The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

Section 1: “Identification with a Collective Whole”

Self-sacrifice demands the obliteration of the individual. At the same time, those who most successfully resist mass movements are often those who already belong to a stable social structure. Once they find themselves inside the mass movement, fanatics yield everything and become totally submissive even to the point of cowardice. When the movement is threatened by outsiders, however, these same submissive cowards often fight with incredible ferocity.

Section 2: “Make-believe”

Mass movements make effective use of theater. When a fanatic comes to believe that he or she plays an important role in a larger drama that features parades and ritual, the fanatic becomes eager to kill or even to die what he or she knows will be perceived as a heroic death. Theater also separates the fanatic from the despised self. Hoffer regards this “make-believe” element as the most “enduring” feature of mass movements (68).

Section 3: “Deprecation of the Present”

Mass movements have a complicated relationship with the past, present, and future. At first, these movements appear to denigrate the past in favor of the present. Invariably, however, if they are to attract fanatics bent on unified action and self-sacrifice, they must make the present appear worthless.

Before long, therefore, the movements change their emphasis from the present to the future—often a distant future. This allows them to defer their goals, make the present as miserable as possible, and still appeal to hope. At this point, the past creeps back into the story, an “often specious” yet “distant glorious past” that allows the true believer to feel a “part of something that stretches endlessly backward and forward—something eternal” (72). Some fanatics come to believe that they can tell the future, or that others can.

In a political sense, conservatives, skeptics, and liberals all value the present. Radicals and reactionaries, however, notwithstanding different doctrines, share an intense loathing of the present. This hatred for the way things are appeals to the frustrated individual.

Section 4: “‘Things Which Are Not’”

People will more readily fight for what they do not yet have than for what they already have. Hoffer regards it as unsurprising that people will die for hope but not for “something palpably worth having” (78).

Section 5: “Doctrine”

While the fanatics’ specific beliefs do not distinguish one mass movement from another—at least, not in the practical methods by which the movements operate— doctrine does play an important role, for it shields the movement’s adherents from reality.

No contrary evidence can shake the true believer’s confidence. This produces “an illiterate air about the most literate true believer” (81). There is neither room nor need for doubt because the true believer already possesses the correct answer to every possible question. By submitting to an all-encompassing doctrine, therefore, frustrated fanatics surrender their individual responsibilities to think and act.

Section 6: “Fanaticism”

For frustrated individuals who embrace mass movements, the destruction of the self becomes a passionate experience. Once converted, the fanatic’s self-worth is inseparable from the movement. The righteousness of the cause is irrelevant. What matters is the emotional connection to something beyond oneself. This explains why fanatics might convert from one cause to another—Communists could become Nazis, for instance, or vice versa—but the true believer will never revert to the “autonomous individual existence” hitherto despised and destroyed (87).

Section 7: “Mass Movements and Armies”

Mass movements and armies employ similar methods to promote unified action and self-sacrifice, including flags, symbols, and other manifestations of pomp and circumstance. There are key differences, however. Regular armies exist to defend the present, not to destroy it. Officers also tend to fear the anarchic consequences of undisciplined armies turned loose, whereas the leaders of mass movements often promote such chaos in the interest of destruction.

Section 1: “Hatred”

Hoffer describes hatred as “the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents” (91). Mass movements must have a powerful and sinister enemy, ideally a foreigner, who never ceases plotting against the true believer’s cause.

Hatred toward one’s imagined enemy often proceeds from feelings of guilt or self-loathing. True believers feel genuine hatred for those whose admirable qualities they find lacking in themselves, but true believers also redirect this hatred toward vulnerable groups—Jews in Nazi Germany, for instance—whom true believers imagine as the most formidable of foes. Furthermore, identification with a mass movement frees the fanatic from individual responsibility and thus enables both hatred and violence. Mass movements, therefore, depend upon hatred as a unifying force, but unified action itself also produces more hatred.

Section 2: “Imitation”

Frustrated individuals would rather behave like others, for it is a way of destroying their own hated selves. Mass movements foster this desire for imitation by insisting that every true believer must be like every other true believer.

Molding and relying on imitators leave mass movements susceptible to infiltration and corruption, for skillful outside agents can turn mere imitators in a different direction. Mass movements guard against these disruptions by encouraging true believers to hate everything foreign.

Section 3: “Persuasion and Coercion”

Persuasion, as in the use of propaganda, is wildly overrated as a unifying agent. Words can help prepare the way for a mass movement by undermining an existing order. Lies can reassure true believers by shielding them from reality. On its own, however, persuasion plays a subordinate role in mass movements because mass movements do not appeal to a person’s reason or moral sense.

Coercion—the threat of force—is far more important, as is the actual use of terror, for violence deepens the true believer’s commitment: “Every act of lynching in our South not only intimidates the Negro but also invigorates the fanatical conviction of white supremacy” (107). Violence also stems from the true believer’s intense need to proselytize—a sign not of confidence, but of desperation in a person who exists only to serve the movement.

Section 4: “Leadership”

Leaders do not create mass movements; the conditions for the movement must already exist. Once those conditions are in place, however, “the presence of an outstanding leader is indispensable” (113). The leader of a mass movement does not have to be smart or decent but does need to inspire fanatical devotion, not only from the mass of followers but from a smaller group of lieutenants able and willing to subordinate themselves while executing the leader’s will. The leader’s actual ideas or program mean little. Ability to command obedience matters above all else.

Section 5: “Action”

Action itself promotes unity. Mass movements proscribe both thought and creativity, but they insist on every kind of collective action, including the simple act of marching, that helps obliterate the individual. Hoffer notes, however, that too much successful action can give the true believer confidence, and this would have the potential to undermine the movement.

Section 6: “Suspicion”

Mass movements use spying, surveillance, and other intrusive methods to promote a general sense of unease among members, who know at all times that they are being watched. In a group of frustrated true believers, “the air is heavy-laden with suspicion” (124). True believers do not feel loyalty to one another, only to the cause—which sometimes must be strengthened by making examples of innocents.

Section 7: “The Effects of Unification”

Although true believers no longer feel frustrated once they have shed their former selves, the act of unification itself merely intensifies “all the reactions which are symptomatic of inner tension and insecurity” (126). With increasing tenacity, true believers cling to the movement as if their lives depend on it. The same often holds true for young people born and raised inside such a movement, for though they have not yet had time to develop deep frustrations or self-loathing, they know only the deprivations and rituals by which they are molded into dependency.