The three chapters of Part Three of Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (1951) — a Japanese official in Berlin in 1932 saying he wishes Japan could have a movement like this one, only it can't, because it hasn't got any Jews; Bukharin confessing because he had been cut off from everything that constitutes the essence of life; Londoners performing heroism on a stage lit by a burning city; and Rauschning deciding that marching kills thought. Read from
RAW/books/The True Believer.md. One full archaeology pass per chapter, sweeping all seven dimensions in every run.This is the engineering half of the book. Part One said what movements are for. Part Two said who joins them. Part Three sets out how united action and self-sacrifice get manufactured, in the register of a manual — the doctrine that must not be understood, the devil who must be one and foreign, the marching that ends individuality. Hoffer warns at the start of it that this is not a textbook but a book of thoughts, and that he will exaggerate in order to illustrate.
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 5 — Hoffer, Part Two · 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, whose subject is this machinery seen from inside.
Source ingest: Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
What makes things happen. Two capacities, and everything a movement is famous for exists to produce them.1 Its vigour comes from its followers' propensity for united action and self-sacrifice. Credit a movement's success to its faith, doctrine, propaganda, leadership or ruthlessness and you have only named instruments. They are means of unifying and means of making men ready to die. The chief preoccupation of a movement is to foster and perpetuate that readiness. Know how it gets engendered and the rest of the behaviour becomes legible.
What is real. A family resemblance produced by function rather than by doctrine. That makes the category wider than it looks. Almost any group trying to hold compact unity and constant readiness for sacrifice will show the peculiarities of a mass movement, noble and base alike. And a movement loses much of what distinguishes it the moment it treats self-interest as a legitimate motive.
The example he picks is a democracy, and it is aimed at his own readers. In peace and prosperity a democratic nation is an institutionalised association of more or less free individuals. Then its existence is threatened. It reinforces unity, it generates a readiness for sacrifice, and it takes on the character of a mass movement to some degree. That happens almost every time.
What a person is. Someone with an unwanted self. The whole mechanism grows out of that one fact. In the poignantly frustrated, the propensities for united action and self-sacrifice arise on their own. So tracing their spontaneous emergence should show how to produce them deliberately. What ails the frustrated is the consciousness of a blemished self, and their chief desire is to escape it.
That revulsion produces both halves at once. It makes a man ready to sacrifice the self, and willing to dissolve it in a compact whole. The estrangement also drags a train of attitudes behind it. They look unrelated and turn out to be the working parts: a depreciation of the present, a facility for make-believe, a proneness to hate, a readiness to imitate, credulity, a readiness to attempt the impossible. Frustration doesn't only produce the desire for unity. It supplies the mechanism for it.
How you know. By reading the technique off the symptom. He states the whole thesis before demonstrating it. When we set out to inculcate a facility for united action and self-sacrifice, we do everything we can to induce an estrangement from the self. We do it whether we know it or not. And we try to evoke the attitudes that accompany that estrangement in the frustrated. The technique of an active movement is the cultivation of proclivities already native to the frustrated mind.
He also tells the reader in advance to argue with him. This is not an authoritative textbook. It is a book of thoughts, and it does not shy from half-truths if they hint at a new approach. Bagehot supplies the licence. To illustrate a principle you must exaggerate much and omit much.
How people should relate. As parts that have had to shed something to fit. United action and self-sacrifice almost always travel together. Both require self-diminution. To become part of a compact whole a man gives up privacy, individual judgment and often his possessions. So schooling a person to united action readies him for self-denial. And the man who practises self-abnegation sloughs off the hard shell that keeps him apart, which makes him assimilable. Every unifying agent promotes self-sacrifice, and every promoter of self-sacrifice unifies.
What is worth having. From the movement's side, plasticity. He names it outright two chapters later.
The shape of time. Laid out here as a plan for the rest of Part Three. Separate the individual from his flesh-and-blood self. Assimilate him into a collective body. Give him an imaginary self. Teach him to despise the present and fix his interest on what is not yet. Put a fact-proof screen between him and reality. And keep him at a pitch of passion that prevents any stable balance with himself.
Read: lines 582–611.
What a person is. Not George, Hans, Ivan or Tadao.2 That is the point. To ripen a man for self-sacrifice, strip him of his individual identity. The most drastic way is complete assimilation into a collective body. Ask the fully assimilated man who he is. He answers that he is a German, a Russian, a Japanese, a Christian, a Muslim, a member of a tribe. He has no worth or destiny apart from that body, and while the body lives he cannot really die.
The counter-case is a man with nothing to belong to. Hoffer reaches for Raskolnikov, walking near the Hay Market after killing two old women with an axe. Suppose a man had to live on a high rock. A ledge with room only to stand. Everlasting darkness and solitude and tempest around him, a square yard of space for a thousand years. It would still be better than dying at once. Only to live, to live and live. Life whatever it may be. To a man with no sense of belonging, mere life is all there is.
The effacement has to be thorough. In every trivial act the individual associates himself by ritual with the congregation, the tribe or the party. His joys and his pride come from the group's fortunes rather than his own. Above all he must never feel alone. Stranded on a desert island he should still feel under the eyes of the group. Being cast out should be the same as being cut off from life.
What is worth having. Whatever lets a man survive torture. The evidence is the camps. Those who stood up best in the Nazi camps felt themselves members of a compact party — the Communists — or of a church, or of a close-knit national group. The individualists, whatever their nationality, caved in. The Western European Jew proved the most defenceless. He was spurned by Gentiles even inside the camps. He had no vital ties to a Jewish community. He faced his tormentors alone.
From that Hoffer reads the medieval ghetto backwards. For the Jews it was more a fortress than a prison. Without the unity and distinctness it imposed they could not have endured those centuries with unbroken spirit. When the Middle Ages returned for a brief decade, they caught the Jew without his ancient defences.
So faith here is primarily a process of identification. It is the process by which a man ceases to be himself and becomes part of something eternal. Faith in humanity, in posterity, in a religion or nation or race or party — each is a way of picturing that eternal something. We then attach to it a self that is about to be annihilated.
What makes things happen. The same mechanism, run in reverse. This is the run's coldest finding. The totalitarian leaders recognised this source of desperate courage. They used it to steel their followers and also to break their opponents. In the purges Stalin turned proud and brave men into cringing cowards by cutting off their identification with the party they had served all their lives.
The old Bolsheviks had long since cut themselves off from humanity outside Russia. They had unbounded contempt for the past. They had contempt for any history capitalist humanity might still make. They had renounced God. There was for them no past and no future outside holy Russia and the Communist party. Both of those were now wholly in Stalin's hands. Bukharin's phrase is the evidence: they felt themselves isolated from everything that constitutes the essence of life. So they confessed. By humbling themselves before the congregation of the faithful, they broke out of the isolation. They renewed communion with the whole by reviling the self in public.
The control experiment is the same people two years later. The Russians who cringed before Stalin's police showed unsurpassed courage facing the invading Germans. The police were not more ruthless than the Wehrmacht. Facing the police, a Russian felt a mere individual. Facing the Germans, he saw himself a member of a mighty race with a glorious past.
The same reversal happened with the Jews. British officials in Palestine reasoned from arithmetic. Hitler had exterminated six million without meeting serious resistance, so six hundred thousand should not be difficult. They found them reckless, stubborn and resourceful. In Europe the Jew faced his enemies as a speck of life floating in an eternity of nothingness. In Palestine he felt himself a member of an eternal race.
The Iron Curtain follows from the same rule. Its purpose is perhaps less to stop spies coming in than to stop Russians reaching out in thought. Emigration is eliminated completely, even for Russian citizens married to foreigners. That blurs the awareness of outside humanity. One might as well dream of escaping to another planet.
How people should relate. As actors, because that is what makes killing and dying possible. Dying seems easy when it is part of a ritual, a ceremony, a performance or a game. To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for. Only as actors in a staged and therefore unreal performance does death lose its finality. So a real leader's main task is to mask the grim reality. He makes his followers feel they are in a grandiose spectacle.
The examples are theatre and not metaphor. Hitler dressed eighty million Germans in costumes and made them perform in a heroic and bloody opera. In Russia even building a latrine involves some self-sacrifice, and life has been a soul-stirring drama for thirty years. The people of London acted heroically under a hail of bombs because Churchill cast them in the role of heroes. They played to an audience of ancestors, contemporaries and posterity, on a stage lit by a burning world city.
Armies do the same work. Uniforms, flags, emblems, parades, music and elaborate etiquette all separate the soldier from his flesh-and-blood self. We speak of the theatre of war and of battle scenes. Generals remind soldiers in battle orders that the eyes of the world are on them. The great general knows how to conjure an audience out of the sands of the desert. Glory is largely a theatrical concept: there is no striving for it without an audience. We sacrifice a real, transitory self for an imaginary eternal one built in the opinion of others.
The shape of time. Emptied of the present, on purpose. The manoeuvre is worth following closely. At its inception a movement seems to champion the present against the past. It sees in established privileges the encroachment of a senile past on a virgin present. But prying loose the past takes utmost unity and unlimited sacrifice. That means the people doing it must give up any chance of ever tasting the present. So the present gets shoved off the stage and lumped in with the past. The battle line is redrawn between the things that are and the things that are not yet. To lose your life is only to lose the present. Losing a defiled present is not to lose much.
Then a shift of emphasis becomes a programme. A movement does not only depict the present as mean. It deliberately makes it so. It fashions a pattern of life that is dour, hard, repressive and dull. It decries pleasures and extols rigour. Ordinary enjoyment becomes discreditable and personal happiness immoral. To enjoy oneself is to have truck with the enemy. The ascetic ideal exists to breed contempt for the present. The campaign against the appetites pries loose the tentacles holding on to it. And a cheerless private life runs against a background of colourful collective pageantry, which makes it look worse.
Even impracticability is part of the campaign. All that is feasible belongs to the present. Offering something achievable would increase the present's promise and reconcile people to it. Faith in miracles is a defiance of the present. Tertullian proclaiming he was buried and rose again, it is certain because it is impossible was snapping his fingers at it.
The counterweight has to be a future. There can be no genuine deprecation of the present without an assured hope of a better one. However much we lament our times, we reconcile ourselves to them if what is ahead looks worse or the same. So every movement casts the present as a doormat on the threshold of the millennium. To a religious movement it is a vale of tears. To a social revolution it is a way station on the road to Utopia. To a nationalist movement it is an ignoble episode before the triumph.
The evidence that hope rather than suffering unites is three cases, and they are the strongest in the chapter. The Donner party shared while hope held and turned to desperate self-seeking when it went. The enslaved Hebrews in Egypt, their lives made bitter with hard bondage, were a bickering, back-biting lot. Moses had to give them a promised land before he could join them together. And the thirty thousand hopeless people in Buchenwald developed no united action and no readiness for sacrifice. There was more greed and ruthless selfishness there than in the most corrupt free society. Instead of studying how to help each other they used all their ingenuity to dominate and oppress each other.
The past gets recruited too. Glorifying the past alone produces caution rather than reckless striving. A present viewed as a link between a glorious past and a glorious future is dwarfed far more thoroughly. So religious movements go back to the day of creation. Social revolutions tell of a golden age of free and equal men. Nationalist movements revive or invent memories of past greatness. A vivid awareness of both directions gives the believer a sense of continuity, and lets him let go of the present. It also makes the present seem like a section in a procession. The followers see themselves on the march with drums beating and colours flying, playing to generations gone and generations to come.
How you know. Better than comfortable people do. That is the chapter's one compliment to the frustrated. Deprecating the present fosters a capacity for prognostication, and the well-adjusted make poor prophets. A pleasant existence blinds us to the possibility of drastic change. What we call common sense is a name for an all-absorbing familiarity with things as they are. So when the times become unhinged it is the practical people who are caught unaware. They are made to look like visionaries clinging to things that do not exist. It is often the fanatics, and not the delicate spirits, who grasp the right thread of the solutions the future requires.
He sorts the political types on the same axis. The conservative doubts the present can be bettered and tries to shape the future in its image. The skeptic treats the present as the sum of all that has been and shall be. The liberal sees the present as the legitimate offspring of the past, growing toward something better, so damaging it maims what comes next. All three cherish the present, and none takes willingly to self-sacrifice. The radical and the reactionary both reject it. They differ on the malleability of human nature. The radical believes in infinite perfectibility. The reactionary sees the future as a glorious restoration. And the line between them is not distinct. The reactionary recreating his ideal past innovates more than he reconstructs, and the radical who has destroyed the present must link his new world to some point behind him.
What is real. Whatever the doctrine says. The doctrine's job is not to be true. Readiness for self-sacrifice depends on being impervious to the realities of life. Self-sacrifice is an unreasonable act and cannot be the end-product of deliberation. So all active movements put a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the world. They claim absolute truth is embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth outside it. The line he quotes is exact about the discipline required. Were I to see all the angels of Heaven coming down to tell me something different, I would shut my eyes and stop my ears.
It is startling, he says, how much unbelief is needed to make belief possible. Blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs. The fanatical Japanese in Brazil refused for years to believe Japan had lost. The fanatical Communist refuses any unfavourable evidence about Russia, and seeing the misery himself will not disillusion him. That ability to shut his eyes is the source of the true believer's fortitude. He cannot be frightened by danger or baffled by contradiction, because he denies that either exists. Strength of faith, in Bergson's phrase, shows not in moving mountains but in not seeing mountains to move.
So judge a doctrine by neither its profundity nor its truth. Judge it by how thoroughly it insulates a man from himself and from the world. Its effectiveness comes not from meaning but from certitude. Crude absurdities and sublime truths are equally potent if taken as the sole eternal truth. Which yields the rule the chapter is remembered for. To be effective a doctrine must not be understood but believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength. Once we understand a thing it is as if it had originated in us. And men asked to renounce the self cannot find eternal certitude in anything that came out of that self.
The specification follows. If a doctrine is not unintelligible it has to be vague. If neither, it has to be unverifiable. One should have to reach heaven or the distant future to check it. Where part of a doctrine is simple, the faithful will complicate and obscure it. Simple words are made pregnant and treated as symbols in a secret message. There is an illiterate air about the most literate true believer, and a taste for quibbling and hair-splitting. When a movement starts rationalising its doctrine and making it intelligible, its dynamic span is over.
What is worth having — the fanatic's state. Passion, kept at a pitch that prevents settling. Estrangement from the self almost always proceeds in an atmosphere of intense passion. Stirring passion is an effective way to upset a man's equilibrium with himself. It is also the by-product of that upsetting. Only the man who has come to terms with himself can be dispassionate about the world. Once the harmony breaks he becomes highly reactive. He is like an unstable chemical radical, hungering to combine with whatever comes within reach, unable to stand apart.
So the fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of a rejected self. He finds it by clinging to whatever support he has embraced. His dedication is a holding on for dear life, and he easily sees himself as the defender of what he clings to. He sacrifices his life to prove his worth. His security comes from the attachment, not from the excellence of the cause. So he is not really a stickler for principle. Often it is his need for attachment that turns every cause he takes up into a holy one. He cannot be weaned away by reason or moral appeal. He can swing suddenly from one holy cause to another. He cannot be convinced, only converted.
That gives a map of who stands near whom. Fanatics of all kinds are crowded at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet. Fanatics of different colours eye each other with suspicion and are ready to fly at each other's throats. They are neighbours and almost family — as far apart and as close together as Saul and Paul. It is easier for a fanatic Communist to become a fascist or a Catholic than to become a sober liberal. The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the militant atheist but the gentle cynic who does not care whether there is a God. The atheist believes in atheism as though it were a new religion. And the opposite of the chauvinist is not the traitor but the reasonable citizen with no taste for martyrdom. The traitor is usually a fanatic going over to the enemy to hasten the fall of a world he loathes.
How people should relate — armies against movements. The chapter's last section separates two things that look alike. Both are collective bodies. Both strip the individual of his separateness. Both demand self-sacrifice and unquestioning obedience. Both use make-believe. Both can shelter the frustrated. The Foreign Legion attracts the types who rush to join a new movement, and the recruiting officer, the Communist agitator and the missionary fish in the same waters.
The differences are what matter. An army does not come to fulfil a need for a new way of life and is not a road to salvation. It is an instrument for preserving or expanding an established order. It is temporary, assembled and taken apart at will. A movement seems an instrument of eternity, and those who join do so for life. The ex-soldier is a veteran and even a hero. The ex-true believer is a renegade.
Being an instrument of the present, an army deals with the possible. Its leaders do not rely on miracles. They are open to compromise, and they know how to surrender. The leader of a movement relies on miracles and destroys his country rather than surrender.
The difference in attitude to the crowd is the sharpest of them. To a general the mass is what his army would become if it fell apart. He is more aware of its inconstancy and its will to anarchy than of any readiness for sacrifice. He sees it as the end-product of a crumbling body. His attitude mixes fear with contempt. He knows how to suppress the mass and not how to win it. The movement leader, from Moses to Hitler, draws his inspiration from the sea of upturned faces, and the roar of the mass is as the voice of God in his ears.
Read: lines 612–842.
What makes things happen. Hatred, which he calls the most accessible of all unifying agents.3 It pulls a man away from himself. It makes him oblivious of his own welfare and future. It frees him of jealousy and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle craving to fuse with his like into one flaming mass. Heine's line is that what Christian love cannot do is achieved by a common hatred.
Then the sentence the chapter is built on. Mass movements can rise without belief in a God, and never without belief in a devil. The strength of a movement is usually proportionate to how vivid and tangible its devil is.
The evidence comes from the men who built the machinery. Hitler was asked whether the Jew must be destroyed. He answered no — we should then have to invent him, since it is essential to have a tangible enemy and not merely an abstract one. Voigt reports a Japanese mission that came to Berlin in 1932 to study National Socialism. Asked what he thought of the movement, one member said it was magnificent, and that he wished Japan could have something like it. Only we can't, because we haven't got any Jews. Hoffer adds that Chiang Kai-shek's worst failure was not finding a new devil once the Japanese enemy vanished.
What is real. A devil with the attributes of a god. He works through them one at a time. The ideal devil is one. Hitler's own line is that a great leader's genius lies in concentrating all hatred on a single foe. Adversaries far removed from each other must seem to belong to a single category. Behind England stands Israel, and behind France, and behind the United States. The ideal devil is also omnipotent and omnipresent. Every difficulty inside the movement is his work and every success a triumph over his plotting. And the ideal devil is a foreigner. A domestic enemy must be given a foreign ancestry first. German Jews were branded as foreigners. Russian aristocrats were given Varangian, Tartar or Western origins. French aristocrats became descendants of barbarous Germans while the commoners descended from civilised Gauls. English royalists were labelled Normans.
What a person is. Somebody looking for allies, and the direction of the search is the tell. We do not usually look for allies when we love. We often see those who love with us as rivals. We always look for allies when we hate. The puzzle is that the desire for allies is most pressing when the hatred has no visible grievance behind it.
His explanation is that unreasonable hatreds suppress an awareness of our own inadequacy and guilt. Self-contempt gets transmuted into hatred of others. There is then a determined effort to mask the switch, and the best mask is to find as many people as possible who hate the same way. Much of our proselytising consists in infecting others with our particular brand of unreasonable hatred. Even with a just grievance the hatred comes less from the wrong than from our own helplessness. That is why we despise and even pity tormentors we feel superior to, rather than hating them.
The released hatred often does not go to whoever caused it. Russians bullied by Stalin's police are easily inflamed against capitalist warmongers. Germans aggrieved by Versailles avenged themselves by exterminating Jews. Zulus oppressed by Boers butcher Hindus. White trash exploited by Dixiecrats lynch Blacks.
How people should relate — guilt and its consequences. The second engine is a guilty conscience. The causation runs the opposite way from what a reader expects. There is no surer way of infecting ourselves with hatred toward a man than by doing him a grave injustice. That others have a just grievance against us is a more potent reason for hating them than that we have one against them. Showing people their guilt does not make them humble. It stirs their arrogance and rouses a reckless aggressiveness. Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within.
Two rules follow, each in a line. To wrong those we hate adds fuel to the hatred. To treat an enemy with magnanimity blunts it. And the surest way to silence a guilty conscience is to convince ourselves that those we sinned against are depraved and deserve every punishment, even extermination. We cannot pity those we have wronged, nor be indifferent to them. We hate them, or we leave the door open to self-contempt.
He extends it to religion without softening it. A sublime religion generates a strong feeling of guilt. The contrast between loftiness of profession and imperfection of practice is unavoidable. And guilt promotes hate and brazenness. So the more sublime the faith, the more virulent the hatred it breeds.
What is worth having — and what hating costs. Here the chapter turns and takes something back. It is easier to hate an enemy with much good in him than one who is all bad, because we cannot hate those we despise. The Japanese admired Americans more than they were admired, so they could hate more fervently. Americans are poor haters in international affairs because of an innate feeling of superiority over foreigners. An American's hatred for a fellow American is far more virulent than anything he can raise against a foreigner. He notes that the backward South shows more xenophobia than the rest of the country. If Americans ever begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will mean they have lost confidence in their own way of life.
The admiration inside hatred then produces the costliest finding in the chapter. Every movement shapes itself after its specific devil. Christianity at its height realised the image of the antichrist. The Jacobins practised all the evils of the tyranny they rose against. Soviet Russia is realising the purest example of monopolistic capitalism. Hitler took the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion for his guide and followed them down to the smallest detail. The oppressed almost invariably shape themselves in the image of their hated oppressors.
So the fanatic's influence runs far beyond his abilities. He shapes the world both by converting and by antagonising. Fanatical Christianity marked the ancient world by gaining adherents and by provoking a new ruthlessness in its pagan opponents. Hitler imposed himself by promoting Nazism and by forcing the democracies to become zealous and intolerant. Hatred mobilises a community for defence, and it does not come cheap. We pay for it by losing many of the values we set out to defend. Hitler sensed the admiration inside hatred and drew his own conclusion. The National Socialist should seek and deserve the violent hatred of his enemies, since the hostility he attracts is the best yardstick of his attitude.
What makes things happen — the second unifier. Imitation, ranked alongside obedience. A close-knit group is inconceivable without a diffusion of uniformity. The one-mindedness every movement prizes is achieved as much by copying as by command. Obedience itself is as much the imitation of an example as the following of a precept.
The frustrated are especially imitative, for a reason that follows from their burden. Wanting to shed an unwanted self, they seek either a new identity or a camouflage. Imitation supplies both. The less satisfaction we get from being ourselves, the greater the desire to be like others. We are readier to copy those different from us than those nearly like us. Lack of self-confidence works the same way. The more we mistrust our own judgment, the readier we are to follow an example.
His American case stings, and it is about his own country. Suppose the millions of immigrants had been superior people, the cream of the countries they left. There would have been not one United States but a mosaic of language and culture groups. It was because most of them were the lowest and the poorest that the heterogeneous millions blended so fast. They arrived wanting to shed an old-world identity. They were equipped with an unbounded capacity to imitate. The strangeness of the new country attracted rather than repelled them, and even the strange language helped, since having to learn to speak enhanced the illusion of being born anew.
Imitation is also a shortcut. We copy when we lack the time or the ability to work something out. So people in a hurry copy more readily, and hustling produces uniformity. Unification itself intensifies the capacity. A civilian drafted into a close-knit unit becomes more imitative than he was, because the unified man has no distinct self to resist influence.
That creates a vulnerability, and the movements know it. A thoroughly unified group is easily seduced and corrupted. So the preaching of every movement bristles with warnings against copying foreign models. Imitating outsiders is branded as treason. Whoever copies a foreigner insults the nation, like a spy who admits an enemy by a secret doorway. Some movements lead their following into the wilderness to let the new pattern settle undisturbed. And the imitativeness that creates the risk also gives great flexibility. That is why a united Japan or Turkey modernised so much faster than China or Iran.
How you know — what propaganda can and cannot do. Here he contradicts the discipline Le Bon founded, and he argues it from the record. We exaggerate the effectiveness of persuasion. We have come to fear the word as much as the sword. Were propaganda one-tenth as potent as it is made out to be, the totalitarian regimes would have been mild affairs. They would have been blatant and brazen, and without the secret police, the camps and the mass exterminations.
The truth, he says, is narrower. Propaganda cannot force its way into unwilling minds. It cannot inculcate something wholly new. It cannot keep people persuaded once they have stopped believing. It penetrates only minds already open. Rather than instilling opinion it articulates opinions already there. The gifted propagandist brings to a boil ideas already simmering in the minds of his hearers. Where opinion is not coerced, people can be made to believe only what they already know.
It also succeeds mainly with the frustrated. Their fears and hopes crowd at the portals of their senses. They hear the music of their own souls in the propagandist's words. And they detect their own imaginings more easily in impassioned double-talk than in precise words joined by faultless logic.
The corollary is a sword. To maintain itself, a movement must arrange that when people no longer believe they can be made to believe by force. Goebbels admits it in an unguarded moment. A sharp sword must always stand behind propaganda if it is to be really effective. And propaganda becomes more fervent when it works alongside coercion, not less. Both the converter and the coerced convert need to believe the imposed faith is the only true one. Propaganda serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others, and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent it becomes.
Violence and fanaticism then breed each other, and it is often impossible to say which came first. Ferrero on the terrorists of the French Revolution is the sharpest version. The more blood they shed, the more they needed to believe their principles were absolute. Only the absolute could still absolve them in their own eyes. They did not spill the blood because they believed in popular sovereignty. They tried to believe in it because their fear made them spill so much blood. Hoffer's American example sits in the same paragraph. Every lynching in our South intimidates the Negro and invigorates the fanatical conviction of white supremacy.
Coerced converts turn out to be as fanatical as persuaded ones, and sometimes more so. Islam imposed its faith by force. Its coerced Muslims showed a devotion more ardent than the first Arabs, obtaining, in Renan's phrase, a faith ever tending to grow stronger. It needs fanatical faith to rationalise our cowardice. That is why the recantations forced from Soviet scientists and writers are likely to be genuine conversions rather than lip service.
The historical claim he draws is blunt. There is hardly an example of a movement reaching vast size by persuasion alone. A Christian historian has to admit that armed force has often made it possible for the spirit of Jesus to survive. It was the temporal sword that made Christianity a world religion, and where it lacked state backing it never got a permanent hold. Conquest was primary in the spread of Islam and conversion a by-product. The Reformation advanced only where it won the local ruler. Melanchthon asked what their precepts would become without the civil authority — Platonic laws. And it was the armies of the Revolution, not its ideas, that penetrated Europe. Where a movement can either persuade or coerce, it usually chooses the second. Persuasion is clumsy and its results uncertain.
The reverse holds too, and he states it as a warning. A movement can be stopped by force. To do it the force must be ruthless and persistent, which can only come from fanatical conviction of its own. Terrorism that comes from individual brutality is spasmodic and subject to moods. As soon as force wavers and alternates with forbearance, the doctrine recovers and draws new benefit from every persecution. So ardent faith is needed not only to resist coercion but to exercise it.
What is worth having — why they proselytise. Not overflowing strength. The opposite. The missionary impulse is not a product of intensity of conviction, since religions of great intensity often confine themselves to despising what is not themselves. Missionary zeal expresses some deep misgiving, some feeling that something is missing at the centre. Proselytising is a passionate search for something not yet found rather than a wish to give the world something we have. What is being searched for is a final demonstration that our truth is the only truth.
So the creed whose legitimacy is easiest to challenge develops the strongest proselytising impulse. Movements with the widest gap between profession and practice are the most fervent in imposing their faith. He runs the test forward on three cases. The more unworkable communism proves in Russia, the more brazen its attack on the unbelieving world will be. The slaveholders of the South grew more aggressive in spreading their way of life as their position became more untenable. And if free enterprise ever becomes a proselytising holy cause, it will be a sign that its advantages have stopped being self-evident.
How people should relate — the leader. He cannot create the conditions, and he is indispensable once they exist. There has to be an eagerness to follow, and an intense dissatisfaction with things as they are, before movement and leader appear. When conditions are not ripe the potential leader stays without a following however gifted. Had the First World War been averted or postponed a decade, Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler would have ended like the brilliant plotters of the nineteenth century who never ripened a crisis into a movement.
The British case makes the point with a man everyone knows. Through the 1930s the potential leader was prominent and made himself heard, day in and day out. The will to follow was not there. It was only when disaster made autonomous individual lives untenable that Churchill came into his own. There is a period of waiting in the wings, often very long, for every great leader whose entrance looks to us like the crucial moment.
Once the stage is set, he is indispensable. Ripeness produces nothing by itself. It was Lenin who forced events into the channels of the Bolshevik revolution. Had he died in Switzerland, or on the way to Russia in 1917, the other prominent Bolsheviks would almost certainly have joined a coalition government. With Mussolini and Hitler the evidence is even more decisive. Without them there would have been neither a Fascist nor a Nazi movement.
The list of what a leader needs is the least flattering inventory in the book. Exceptional intelligence, noble character and originality seem neither necessary nor desirable. What is wanted is audacity and a joy in defiance. An iron will. A fanatical conviction of holding the one and only truth. Faith in his own destiny and luck. A capacity for passionate hatred. Contempt for the present. A cunning estimate of human nature. A delight in symbols. An unbounded brazenness expressed in disregard for consistency and fairness. And a recognition that the innermost craving of a following is for communion, and that there can never be too much of it.
The last requirement is the one he calls most essential and most elusive. A leader's uncanny powers show less in his hold on the masses than in his ability to bewitch a small group of able men. Those men must be fearless, proud, intelligent and capable of running large undertakings. They must also submit wholly to his will and glory in the submission. Trotsky failed as a leader because he could not build a machine of loyal lieutenants. He also had an ineradicable respect for the creative individual, so he never grasped the importance of communion.
Two further notes finish the portrait. Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable, since no movement exists without deliberate misrepresentation of facts. The leader must be a practical realist who talks the language of the visionary. And originality is not required. One of his most striking traits is a readiness to imitate friend and foe, past and present. The clue to any heroic career is perhaps an unbounded capacity for imitation. That indicates a man without a fully developed self, whose strength lies in his blind spots and in plugging all outlets but one.
What a person is — under obedience and under action. Obedient, in a way that inverts the usual picture of a rioter. Disorder and bloodshed make us think of a movement's followers as lawless by nature. Mass ferocity is not the sum of individual lawlessness. Personal truculence works against united action. It produces the pioneer, the adventurer and the bandit. The true believer, however violent his acts, is basically submissive. The Christian converts who lynched professors at Alexandria were submissive members of a compact church. The Communist rioter is a servile party member. The Japanese and Nazi rowdies were the most disciplined people the world has seen.
Then Hoffer turns the same sentence on his own country. In America the employer often finds in the racial fanatic of our South, so given to mass violence, a respectful and docile factory hand. The army finds him particularly amenable to discipline.
The frustrated obey readily because freedom from responsibility attracts them more than freedom from restraint. They will trade independence for relief from willing, deciding and being answerable for failure. Submission by everybody to a supreme leader is also an approach to their ideal of equality. They follow a leader less because he is taking them somewhere than because he is leading them away from their unwanted selves. Surrender is a fulfilment rather than a means. Where they are led is secondary.
Action does the same work by another route. There is less individual distinctness in the man of action than in the thinker. One is never really stripped for action unless one is stripped of a distinct self. So an active people tends toward uniformity. The immigrants who came to America to make money were Americanised faster than those who came to realise an ideal. The second kind measured the new country against the ideal, found it wanting, and insulated themselves.
Movements use action deliberately. The conflicts they incite down enemies and also strip followers of individuality. Clearing land, building cities and large industrial undertakings do the same. Even mere marching serves. Rauschning first thought the eternal marching a senseless waste and came to recognise its effect. Marching diverts men's thoughts. Marching kills thought. Marching makes an end of individuality.
The call to action meets an eager response, because frustration stems chiefly from an inability to act. The most poignantly frustrated are those equipped for action and condemned to rust in idleness. That is how the Lenins, Trotskys, Mussolinis and Hitlers, who spent the best part of their lives talking in cafés, could reveal themselves suddenly as the most tireless men of action of their time.
But successful action is fatal to what produced it. This is the chapter's most useful reversal. Action becomes an end in itself and drains all fervour into its own channels. Faith turns into a lubricant for the machine rather than the purpose. The true believer who succeeds in everything becomes reconciled with himself and the present. He stops seeking salvation in losing himself and finds it in proving his worth. So a people steeped in action is likely to be the least religious, the least revolutionary and the least chauvinist. The stability and tolerance of the Anglo-Saxon peoples owe something to the abundance of the will, skill and opportunity for action, which served them as a substitute for a mass movement.
The danger is what happens when those avenues close. Block action with a severe depression or a defeat in war and the resulting frustration is intense enough that almost any movement finds the ground ready. The explosive situation in Germany after the First World War was partly the inactivity forced on a population that knew itself equipped for action. Hitler gave them a movement. More importantly, he gave them unlimited opportunities for feverish and spectacular action.
How people should relate — suspicion, and what unity does to a person. Badly, and on purpose. Awareness of their own blemishes inclines the frustrated to detect ill will in others. So when they congregate the air is heavy with suspicion. There is prying and spying, tense watching and a tense awareness of being watched. The surprising thing is that this mistrust produces conformity rather than dissension. Knowing they are watched, the faithful escape suspicion by adhering zealously to prescribed behaviour. Strict orthodoxy is as much the result of mutual suspicion as of ardent faith.
Movements use it deliberately. The Nazi rank and file were kept in a permanent state of uneasy conscience. Now and then innocent people are accused and sacrificed to keep suspicion alive. The edge is sharpened by tying internal opposition to the external enemy. The devil plots inside the ranks as well as outside. It is his voice speaking through the dissenter. And it is the sacred duty of the true believer to be suspicious.
Loyalty runs to the whole and not to the fellow member. True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society. As Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son to prove his devotion, so the fanatic must be ready to sacrifice relatives and friends. Ties of blood and friendship look to a movement like a diminution of its own cohesion. So mutual suspicion is not merely compatible with corporate strength but close to a precondition of it. Men of strong convictions, leagued together, watch one another and find their strength in it. Mutual dread binds them as by an iron band and prevents desertion.
What is worth having — and what unity costs. Unification intensifies everything that produced it. Hatred, imitativeness, credulity and obedience all go up, even without manipulation from the leadership. Hoffer finds that surprising. The unifying factors all originated in the frustrated man's revulsion from himself, and the fully assimilated believer is no longer frustrated. He has a new identity and a new life. He is one of the chosen, protected by invincible powers. And he displays, with increased intensity, all the reactions that are symptoms of inner tension.
His explanation is that unification is a process of diminution rather than addition. To be assimilated, a person is stripped of distinctness. He is deprived of free choice and independent judgment. Many of his natural impulses are blunted. The faith, hope, pride and confidence that appear to be added are negative in origin. The exaltation of the true believer flows from a sense of deliverance rather than from reserves of strength. He has been delivered from the meaningless burdens of an autonomous existence. We Germans are so happy. We are free from freedom.
His invincibility depends on the line connecting him to the whole. As long as he feels himself part of it and nothing else, he is indestructible. Which is why the frustrated man still has choices — a new environment, an absorbing undertaking — and the unified man has none. He must cling to the collective body or wither like a fallen leaf. It is doubtful whether the excommunicated priest, the expelled Communist and the renegade chauvinist ever find peace as autonomous individuals. The true believer is eternally incomplete and eternally insecure.
The last section lists how that incompleteness is maintained, and it reads as a specification. Dogma is elevated above reason, so intelligence never becomes self-reliant. Economic dependence is kept up by centralising economic power and by a deliberately created scarcity of necessities. Social self-reliance is discouraged by crowded housing or communal quarters, and by enforced daily participation in public functions. Censorship of literature, art, music and science stops even the creative few from living self-contained lives. And the inculcated devotions do it too, since every devotion is a socket demanding a complementary part from outside. People raised in that atmosphere become incomplete and dependent even when they had the making of self-contained ones. They are strangers to frustration, they have no grievance, and they exhibit the peculiarities of people who crave to be rid of a spoiled existence.
The shape of time in this run is short and instrumental. The leader waits in the wings until the times ripen. After that everything is engineering.
Read: lines 843–1216.
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.
That the interesting question about the camps is who survived them psychologically. The comparison of Communists, priests and individualists is made in the register of an experiment, four years after the liberations and before most of the testimony existed.
Lynching as an available illustration. It appears twice — once as evidence that violence invigorates the faith of the violent, once as evidence that the racial fanatic makes a docile factory hand — and in neither place is it the subject.
Colonial and racial hierarchy as background furniture. The Japanese admiring Americans more than they were admired, the backward South, the imitativeness of the oppressed. All offered as observations that need no defending.
Marching, uniforms and pageantry as obviously effective. A reader in 1951 had watched twenty years of it and needed no convincing.
Paradigm-breaking, and the cost is what marks it.
Saying propaganda is nearly powerless. It contradicts the discipline Le Bon founded and everything the war taught the reading public. Hoffer argues it from the regimes' own behaviour: if the word worked, the camps would have been unnecessary. The cost is that it removes the comfortable explanation in which ordinary people were tricked.
Explaining the Moscow confessions as a route back into communion. Bukharin confessing to break out of isolation is a claim about what the old Bolsheviks wanted, made about men whose treatment was already known.
Writing that the more sublime the faith, the more virulent the hatred it breeds. And ending a paragraph about generous enthusiasms with the line that the torture chamber is a corporate institution.
Naming the oppressed as the reliable imitators of their oppressors. He makes it general — Christianity realising the antichrist, the Jacobins practising the tyranny they rose against, Soviet Russia as the purest monopolistic capitalism. That puts every liberation movement inside the finding.
Telling America that its homogeneity was produced by the lowest and poorest of Europe having no self worth keeping. The cost is the compliment it withdraws, and he pays it in the same paragraph where he explains why the country worked.
[SPECULATIVE]Decision type: judging whether a body of ideas will hold people, as against whether it is any good.
The finding separates two things everyone runs together. A doctrine's effectiveness comes from its certitude and not from its meaning. Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense and sublime truths are equally potent if accepted as the sole eternal truth. So the test is not profundity and not validity. It is how thoroughly the doctrine insulates a person from himself and from the world as it is.
The mechanism is the part worth carrying. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength. Once we understand a thing, it is as if it originated in us. And a man asked to renounce the self cannot find eternal certitude in anything that came from that self. Comprehension and authority are in direct competition. From which the specification follows. Unintelligible, or failing that vague, or failing that unverifiable — so that checking it requires getting to heaven or to the distant future.
Scope conditions. This holds where the doctrine's job is to produce sacrifice and united action. It fails where the job is to run something. Hoffer says so himself: when a movement begins making its doctrine intelligible, its dynamic span is over. An arrived movement needs the intellectuals, and intelligibility is what buys them. The property that makes a doctrine effective early makes it useless later. That is a prediction, not a paradox.
The general form. A body of belief holds people in proportion to how little of it can be checked. Any move to make it clear is a move toward stability and away from fervour. Modern equivalent: watch what happens to a movement's texts once it acquires institutions. The clarifications, the official readings, the authorised interpretations. Those are not signs of strength.
The diagnostic is cheap to run. Look at whether the faithful are complicating the simple parts. Hoffer's observation is that where a doctrine is plain, believers make its simple words pregnant and treat them as symbols in a secret message. Hair-splitting is not evidence that a doctrine is deep. It is evidence that it has to be kept uncheckable.
[SPECULATIVE]Decision type: designing, or recognising, a device for holding a heterogeneous group together.
The specification is explicit, and it is the most operational passage in either book. A movement can rise without a God and never without a devil. The devil should be one, so that adversaries far removed from each other seem to belong to a single category. He should be omnipotent and omnipresent, so that every internal failure is his work. And he should be a foreigner. A domestic enemy has to be given a foreign ancestry before he will serve.
The mechanism underneath is that hatred works where love does not. We always look for allies when we hate and rarely when we love. And the hatreds that unify best are the ones with no visible grievance behind them, because those are the ones that need general consent. Self-contempt is transmuted into hatred of others, and the switch is masked by finding as many people as possible who hate the same way.
Scope conditions. This requires a group heterogeneous enough that nothing else would bind it. Common hatred unites the most disparate elements, which is the whole point of using it. It requires a devil tangible enough to picture, which is the content of the Japanese visitor's remark. And it degrades where the enemy can be despised rather than hated, since we cannot hate those we look down on.
The general form. A group with nothing in common can be unified by a single, omnipresent, foreign enemy, and the unity will be proportional to how vivid that enemy is. Modern equivalent: any coalition whose only shared content is an opponent. Any organisation whose failures are always attributed outward.
The cost is stated by Hoffer himself, and it is why this transfers as a warning rather than a tool. Hatred contains an undercurrent of admiration. So every movement shapes itself after its specific devil — the Jacobins practising the tyranny they overthrew, Hitler working from the Protocols down to the smallest detail. A community mobilised by hatred loses many of the values it set out to defend. The device works, and what it delivers is a copy of the thing you built it against.
[SPECULATIVE]Take the man at section 77. He has done what the book describes. He renounced the self, joined the compact whole, and got the deliverance he came for. He is not a cynic and he was not tricked. And Hoffer's finding is that in losing his individual independence he has found a new freedom — freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame — and that this is part of the attraction. The humbling of the self has bred pride rather than humility. The act of self-denial seems to confer the right to be merciless.
Hoffer offers him nothing. The chapter's last word is that the torture chamber is a corporate institution.
An advisor working from loving-kindness as systematic practice would say the man has done half a practice and stopped. This tradition knows you can go a long way inward and stay defended. You can meditate on emptiness for years and remain armoured. What cracks a defended heart is a deliberate, repeated wishing of wellbeing, extended outward by steps until it reaches people you have no reason to like. That is a discipline with a direction, and the direction is the whole point here. The movement's version of self-loss also dissolves a boundary. It dissolves it inward only, toward the group. The counsel is that a self-loss stopping at the edge of the congregation has not gone anywhere. It has relocated the wall.
An advisor working from the difference between compassion and empathy would leave the heart alone and go at the mechanics. That makes it more use to a sceptic. Empathy is catching what somebody else feels. It is exactly the faculty Hoffer's unifiers exploit — contagion, imitation, the sea of upturned faces. A group can raise empathy to a white heat and become more dangerous, not less. Feeling with your own people is entirely compatible with feeling nothing for anyone outside. Compassion is a different operation. It is trained, it is aimed at suffering as such, and its object is not selected by membership. The counsel is to stop asking whether he feels strongly with his fellows, which he plainly does. The question is whether the feeling is available to anybody who is not one of them.
They disagree about the entry point. The first says the fault is in what he did with the boundary of the self. The second says the fault is in mistaking a shared feeling for a moral faculty.
Where they converge is on a sentence Hoffer treats as an irony and leaves standing. He writes that the hatred and cruelty born of selflessness are far worse than anything selfishness produces. Then he lets it sit as a paradox. Both advisors would say it is not a paradox. It is what happens when self-loss is achieved with no specification of what it is being lost into. The dissolution is real and the deliverance is real. Neither of them carries any information about direction. A tradition that spent two thousand years on the technique spent them on the target as well. Hoffer's movements supply the first half and take the second choice away.