This a a great book, highly relevant these days, a classic that everyone should read. History reveals man's shocking capacity for mass madness and insane cruelty. What is the good, the purpose of pain, suffering, decay and so much abject brutality? One answer is simply that in a polarity universe the one extreme of purity and goodness cannot exist without the other extreme, meaning contamination and evil. In the temporal hologram, everything rots. It is simple physics, or rather metaphysics. A more western oriented explanation of the purpose for such brutal and destructive energies is offered by the plain speaking, down-to-earth American philosopher Eric Hoffer in his classic astute and insightful book, `The True Believer, Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements' [1951]:
"The discarded and rejected [of any society] are often the raw material of a nation's future. The stone builders reject becomes the cornerstone of a new world. A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, decent, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come. It was not the irony of history that the undesired in the countries of Europe should have crossed an ocean to build a new world on the [North American] continent. Only they could do it."
From this pragmatic assessment we may approach the idea that those we consider to be the dregs of society, the losers, and the various forms of eroding contamination, chemical or ideological -- are in fact the seed store of new forms. Bacteria and viruses, which destroy weakened living cells, have been with us forever. In a cyclical universe, there must be energies that decay, dissolve, and destroy. Often these are hidden beyond our sight, decomposing matter under rocks, in putrid slime yucky-goo rubbish, or silently lurking inside our human bodies.
Sometimes they are found in the malcontent, the alienated, misfits who in blaming others for their "spoiled lives" [Hoffer's words] overthrow the existing order. Hoffer counts political and religious fanatics such as Hitler and Lenin among these `true believers' who throughout history have murdered thousands in the name of truth.
Eric Hoffer worked on the San Francisco docks as a stevedore in the 1940s. He was self-educated and his experiences in the realm of physical labour combined with a lack of ivory tower intellectual conditioning, which so is often removed from any real life, and therefore produced an extraordinary view of the human condition. I first read `The True Believer' back in Texas high school, perhaps 1962, and I admit that I did not and could not have understood it in those days -- but even in my tender green naive teens, I realized that there was something deeply profoundly true in this book. Because of the recent rumours of revolution, I remembered and thus reread this classic, which was reissued in 2010.
Hoffer makes it unequivocally clear that what motivates the True Believer into fanaticism is his or her own lack. They are as he says the disaffected, the poor, the unemployed, the misfits, outcasts, minorities, adolescent youth, the ambitious, the obsessed, the impotent in mind or body, the inordinately selfish, the bored and sinners.
"...they are wholly without reverence toward the present. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both: hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy...Thus they are among the early recruits of revolutions, mass migrations, and of religious, racial and chauvinist movements, and they imprint their mark upon these upheavals and movements which shape a nations character and history."
Hoffer's keen observations are brilliant, timeless, and yet more relevant than ever.
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Insightful and important food for thought
This is an older book but is still quite relevant. It has also been famous over the years and required in innumerable college classrooms. The author states early in the text that this is a work of theory, and he provides only antidotal evidence for his assertions. Therefore, his ideas are really to be critiqued and considered rather than cited as even tentative conclusions. Nevertheless, Hoffer has powerful ideas about human nature and the reasons that individuals are drawn to a mass movement even and perhaps especially if it requires what he calls the “vilification of the self.” What turns a person into a fanatic? This seems to be a question that is worth answering. And at least Hoffer is asking the question and providing some very thoughtful theories.
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- Tony HymesReviewed in France on February 2, 2016
Extremely thought provoking
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase - AthanReviewed in the United Kingdom on February 27, 2017
Fantastic, if no longer entirely relevant
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1stein2Reviewed in Germany on November 29, 2017
Why people kill other people while feeling good about it.
Format: KindleVerified Purchase - Amazon CustomerReviewed in India on July 31, 2024
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