thoughts on the nature of mass movements

Mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding The less justified a man is in claiming excellenceįor his own self, the more ready he is to claim allĮxcellence for his nation, his religion, his raceĪ man is likely to mind his own business when it Joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from They considered themselvesĬheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility Themselves not guilty of all the enormities they Hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared Nazi, 'to be free from freedom.' It was not sheer Himself, freedom is an irksome burden.We joinĪ mass movement to escape from individual responsibility, Unless a man has the talents to make something of In any particular ideals or goals but because they do not believe in themselves They join such movements not because they believe Seek to better the lot of all mankind, are motivated not by altruism butīy selfishness. To settle on just one-is that the members of mass movements, who ostensibly Perhaps the most important insight in the book-and it is very hard That he broaches, so let me just try a couple. It is in no way possible to address all the ideas In this little book that you can seriously open to just about any pageĪnd find a sentence that will stop you in your tracks and make you ponder Influence of his ideas, must be admitted to be a brilliant philosopherīut interestingly enough, Eric Hoffer, a self educated field hand and longshoreman, Rule is Friederich Nietzsche, who, whatever we may think of the destructive The required combination of brevity and profundity isĮxceptionally hard to maintain, in fact most authors only toss off a few There may be no harder form for an author to attempt than writing inĪphorisms. Editor's Preface to the Time-Life Books edition of The True Believer Who begins as a frustrated man driven by guilt,įailure and self-disgust to bury his own identity in a In Hoffer's book, this hero, nourishedīy free societies, is set off against 'the true believer,' Man at peace with himself, engaged in the The literary shock could hardly have been greater.įor Hoffer's hero is 'the autonomous man,' the content A genuine one emergedĪt last-with a philosophical cast very differentįrom what a proletarian was supposed to think. In 1951, when Believer first appeared, eagerĮyes had long been peeled for the emergence of a

Thoughts on the nature of mass movements