True believers abound and they see others with differing views as an evil scourge that must be eradicated.
Please try again later.Īlthough published seven decades ago, Hoffer’s observations strike home today in a nation that might more accurately be called the Disunited States of America. The phenomenon, Hoffer importantly concluded, is not confined to any one religious or ideological belief, noting that in post-World War I Germany, communists and Nazis competed for allegiance among the same frustrated, marginalized and angry slices of the population. But the real attraction for this population is an escape from the self, not a realization of individual hopes.” Thus, a mass movement attracts followers “not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.” Hoffer applied the term “mass movements” to “revolutionary parties, nationalistic movements, and religious movements” and added, “A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated by men of actions.”Īs summarized in Wikipedia, “Hoffer argues that fanatical and extremist cultural movements, whether religious, social, or national, arise when large numbers of frustrated people, believing their own individual lives to be worthless or spoiled, join a movement demanding radical change. He continued to labor on the docks and continued to write for another 13 years, before becoming an adjunct professor at UC-Berkeley, but “True Believer” remains his most cogent work. Hoffer’s first of many books,“The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements,” was published in 1951, while he was a longshoreman in San Francisco. The “true believers” that philosopher Eric Hoffer defined seven decades ago threaten to undermine civic and political life.Įric Hoffer was a former migrant farm worker who achieved praise and fame in the 1950s and 1960s as a writer and philosopher.
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