We Must All Be Right, Because We All Agree With Each Other.
Propaganda does not deceive people, it merely helps them to deceive themselves.--Eric Hoffer
Can We Follow a Mass Movement and Chew Gum at the Same Time?
Eric Hoffer is a name that might be quite familiar to you, or not. I am familiar with his name, and not much else. I went to college in the Dark Ages, the 1960s. The earth was a primordial ooze at that time. Dinosaurs had only recently become extinct, and birds had not yet learned to fly. We all sat around on the front porch of the old homestead, denigrating negros, punctuated with spits of tobacco juice over the railing and into Ma’s garden. She would always complain.
OK, I think I’ve worked in enough cliches. Anyway, I went to college over half a century ago, when Eric Hoffer was talked of a lot. Somehow, no teacher ever assigned me one of his books. Hoffer is notable for having little formal education, yet being well educated. In not being taught any specific academic program, he was free to develop his own thoughts.
At the recommendation of a fellow Substacker, I ordered a copy of Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer” from the library. The several weeks’ wait to obtain it indicates that people still read his stuff. I’m not too far into the book, but it’s already intriguing. Somehow, this uneducated guy managed to read a lot, learn a lot, and comprehend a lot. Who knew that self-directed education could be so productive? I thought we needed a defined course of study led by people who have never experienced much of anything outside their ivory tower. That’s how we all develop into our unique selves, right?
OK, maybe not. Anyway, The True Believer is about what factors need to be present in order for a mass movement to come about. You know, mass movements such as the American Revolution, the French Revolution, The Russian Revolutions, etc. Interestingly, Hoffer suggests that the extremely poor, who have suffered generations of poverty do not generally revolt. They are too busy trying to survive to revolt. It is the people who have been accustomed to a decent life, who then suddenly find themselves impoverished, who revolt. In the nineteenth century many people who had farmed reasonably productively for generations were thrown off the land. They had no place to go, no other way to live; so they revolted.
I won’t get long-winded here, but it’s interesting to read a book that was written over half a century ago, largely written about events a century earlier, and consider how it relates to events today. Because, as I sometimes say, times change, people don’t.
Hoffer made reference to a guy I’ve never heard of, a Frenchman named Ernest Renan, who, in a lecture in 1890 said, “Let liberty alone. Fanatics fear her far more than they fear persecution. In her own unaided strength, she knows how to overcome her enemies.”
Hmmmm. Fanatics fear liberty more than they fear persecution. Can that be? Yes, it can. As Hoffer points out, mass movements demand the relinquishing of individual identity in order to become one with the movement. Liberty is the antithesis of that. Thinking for yourself is the antithesis of solidarity. Hoffer suggests that the only hope of any real liberty comes after, not during, the mass movement, the overthrow. And, perhaps, not then.
Hoffer says, “They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society. The frustrated, oppressed by their shortcomings, blame their failure on existing restraints. Actually, their innermost desire is for an end to the” free for all.” They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society.”
Whoa! Why didn’t I read this fifty years ago?! Lord knows, I’ve been saying it for the last half century. Formal education is largely the place where ideas and imagination go to die. Liberal arts schools are bastions of academic inbreeding and intellectual incest. But if you desire to abandon any sense of individuality, any self-reliance; if you desire to meld into a movement and become lost and yet secure in it, a liberal arts college may be for you.
”When people are free to choose, they usually imitate each other.”
—Eric Hoffer