📖 Eric Hoffer - The True Believer
Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
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Today’s book is:
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements - by Eric Hoffer
“Its theme is political fanaticism, with which it deals severely and brilliantly.” —New Yorker
The famous bestseller with “concise insight into what drives the mind of the fanatic and the dynamics of a mass movement” (Wall Street Journal) by the legendary San Francisco longshoreman.
Published in 1951, it depicts a variety of arguments in terms of applied world history and social psychology to explain why mass movements arise to challenge the status quo. Hoffer discusses the sense of individual identity and the holding to particular ideals that can lead to extremism and fanaticism among both leaders and followers.
A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare time while living in the railroad yards. The True Believer—the first and most famous of his books—was made into a bestseller when President Eisenhower cited it during one of the earliest television press conferences.
Called a “brilliant and original inquiry” and “a genuine contribution to our social thought” by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., this landmark in the field of social psychology is completely relevant and essential for understanding the world today as it delivers a visionary, highly provocative look into the mind of the fanatic and a penetrating study of how an individual becomes one.
You can buy the book here (Amazon link).
I grew up intellectually in part on Eric, and as a fellow manual laborer including working on the docks, we had much in common including our distrust of collectives. I went to San Francisco in 1993 and did interviews with those still alive who knew Eric in preparation for a biography I have yet to write.
His first critique of collectivism, The True Believer, still affords deep insights into today's totalitarian temptations. Here is a favorite quote I put together from various sources:
“How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization. The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They asked to be deceived. The substitute for self-confidence is faith; the substitute for self-esteem is pride; and the substitute for individual balance is fusion with others into a compact group. The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of irrevocable extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter. Thus the renunciation of the self is felt as a liberation and salvation.” Eric Hoffer
And yes, unfortunately, Eric believed in the god of government, yet that does not diminish the best of his work. Like Ayn Rand you can accept the ideas and abide with the personal immoralities.
I became aware of theTrue Believer in 1964, or 65. Early Vietnam, war protests, bra burning, friends of mine going off the rails... Hoffer offered me an insight, beyond just blaming propaganda, and I kept friendsI would have rejected. I have been his fan ever since.