Thoughts on Mass Movements

The True Believer: 
Thoughts on the Nature of 
Mass Movements 
by Eric Hoffer


"This book deals with some of the peculiarities common to all mass movements, be they religious movements, social revolutions, or national movements. It does not maintain that all movements are identical, but that they share certain essential characteristics which give them a family likeness." (from the Introduction)


I have read this book several times over the years, starting the summer before I entered college. It is a classic in the sense that it both retains a freshness upon rereading and succeeds in challenging the reader with the thoughts that it presents. I use the word thoughts in the sense that Pascal wrote his own Pensees in the Seventeenth Century. Hoffer's observations on the nature of mass movements are still essential reading for anyone who desires to understand the nature of the twentieth century culture--and even the twenty-first. His short collection of thoughtful essays are divided into four parts: 1)the appeal of mass movements, 2) the potential converts, 3) Self-sacrifice and other unifying agents, and 4) a concluding summing up of some particular aspects of true believers and the movements to which they adhere.

Early in the book Hoffer identifies many true believers as those who seek "substitutes either for the whole self or for the elements which make life bearable and which they cannot evoke out of their individual resources." (p 13) They are people "who see their lives as irremediably spoiled cannot find a worth-while purpose in self-advancement. The prospect of an individual career cannot stir them to a mighty effort, nor can it evoke in them faith and a single-minded dedication. They look on self-interest as on something tainted and evil; something unclean and unlucky. Anything undertaken under the auspices of the self seems to them foredoomed. Nothing that has its roots and reasons in the self can be noble and good. Their innermost craving is for a new life -- a rebirth -- or, failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identification with a holy cause." (p 12)

The book continues with a focus on Hoffer's analysis of the means used to motivate true believers and bind them together. He concludes his analysis with a discussion of the energumen of those who join both good and bad mass movements. His prose style is at once aphoristic and thoughtful. It is distinguished by a depth that is demonstrated by the breadth of his personal reading and studies. There are references to the thoughts of thinkers as disparate as Epictetus, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Thoreau, Dostoevsky, and many more. His thoughts spurred my thinking more than forty years ago and rereading this short but challenging book continues to raise questions that help me better understand myself and the society around me. Eric Hoffer was a thinker whose writings in this and his several other books helped to shape my personal philosophy of life.

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Quote for Today

What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, and imbecile norm of the earth; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe. Who shall unravel this confusion?

—from the Pensées of Blaise Pascal, born on this day in 1623  

In Search of Lost Time

The Fugitive, Book VI

The Anguish of Separation

Returning to Proust after a summer hiatus we pick up where Albertine left off, literally, for as The Fugitive opens we read the lines: "'Mademoiselle Albertine has gone!' How much further does anguish penetrate in psychology than psychology itself?"(p 563). Just as the old saying goes we do not appreciate what we have until we get what we wish for, Marcel is faced with the 'anguish' of having his wish fulfilled with the departure of Albertine. What ensues in the first section of this part of the novel is what can only be described as anguish for this reader as Marcel grieves over his loss. Pascal's famous saying, the heart has reasons that reason cannot know, is reformulated by Marcel when he meditates:

"I believed that I no longer loved Albertine, that I knew the state of my own heart. Our intelligence can't perceive the elements that compose the heart and they remain unsuspected so long as - from the volatile state in which they usually exist - a phenomenon capable of isolating them hasn't subjected them to the first stages of solidification." (p 564)

His separation, the "unforeseen calamity" is a blow to his sensibility that he describes as "somehow contemporaneous with all the epochs in our life in which we have suffered." (p 571). The result is his continuing meditation on the varieties of memories, particularly of Albertine and the suffering that her presence and absence represented, that are brought to the foreground of his mind as a result of this experience.

"But what we call experience is merely the revelation to our own eyes of a trait in our character which naturally reappears because we've already brought it to light. The spontaneous impulse which guided us on the first occasion finds itself reinforced by all the suggestions of memory." (p 586)

It is the permutations of this memory that will be the narrator's guiding focus more than ever over the next section of The Captive, although it has been omnipresent in the books we have already completed.

In Search of Lost Time Vol V, The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust. The Modern Library, New York. 2003 (1923)

Philosophical Thoughts

Pensees

by Pascal






It is difficult to decide what to say upon reading The Pensees of Blaise Pascal. The fragments, some resembling aphorisms with a few extending to several pages of prose, were left disorganized and unedited at Pascal's death.
Readers have pondered over The Pensees (literally thoughts) ever since trying to interpret them and discern some semblance of a world view from them. In my reading I also tried to comprehend the fragmentary comments and found the views of Monsieur Pascal, to the extent that I understand them, to be foreign to my own views of life. For Pascal the human condition is wretched with man's reason a frail thing on which life ultimately cannot depend. The overwhelming importance of such concepts as immortality and original sin imbue his world view with a supernatural and other-worldly outlook that is difficult to reconcile with reality. Perhaps his personal physical ailments were the source of his view that man in general shared his hatred of the human body.
Of the many thinkers who have contemplated Pascal over the years since his Pensees were left to us in 1670, Voltaire expresses thoughts close to my own when he says, "Nature does not make us unhappy all the time. Pascal always speaks like a sick man who wants the entire world to suffer."(Philosophical Letters, "Twenty-fifth Letter, On Mr. Pascal's Pensees"). For Pascal unhappiness is our lot, the corruption of the body is complete and irredeemable, self esteem is to be abhorred, god's thoughts are impenetrable and yet, we would be better off if we accept the wager that he does exist. Well I, for one, neither accept Mr. Pascal's worldview nor his wager. I look forward to continued wonder at the mysteries of existence and I celebrate the continuing progress that, weak as we may be, we humans produce with our reason.


Pensees and other writings by Blaise Pascal. Oxford University Press, New York. 1995.