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.

The true believer is a person "of fanatical faith who is ready to give his life for a holy cause." In the context of mass movements, words like “faith” and “holy” overflow the confines of formal religion and spill out into any manifestation of radical collective self-sacrifice. The true believer’s zealotry can be attached to any kind of movement: Christian, Islamic, nationalist, socialist, Communist, and so on. A mass movement may not explicitly invoke God or religion, but it is never irreligious.

Regardless of a movement’s particular tenets, it stirs up extremism, excitement, passionate hope for a brighter tomorrow, hatred, and contempt for differences. The adherents’ faith is blind and their loyalty is unflinching.

Mass movements are all in the same family, but that is not to suggest that they are all equally favorable or toxic. It is important to identify the commonalities of movements and the true believers that comprise and animate them, regardless of the movements’ particular names or flavors.

Revolutions are exciting because they capture and harness people’s desire for change; and not just cosmetic changes over long periods of time, but fast and far-reaching changes. These kinds of radical changes depend on a groundswell of excitement and enthusiasm. Any kind of movement requires it—even explicitly religious and nationalistic ones, not just revolutions.

In recent history, revolutionary and nationalistic movements have proven the most common vehicles driving mass movements. They effectively drum up the necessary enthusiasm. Movements are rarely one or the other, however: It’s rarely an either-or between nationalistic and revolutionary. Look at the French and Russian Revolutions, and how quickly they turned nationalistic. Nationalism appears to be the most effective and reliable way to channel those early revolutionary energies and realize some of the fevered dreams of change.

In either form, enthusiasm remains a necessity. Japan’s rapid modernization would never have happened without the enthusiasm generated by their nationalistic movement. The leader Atatürk Kamal would never have managed to reform Turkey without widespread national enthusiasm. In the East, the most powerful unifying agent (and immolator) has not been a desire for democracy that the West hoped to inculcate, but a smoldering anger over the West’s meddling. The West has certainly inspired many of Asia’s mass movements, just not in the ways the West hoped or anticipated.

Massive change requires massive enthusiasm, but what else do movements need to gain ground? To answer this, we need to ask the more basic question of where the desire for change comes from in the first place. Without ever realizing it, most people tend to look outside themselves to explain their successes or failures in life. They find external factors to blame for how they got to “now.” The successful do the same thing: However pleased they are of their assertiveness, business acumen, and talents, most still chalk it up to a confluence of favorable conditions. They acknowledge a kind of luck to it all, that there were some forces at work beyond their control.

The successful and powerful are more likely to look at the world as beneficent and see how its forces shape personal successes. They want to preserve the world as it is. By contrast, the unsuccessful will look at those same forces as cruel and desire extreme adjustments to their environs. Without discontentment and frustration, a movement is impossible.

Discontentment is a vital condition of mass movements, but it alone is not enough to create one. Plenty of people are discontented with their situations, but feel completely at the mercy of their circumstances. In their minds, their circumstances are so formidable that they are inoculated against any gumption to change. Thus for a movement to spring up and gain traction, discontented people must believe they have power.

The feeling of life’s enormity and chaos leaves many people scrambling to stick to little, familiar routines. They desire to conserve what is and not upset the precarious balance in which their life hangs. For this reason, many fishermen, fruit pickers, and anyone in deep poverty are conservative by default—every bit as conservative as the wealthy and well established. When we look at the careful conservatism of the poor and disenfranchised, we see that they have as much a role in the maintenance of the status quo as those enjoying power.

So when people sense the tremors of radical change and the rush of momentum that seems to be gathering behind a movement, people who join feel that power, too. Connecting discontentment and power is a must for any mass movement.

The French social critic Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the French revolutionaries that “never had humanity been prouder of itself nor had it ever had so much faith in its own omnipotence.” The true believer has a deep faith in human potential, whether that faith looks like optimism about human goodness, the efficacy of science, or the superiority of one’s ethnicity. There is a rebelliousness to the true believer. His faith is a new iteration of an old pattern of the Tower of Babel, where people believed that their strength, will, and intelligence were more than enough to build a tower to heaven.

Power is a necessary complement to seething discontentment, but power will reinforce the status quo unless it is linked to a faith that the future could be brighter than the present. A movement needs hope. Power without hope keeps structures in place. So will hope without genuine power. Communists have been persuasive around the world, but not because they whipped up working class discontents and resentment as many suppose. They have gained a foothold because they heralded a new and brighter future.

The biggest difference between the conservative and the revolutionary is their view of the future. Both the rich and poor, powerful and powerless will tilt toward conservatism as long as they are fearful about change. But radicals are made when people are convinced of a beautiful alternative vision of the future, and when they hate the present and wouldn’t mind seeing it smashed to pieces. They are willing to take risks and even  treat the present brazenly, willing to ruin it in order to recast it in their image.

It makes sense that when visions of bright tomorrows pulse through a city, the more cautious citizens lock their doors and hunker down till the enthusiasm passes. No matter how grand the vision, the methods of accomplishing it usually fall painfully short.

The mass’ faith in the future must be a blind and ignorant faith. The true cost and struggle involved in putting their faith into action needs to remain hidden, because experience has a way of tempering zeal. We saw this pattern in the French and Bolshevik Revolutions, as well as the mass movements in Asia and Nazi Germany: None of their architects was a politician.

Practical organizations [probably “non-profits” in more modern parlance] aim to help people who are ready to help themselves. People do not persist in these programs unless they view themselves as people worth caring about and improving. By contrast, mass movements attract people who are fleeing themselves and then accept the movement’s invitation to lose themselves in the whole.

Anyone who considers his life irredeemably messed up will hate any notion of self-improvement and purpose. He will not strive for betterment. He will look at those who wish to better themselves as skewed and greedy, and he will forecast disaster over his own endeavors before ever starting them.

Practical organizations are run on the basis of self-advancement. Mass movements run on the basis of self-renunciation. Practical organizations fall apart when they fail to address the need for self-actualization. Mass movements fail when they fail to emotionally satisfy the hunger for self-renunciation. When the careerists and opportunists begin joining a movement, you know that the initial stage of earth shattering angst is losing steam. The individualists and opportunists coming out of the woodwork are proof that it is now safe enough for them to emerge and capture some of the movement’s momentum for their own personal ends.

Hitler observed that the bigger a movement becomes, with more positions and offices, and the less recognizable it will look to the original rebels. What began at the fringes gets sucked back into the center, and the movement begins to dissolve. Bureaucracy and protocol crowd out the original vision.

The true believer makes faith in a holy cause a substitute for the faith he has lost in himself. Think about it: If you hate yourself and cannot look at your life and feel proud of who you are or what you have accomplished, wouldn’t you want a substitute for yourself, or something in which you can lose yourself? The mass movement provides a golden opportunity to do just that. Why mind your own business if you hate your own business? It is far easier to obsess over someone else’s.

Some people become so viscerally impassioned by issues of race and social class because they have a chance to pry into someone else’s business and continue neglecting their own. A movement provides the true believer with a purpose, but that purpose can be someone else. It is a much lower risk, with all the satisfying feelings of righteousness. In our desperate attempts to run from our own selves, we land with crushing weight on someone else’s shoulders.

We tend to judge an ethnic group or nation based on the worst members of that group. While that is hardly fair, there is something vital to learn by observing subcultures at the bottom and understanding them. The future of any group is usually driven by its most unsavory elements.

If we look at a society, we will find a thick midsection comfortably ensconced between more volatile minorities of rich above and the poor below. Unbeknownst to a blissfully ignorant middle class, there is a battle being waged between the extremes it separates: the powerful and the powerless.

The unsavory elements at the bottom are influential because they have abandoned the present as a rotten thing that offers no reason to fight for its preservation. Those at the fringe have nothing to lose, which makes them unpredictable and potentially dangerous. Anarchy does not faze them.

Those at the fringes most susceptible to mass movements are:

-the poor

-the misfits

-the outcasts

-the minorities

-the youth

-the ambitious

-the addicts or otherwise obsessed

-the impotent

-those with an extra dose of selfishness, and

-the bored

Thus there is a certain kind of person who is drawn to mass movements, but they do not neatly fall into the boxes that most people create. These true believers can come from any background: religious or secular, communal, nationalistic, socialistic, or Communist. What they have in common is suggestibility to a holy cause, one better than the present moment. These people usually hate themselves and their present circumstances, and find a fringe cause that could disrupt or even destroy the status quo. The true believers lose themselves in the cause and are thus willing to die for it.

Of course, the deeply frustrated populations at the fringes are likely to become true believers, but there is an unpredictable spontaneity to their surges of angst. There is no telling where they will come from, but once they emerge, their enthusiasm can be harnessed and congealed. You cannot grasp a mass movement until you see that its main task is to promote unified action and self-sacrifice. All its instruments, from propaganda to doctrine to violence to leadership, are bent toward those ends. Without fail, any movement’s doctrines reinforce the unity and the worthiness of the cause. They essentially tell the true believer by every means available, “This is a movement worth giving your life to.”

These insights are just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of The True Believer here. And since we get a commission on every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.

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