"The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements"

A post for progressives, conservatives, & independents concerned about America

My first book recommendation for strange times is, “The True Believer: Thoughts on The Nature of Mass Movements” by Eric Hoffer.

First a story. From 2016 to 2020 I worked on a progressive college campus as a chaplain. I wrote about it in The Hedgehog Review. These were the years of peak “woke” on the Left and growing moral panic on the Right. Everyone on my progressive campus was obsessed with intersecting identities (race, gender, sexual orientation). Who is the oppressor? Who is the oppressed? You couldn’t be neither much less both. The idea sweeping progressive campuses was that past discrimination (heteronormativity, racism etc.) could be undone by current discrimination against people from “privileged” groups (straight, white, cis etc.) Needless to say this did not make for a harmonious learning environment. Everyone was on edge & afraid of being called out for even asking a question that broke with the orthodoxy of the movement.

In my second year my boss gave me hope about my future at the college. He told me, “Anna, you’re a rising star, and I want you to be a part of the dream team I’m building. My goals are big, I want an expert in each religion, some will have to be volunteers, but I want us all on staff to be equal partners. I know you’ve been part time. I want to change that. I want to get you benefits, health insurance and the ability to take classes for free, and also free tuition for your kids to this school or to any school in our network.” I was overjoyed. “Thank you!” I said.

My husband Geoffrey and I owned a small business (Keating Woodworks) we had three little kids, and we had been boot strapping the business for our entire marriage. Every extra dollar we made from the furniture we designed and built in our home, we poured back into growing our small business. If a job was profitable (and many were not) we used the profits to buy a bigger sander, a better table saw, or to hire and train a new employee. So, we didn’t have an emergency fund, let alone a college fund or health insurance. I was a writer, I needed this job.

Plus, I had always wanted to work in higher ed, so I was excited to have a job at a great school with the possibility of benefits down the line. “I could work happily here forever,” I thought. I imagined myself going to lectures, leading workshops, taking students on pilgrimages and smiled. My boss had said what I’d most wanted to hear, hang in there and you will be given health insurance. When I came out of his office that day the sun was shining but it was raining at the same time. My favorite weather. Each raindrop shined in the sun. It felt like a good omen.

I called Geoffrey, “I could get our kids healthcare and college funds!” He was cautious, “It sounds good Anna, but we don’t know what’s going to happen.” I thought he was wrong. I knew what was going to happen. I was asking for what I needed to make this work. I was leaning in and doing a good job and I was going to be rewarded. Why couldn’t he just be happy for me?

But my husband had spent enough time in the academe to be skeptical. He’d been in a PhD program before becoming a craftsmen and was aware of campus vicissitudes. He was right to be skeptical. A year later when I asked my boss about moving me from nineteen to twenty hours a week, so I could qualify for the promised health insurance he told me, “The college would prefer an LGBTQ person or a person of color in your position. There’s nothing I can do.” He explained that my immutable characteristics (straight, white, cis, female) were not the best fit for the institution if the institutions number one goal was Ibrahim Kendhi style anti-racism. Everyone else in my department had health insurance, but there was nothing I could do. I could go back to school for another degree, but I couldn’t change my categories. And I certainly couldn’t change which way the revolutionary winds were blowing.

I wondered: How did this happen? Why does everyone agree that it is the best course? It felt wrong, illiberal, to say we want to get rid of people because of their categories alone. It also seemed obvious that this kind of thing was going to lead to a massive anti-woke backlash, that identity games on the left would fan the flames of the manosphere, white nationalism, the alt right, etc.

There were many problems with reducing people to identity categories and then ranking those categories as better or worse. One was identity hoaxing. All around me I saw people adopting labels and categories that were advantageous to them. You would be hard pressed to find a straight girl on a progressive campus at the time who didn’t identify as pansexual. Just as in some conservative Catholic spaces, gay people remained deeply closeted. Hiding isn’t really hoaxing, but it probably isn’t the sign of a healthy community either. It’s a sign that people are afraid.

I was surprised that people were pretending to be queer on campus, as the gay rights movement was all about being free to live authentically, but people were pretending to be all kinds of things in order to advance. I worked with a white secular woman who wore a hijab once a week “in solidarity.” It seemed absurd, like cosplay, or cultural appropriation. If a professor was mixed race, Jewish on one side and Puerto Rican on the other, for example, they only spoke about the “Latinx” part of their identity, because having family living in Israel was hardly something that was advantageous in terms of self-promotion within the identity synthesis. He wanted to be seen as oppressed not oppressor and on and on.

This all seemed crazy. It was crazy. Why were all Jews categorized as oppressors, for example? Who decided which identities were oppressed? There were lots of things that were taken on blind faith. Lots of phrases that were repeated unthinkingly like a creed. All of our meetings began with stating our pronouns, even with people whose pronouns we already knew, people we met with every week. What was the purpose, if not just signaling our allegiance? All campus wide events began with acknowledging that we were on stolen land. You weren’t allowed to ask, “If the land has been stolen, shouldn’t we, you know, give it back?” Critical thinking was discouraged. Individualism and asking questions were discouraged. If you dissented even in part you were one of “them” a Trump supporter and an enemy. I cried when Trump was elected the first time, because when he came down that golden escalator he had made xenophobia the heart of his message, I was in no way a Trump supporter, but I was a small c liberal. I wanted to host campus wide debates. I was told debates were forbidden. My mind was blown. I thought people learned best when ideas were brought into conversation with one another. Where was this “error has no rights” soft authoritarianism coming from?

I am a classical liberal. I believe in: human rights, equality under the law, freedom of speech, a free press, freedom of assembly, free elections, due process, checks and balances, and all the rest of the boring uncool status quo stuff that we used take for granted in 90s America. I tend to vote for Democrats but I disagree with Democrats on some things and disagree with Republicans on others. Not having a “team” on campus, I watched what was happening around me and it felt frankly, cultish. Students told me in hushed tones that their greatest fear was being called “problematic.” Which is to say, their greatest fear was expressing an unpopular opinion, which could be something as innocuous as, “I go to church.”

I did what I always do when I want to make sense of things, I read books, lots of books. It was in those years during the first Trump administration that I stumbled upon this short book from the 1950s by Eric Hoffer called The True Believer: The Nature of Mass Movements. It’s a remarkable and very helpful short read about the rise of Nazism, fascism, and communism as reactions to the Great Depression… but it has insights into any revolutionary mass movement which encourages its followers to become the very thing they denounce for example “Fighting corruption” by selling the presidency for favors. Or “being anti-racist” by trying to get people to resign because they are the members of a certain race. In short, I found the book immensely helpful in terms of understanding both the woke left and the woke right.

In recent weeks I have been re-reading it to understand how people who wear “We the People” t-shirts could justify doing unconstitutional things like putting students here legally in jail for writing an op-ed in a student newspaper without due process, or attacking judges for doing their job and interpreting the Constitution, or cheering when Trump expresses an unconstitutional desire to seek a third term.

The book’s author, Eric Hoffer was a longshoreman in San Francisco and a migrant field worker. Orphaned at age 5 he went blind at 7 and his sight was restored at age 15. He worked odd jobs and didn’t have advance degrees but was a brilliant thinker. Over his lifetime, Hoffer wrote ten books and won the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Nature of Mass Movements, his first book, attempted to discover what all revolutionary movements have in common & how they get people to justify committing crimes and even violence against their fellow man.

I recommend the book to you, not just because it offers insights into Trump 2.0 and the real threat of authoritarianism in America, but also because it offers insights into how to stay free, remain an individual, and continue thinking critically despite enormous pressure to pick a side and give it your blind obedience out of fear. Read the book for yourself, or read on for some key takeaways.

1) Mass Movements Attract Discontented & Frustrated People

Hoffer believed that mass movements are made up of disaffected but not destitute individuals. If you are truly destitute you are too busy trying to survive to join a holy cause. The perfect candidate is someone who feels frustrated with how their life has turned out, who holds a grudge, but who is materially doing okay. People swept up into a mass movements have enough mental energy to place the blame for their disaffection elsewhere. Maybe the problem is “all these white men” or the problem with the country is “the DEMON-crats” or the “queers.” Looking in the mirror and working on your own life is painful and difficult. Mass movements thrive on disaffected people who don’t want to do the hard work of changing their entire lives, instead they are looking to place the blame on someone else: Jews, the bourgeoisie, Blacks, Catholics, trans people, immigrants, people on food stamps, etc.

HOW TO STAY FREE: Do things that make you feel joyful and build a life you love. Actively look for and celebrate what is good in your life. Practice gratitude at the end of every day. Mass movements like MAGA sew contempt for the present moment and the current system, hence the need for something radically different. Loving your life is a vaccine against hysteria.

2) Mass Movements Attract People Unable to Satisfy Their Creative Impulses

Hoffer writes, “Poverty when coupled with creativeness is usually free of frustration.” Nothing so bolsters a sense of one’s human dignity as making and doing things in the physical world. If you are consumed with creating, if you are skilled in a trade, writing a novel, nurturing animals, or children, or plants, chances are you have a feeling of accomplishment. If on the other hand, you feel yourself to have no creative outlet, you “answer emails all day” or are scrolling on your phone, you are more susceptible to the ideology of a mass movement which attempts to come up with a master narrative to explain why life feels unsatisfying.

HOW TO STAY FREE: Create more than you consume. Any creative outlet connects you to your heart, your humanity, your own deep sacred wisdom. “Being stuck” is a story you tell yourself. Do one thing every day that doesn’t compute. Take an action that someone who isn’t stuck or in a rut would take. Swim in the ocean, join a dance class, learn to bake bread, paint a mural on your kid’s wall. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be good.

3) Leaders of mass movements preach “extravagant hope.”

The goals of revolutionary movements are not moderate. They are larger than life. Whether it’s the woke left believing that we could erase all sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, fatphobia, ableism in a very short time by hiring the right people and firing the wrong ones. Or the larger than life promises of Trump 2.0 that “a golden age begins right now” despite all the evidence to the contrary including a tanking stock market. Hoffer writes, “It is not actual suffering but the promise of better things which excited people to revolt.”

HOW TO STAY FREE: Remember that governments can do things to make life better: medical research, a standing Army, public schools, interstate highways, Medicare for all, but they can’t do everything nor should they! If something sounds too good to be true, like the new creepy hats that say “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING” it probably is. Nobody is right about everything, not me, not you, not anybody.

4) Mass movements require true believers to deny their own senses and experiences & have total faith in the group.

In other words they require blind faith in obviously untrue things. Trump said after the security breach on Signal, “Our national security has never been better!” These kinds of movements require certitude that what the group is doing is right. True believers cannot be baffled by contradictions, they must deny their existence. All questions have already been answered. “The true doctrine is a master key to all the world’s problems.” If you ask questions, you are not a “true believer” and risk being cast out. A true ideologue will never acknowledge even obvious flaws in his movement.

HOW TO STAY FREE: Tell the truth as best you can even when, especially when, your own group will give you a hard time for it. This is why I started this post with when my own side liberals, acting in ways that seemed illiberal and that led to some of the terrible things we are living through. It’s easy to point out the speck in your neighbors eye, what takes real courage is speaking up when your own group is doing something that feels illegal or immoral. Courage is a muscle. It can atrophy from lack of use but flex it every once in a while and it gets easier. Plus, when you speak up you give others permission to do the same thus leading to greater freedom for all.

5) Finally, and most importantly, mass movements require a devil or a scapegoat.

Hoffer writes, “Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.” When Hitler was asked if he thought the Jew must be destroyed he answered that if the Jews hadn’t existed “we should have to invent (them). It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.” Common hatreds unite disparate groups much faster than a common love. This is why Trump tries out varies scapegoats (illegal immigrants, trans people, etc.) to see which get the most applause. It’s not about immigrants or trans people, per se, it’s about the fact that “passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.” An ideal devil, Hoffer explains, is a foreigner.

Hoffer writes in his book that happy people mind their business. They are thoroughly engrossed in farming or raising kids, or working on becoming a better guitar player. Unhappy people, on the other hand, mind other peoples’ business. We’ve been down this road of scapegoating before, think the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Or think DEI coordinators beginning their trainings by saying, “All white people are racist.” If anybody says all members of a certain group are bad and that there is nothing they can do to change their badness, it’s not true. There are exceptions to every rule, there are white people who were abolitionists during slavery for example. And I promise you there are trans people that even your conservative Republican uncle would really like if they met and had lunch.

HOW TO STAY FREE: Meet people in real life who are different from you, think different from you, vote different from you, are in a different category than you, and hang out and do fun things together. Stubbornly refuse to hate people “as a group” and you will be less willing to justify or participate in denying them their human rights, due process, etc. Make eye contact with people on the street, engage in small talk, know your neighbors, get a hobby.

Feeling alive and building a life full of friendships, creative work, or things that make you feel joyful is actually a vaccine against propaganda. Contented people are less likely to simply “follow orders” when the orders feel wrong. When something feels off to you that once felt OK, normalize changing your mind. Stay weird. It’s those who were considered eccentric in their own time, who didn’t change when the world around them did, who we remember today. As Hoffer wrote, “Any man can ride a train, only a wise man knows when to get off.” If you voted for Trump or Harris or not at all, and you don’t like something this administration is doing, speak up, call your reps and tell them: 202-224-3121.