True Believers

What follow are excerpts from Eric Hoffer’s THE TRUE BELIEVER, publ.. 1951 which has been replaying itself out in the Obama ‘mass movement.’ Jump to my * for the short-cut version of reality. Parenthesis are mine.

For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast chance, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, INFALLIBLE LEADER, or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. (Obama)

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves. (Obama’s followers).

One of the most potent attractions of a mass movement is its offering of a substitute for individual hope. ... Mass movements are usually accused of doping their followers with hope of the future while cheating them of the enjoyment of the present. ( Obama’s hope and change).

A mass movement has to center the hearts and minds of its followers on the future even when it is not engaged in a life-and-death struggle with established institutions and privileges. ... The self-sacrifice involved in mutual sharing and co-operative actions is impossible without hope.

It is obvious, therefore, that in order to be effective, a doctrine must not be understood, but has to be believed in... A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength. ( Obama’s communism, socialism, liberalism, statism, disguised as hope and change).

Mass movements can rise and spread without a belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. (George W. Bush and conservatives).

It needs the iron will, daring and vison of an exceptional leader to concert and mobilize existing attitudes and impulses into a collective drive of a mass movement. ( Obama and his followers in the campaign and in the White House.)

*** What are the talents requisite for such a performance? Exceptional intelligence, noble character and originality seem neither indispensable nor perhaps DESIRABLE. The main requirements seem to be AUDACITY and a joy in defiance; an iron will; a fanatical conviction that he is in possession of the one and only truth; faith in his destiny and luck; a capacity for passionate hatred; contempt for the present; a cunning estimate of human nature; a delight in symbols (spectacles and ceremonials); unbounded brazenness which finds expression in a disregard of consistency and fairness; a recognition that the innermost craving of a following is for communion and that there can never be too much of it; a capacity for winning and holding the utmost loyalty of a group of able lieutenants. This last faculty is one of the most essential and



elusive. (Obama, whose one book remember, is titled THE AUDACITY TO HOPE.)

*** ...the readying of the ground for a mass movement is done best by men whose chief claim to excellence is their skill in the use of the spoken or written word. (Obama)

To sum up, the militant man of words prepares the ground for the rise of a mass movement : by
discrediting prevailing creeds and institutions and detaching from them the allegiance of the people; ... by furnishing the doctrine and slogans of the new faith; (hope and change)

Rare (good ) leaders, ... blended their faith in humanity, for they know that no one can be honorable unless he honors mankind.... The genuine man of action, ( who is bad), is intent not on renovating the world but on possessing it. ( Obama).

All the true believers of our time - whether Communist, Nazi, Fascist, Japanese or Catholic - declaimed volubly on the decadence of the Western democracies. ( Hoffer who unfortunately despises Christianity, could now justly add Obama to his list).