It's been quite enlightening to read this book whilst the far right racist riots have been unfolding across the UK. It's the only story currently dominating news headlines and my social media is awash with fellow campaigners and organisations posting about the unfolding events. Most upsetting for me however, have been social media posts and private messages from my migrant friends expressing their fear and terror and how much these events have affected them psychologically making them feel unsafe in their home country. I've cried a few times in the last week reading their words. Reading this book by Eric Hoffer, on the other hand, has helped me to see the issue from a more objective lense and to understand how the far right have been mobilised and weaponised by the likes of Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage, emboldened by the election of Reform UK to political office. It wasn't an easy read, but it was important nonetheless - and very interesting to compare Hoffer's reflections on mass movements to the recent reading I have been doing on covert abuse in a domestic context because there are so many parallels to draw.
Key Quotes
‘All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance’ (page xi)
‘Discontent by itself does not invariably create a desire for change. Other factors have to be present before discontent turns into disaffection. One of these is a sense of power.’ (page 7)
‘Offhand one would expect that the mere possession of power would automatically result in a cocky attitude toward the world and a receptivity to change. But it is not always so. The powerful can be as timid as the weak. What seems to count more than possession of instruments of power is faith in the future. Where power is not joined with faith in the future, it is used mainly to ward off the new and preserve the status quo. On the other hand, extravagant hope, even when not backed by actual power, is likely to generate a most reckless daring.’ (page 9)
‘To the frustrated a mass movement offers substitutes either for the whole self of for the elements which make life bearable and which they cannot evoke out of their individual resources.’ (page 13)
‘Emigration offers some of the things the frustrated hope to find when they join a mass movement, namely, change and a chance for a new beginning.’ (page 20)
‘There is a tendency to judge a race, a nation or any distinct group by its least worthy members. Though manifestly unfair, this tendency has some justification. For the character and destiny of a group are often determined by its inferior elements.’ (page 24)
‘Where people toil from sunrise to sunset for a bare living, they nurse no grievances and dream no dreams. One of the reasons for the rebelliousness of the masses in China is the inordinate effort required there to scrape together the means of the scantiest subsistence.’ (page 28)
‘It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.’ (page 28)
‘There is a hope that acts as an explosive, and a hope that disciplines and infuses patience. The difference is between the immediate hope and the distant hope.’ (page 30)
‘Freedom aggravates at least as much as it alleviates frustration. Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual.’ (page 31)
‘Equality without freedom creates a more stable social pattern than freedom without equality.’ (page 33)
‘A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on the an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing the from their ineffectual selves-and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.’ (page 41)
‘When people revolt in a totalitarian society, they rise not against the wickedness of the regime but its weakness.’ (page 43)
‘The differentiated individual is free of boredom only when he is engaged either in creative work or some absorbing occupation or when he is wholly engrossed in the struggle for existence. Pleasure-chasing and dissipation are ineffective palliatives.’ (page 52)
‘an attempt will be made to show that when we set out to inculcate in people a facility for united action and self-sacrifice, we do all we can – whether we know it or not – to induce and encourage an estrangement from the self, and that we strive to evoke and cultivate in them many of the diverse attitudes and impulses which accompany the spontaneous estrangement from the self in the frustrated. In short, we shall try to show that the technique of an active mass movement consists basically in the inculcation and cultivation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind.’ (page 60)
‘To ripen a person for self-sacrifice he must be stripped of his individual identity and distinctness. He must cease to be George, Hans, Ivan or Tadao – a human atom with an existence bounded by birth and death. The most drastic way to achieve this end is by the complete assimilation of the individual into a collective body.’ (page 62)
‘Where there is no hope, people either run, or allow themselves to be killed without a fight. They will hang onto life in a daze. How else explain the fact that millions of Europeans allowed themselves to be led into annihilation camps and gas chambers, knowing beyond doubt that they were being led to death?’ (page 78)
‘What Stresemann said of the Germans is true of the frustrated in general: “[They] pray not only for [their] daily bread, but also for [their] daily illusion.” The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led.’ (page 83)
‘The chief preoccupation of an active mass movement is to instil in its followers a facility for united action and self-sacrifice, and that it achieves this facility by stripping each human entity of its distinctness and autonomy and turning it into an anonymous particle with no will and judgement of its own.’ (page 84)
‘Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking.’ (page 91)
‘The hatred springs more from self-contempt than from a legitimate grievance is seen in the intimate connection between hatred and a guilty conscience. There is perhaps no way of infecting ourselves with virulent hatred towards a person than by doing him a grave injustice. That others have a just grievance against us is a more potent reason for hating them than that we have a just grievance against the.’ (page 95)
‘To wrong those we hate is to add fuel to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for him.’ (page 95)
‘When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement we find a new freedom – freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse.’ (page 100)
‘The deindividualization which is a prerequisite for thorough integration and selfless dedication is also, to a considerable extent, a process of dehumanisation. The torture chamber is a corporate institution.’ (page 101)
‘As to the blurring and camouflaging of the self, it is achieved solely by imitation – by becoming as like others as possible. The desire to belong is partly a desire to lose oneself.’ (page 102)
‘Propaganda thus serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others; and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda.’ (page 107)
‘When Stalin forces scientists, writers and artists to crawl on their bellies and deny their individual intelligence, sense of beauty and moral sense, he is not inducing a sadistic impulse but is solemnising, in a most impressive way, the supreme virtue of blind obedience.’ (page 117)
‘Unification is more a process of diminution than of addition. In order to be assimilated into a collective medium a person has to be stripped of his individual distinctness. He has to be deprived of free choice and independent judgement… His happiness and fortitude come from his no longer being himself. Attacks against the self cannot touch him. His powers of endurance when at the mercy of an implacable enemy or when facing insupportable circumstances are superior to those of an autonomous individual.’ (page 127)
‘the freedom the masses crave is not freedom of self-expression and self-realisation, but freedom from the intolerable burden of an autonomous existence… The reason for the tragic fate which almost always overtakes the intellectual midwives of a mass movement is that, no matter how much they preach and glorify the united effort, they remain essentially individualists. They believe in the possibility of individual opinion and initiative.’ (page 142)
‘The interference of an active mass movement with the creative process is deep-reaching and manifold: 1) The fervor it generates drains the energies which would have flowed into creative work. Fervor has the same effect on creativeness as dissipation. 2) It subordinates creative work to the advancement of the movement. Literature, art and science must be propagandistic and they must be “practical”.’ (page 155)
‘A mass movement with a concrete, limited objective is likely to have a shorter active phase than a movement with a nebulous, indefinite objective. The vague objective is perhaps indispensable for the development of chronic extremism.’ (page 157)
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