Eric Hoffer on the neocons
December 25, 2007 – 12:03 am by JohnIf I were in a position of importance at a university and I was able to specify three books that every incoming student must have read before enrolling, I would choose The Law, The True Believer, and The Law again.
The True Believer by Eric Hoffer (1951) is about mass movements. How they form, how people are swayed by them, how they join, how members become infected with blind hatred and mass-mindedness. It is quite good, and quite quotable.
Butler Shaffer wrote in the LRC blag:
Those trying to understand the ease with which Marxists can turn themselves into fascists - a process of seeming polar reversal exhibited by so many neocons - might consider the insight provided by one of 20th century America’s greatest minds, Eric Hoffer. Addressing “the interchangeability of mass movements,” Hoffer observed:
“When people are ripe for a mass movement, they are usually ripe
for any effective movement, and not solely for one with a
particular doctrine or program. In pre-Hitlerian Germany it
was often a tossup whether a restless youth would join the
Communists or the Nazis. . . . Where mass movements are in
violent competition with each other, there are not infrequent
instances of converts - even the most zealous - shifting their
allegiance from one to the other. . . . One mass movement readily
transforms itself into another.”