Trego's Mountain Ear

So I ran across an article written by a guy who first encountered Eric Hoffer’s book The True Believer in 2021.  He described Hoffer as a “dockworker” – back in the sixties, when I first read the book, he was described as a longshoreman and a philosopher.  I strongly suspect Hoffer was an illegal immigrant – his personal history pans out more as if he were concealing his past than revealing it.   He did spend some time as an adjunct professor at Berkeley – a pretty good accomplishment for a man with no educational transcript.

I still have my copy of The Ordeal of Change from the sixties, but the paperback True Believer disassembled itself from overuse at least 35 years ago.  It’s available online, so you can get a copy a lot easier now than when mine became unusable.

The insight I got from my first read (at 17) was a shock – Hoffer pointed out that there was little to no difference between communist true believers and nazi true believers – the ideology was unimportant to the personalities who would become true believers. 

“The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.”

“The permanent misfits 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.”

“The enemy—the indispensible devil of every mass movement—is omnipresent. He plots both outside and inside the ranks of the faithful. It is his voice that speaks through the mouth of the dissenter, and the deviationists are his stooges. If anything goes wrong within the movement, it is his doing. It is the sacred duty of the true believer to be suspicious. He must be constantly on the lookout for saboteurs, spies and traitors.”

“Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”

My second read brought me this: “Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist.”  My classes in social theory pretty well supported that Marx believed in a social conflict approach to understanding society, and that he spent most of his life studying capitalism.  Christianity as we know it was largely established by a guy named Paul – I think Hoffer would have classified Paul as a True Believer. 

“An effective mass movement cultivates the idea of sin. It depicts the autonomous self not only as barren and helpless but also as vile. To confess and repent is to slough off one’s individual distinctness and separateness, and salvation is found by losing oneself in the holy oneness of the congregation.”

“Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, ‘to be free from freedom.’ It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?”

“Nature of the Desire for Change:

There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change. The tendency to look for all causes outside ourselves persists even when it is clear that our state of being is the product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health and so on. “If anything ail a man,” says Thoreau, “so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even … he forthwith sets about reforming—the world.”

It is understandable that those who fail should incline to blame the world for their failure. The remarkable thing is that the successful, too, however much they pride themselves on their foresight, fortitude, thrift and other “sterling qualities,” are at bottom convinced that their success is the result of a fortuitous combination of circumstances. The self-confidence of even the consistently successful is never absolute. They are never sure that they know all the ingredients which go into the making of their success. The outside world seems to them a precariously balanced mechanism, and so long as it ticks in their favor they are afraid to tinker with it. Thus the resistance to change and the ardent desire for it spring from the same conviction, and the one can be as vehement as the other.”

I hope that these quotes can get you to click the link, and read The True Believer.  I suspect Hoffer’s example nearly ruined me as an academic writer – but the old longshoreman/philosopher taught me a lot with his first small book.