The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

Having explained in Part 1 what the frustrated individual craves, Hoffer in Part 2 categorizes the types of individuals who are likely to become frustrated in the first place. In Chapter 4 he identifies eleven such categories, and in the ensuing seven chapters he explains why the people who fall into those categories either do or do not gravitate toward mass movements.

To avoid confusion, readers should be aware that the eleven specific categories Hoffer identifies near the end of Chapter 4 do not precisely correspond with the five sections of Chapter 5 plus the subsequent six chapters of Part 2, all of which are summarized above. For instance, one of Hoffer’s original eleven categories is “the poor,” but in Chapter 5 he divides this category into five different types of poor, each of which receives its own section (25). On the other hand, while Hoffer identifies “misfits,” “outcasts,” and “adolescent youth” among the separate categories, he covers all three of these in a single chapter (25). This analysis section, therefore, follows Hoffer’s organizational choices—his chapter and section titles—rather than the eleven categories he identifies near the end of Chapter 4.

Hoffer’s most important conclusion, at least as it relates to his larger argument, is that poverty alone does not predict frustration. Of his five “poor” categories, only the “new” poor and the “free” poor experience frustration of sufficient intensity to make them question the value of their own individual existence. The “abjectly,” “creative,” and “unified” poor all possess qualities or experience life circumstances that mitigate severe frustration. These qualities and circumstances are all different, too, which suggests that the poor enjoy multiple safeguards against the temptations of mass movements.

While three of the five “poor” types are unlikely to find mass movements appealing, people who fall into one or more of the other six categories are very likely to experience a degree of frustration that drives them away from themselves and toward a collective whole. Misfits, the inordinately selfish, the ambitious facing unlimited opportunities, minorities, the bored, and the sinners, together with the “new” and “free” poor, constitute the raw materials of which true believers are made.

The common thread among all these groups is a frustration so intense that those who feel it want nothing more than to destroy the worthless present and submit their entire beings to a mass movement that gives them hope for the future. Hoffer identifies only two exceptions: 1) misfits who believe their misfit condition to be temporary and 2) minorities who, whether assimilated or otherwise, preserve a meaningful connection to their original group structure.

On the whole, therefore, Hoffer finds no direct correlation between an individual’s material circumstances and the degree of frustration required to transform the autonomous person into a mass movement’s true believer. This means that the pathway to fanaticism is open to anyone who seeks escape from individual freedom and responsibility.