What You'll Learn:
Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) was a longshoreman for decades, loading and unloading cargo from ships. He was also a farmer, a railway man, and a lay scholar. After being temporarily blinded from ages 7 to 15, he read voraciously for fear that the blindness might return. Hoffer was also a prolific writer, and though he taught at Berkeley in the 1960s, he rejected the label “intellectual,” always preferring to think of himself as a longshoreman. His admiration of the poor and belief in their potential show up in his 1951 work The True Believer, in which he explores the fundamental aspects of mass movements and the people those movements attract.
Key Insights:
- A mass movement may be godless, but it is never irreligious.
- In any movement—religious, nationalist, or revolutionary—collective enthusiasm is a non-negotiable.
- The poor who feel their lives are precarious are every bit as conservative as the powerful and wealthy.
- Mass movements are impossible without an unremitting faith in the future.
- The true believer makes faith in a holy cause a substitute for the faith he has lost in himself.
- People at the fringe with nothing to lose are the most eager to join a mass movement that will disrupt the status quo.
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