The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer
I.
Eric Hoffer sets out to create a unified theory of mass movements. And he doesn’t just mean to tell you about some patterns in the development of political movements. He means to say that whether you are joining a political, a nationalist, a religious or a revolutionary movement, you are probably doing it for the same reasons, and you are probably going to play a role in a remake of the same old play. The premise of The True Believer seems destined to end in cherry-picked examples from history, further cherry-picked for characteristics that match some template. And if I were to imagine someone who might have a broad enough knowledge base and the qualification to do rigorous enough analysis to calm some of my concerns, Hoffer is the opposite. If his own claims about his education are to be believed, he did all of his learning while dividing his free time after migrant work between brothels and a library.
And yet he mostly pulls it off. The book repeatedly gives you jolts of insight; and Hillary Clinton is still telling people working on her campaign seventy years after its writing that they need to read it to understand contemporary America.
Hoffer’s most original argument is that there is a fixed pool of people who are in the right kind of situation to be open to joining a mass movement. So a leader is competing for the same audience whether he is recruiting for a religion, a fascist party, or a communist revolution. This lines up surprisingly well with Jonathan Haidt’s recent moral foundations research, where he finds that people on both the far left and far right, as well as religious people rely heavily on purity as a moral foundation. Hoffer’s description of a true believer is more determined by his immediate circumstances than Haidt’s would be, but Hoffer seems to have glimpsed the underlying structure of moral motivation decades early. He describes how both fascist and communist leaders in the first half of the twentieth century would boast about how good they were at poaching followers from each other. These potential converts are people who feel that their lives are spoiled, and that they can’t individually fix anything. They want to subsume themselves in something bigger, and forget about their individual lives. The largest group are the new poor, who have recently lost what they had come to expect. His second group are misfits, who haven’t found their place in life. These range from unemployed college graduates, to veterans, to new immigrants to the irreperably defective. These are followed by a grab bag of other outliers, from the inordinately selfish, to minorities in the process of losing their traditional culture, to bored spinsters, to criminals.
The second argument of the book is that movements have a strange mood. Everyone is frustrated, but no one actually wants things to get better in their lives right now. The true believers are primed for self-sacrifice, for their lives to actually get more difficult in the present, all for some idealized distant future. And in their eagerness to abandon the self, they all rush into a world of make-believe, where they are cast as the heroes in a theatrical production, unafraid of death. Hoffer talks about how Hitler’s costumes and rallies were directed towards this aim; but we could as easily talk about the live action role-play feel of Jan 6, 2021.
Hoffer’s final big idea is that all movements have distinct stages, each led by a different type of personality. The first stage is led by “men of words with a grievance.” They speak and write to criticize and undermine the existing order, priming the movement. This again seems to be an impressive premonition of future, more rigorous analysis. In Ages of Discord, Peter Turchin argues that cycles of unrest are set in motion by there being too many educated people with frustrated expectations of power at a given time. The second stage is the destruction of the status quo, led by fanatics. The fanatic leader is not interested in reform, but only in wholesale destruction and chaos. The final stage is the consolidation of a mature movement, led by “practical men of action.” The fanatic is pushed aside as being too radical, and more predisposed to constant destruction than the building of a new order. At this point the movement stops arousing selfless devotion, and starts to maintain itself through institutions, propaganda and coercion.
II.
Much of this sounds like it’s getting at something deep, but does it actually describe the majority of movements? Or does this all seem original because Hoffer is describing counterintuitive features of some of the weirder movements of history. Let’s try to spot check the generality of a couple of his more interesting arguments.
Are the “new poor,” who are not that poor, but just downwardly mobile, really at the center of movements? Hoffer bases this generalization on all of the “ruined middle class” Germans and Italians who joined Nazi and Fascist movements. He even goes so far as to say that historically economic depressions didn’t really frustrate the masses until enough people got wealthy enough to really have something to lose. Looking outside of his examples, the theory seems to do surprisingly well describing the 1905 Russian Revolution. The recent advancement of peasants from serfdom to land ownership, the economic depression around 1900, and the frustrated veterans returning from the Ruso Japanese war, all seem to have played a role. As far as I can tell, the theory does worse with the French and Chinese communist revolutions, where the peasants seem to have been much poorer (and in the case of France, were maybe just starting on their way up). And it would probably do even worse with the first converts to Islam, who were apparently the poorest members of the surrounding society. These are the kinds of people labeled the abject poor by Hoffer, about whom he writes:
To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility. The goals are concrete and immediate. Every meal is a fulfillment; to go to sleep on a full stomach is a triumph; and every windfall a miracle. What need could they have for “an inspiring super-individual goal which would give meaning and dignity to their lives?”
Next let’s turn to a few examples after Hoffer’s time, and therefore a sort of out-of-sample test for his theory. The story appears to line up well with narratives of suicide bombers coming from the middle classes, and the more educated segments of society leading protests in Tiananmen Square, during the Arab Spring and during the Color Revolutions. However, even there, one has to be careful in that Tiananmen Square and some of the color revolutions happened during times of increasing prosperity and reform, rather than during impoverishment. The example that seems to push the balance of evidence in Hoffer’s favor is the civil rights movement in 1960’s America. It recruited heavily from those in the black population who had started to advance economically through the 40s and 50s, as well as the criminal population in the case of the nation of Islam. And at least some of the precipitating events appear to have been early automation, white flight, and relocation of urban factories leaving many of the millions who had moved to cities for work unemployed.
How about the claim that there are stages of all movements, characterized by men of words, followed by fanatics, followed by practical men? Hoffer offers Robespierre, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, F.D.R. and Gandhi as some of his fanatics (although the latter two with qualifications). He is far less explicit in providing distinct examples of frustrated men of words and men of action, presumably because many of them don’t make history. He also admits that many of his examples serve in more than one of the three roles.
If we take Malcolm X and a potential historical Jesus Christ as men or words, they seem to support the idea that at the beginning of movements, there are intelligent men excluded from the mainstream and critical of it. Malcolm X describes a teacher who told him he could never be a lawyer, and contributed to his choice to drop out of school and pursue a life of crime. Jesus criticizes the legal expert scribes and Pharisees (who apparently have a higher social standing than him), and the institutions they represent. Both of them also show that it is possible for there to be men of words even without them having to rely on the written word. Both operated at a time when many prophets and critics preached in public places to anyone who would listen. A more explicit supporting example that comes to mind is Anne Applebaum’s description of her former friends who have risen to the top of Poland’s new far right parties. She says many of them joined the liberal democratic anti-communist movement in the 1980s because they were frustrated that they weren’t being recognized in that regime, and have now joined anti-liberal movements because they feel like western institutions haven’t given them enough recognition or respect either. On the other hand, the founding fathers who wrote to prepare the way for the American revolution weren’t at all frustrated in their social aspirations, they were at the top of society in the richest part of the United Kingdom. Similarly, the leadership of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), who would radicalize to become the Weather Underground, were all doing pretty well at elite universities. There are probably lesser known men of words criticizing the order around the start of any movement, but it’s not at all clear that they are actually a necessary ingredient rather than a side effect. The easier explanation seems to be that when people are frustrated enough to throw their life into a movement, there will be a few of them who are also predisposed to put it into words. If one of them is influential enough, he will often rise to the position of fanatic leader (as Hoffer admits about Lenin, Hitler and others). If he is not, it’s not clear he plays much of a role aside from hardening his own belief in the process of preaching.
The label of Fanatic also seems to be informative, but not clearly applicable to most leaders of movements in their active phase. Hoffer’s description of the will to totally destroy the current order seems to be built around the likes of Lenin and Hitler. But this is far less obviously true the founders of religions, even less so about leaders like F.D.R and Churchill, and even less about M.L.K.
I find the Practical Man of Action category less enlightening yet. It seems to be restating the obvious, that if a movement succeeds it will need to be maintained by someone. Hoffer also admits that this person will often just be the Fanatic serving a new role, and has no slam dunk examples of a fanatic leader being pushed aside by the practical men. However, Hoffer does have some interesting observations about the methods such leaders use to try to maintain the devotion of their followers. He implies that coercion, and keeping the masses reliant on the new leadership are essential, and goes on to predict:
The most dangerous moment for the regime of the Politburo will be when a considerable improvement in the economic conditions of the Russian masses has been achieved and the iron totalitarian rule somewhat relaxed.
This is not exactly a detailed prediction of how the Soviet Union would collapse forty years after he wrote the book, but it’s enough to be a little eerie.
Overall, Hoffer comes out pretty well. His description of the mass of True Believers seems to point out something important and surprising and yet mostly true. I read a bit about the 1905 Russian revolution and the motivation of the civil rights March on Washington as I was doing my spot check, expecting to find that the participants had actually been on their way up economically. Instead I found Hoffer’s “new poor” description to be surprisingly accurate, and to find other observations from the book unexpectedly confirmed. Hoffer’s description of the types of men who lead each stage of a movement seem less insightful, and less clearly accurate, but it still provides a potentially useful lens.
III.
What does this all say about the United States, and especially our current moment in politics? Hoffer talks about how America has few movements because it has had the outlets of westward migration and self-advancement to prevent the buildup of frustration. We can add the individualism and optimism often highlighted in the American attitude as additional defenses. The relevance of optimism may be best captured by Martin Seligman’s claim that the more optimistic candidate won US presidential elections the vast majority of the time in the 20th century. Americans do not seem to go for the oratorical style of deprecating the present Hoffer claims is central to movements. And yet, Seligman admits that optimism stopped being a reliable predictor of elections around 1988, and that Trump was clearly the more pessimistic candidate in the 2016 election. Internal migration within the United States has plummeted over the past decades. Social mobility (and therefore self-advancement) has plummeted as well, to a level well below European levels. Perhaps we are not as immune to movements as we once were?
The United States was built by the frustrated immigrants who Hoffer admits may otherwise have joined a movement. Could this have left an imprint on our innate or cultural legacy leaving us more predisposed to movements, even if circumstances did not allow these tendencies to play out for the first couple of hundred years? And perhaps this predisposition is reflected in our penchant for violent crime unique in the developed world. In fact, Hoffer claims crime is often an alternate outlet for a potential true believer. Similarly, the level of religiosity in this country and our waves of religious revivals may reflect the same predisposition. And now we come to a moment in our history when for the first time the large majority of people can expect to be economically worse off than their parents. What’s more, Hochschild describes how many now feel resentful that minorities, immigrants and women are “cutting in line,” unfairly leaving them behind. Is it possible that our previous optimism and individual advancement only mean a bigger moment of reckoning now that those trends reverse? Maybe our deaths of despair (from opioids, alcohol and suicide), our polarization, our low trust in government are all just warning signs that our underlying predisposition and our recent reversal of fortune our about to create a moment overripe for movements?
Nothing today yet appears truly worthy of the name mass movement, where people sacrifice their comfort and lives for some distant goal. And yet much in the present rhymes with Hoffer’s observations. Are the underemployed college graduates who supported Bernie Sanders, and conservative commentators excluded from liberal media and academia, versions of frustrated men of words? Is Qanon a manifestation of the self-contained and nonsensical nature of an idealized movement Hoffer describes in:
Thus the effectiveness of a doctrine should not be judged by its profundity, sublimity or the validity of the truths it embodies, but by how thoroughly it insulates the individual from his self and the world as it is. What Pascal said of an effective religion is true of any effective doctrine: it must be “contrary to nature, to common sense and to pleasure.”
Or does this sound at all relevant to the current moment?
Indeed, it is easier for the frustrated to detect their own imaginings and hear the echo of their own musings in impassioned double-talk and sonorous refrains than in precise words joined together with faultless logic.
All of this has me concerned, especially when combined with Peter Turchin’s prediction from ten years ago that the coming decade is going to be a tumultuous one. Turchin’s theory has some of the same causal mechanisms as Hoffers, and it’s already had some confirmation with the storming of the capital. But at the same time my main intuition is that even if these theories are valid, we are living in a very different time from The True Believer’s 1951. We are living in a world with social safety nets that make it harder to feel desperate, streaming TV to quiet the frustrated mind and stave off the boredom Hoffer describes as a vital ingredient of movements, and a growing distance from experiences of self-sacrifice in wars.
At the same time, maybe a movement is what America really needs right now? Hoffer says about the fanaticism of movements:
And it is strange to think that in receiving this malady of the soul the world also received a miraculous instrument for raising societies and nations from the dead—an instrument of resurrection.
Maybe America’s anemic economic growth and decreasing effectiveness of government of the past few decades are signs that we are desperately in need of a resurrection? Maybe the antidote to the decadence some complain about today is a reinvigoration through a mass movement. The chaos of movements seems generally very dangerous for the short term prospects of a country, and often the long term prospects as well. And I am comforted to think that our modern world is one far less susceptible to truly totalizing movements. And yet there is the chance that without them our status quo is a slow one-way ratchet in the wrong direction.
IV.
Now let’s accept for a moment that Hoffer’s mass movement is the generalized human response among the most frustrated at frustrating historical moments. And for a brief speculative overreach, let’s ask, does that imply anything about more everyday existence? In the same way that mental disorders are often on a continuum, and seem to provide insight into all human minds, is a movement just an extreme version of the standard human response to frustration?
Hoffer mentions a proneness to hate and credulity as attributes of the true believer. We see watered down hate among people going through a difficult time, who fall into depression which manifests itself as constant anger. We see it in the increases in spousal and child abuse during recessions. Perhaps we even glimpse it in the spikes in race riots in the United States during the unrest of the early 20th century, and the increases in witch burnings and ethnic violence during difficult economic times historically. Increased credulity might be what drives the suffering sick to quack medicines and the angry to conspiracy theories.
To consider a more encouraging attribute of true believers, we can look at Hoffer’s “willingness to dissolve [the self] by losing one’s individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.” Perhaps turning to alcohol, religion or meditation in times of trouble are all just variations on this dissolution of the self. Much has been said about suffering as a route to transcendence. Maybe Hoffer’s “desire to escape the blemished self” happens at all moments of frustration, and at the extreme is what leads to most spiritual experiences.