Posted on 10/20/2001 7:04:33 AM PDT by LadyDoc
Heads up to Freepers: The psychology of terrorists was described by Eric Hoffer in his book True Believer. Below is from a web site that has a few quotes:
Page 4 In modern times, the mass movements involved in the realization of vast and rapid change are revolutionary and nationalist—singly or in combination. Peter the Great was probably the equal, in dedication, power and ruthlessness, of many of the most successful revolutionary or nationalist leaders. Yet he failed in his chief purpose, which was to turn Russia into a Western nation. And the reason he failed was that he did not infuse the Russian masses with some soul-stirring enthusiasm. He either did not think it necessary or did not know how to make of his purpose a holy cause. It is not strange that the Bolshevik revolutionaries who wiped out the last of the Czars and Romanovs should have a sense of kinship with Peter a Czar and a Romanov. For his purpose is now theirs, and they hope to succeed where he failed. The Bolshevik revolution may figure in history as much an attempt to modernize a sixth of the world’s surface as an attempt to build a Communist economy...
Page 7 Discontent by itself does not invariably create a desire for change. Other factors have to be present before discontent turns into disaffection. One of these is a sense of power.
Those who are awed by their surroundings do not think of change, no matter how miserable their condition. When our mode of life is so precarious as to make it patent that we cannot control the circumstances of our existence, we tend to stick to the proven and the familiar. We counteract a deep feeling of insecurity by making of our existence a fixed routine.
Page 8 It is a dangerous life we live when hunger and cold are at our heels. There is thus a conservatism of the destitute as profound as the conservatism of the privileged, and the former is as much a factor in the perpetuation of a social order as the latter.
Page 9 The powerful can be as timid as the weak. What seems to count more than possession of instruments of power is faith in the future. Where power is not joined with faith in the future, it is used mainly to ward off the new and preserve the status quo. On the other hand, extravagant hope, even when not backed by actual power, is likely to generate a most reckless daring. For the hopeful can draw strength from the most ridiculous sources of power—a slogan, a word, a button. No faith is potent unless it is also faith in the future; unless it has a millennial component. So, too, an effective doctrine: as well as being a source of power, it must also claim to be a key to the book of the future.
Those who would transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding and captaining discontent or by demonstrating the reasonableness and desirability of the intended changes or by coercing people into a new way of life. They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope.
Page 11 For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap.
Page 15 In a modern society people can live without hope only when kept dazed and out of breath with incessant hustling. The despair brought by unemployment comes not only from the threat of destitution, but from the sudden view of a vast nothingness ahead. The unemployed are more likely to follow the peddlers of hope than the handers-out of relief.
Page 16 . . . Hence the embracing of a substitute will necessarily be passionate and extreme. We can have qualified confidence in ourselves, but the faith we have in our nation, religion, race or holy cause has to be extravagant and uncompromising. A substitute embraced in moderation cannot supplant and efface the self we want to forget. We cannot be sure that we have something worth living for unless we are ready to die for it. This readiness to die is evidence to ourselves and others that what we had to take as a substitute for an irrevocably missed or spoiled first choice is indeed the best there ever was.
Page 19 The problem of stopping a mass movement is often a matter of substituting one movement for another.
Page 21 Every mass movement is in a sense a migration—a movement toward a promised land; and, when feasible and expedient, an actual migration takes place. This happened in the case of the Puritans, Anabaptists, Mormons, Dukhobors and Zionists. Migration, in the mass, strengthens the spirit and unity of movement; and whether in the form of foreign conquest, crusade, pilgrimage or settlement of new land it is practiced by most active mass movements.
Page 107 Imitation is often a shortcut to a solution. We copy when we lack the inclination, the ability or the time to work out an independent solution. People in a hurry will imitate more readily than people at leisure. Hustling thus tends to produce uniformity. And in the deliberate fusing of individuals into a compact group, incessant action will play a considerable role.
Page 109 The truth seems to be that propaganda on its own cannot force its way into unwilling minds. . . . The gifted propagandist brings to a boil ideas and passions already simmering in the minds of his hearers.
Page 124 Action is a unifier. There is less individual distinctness in the genuine man of action—the builder, soldier, sportsman and even the scientist—than in the thinker or in one whose creativeness flows from communion with the self. The go-getter and the hustler have much in them that is abortive and undifferentiated. One is never really stripped for action unless one is stripped of a distinct and differentiated self. An active people thus tends toward uniformity. It is doubtful whether without the vast action involved in the conquest of a continent, our nation of immigrants could have attained its amazing homogeneity in so short a time.
Pages 125-126 Men of thought seldom work well together, whereas between men of action there is usually an easy camaraderie. Teamwork is rare in intellectual or artistic undertakings, but common and almost indispensable among men of action. The cry “Go to, let us build us a city, and a tower” is always a call for united action. A Communist commissar of industry has probably more in common with a capitalist industrialist than with a Communist theoretician. The real International is that of men of action.
All mass movements avail themselves of action as a means of unification. The conflicts a mass movement seeks and cites serve not only to down its enemies but also to strip its followers of their distinct individuality and render them more soluble in the collective medium. Clearing of land, building of cities, exploration and large-scale industrial undertakings serve a similar purpose. Even mere marching can serve as a unifier. The Nazis made vast use of this preposterous variant of action. Hermann Rauschning, who at first thought this eternal marching a senseless waste of time and energy, recognized later its subtle effect. “Marching diverts men’s thoughts. Marching kills thought. Marching makes an end of individuality.”
The web site is about people who become true believers in "aerobics" (!)
I would have typed in from my own book, but it must have been discarded in one of my moves (I have another on backorder).
In 1951, when Believer first appeared, eager eyes had long been peeled for the emergence of a proletarian philosopher. A genuine one emerged at last--with a philosophical cast very different from what a proletarian was supposed to think. The literary shock could hardly have been greater.
For Hoffer's hero is 'the autonomous man,' the content man at peace with himself, engaged in the present. In Hoffer's book, this hero, nourished by free societies, is set off against 'the true believer,' who begins as a frustrated man driven by guilt, failure and self-disgust to bury his own identity in a cause oriented to some future goal. -Editor's Preface to the Time-Life Books edition of The True Believer
There may be no harder form for an author to attempt than writing in aphorisms. The required combination of brevity and profundity is exceptionally hard to maintain, in fact most authors only toss off a few good ones in their entire career. The most famous exception to the rule is Friederich Nietzsche, who, whatever we may think of the destructive influence of his ideas, must be admitted to be a brilliant philosopher (see Orrin's review.) But interestingly enough, Eric Hoffer, a self educated field hand and longshoreman, is more than a match for him. There are so many quotable passages in this little book that you can seriously open to just about any page and find a sentence that will stop you in your tracks and make you ponder it's implications. It is in no way possible to address all the ideas that he broaches, so let me just try a couple.
Perhaps the most important insight in the book--and it is very hard to settle on just one--is that the members of mass movements, who ostensibly seek to better the lot of all mankind, are motivated not by altruism but by selfishness. They join such movements not because they believe in any particular ideals or goals but because they do not believe in themselves :
Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden...We join a mass movement to escape from individual responsibility, or, in the words of an 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?
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The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.
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A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.
With these startling thoughts, Eric Hoffer, one of the very proletarians for whom activist intellectuals always claim to be fighting, stood conventional wisdom on it's collective head and threw down a challenge which has never been adequately answered.
Traditionally folks have been willing to forgive coercive utopians for the catastrophic harm they have done to society because it was felt : "their hearts were in the right place," that however misguided their actions proved to be, they should be forgiven because they meant well. Think of how charitably we look upon youthful membership in the Communist Party by many artists and intellectuals of the 1930's. Sure the Party was funded by Moscow and served Soviet ends and, of course, we realize now that Communism was not quite as beneficial to the workers of the world as it was supposed to be, but surely we can all agree that their motivations were noble, that they were thinking only of the downtrodden, right? Wrong. Hoffer exploded that myth and forced us to consider that they were driven by feelings of personal inadequacy and the desire to tear others down.
In fairness to Hoffer, let it be noted that he applied this logic to all mass movements, including Christianity, not just to Communism or Nazism. In addition, he differentiated amongst such movements, believing some to be more beneficial in the long term than others :
The manner in which a mass movement starts out can also have an effect on the duration and mode of termination of the active phase of the movement. When we see the Reformation, the Puritan, American and French revolutions and many nationalist uprisings terminate, after a relatively short active phase, in a social order marked by increased individual liberty, we are witnessing the realization of moods and examples which characterized the earliest days of the movements. All of them started by defying and overthrowing a long-established authority. The more clear-cut this initial act of defiance and the more vivid its memory in the minds of the people, the more likely is the eventual emergence of individual liberty.
Of course, this really boils down to the fact that those movements which had freedom as their ultimate goal were more likely than others to arrive there. For this reason, the French Revolution does not actually belong in this category, but serves to prove the point. It was less about liberty and more about equality, or at least placed equal emphasis on the two; but history has shown these to be incompatible goals and that, contrary to the kind of Rousseauean ideals of the French, equality does not occur naturally, and can only be imposed by government force. Thus, the French Revolution was fated to end in the Terror, while the American Revolution was destined to end in libertarian democracy.
For Hoffer though, as I would assume for the rest of us these days, the free, or autonomous, man is real hero of society. Though activists of all ideological stripes tend to dismiss them as complacent and unmotivated, even characterless :
Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.
Hoffer's free man has none of the romantic trappings of the radical, perhaps appeals less to a certain kind of imagination. But as experience has shown, at great cost in human life, the adherents of mass movements, cloaked though they are in the language of selflessness, are, as Hoffer says, all too eager to trade the burden of freedom for the comfort of equality, however brutally attained and maintained.
Despite some historical inaccuracies, occasionally sketchy reasoning, and a too thorough dismissal of the value of faith, Hoffer's great contribution throughout the book lies in his recognition that these are not fundamentally economic matters, that mass movements, despite their protestations to the contrary, are not truly concerned with altruistically securing a better standard of living for everyone, but rather are driven by a selfish desire to secure an equal standard for all, regardless of the cost.
Though this insight has taken hold in the intervening fifty years, as academic Marxism, with it's emphasis on economics, has been put to flight, Hoffer seems now to be largely forgotten. This seems to be partly a function of his own personality--worldly success made him uncomfortable, so he did not capitalize on his temporary fame as others might have. But it is undoubtedly also a function of the challenge his ideas pose to the academic Left. Though his intellectual honesty is admirable, when he said during the years of student unrest in the 1960's that :
The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us.
and
Never have the young taken themselves so seriously, and the calamity is that they are listened to and deferred to by so many adults.
he essentially committed professional suicide. Of course, he never considered himself a professional philosopher, returning always to life as a longshoreman.
This book is required reading for anyone trying to make sense of the 20th Century, and, unfortunately, will likely remain pertinent in the 21st. It is concise, lively, and thought provoking, a book you will return to again and again.
GRADE : A
Perhaps the most important insight in the book--and it is very hard to settle on just one--is that the members of mass movements, who ostensibly seek to better the lot of all mankind, are motivated not by altruism but by selfishness. They join such movements not because they believe in any particular ideals or goals but because they do not believe in themselves :
Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden...We join a mass movement to escape from individual responsibility, or, in the words of an 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?
+++++++++++
and this sure outlines the major task we have ahead, both in this war and the war with liberals:
The manner in which a mass movement starts out can also have an effect on the duration and mode of termination of the active phase of the movement. When we see the Reformation, the Puritan, American and French revolutions and many nationalist uprisings terminate, after a relatively short active phase, in a social order marked by increased individual liberty, we are witnessing the realization of moods and examples which characterized the earliest days of the movements. All of them started by defying and overthrowing a long-established authority. The more clear-cut this initial act of defiance and the more vivid its memory in the minds of the people, the more likely is the eventual emergence of individual liberty.
URWelcomeBTTT
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