True believers and mass movements

Essay

Welcome! For those new here, On the Commons explores the ancient roots and ongoing consequences of private property and commodification—from the Doctrine of Discovery to ancient enclosures of the commons, and more—along with love for this world and being human in the middle of systems that often make such “being” difficult.

After nearly a year of collaborative work, High Country News has published my essay on the transition from land relationship to land ownership through the theft of the commons. I’m a longtime reader and sometime contributor to HCN, and am thrilled that an essay about this idea made its way to their readers. You can read “The theft of the commons” here.

I have an essay almost ready about completely giving up my smartphone—and regaining my attention—but there’s a lot going on in the world. I’m saving that one for later this week. You’ll like it. There are sandhill cranes and marsh hawks.

The following essay, about mass movements and true believers, was first published nearly two years ago. Like Eric Hoffer’s book The True Believer itself, the ideas within are unfortunately relevant again. The commons include land, water, and air, but also ideas and imagination. As Ijeoma Oluo wrote recently, “we have the power to effectively fight this.” But as with the stories of ownership that keep us entangled in systems of domination, knowing how we got here—and what keeps us stuck—is key to knowing how to get out.

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Audio version:

Thirty years ago I had a high school history and government teacher who forever changed the way I think about the power of identity, especially group identity, in affecting human behavior. In my senior year of high school, in the early 1990s, he taught a section on Nazi propaganda that I’m sure these days would be posted to social media in a hot minute, for good or ill. Recently, I’ve begun to wonder if on some level he hoped through this course to inoculate his students against the kind of groupthink that characterizes movements like Nazism.

In addition to having us watch and analyze Nazi propaganda videos to learn about the power of dehumanization along with the lure of group identity and belonging, one of the books he assigned to us was Eric Hoffer’s 1951 classic The True Believer.

Hoffer, for those who haven’t heard of him, was a lot of things. Born, he said, in 1902 in the Bronx to German immigrants who died young, he worked as a migrant farm laborer and spent time on Los Angeles’s Skid Row before ending up working as a longshoreman after being rejected from Army enlistment in 1940 due to a hernia.

All of this information comes from Hoffer himself, and there remain some questions bordering on controversy about how much of his early life is true and what he might have fabricated.

He definitely did write ten books, however, and spent a few years as an adjunct professor at Berkeley. The True Believer became a bestseller after President Dwight D. Eisenhower mentioned it in a press conference and it remains Hoffer’s most well-known and widely read book.

The True Believer has cropped up here and there over the past several years in mass media mentions of seemingly inexplicable or out-of-nowhere mass movements and political forces. One of the intriguing things about the book is that one’s interpretation of who constitutes a “true believer” can be bent according to perspective or ideology. But no matter how readily its characterizations are construed to serve any political interpretation, the main messages regarding the appeal of mass movements remain the same. They’re lessons that have stuck with me for three decades. 

Mass movements are more, and less, than what we think they are. Fostered and promoted by what Hoffer calls “men of words” (Hoffer’s “men of words” are people who prime the populace for radical change through language, but who are not leaders of change themselves—pundits, maybe, or, these days, social media influencers), these movements rely on charismatic leaders with little need for truth or integrity, but who have, among other qualities:

“. . . audacity and joy in defiance; a fanatical conviction that he is in possession of the one and only truth; faith in his destiny and luck; a capacity for passionate hatred; contempt for the present; unbounded brazenness which finds expression in a disregard of consistency and fairness; . . .”

along with

“a capacity for winning and holding the utmost loyalty of a group of able lieutenants. . . . The uncanny powers of a leader manifest themselves not so much in the hold he has on the masses as in his ability to dominate and almost bewitch a small group of able men.”

All of which sounds awfully familiar.

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Mass movements, when presented with the right kind of leader, catch fire with a populace that is bored and somewhat self-disgusted, possibly angry but not completely downtrodden. Pointing to examples like the French Revolution, Hoffer posits that mass movements are far more likely to occur when people have seen small improvements in their life conditions than when they have very little and expectations of less. These movements also rely heavily on “inventing memories of past greatness” to persuade true believers that the present is a miserable state of existence. The movement must then go beyond the mirage to “make a misery of the present” in order to keep followers fixed on a prize that is always just a little out of reach.

To get there, though, mass movements need to rely on unifying forces and unifying messages. Hatred is the obvious choice, “the most accessible and comprehensible of all unifying agents.”  

“Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”

There is nothing so easy as shared hatred unless it is shared contempt.

Hoffer has a lot to say on the subject of hatred. Reading his assessment struck me in particular because in the year I reread The True Believer, Montana’s legislative session saw the characterization of people as “mean” mentioned more than once. Never in recent memory, I heard both privately and publicly, have people seen a group of lawmakers so bent on cruelty, so eager to use their power to punish those they deem an enemy, or just plain abhorrent. Never so desirous of finding an outlet for an emotion that gets as close to hatred as you can without saying it out loud.

This essay was originally published in 2021, and I can only say that 2023’s legislative session (Montana’s legislature meets every two years) was far worse.

Where, Hoffer asks, does this hatred come from? My own thoughts had landed on a general fear of and resistance to change, but Hoffer’s ideas are perhaps ahead of his time, a kind of gut-thrust into the human psyche:

“They are an expression of a desperate effort to suppress an awareness of our inadequacy, worthlessness, guilt, and other shortcomings of the self. Self-contempt is here transmuted into hatred of others—and there is a most determined and persistent effort to mask this switch. . . . Even in the case of a just grievance, our hatred comes less from a wrong done to us than from the consciousness of our helplessness, inadequacy and cowardice.”

The unifying force of the mass movement, then, realizes itself eventually in its vilification of the present, mirages of past and future greatness, shared hatred of a manufactured enemy, and, finally, a leader’s ability to control the movement, its members, and its loyalties.

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A few years ago a leader in my state’s legislature published an editorial complaining about members of what at the time was called the Common Sense Caucus—a group of a particular party, say Party A, of legislators willing to vote with the other party, Party B, over what they saw as common sense legislation that benefited Montanans. I wish I could remember what the exact wording of the letter was, but it boiled down to the idea that Party A members were not doing their job unless they voted in lockstep with the nationwide Party A’s priorities. Nevermind what legislators’ local constituents wanted of them; what mattered was following the Party line.

The merging of individual identity with Party identity—and a subsequent leader’s control over that group identity—is an early characteristic of mass movements: 

“Stalin succeeded in turning proud and brave men into cringing cowards by depriving them of any possibility of identification with the party they had served all their lives and with the Russian masses. These old Bolsheviks had long ago cut themselves off from humanity outside Russia. . . . There was for them neither past nor future, neither memory nor glory outside the confines of holy Russia and the Communist party—and both these were now wholly and irrevocably in Stalin’s hands.” (Emphasis added.)

The submersion of an individual’s identity into the mass, into a group identity, is the main thrust of Hoffer’s thesis. He repeatedly makes the point that people do not turn to mass movements because they are inspired or because they are stupid, but because they are bored, searching for a way to exist that allows them to escape an unsatisfactory or unfulfilling “self”—to escape themselves. The particular ideology doesn’t always matter—Hoffer points out that there was plenty of ship-jumping between Nazism and communism during World War II, a common theme among adherents to hardline or extremist ideologies that is no less true today. It’s not the movement itself but the sense of belonging that matters.

In other words, any of us could fall in with a mass movement, an understanding that I believe might have been the purpose of my high school teacher’s lesson on Nazi propaganda. The attraction of escaping yourself and being part of something bigger, grander, could lure anyone, given the right time of life or right circumstances.

Interestingly, Hoffer also makes the repeated but less emphasized point that creative people—fulfilled creative people; Hitler was not alone among Nazi leadership in being a failed, frustrated artist—are less prone to subsume themselves in mass movements. Not because fulfilled creative people are smarter or more successful or wiser, but because they have a way of being secure with themselves, within themselves, and their work that negates the need for finding an outside identity. I would at that creativity in general can do much to undermine the attraction of a mass movement, through fostering imaginations and increasing empathy.

Sadly, he doesn’t provide a method of cultivating this kind of groundedness among the greater populace. But it was in fact Ijeoma Oluo’s recent essay on the social and political futures staring America in the face that reminded me of The True Believer, due not to the dire facts she rightfully set forth, but to her inclusion of joy and strong relationships as necessary for getting through what is to come:

“Cultivate joy. Remember, we’re not just fighting against fascism, colonialism, and oppression. We’re fighting for us. We’re fighting for our lives, for our freedom, for our communities, for our children. There are so many ways in which our lives can be taken from us, and they can be taken from us while we are still living. How we live matters.”

I often talk and write about my Russian grandparents. They were born during the Russian Empire, were as Jews confined to living in the Pale of Settlement and had limited rights. They married and raised children during Stalin’s purges (during which millions died) and under increasing anti-Semitism. Not to mention surviving the Siege of Leningrad. Through lives that never had much of what we might call hope for a better future, they stayed true to values of honesty, ethics, and integrity. They laughed, they loved, they lived, even when they had much to fear.

My grandparents didn’t escape the Soviet Union or overthrow authoritarianism. Most of us don’t. And still, how they lived mattered. I can only hope to be as good an ancestor to others as they have been to me.

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Once someone has fallen in with a mass movement, facts cease to become persuasive, if they ever were in the first place. It is the certainty of belief that matters, never reality:

“The effectiveness of 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. . . . the effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude.”

In an effective mass movement, the true believer’s yearning for identity finds a place. A sense of belonging is fulfilled, and individual responsibility is then taken out of one’s hands. The movement, and its leader, decide what’s right and wrong. All one needs to do is stay with the movement and the whole gnawing existential issue of what is the point of this life; what am I doing here? is lifted blissfully off of one’s shoulders.

That’s what I got from those long-ago lessons on Nazi propaganda, anyway. It’s hard to get my mind around the fact that millions of people are able to find belonging and hatred compatible, even easy, but then I think of The True Believer and remember that the question is how many people are capable of releasing their own moral responsibility.

Though the last sections of the book talk a bit about Gandhi and Lincoln and other mass movement leaders who managed to channel the energy of true believers into change for good, The True Believer spends more time on Nazism and Soviet communism (it was published only a few years after World War II ended) and isn’t what I’d call a hopeful book. I was left feeling that there is little anyone can do to stop a mass movement once it has gathered enough true believers, even if the movement hasn’t yet reached a point of no return. The minds are locked away and there’s little anyone can do but try to survive it.

I really don’t want to live that way, much less think that way.

There are a few things to consider here that make me feel a little less hopeless. One is research I did a few years ago for an essay on riots in Aeon magazine. I suspect, though I don’t know for certain, that Hoffer took some understanding about human nature from late-1800s theories about common people, riots, and the thought that people (commoners, that is) lose their individuality when in a crowd, acting as a destructive mass. More recent scholarship (much of which I wrote about in that essay on riots) undermines this understanding. Even when I asked one of the researchers in Britain about the phenomenon of football hooliganism, he pushed back: alcohol and euphoria are at play there, but many football riots have been found to have outside actors prodding violence. Where the line is between manufactured violence and “real” violence I don’t know, but much of what we believe about crowd groupthink is both incorrect—this is backed by research going back decades—and, seemingly, intractable.

While lacking or despising one’s sense of self, and the unifying force of hatred, certainly ring true as foundation stones for mass movements—the early-1990s genocide in Rwanda comes to mind—I don’t know that the inevitability of them is as certain as the book left me feeling. Maybe that’s just me; maybe it’s part of my belief that we have to change the narratives of what we think humans are capable of in order to change our societies and our future, but I remain persuaded that humanity is capable of more, and better, even if we don’t always know how.

One of the essays I share and recommend more than just about any other is also from Aeon, on echo chambers and epistemic bubbles by philosophy professor C Thi Nguyen. I keep returning to it because it gives me an in-depth understanding of epistemic bubbles and echo chambers—and the differences between them—but also of what works and what doesn’t in escaping them, or trying to help someone else escape them. “We can pop an epistemic bubble simply by exposing its members to the information and arguments that they’ve missed,” wrote Nguyen. “But echo chambers are a far more pernicious and robust phenomenon.”

“Does a community’s belief system actively undermine the trustworthiness of any outsiders who don’t subscribe to its central dogmas? Then it’s probably an echo chamber. . . . Epistemic bubbles are rather ramshackle; they go up easily, and they collapse easily, too. Echo chambers are far more pernicious and far more robust. They can start to seem almost like living things.”

These needn’t be purely socio-political-religious phenomena. Nguyen uses Crossfit exercise devotees and adherents to the Paleo diet as brief examples. But the researchers he discussed also use the late right-wing talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh as an example of an effective echo chamber:

“Limbaugh uses methods to actively transfigure whom his listeners trust. His constant attacks on the ‘mainstream media’ are attempts to discredit all other sources of knowledge. He systematically undermines the integrity of anybody who expresses any kind of contrary view. And outsiders are not simply mistaken—they are malicious, manipulative and actively working to destroy Limbaugh and his followers.  . . . The result is a rather striking parallel to the techniques of emotional isolation typically practised in cult indoctrination.”

As with Hoffer’s description of mass movements, facts cease to matter. What matters is what the echo chamber or movement’s leaders make of those facts. Unlike an epistemic bubble, “an echo chamber doesn’t destroy their members’ interest in the truth,” wrote Nguyen; “it merely manipulates whom they trust and changes whom they accept as trustworthy sources and institutions.” 

That sounds a lot like the kind of mass movement that Hoffer detailed. And while Nguyen doesn’t offer a cure or a fix for these phenomena, there are at least ways to think about them that might be helpful. 

The main method is through what Nguyen describes as a “social-epistemic reboot”: Whether you’re following René Descartes’s arguments in Meditations on First Philosophy or imagining a “hapless teenager” who’s grown up in a cult, what’s required is abandoning what they believe about pretty much everything and starting from scratch. Which honestly sounds terrifying for the average person and is probably why these positions are so hard for people to shift out of.

What makes the difference is having at least one person outside of the echo chamber whom you can trust. Nguyen brings in the example of Derek Black, who was raised by a neo-Nazi family to be a neo-Nazi leader. He wasn’t looking for a way out of his indoctrination—he was in fact hosting a neo-Nazi radio show while in college—but a way found him in the form of a Jewish student at his undergraduate college who began inviting Black over for Shabbat dinners.

“In Black’s telling, Stevenson was unfailingly kind, open and generous, and slowly earned Black’s trust. This was the seed, says Black, that led to a massive intellectual upheaval—a slow-dawning realisation of the depths to which he had been misled. Black went through a years-long personal transformation, and is now an anti-Nazi spokesperson. . . .

“Why is trust so important? Baier suggests one key facet: trust is unified. We don’t simply trust people as educated experts in a field—we rely on their goodwill. And this is why trust, rather than mere reliability, is the key concept. Reliability can be domain-specific. The fact, for example, that somebody is a reliable mechanic sheds no light on whether or not their political or economic beliefs are worth anything. But goodwill is a general feature of a person’s character. If I demonstrate goodwill in action, then you have some reason to think that I also have goodwill in matters of thought and knowledge.”

People do leave cults and exit echo chambers, and although Hoffer didn’t talk in The True Believer about what could prompt people to leave mass movements, I don’t think it’s impossible for a movement to dissolve for various reasons—whether members come to terms with the harm that’s being caused, or trusted family members or friends leave some room for welcome, or some other inexplicable tipping point is reached.

I don’t necessarily know how to do this. I’m just as angry and frustrated and exhausted as anyone else, especially recently as a variety of forces and factors seem hell-bent on proving just how selfish humans can be, just how hell-bent an entire society can make itself on causing others suffering if enough people persuade themselves that there’s an enemy to defeat, even when that enemy is your neighbor or your family.

But I’ve got a lot of influences in my life, including my Russian grandparents, to remind me that self-protection doesn’t have to be one’s only driving force.

And I had this teacher, close to three decades ago, whose parents had, if I remember correctly, been German scientists brought over during World War II to work for the U.S. government, and he used his life to teach adolescent minds what it looks like when a society becomes mindless.

That teacher, and writers like Eric Hoffer who see much (though not all) with clarity, and researchers and thinkers who continue to work on compassion and cognitive empathy, remind us, once again, that we are not alone. Our resources are strained, our compassion is constantly challenged, and yet as a species humanity has been through far, far worse and has still not given up trying to be human.

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