority. Those who clamour loudest for freedom are often the least likely to be happy in a free society, because their innermost desire is for an end to the free-for-all and to the ruthless testing a free society applies. Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses; where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.
What is real — the creative exception. Poverty coupled with creativeness is usually free of frustration. That holds for the poor artisan skilled in his trade and for the poor writer, artist or scientist in full possession of his powers, because nothing bolsters self-confidence like the continuous ability to create and to watch things grow under your hand day after day. He thinks the decline of handicrafts may be one cause of the rise of frustration in modern times.
The reverse is what he wants you to notice. As a person's creative powers fade there appears a pronounced inclination to join a movement. The slipping author, artist or scientist — slipping because the creative flow within has dried up — drifts sooner or later into the camps of ardent patriots, race mongers, uplift promoters and champions of holy causes.
How you know. By whether a person belongs to something compact. The poor who are members of a tight group — a tribe, a close family, a compact racial or religious body — are relatively free of frustration and nearly immune. The less a man sees himself as an autonomous individual solely responsible for his station, the less likely he is to read his poverty as evidence of his own inferiority. A member of a compact group has a higher revolting point: it takes more misery and more personal humiliation to goad him. The cause of revolution in a totalitarian society is usually a weakening of the totalitarian framework rather than resentment at oppression.
From which the operational conclusion follows. A proselytising movement must break down existing group ties to win a following, and the ideal potential convert is the man who stands alone with no collective body to blend into. Where a movement finds family, tribe and country decaying it moves in and gathers the harvest; where it finds them in good repair it must attack and disrupt. And when a movement starts bolstering family solidarity and national and religious cohesion, as Bolshevism was doing in Russia by 1951, that's a sign it has passed its dynamic phase and now wants to hold what it has.
The evidence for the family-wrecking is a set of quotations he doesn't soften. Contemporary movements undermined parental authority, made divorce easy, took over feeding and educating and entertaining children, and encouraged illegitimacy. And none of them was as outspokenly hostile to the family as early Christianity. He quotes Jesus at length: come to set a man at variance against his father, a man's foes shall be they of his own household, he that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. Told his mother and brothers were outside, he stretched his hand toward the disciples and said behold my mother and my brethren. Asked leave by a disciple to bury his father, he said follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.
Hoffer's own gloss is that the proselytiser who says follow me is a family-wrecker even when he has no hostility to the family and no intention of weakening it. The illustration is St Bernard, whose preaching was so powerful that mothers are said to have hidden their sons from him and wives their husbands, and who broke up so many homes that the abandoned wives formed a nunnery.
How people should relate — the colonial pages. This is where the chapter turns into advice, and the advice is addressed to rulers. He argues that the discontent generated in backward countries by contact with the West is not primarily resentment at exploitation but the result of tribal solidarity crumbling. The ideal of self-advancement the West offers brings the plague of individual frustration with it, and even the Westernised native who becomes rich or masters a respected profession isn't happy — he feels naked and orphaned. What looks like the gift of individual freedom actually amounts to individual isolation, cutting an immature and poorly furnished individual off from the corporate whole and releasing him, in Khomiakov's phrase, to the freedom of his own impotence.
Then the counsel, stated without hedging. The policy of an exploiting colonial power should be to encourage communal cohesion among the natives, and to foster equality and a feeling of brotherhood among them — because the more the ruled blend into a compact whole, the less poignant their individual futility, and the process that turns misery into frustration and revolt is checked at the source. Divide and rule is ineffective when it aims at weakening all forms of cohesion; an effective division fosters a multiplicity of compact bodies vying with and suspicious of each other. Even a wholly philanthropic colonial power must reinforce the corporate pattern and inject its reforms into tribal or communal channels rather than into individuals.
He then applies the same principle to factories at home, which is where it stops being about colonies. The employer who wants to get all he can out of his workers won't do it by playing one off against another; it's in his interest that they feel part of a whole, preferably one that includes him. A vivid feeling of solidarity, racial, national or religious, is an effective means of preventing labour unrest. And he quotes the management research of his day: individual bonus plans do more harm than good, while group incentive plans based on the work of the whole team, foreman included, promote greater productivity and greater satisfaction.
What makes things happen — the organisational finding. A rising movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine or its promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties and meaninglessness of individual existence. It cures the frustrated not by giving them truth or by remedying the abuses that made them miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves — and it does that by absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.
So it's futile to judge a new movement by the truth of its doctrine or the feasibility of its promises. What has to be judged is its corporate organisation for the quick and total absorption of the frustrated, and where creeds compete, the one with the most perfected collective framework wins. Of all the cults and philosophies competing in the Graeco-Roman world, only Christianity had a compact organisation from its inception, and none of its rivals gave adherents the same feeling of coming into a closely knit community. The Bolsheviks outdistanced the other Marxist movements for the same reason, and the Nazis outdistanced the other folkish movements because Hitler saw early that a rising movement can never go too far in promoting collective cohesion. He knew the chief passion of the frustrated is to belong.
The shape of time — the general rule. As one pattern of corporate cohesion weakens, conditions ripen for a movement and for a new, more vigorous form of compact unity. Christianity rose in an age when large numbers of men were uprooted, the compact city states having been merged into one empire, and it made its greatest headway in the big cities among thousands of deracinated individuals — slaves, freedmen and merchants separated from their hereditary milieu. In the countryside, where the communal pattern was least disturbed, the ground was less favourable, and the villagers and heath-dwellers clung longest to the old cults. The same pattern shows in the nationalist and socialist movements of the later nineteenth century, produced by extraordinary mobility and urbanisation.
He then turns it upside down and says the thing that is easiest to miss. When people revolt in a totalitarian society, they rise not against the wickedness of the regime but against its weakness. Wells said the same of the Reformation: people objected not to the church's power but to its weaknesses, and their movements against it were not for release from religious control but for a fuller and more abundant religious control. The French Revolution came as a reaction not against the vigorous tyranny of the Church and the old regime but against their ineffectuality.
The German case closes the argument. There was no likelihood of a revolutionary movement in Wilhelmine Germany, since Germans were satisfied with the centralised authoritarian regime and even defeat didn't impair their love of it. The Weimar years were a time of irritation, because a people used to commands from above found the loose, irreverent democratic order all confusion, and were shocked to realise that they had to participate in government, choose a party and pass judgment on political matters. They longed for a new corporate whole more monolithic and more glorious than the Kaiser's, and the Third Reich more than answered their prayer. Once established, Hitler's regime was never in danger of mass revolt, so long as the hierarchy was willing to shoulder all responsibility and make all decisions. The danger point would have come if the discipline had been relaxed — because, as Tocqueville said of tyrannical governments, their moment of greatest danger is when they begin to reform.
The last illustration is an army. There's hardly an instance of an intact army giving rise to a religious, revolutionary or nationalist movement, and a disintegrating one — demobilised in good order or deserting from demoralisation — is fertile ground. The man just out of the army is an ideal potential convert, found among the early adherents of all contemporary movements. He feels alone and lost in the free-for-all of civilian life, the responsibilities of an autonomous existence prey on him, and he wants certitude, camaraderie, freedom from individual responsibility and a vision of something different from the competitive society around him. He finds all of it in the brotherhood of a rising movement.
Read: lines 328–499.
What a person is. A misfit of one of two kinds, and the second kind is the dangerous one.3 The temporary misfits are people who haven't found their place but still hope to — adolescent youth, unemployed college graduates, veterans, new immigrants. They're restless and dissatisfied and haunted by the fear that their best years will be wasted before they reach their goal. They're receptive to preaching and don't always make staunch converts, because they aren't irrevocably estranged from the self and don't see it as spoiled beyond repair. The slightest evidence of progress reconciles them with the world.
The shape of time. Broken by war, and he thinks the break rather than the violence is what matters. A long war fought by national armies is likely to be followed by social unrest for victors and vanquished alike, and the reason is neither the unleashing of passions and the taste of violence nor lost faith in an order that permitted the waste. It's the prolonged break in the civilian routine of millions. Returning soldiers can't recapture the rhythm of their prewar lives, the readjustment is slow and painful, and the country fills with temporary misfits. So the passage from war to peace is more critical for an established order than the passage from peace to war.
What makes things happen. A craving that cannot be satisfied by anything except the thing that's impossible. The permanent misfits are those who, through lack of talent or some irreparable defect of body or mind, cannot do the one thing their whole being craves. No achievement in any other field gives them a sense of fulfilment. Whatever they take up becomes a passionate pursuit, and they never arrive and never pause. They demonstrate that we can never have enough of what we do not really want, and that we run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.
What is worth having. For them, only a complete separation from the self, which they usually find by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a movement. Renouncing individual will, judgment and ambition, and giving all their powers to an eternal cause, they're lifted off the endless treadmill that could never have led them to fulfilment.
How you know. By identifying the sharpest case, and he names it: the unfulfilled craving for creative work. Both those who try to write, paint or compose and fail decisively, and those who tasted the elation of creating and then felt the flow dry up knowing they'll never produce anything worthwhile again, are in the grip of the same desperate passion. Neither fame nor power nor riches nor monumental achievement elsewhere stills the hunger. Even wholehearted dedication to a holy cause doesn't always cure them — the unappeased hunger persists, and they are likely to become the most violent extremists in the service of that cause.
What is real and How people should relate get no separate development in this run; the chapter sorts one type and names its causes, and the social claims are carried over from the previous chapter's account of the compact group.
Read: lines 500–517.
What a person is. Someone whose selfishness has outlived his self.4 The inordinately selfish are particularly susceptible to frustration, because the more selfish a person is the more poignant his disappointments. So it's the inordinately selfish who are likely to become the most persuasive champions of selflessness.
What makes things happen. A transfer, and the metaphor he uses is mechanical. The fiercest fanatics are often selfish people who were forced, by innate shortcomings or by circumstances, to lose faith in their own selves. They separate the excellent instrument of their selfishness from their ineffectual selves and attach it to the service of some holy cause. The instrument still works. It's simply pointed somewhere else.
What is worth having. Nothing they can now get for themselves, which is the point. And the consequence he draws is the one that makes the chapter matter: though the faith they adopt be one of love and humility, they can be neither loving nor humble. The doctrine doesn't reach the man; the man arrives with his equipment and the doctrine gets used by it.
How you know, What is real, The shape of time and How people should relate are not developed here — this is the shortest chapter in the book, a single mechanism stated twice.
Read: lines 518–525.
What makes things happen. Too much opportunity, which he says can frustrate as badly as too little.5 When opportunities look unlimited there's an inevitable depreciation of the present, and the attitude becomes: all that I'm doing or could possibly do is chicken feed compared with what is left undone.
What is real. A specific place where that frustration lives, and he names it. It broods over gold camps and haunts taut minds in boom times.
How people should relate. Paradoxically, and the paradox is the finding. Joined to the ruthless self-seeking that seems to drive gold-hunters, land-grabbers and other get-rich-quick enthusiasts, there is an excessive readiness for self-sacrifice and united action. Patriotism, racial solidarity and even the preaching of revolution find a readier response among people who see limitless opportunities in front of them. They find less among people moving inside the fixed limits of a familiar, orderly and predictable existence.
What a person is, What is worth having, The shape of time and How you know are not separately developed; the chapter is one paragraph and one claim.
Read: lines 526–538.
How people should relate. As a minority, and which kind of minority decides everything.6 A minority is in a precarious position however well protected by law or force, and the frustration produced by that insecurity is less intense in a minority intent on preserving its identity than in one bent on dissolving into the majority. A minority that keeps its identity is a compact whole, which shelters the individual and gives him a sense of belonging. In a minority bent on assimilation the individual stands alone against prejudice and discrimination, and carries as well the vague guilt of a renegade.
Then the two comparisons the chapter is built on, in his own words. The orthodox Jew is less frustrated than the emancipated Jew. And: the segregated Negro in the South is less frustrated than the nonsegregated Negro in the North. It is offered as a neutral illustration of the mechanism, in a book published in 1951.
What a person is. Positioned somewhere on a scale where both ends hurt. Inside a minority bent on assimilation, the least and the most successful are likelier to be frustrated than those in between. The man who fails sees himself as an outsider, and for someone trying to blend in, failure intensifies the feeling of not belonging. The same feeling appears at the other end: those who reach fortune and fame often find they still can't enter the exclusive circles of the majority, and are made conscious of their foreignness. Having evidence of their individual superiority, they also resent the admission of inferiority implied in assimilating at all.
How you know. By checking the prediction against four groups, which he does. The least and most successful Italian Americans were the most ardent admirers of Mussolini's revolution. The least and most successful Irish Americans were the most responsive to De Valera. The least and most successful Jews are the most responsive to Zionism, and the least and most successful Blacks are the most race conscious. The pattern he's claiming is a U-shape, and it's one of the few places in the book where he states a distribution rather than a type.
What is real, What makes things happen, What is worth having and The shape of time are not developed separately in this run.
Read: lines 539–549.
How you know. By boredom, which he rates above misery as an indicator.7 There is perhaps no more reliable sign of a society's ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. Almost every description of the period before a movement rises refers to vast ennui, and in their earliest stages movements find sympathisers among the bored rather than among the exploited and oppressed. To a deliberate fomenter of upheavals, the report that people are bored stiff should be at least as encouraging as the report that they're suffering intolerable abuses.
What a person is. Bored with himself, in the first place. The consciousness of a barren, meaningless existence is the main fountainhead of boredom. People who aren't conscious of their individual separateness — members of a compact tribe, church or party — are not accessible to it at all. The differentiated individual is free of boredom only when engaged in creative work, or in some absorbing occupation, or when wholly taken up with the struggle for existence. Pleasure-chasing and dissipation are ineffective palliatives. Where people live autonomous lives and are not badly off, yet have no ability or opportunity for creative work or useful action, there's no telling what they will resort to. The shifts can be desperate and fantastic, and their object is to give a life meaning.
What is worth having. A new purpose, a new future, a new identity — and he notes that marriage supplies women many of the same things a movement does, including a new name. That's the setup for the chapter's real subject.
How people should relate. Through the people boredom leaves available, and his examples are all women whose lives had run out of use. Boredom accounts for the almost invariable presence of spinsters and middle-aged women at the birth of mass movements. Even Islam and the Nazi movement, which frowned on feminine activity outside the home, had women of a certain type playing an important role early on. The boredom of spinsters and of women who can no longer find joy in marriage comes from an awareness of a barren, spoiled life, and embracing a holy cause gives them a life full of purpose.
The evidence is a financial fact, and it's the best thing in the chapter. Hitler made full use of the society ladies thirsting for adventure, sick of their empty lives, no longer getting a kick out of love affairs. He was financed by the wives of some of the great industrialists long before their husbands had heard of him. Miriam Beard reports the same role for the bored wives of businessmen before the French Revolution: devastated with boredom, given to fits of the vapours, and restlessly applauding innovators.
What is real, What makes things happen and The shape of time are not separately developed. The chapter's causal claim is the one already stated — an empty self produces the appetite, and the movement fills it.
Read: lines 550–561.
What a person is. Someone with a conscience to escape, and it turns out that both parties to an injury want the same exit.8 The remark that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels has a less derogatory meaning too: fervent patriotism, like religious and revolutionary enthusiasm, often serves as a refuge from a guilty conscience. It is a strange thing that both the injurer and the injured, the sinner and the sinned-against, should find in a mass movement an escape from a blemished life. Remorse and a sense of grievance drive people in the same direction.
What makes things happen. A manufactured need, and this is the most cynical mechanism in the book. Self-surrender is the source of a movement's unity and vigour, and self-surrender is a sacrifice, an act of atonement — and no atonement is called for unless there's a poignant sense of sin. So the technique of a movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as the cure. An effective movement cultivates the idea of sin, depicting the autonomous self not just as barren and helpless but as vile. To confess and repent is to slough off one's separateness, and salvation is found by losing oneself in the holy oneness of the congregation.
The complaint he quotes from an American clergyman is the same problem seen from the other side of the pulpit: what a task confronts the American clergy, preaching the good news of a Saviour to people who for the most part have no real sense of sin.
How people should relate. With a tender spot for the criminal, which he says all movements have. St Bernard's recruiting appeal for the Second Crusade is the exhibit: what is it but an exquisite and priceless chance of salvation, due to God alone, that the omnipotent should deign to summon to His service, as though they were innocent, murderers, ravishers, adulterers, perjurers, and those guilty of every crime? Revolutionary Russia has the same tender spot for the common criminal while being ruthless with the ideological deviationist. The criminal who embraces a holy cause is probably readier to risk his life and go to extremes than people who are awed by the sanctity of life and property.
What is worth having. An outlet, and the chapter ends by noting the two are substitutes for each other. Crime is to some extent a substitute for a mass movement: where public opinion and law enforcement aren't too stringent and poverty isn't absolute, the underground pressure of malcontents and misfits leaks out as crime. And it has been observed that in the exaltation of a mass movement — patriotic, religious or revolutionary — common crime declines.
What is real, How you know and The shape of time are not developed separately here.
Read: lines 562–579.
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.
Segregation as a datum. The sentence comparing the segregated Negro in the South with the nonsegregated Negro in the North is offered to illustrate a psychological mechanism about minorities, and the mechanism is the only thing it is asked to do. Nothing in the surrounding pages registers that one of the two conditions was maintained by force, and nothing needed to, because the Preface had already declared that the book passes no judgments.
Colonies as a going concern with a management problem. The counsel to an exploiting power is written in the same register as the counsel to an employer, and the two sit four paragraphs apart on purpose. That an occupying power might simply leave is not among the options considered.
The Communist as the standing case. The prediction about the Politburo, the note that Stalinism is an opium, and the assumption that communism is a struggling movement elsewhere in the world all date the book to within about three years.
Psychological typing as explanation. Eight chapters of types — misfits, the selfish, the ambitious, minorities, the bored, sinners — with the confidence that sorting characters explains a political phenomenon.
Paradigm-breaking, and the cost is what marks it.
Telling a 1951 reader that the abjectly poor are safe and the improving poor are dangerous. It contradicts both the sentimental and the Marxist account in the same paragraph, and it is supported by Tocqueville's numbers and by Balabanoff watching famous radicals in Moscow think about nothing but hunger and cold.
Explaining the Nuremberg defence rather than dismissing it. He says the men who protested they were only obeying orders were not being hypocrites, because escaping responsibility was what they joined for. The cost is a sentence that reads as exculpation and is not offered as one, six years after the trials.
Writing that early Christianity was the most family-hostile movement of the lot, and proving it out of the Gospels. He is a man with no institutional position saying it about the religion of most of his readers, and the quotations are the argument.
Naming the failed artist as the most violent extremist. This is the chapter's coldest claim and it costs him the sympathy of exactly the readership most likely to buy the book.
Saying boredom is as good an indicator as oppression. It removes suffering from the centre of the explanation, which is where every other account of the period had put it.
[SPECULATIVE]Decision type: judging when a population is about to become dangerous to the arrangement it lives under.
The rule is counterintuitive and it comes with numbers. Discontent is highest when misery is bearable, and a grievance is most poignant when it is almost redressed. France's prosperity grew faster in the twenty years before 1789 than in any period after it. In both France and Russia the land-hungry peasants held about a third of the agricultural land when the revolution came, and most of it had been acquired in the previous generation or two.
The mechanism is a distance rule rather than a suffering rule. Intensity of discontent varies inversely with distance from the thing desired, whichever direction you're travelling. The man who has just come within sight of the promised land and the man who has just been thrown out of it are in the same state, and the man who was never in sight of it is in none.
Scope conditions. This requires that the improvement be visible and recent, and that the thing desired be conceivable as reachable. It fails at the bottom, where the struggle for food supplies a purpose and there is no distance to measure. It fails at the top, where the present is good enough that change can only mean loss. And it fails where people cannot see themselves as individuals responsible for their own station, which is the compact-group finding from the same chapter and is the reason the rule is about societies rather than about hardship.
The general form. Improvement is the precondition of revolt, and the dangerous moment for any regime is the one just after things get better. Modern equivalent: any institution that has recently conceded part of a demand, any employer who has just raised wages partway, any government relaxing a control it kept for decades.
The second-order finding is his own prediction and it is worth keeping as a scored bet. In 1951 he wrote that a popular upheaval in the Soviet Union was unlikely until people had a real taste of the good life, and that the Politburo's most dangerous moment would come when economic conditions improved and the iron rule was somewhat relaxed. He is describing the end of that state forty years early, and the mechanism he gives is the one that turned out to be operating.
[SPECULATIVE]The road not taken here is one Hoffer takes, and it is the most uncomfortable passage in the build.
He has established that the frustrated individual is the raw material of movements, that a man inside a compact group has a high revolting point, and that colonial contact does its damage by dissolving communal life rather than by extracting wealth. From that he draws a policy: an exploiting colonial power should encourage communal cohesion among the ruled, foster equality and brotherhood among them, and inject its reforms through tribal channels instead of at individuals. Divide and rule fails when it dissolves all cohesion; the effective version fosters a multiplicity of compact bodies suspicious of each other.
Two things about that are worth separating, because they come apart.
The mechanism is probably right and is well evidenced across the chapter — Christianity taking the deracinated cities and failing in the villages, the man just out of the army, the Weimar German shocked to discover he had to choose a party. Cohesion raises the revolting point. That is the finding.
The counsel is a choice about whose problem to solve, and the book that passes no judgments has picked a side. It is written from the ruler's chair, and its criterion of success is the absence of revolt. The alternative reading of exactly the same mechanism is available in the same paragraphs and he never states it: if communal cohesion is what makes a life bearable, then a power that dissolves it has done a specific and nameable harm, and the argument for reinforcing the corporate pattern is an argument the ruled could make on their own behalf.
The four paragraphs that follow are where it becomes visible, because he applies the identical counsel to factories. The employer should make his workers feel part of a whole, preferably one that includes him, because solidarity prevents unrest and group bonus schemes beat individual ones. The colonial advice and the personnel advice are the same advice, and a longshoreman wrote both of them. That is the hardest thing in Part Two to hold steady: the man on the docks giving management the argument for the team.
[SPECULATIVE]Take the permanent misfit of section 37. He is not lazy and not stupid. There is one thing his whole being craves and he cannot do it — either he tried to write or paint and failed decisively, or he did it once, felt the flow dry up, and knows he will never produce anything worthwhile again. Whatever he takes up becomes a passionate pursuit, and he never arrives and never pauses. Hoffer's finding is that he will find relief only in complete separation from the self, that he usually finds it in a movement, and that even then the hunger often persists — which is why he becomes the most violent extremist in the service of his cause.
Hoffer offers him the diagnosis and no counsel at all.
An advisor working from the two fruits would take the running seriously and change one thing about it. The doctrine is stated as a plain fork: do the same practice with a specific desire and the desire gets fulfilled; do it with no desire and you get everything. Same act, same nine days, same room, same sore knees, and two different results depending on what was wanted going in. Applied to this man, the point is not that he should stop working. It is that the work is being done for a fruit that cannot be delivered — a fruit named recognition, or arrival, or being the man who made the thing. Hoffer's own sentence says the same in reverse: we can never have enough of what we do not really want. The counsel is to keep the hands moving and take the desire off the end of it, and the tradition's claim is that this is not a consolation prize but the more productive of the two settings.
An advisor working from restless discontent as a call would refuse the framing that anything has gone wrong yet. The restlessness is not a defect to be cured or a symptom to be sedated; it is information, and it arrives in people whose lives have stopped fitting them. The mistake this advisor would name is the speed of the transfer — the misfit takes an unsatisfied signal and hands it wholesale to the first cause that will accept delivery, which ends the discomfort and answers nothing. The counsel is to stay in the discontent long enough to find out what it is about, on the grounds that the movement is offering to end the feeling rather than to answer it.
They disagree about what the man should do tomorrow. The first says get back to the desk and drop the demand. The second says do not fill the hole yet, because the hole is the only instrument you have.
Where they converge is on the thing Hoffer treats as inevitable. He writes that the permanent misfit can find salvation only in complete separation from the self, and then observes that even the holy cause frequently fails to cure him. Both advisors read that failure as evidence about the route rather than about the man. A hunger that survives conversion was never a hunger for a cause, and handing it to one is what guarantees the violence — because the instrument is still pointed at a fruit, and now it has a following.