The Moderate Activist
Writing in a time
and society traumatized by the second world war of the century, Eric Hoffer
could not have known his work, The True Believer, would become so
identifiable fifty years later. We have entered into a new century – indeed, a
new millennium – and tragically little has changed. It is now a time and
society traumatized instead by the terror-driven religious convictions of a
few, the extremist Al-Qaeda insistent on formulating their plans of a religious
jihad, a mass movement against a common enemy: the
Hoffer opens his book with the assertion that all mass movements, regardless of their doctrine or goal, use the same methods to appeal to the same minds. “All of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance” (1). He thus maintains that “all mass movements are interachangeable” (17). The irrelevancy of the doctrine of a movement is reinforced throughout the book; Hoffer says that you need only employ the proper conversion methods on the proper minds and you will have a mass movement. This is only true, however, if you operate on the premise that all revolutionaries are gang members seeking a family. History has proven righteous cause to be much more of a vehicle for revolution than a sense of belonging ever could be. While a mob mentality is a dangerous thing, the individual, even the categories Hoffer regards, is not so drastically unstable as to have dehumanized themselves to the point of loss of their inherent rationale. While some may be exactly that, most will probably not be - an enormous overgeneralization (a favored technique of Hoffer’s, it would seem). Of one of his “problem groups” – the misfits – Hoffer says “[they] can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement” (47). For different reasons, he invariably ends up at the same conclusion with any of the other groups he analyzes, although he does make subtle affirmations and distinctions regarding those who will not be disaffected enough to betray their individuality. Those subtleties are not enough; he has characterized all mass movements as a gang, and all believers as gang members – an assertion I find difficult to swallow.
Having identified the “mold” of mass movements and the individuals susceptible to it, Hoffer then proceeds to describe the techniques by which a mass movement can change the potential convert to a convert. He says that a successful mass movement must impress on its followers several things: an imperviousness to the realities of life, to think with ones heart rather than ones head, a brief romanticization of the past before a full blown glorification of the future (to deprecate the present), make-believe, identification with a collective whole, and a common enemy. All of these, he maintains, are “instruments of unification and…[of] a readiness for self-sacrifice” (58). In this, I find myself concurring with the techniques; they are the intelligent tools of any demagogue. “Dying and killing seem easy when they are part of a ritual, ceremonial, dramatic performance or game” (66), says Hoffer. This is undoubtedly what drove the Nazi soldiers to be able to do what they did. I believe, though, that there was something more driving them- a general conviction in the doctrine Hitler eloquently presented to them, not only the chance to escape to some all-powerful entity. The tools of the demagogue can not alone drive a mass movement. It is instead merely fuel to the fire, a fire that must be burning through individuals of a society; when that flame burns brightly enough, in enough people, then these techniques may provide the answer for converting passion to action. In and of themselves, these tools cannot drive the active phase of mass movements as Hoffer suggests.
“The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle” (24). Hoffer clearly appears to suggest that mass movements are the definitive pattern of history – a cycle that cannot be ended due to the temperament of its true believers and the developments that begin and end a mass movement. Stability, he says, comes with the carefree satisfaction of collectivism: “Equality without freedom creates a more stable social pattern than freedom without equality” (33). Hoffer is wrong; collectivism is not the inherent desire of man. It is the hunger for true freedom, to exercise one’s will and intelligent reasoning that is at the heart and soul of every human that has had the chance to feel it. Mass movements may drive history, but the American Revolution was not fought by mindless drones. The argument, perhaps, would be that had Americans been given representation (equality) in British parliament, the Revolution would not have incurred, holding with Hoffer’s hypothesis. I maintain that it would only delay the inevitable. Freedom is the natural desire of man. It is that idea that the American revolutionaries held on to it for all it was worth – which, in hindsight, has turned out to be quite a bit.
Hoffer’s
novel was and is a spark of controversy for its unsubtle methods of
over-generalization. His intentions of being profound and shocking resulted in
bold, dangerous statements that leave much to ambiguity. He immediately
discards the moderates and focuses on the fanatics, but one must assume that
all mass movements through history have been compromised of a large faction of
moderates; there are only so many fanatics to be had in the world, especially
to the extent Hoffer describes them. This focus on extremism gives the entire
book an extremist flavor; thus, the controversy. Hoffer invariably concluded
that all mass movements – from the “men of words” to the true believer, stemmed
from a base lacking in the self, an idea I disagree with. I feel Hoffer
discredits humanity to an unjustified level, giving too much weight to the
fanatics that lose themselves in change, and not enough to the ideas that
motivated them and the moderates that retain those ideas. Hoffer describes mass
movements as a process capable of describing a definitive historical pattern;
as one mass movement establishes an order, its order must be slowly
discredited, eventually gripped and discarded, and a new order established. The
idea has merit, but his explanations are too broad and too critical of human
nature. Although this book was written fifty years ago, the most effective
argument may be to bring it into context. Hoffer said that, “In times of peace
and prosperity, a democratic nation is an institutionalized association of more
or less free individuals. On the other hand, in time of crisis, when the
nation’s existence is threatened…it almost always assumes in some degree the
character of the mass movement” (59). I can find no better defense for this
argument than the