The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

5 Responses to “The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements”

1. J. Richardson says:

   September 30, 2010 at 1:54 pm

   I buy books like this for the thoughts and insights they they might provide me about people. I got absolutely nothing out of this one. Eric Hoffer over-uses flowery vocabulary which causes his writing to have poor flow. This makes the book unpleasant to read despite its fleeting part.

   The entire book is a list of pontifications, and I establish no eye-opening revelations in any of them. It’s a book that leaves you feeling like you could have written it better yourself. I can imagine no point in the history of mankind where this book would have been considered insightful, useful, or necessary. Pure drivel.

   To be honest, the title does say “thoughts”, and that is all it is; a collection of thoughts that could as easily have been yours as Hoffer’s. The references used are excellent for small more than allowing you to cock your head, raise an eyebrow, rest an pointer finger across your lips, and say, “Hmmm”.
   Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
2. Anonymous says:

   September 30, 2010 at 4:53 pm

   Mr.Hoffer clarifies the conditions under which men are able to accept philosophies like communism. fundamentally, it is a result of sheer hopelessness. He makes his case very well, and the book has withstood the test of time. Mr Hoffer was a longshoreman, and becam legendary during the Presidency of J.F.Kenned
   Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
3. Kelly Berger says:

   September 30, 2010 at 6:18 pm

   Mostly, his opinion are valid, but i reflect his
   approach is sometimes biased and incorrect. In some cases
   he is simply looking at the outcome and trying to
   cement some of his own beliefs as causation. Example:
   “The frustrated have a propensity for unified action.”
   The movements he is describing are en masse rather
   than unified. He also fails to take into account that
   the movements he is.. well, ‘attacking’ are regularly not
   lead by people of the same mentaility as persons which
   follow. In this case too, unified and en masse are
   different, like together and same direction. Unified
   implies some sort of concious awareness of effert. The
   intellectual movements he describes are not en masse
   per se. There is a lack of them as well, he cites few
   in defense the the Right Believer is establish in both rich
   and poor alike. I reflect he includes it to gloss over
   his own bias, so as to make the work more paletable
   lacking offending anyone.
   There are a few logical fallacies, but the points are
   still worth noting. I wish i had taken notes, i could
   be point here. As it is i am only shiny what i
   remember of my own thoughts as i was reading.
   He does make use of some modern [pop?] psychology. He
   attempts to show the complexity of mass/movement
   behavior in a rational manner. What he really ought to
   do is trreat the movements themselves as memes, and
   examine less the people and more the ideal of the
   movement as a monster of its own.
   The book certainly sheds light on what i caringly refer
   to as “The tyranny of the mundane”. God, I am such an
   elitist pig.
   Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
4. Andrew Robinson says:

   September 30, 2010 at 9:01 pm

   Conservative “intellectuals” exist largely as tokens, facts around which intelligent yet hopelessly incorrect people can rally to assert their erudition and defend the respect that comes with the aver to a tradition of thought. It doesn’t seem to matter much whether they have anything original or accurate to say about the world, so long as they can say it articulately with enough fancy words. This was the case with William F. Buckley, a reactionary creep of the highest order who managed to forestall, until the end of his life, the completion of any of his sentences, a feat which kept millions of American conservatives enthralled and convinced of his staggering intelligence. Lesser known and considerably more blunt, but equally pointless, was Eric Hoffer, who worked as a stevedore for most of his life while writing about politics and philosophy in his spare time, building his books perfect for some middle-class Republican to place on spectacle in a show of sham solidarity with the effective class.

   But Hoffer himself was not in solidarity with the effective class, as he displays in his first book, The Right Believer, ostensibly a treatise on the psychology of fanaticism that reads like a poor man’s version of Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm (Hoffer even steals his thesis wholesale on page 31). Language of poor men, under the category of “potential converts” to what he calls a “mass movement,” Hoffer classes no less than five different types of poor people as “undesirables,” this being the overall class of human slime which have formed the base of well loved movements from Christianity to Communism, according to him. The word “slime” comes by way of a quote from Genesis at the beginning of the book. I infer that this is what he thinks of his subjects because, after describing them with such contemptuous arrogance in Part 2, he makes it perfectly clear on page 124 that it is the attitude of these failures, weaklings and mental defectives which constitutes the glue holding a revolutionary movement together.

   I should point out that I am not defending the Nazis, Bolsheviks or any of the additional groups at which his criticisms are levelled, and since his analysis ignores every factor in the success of totalitarianism besides the despicable character of people who didn’t have the might to embrace their alienation and accept the status quo, it has small real tie to that phenomenon in the first place. This is political philosophy for children. It will make right-wingers feel better about hating the groups they already despise, as evidenced by the fact that it loved a resurgence of interest among them after 9/11 as an explanation of Islamic fundamentalism, but it adds nothing to our understanding of the theme it claims to take up. It is simplistic, dualistic, and promotes the classic American Dream myth that the only thing stopping us from realizing our goals is our own flaws, including the flaw of having pathetic goals in the first place.

   President Eisenhower mentioned The Right Believer during a press talks, and Hoffer won the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983. The ringing endorsement of this man by the United States government shows that he was a tool of the establishment as well as a hack. Do your mind a favor and read Chomsky as a replacement for.
   Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
5. Professor Joseph L. McCauley says:

   September 30, 2010 at 10:22 pm

   This book was written more or less in the Vietnam era by a Longshoreman who was a self-styled conservative philosopher. Hoffer was turned off by the left-wing fanatacism of that time. This was the era in which Maoism was fashionable among a few western academics who, unlike their Chinese counterparts, did not have to do cultural duty on pig farms and in rice fields.

   Hoffer is, but, up to date. His argument is not about left-wing fanatacism in particular, but as a replacement for discusses the causes of fanatacism in all-purpose. The book may help you to some extent to know the trend of internally-miserable people toward extremist movements of all stripes, whether fascist, communist, El Quaida, the Taliban, the Christian Coalition, neo-conservative, or others. Citizens who are wondering why America is where it is today might profit a bit from reading The Right Believer.
   Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5