Book review: The True Believer

Why people believe things that are patently absurd

Jun 10, 2023

The True Believer is a perfect manifestation of the principles upon which this Substack is founded. How easy one finds it to wag a mirth-filled finger at those who believe the earth is flat or that men can get pregnant. What foolishness we decree, quick take their money before they build a bridge to Alaska.

Occasional jest is good for the soul but after the jokes have been cracked we must confront why in this supposedly advanced age is a coterie of our citizenry championing cockeyed horse-crap? And that’s where The True Believer has proven to be nothing short of enlightening.

Eric Hoffer published this book in 1951, fresh on the heels of World War II which housed one of the greatest and deadliest mass delusions in history. The True Believer is Hoffer’s (successful, IMO) attempt to explain why groups of people can behave so horribly, and what makes any given individual willing/eager to join a mass movement with little grounding in reality.

When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock the doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them.

Disclaimer: throughout this book there is reference to “the corporate.” In this context the corporate indicates a group of people (a society) and has nothing to do with a large profit-seeking business.

The True Believer is not a large book but it took me eons to get through. The material is denser than gold and just as valuable, so I found myself glacially rolling through paragraphs and re-reading entire pages on a whim. I absorbed as much as I could but I’ll have to come back for a second helping next year.

The bedrock theme of The True Believer can be summarized as this: why do people believe things that are untrue, and/or join mass movements that are illogical, have little chance of success and seem destined to make the world worse off.

The first answer is frustration. Hoffer argues that people who are frustrated in their lives, those who feel thwarted in their attempt to make something of themselves, are among the most likely to join a mass movement. The rationale for the relegated is my life may be a write-off but I can find redemption by joining a movement that is right and just. The frustrated person seeks to lose themselves in the movement so that they might not be forced to confront their deficiencies.

Boredom also plays a role. Hoffer points out that wealthy housewives of rich industrialists were among the first to support Hitler. Why? The Hausfrauen were bored and wanted to feel like they were on the vanguard of societal transformation. Hitler was an antidote to dreary tea parties and stale conversation.

There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. In almost all the descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of mass movements there is reference to vast ennui; and in their earliest stages mass movements are more likely to find sympathizers and support among the bored than among the exploited and oppressed. - Where people live autonomous lives and are not badly off, yet are without abilities or opportunities for creative work or useful action, there is no telling to what desperate and fantastic shifts they might resort in order to give meaning and purpose to their lives.

When I read about boredom I felt a few pieces click into place. I’ve not yet read Joseph Graeber’s book “Bullshit Jobs” but I’m familiar with the premise. Millions of people work jobs that serve no purpose. Every morning the worker shaves and showers that they might be presentable as they accomplish nothing all day.

While I’ve not read the book I did in fact have a bullshit job and after eighteen months I was a mess. It was the most money I’d ever made yet every morning I woke up with all the good cheer and invigoration of roadkill.

My solution was to move to Thailand, but not everyone has that luxury. If you can’t (or feel like you can’t) change your circumstances what’s the next best thing? Why not join a mass movement! The movement may not benefit society but the group’s forward thrust can be a source of meaning and high-definition drama in an otherwise sepia-toned existence.

It is futile to judge the viability of a new movement by the truth of its doctrine and the feasibility of its promises.

When we wonder why people believe in stories so patently absurd it’s important that we realize that the true believer isn’t actively shopping for the most logical or internally consistent solution. No. The believer wants a story in which they can be the righteous hero who defends society from the incorrigible heretic. So little a role does logic play that an ignorance of facts can actually be quite advantageous.

For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, 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. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking.

The key revelation is that the true believer isn’t concerned with outcomes. Throwing paint on famous art isn’t going to convince anyone to stop using fossil fuels. In fact the most likely outcome is that everyone gets angry at that bullshit and has a knee-jerk reaction in the opposite direction. The actions, feelings and group cohesion are of primary importance to the true believer, not whether the ultimate goal is reached.

The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. No doctrine however profound and sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth. - Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth.

I’ll even argue that on an unconscious level the true believer doesn’t want their cause to succeed. If everyone stopped using fossil fuels, if the so-called racists and patriarchal oppressors disappeared at the stroke of midnight, oppositional movements would cease to be justified and their followers would be forced to confront their frustration, boredom and lack of meaning all over again.

What ails the frustrated? It is the consciousness of an irremediably blemished self. Their chief desire is to escape that self—and it is this desire which manifests itself in a propensity for united action and self-sacrifice. The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one’s individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.

The true believer can always find another movement

You might suspect that the fanatically devoted will remain steadfast in their iron-clad convictions come hell or high water. Not so… Claims Hoffer, the most devoted believers will almost never give up fanaticism in its entirety but any radical may be converted to serve another cause.

The fanatic cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to his reason or moral sense. He fears compromise and cannot be persuaded to qualify the certitude and righteousness of his holy cause. But he finds no difficulty in swinging suddenly and wildly from one holy cause to another. He cannot be convinced but only converted. His passionate attachment is more vital than the quality of the cause to which he is attached.

I’m reminded of stories in which devout Christians have become even more assiduous Muslims. Or a diehard Democrat topples into everlasting clarity that the traditional Republican creed constitutes the sole truth. At one point Hoffer claims that the opposite of a fanatic is not another fanatic who believes in a wildly different story. No. The opposite of the fanatic is the moderate, the person who does not hang their hat on extremes. Where the true believer perceives only black and white, the man in the middle adorns his home in hues of gray.

Society is uprooted

One of a society’s most important functions is to provide a person with a role that they can step into, and to dictate the norms by which citizens are expected to live. Hoffer points out that when a society is stable and the people are enfranchised, a mass movement is unlikely to take hold. Mass movements do best during times of upheaval, which explains why we’re experiencing so much weirdness right now.

I have an overarching and not particularly insightful theory that the internet has short-circuited our culture’s motherboard. The internet has changed how we,

Date
Hate
Communicate
Argue
Work
Get the news
Etc.

And the trouble is that we’ve yet to develop norms that will allow us to restore some semblance of stability to our skirmishing society. The most glaring example being the callous way that we treat each other online, headless of the human consequence. We too easily forget that someone is on the other side of the screen, and that our words can and do have an effect. But I feel that I’m drifting, let’s change course…

Some of you probably know Mike Solana, a popular personality out of California who writes about tech, social movements, culture, etc. All the good stuff, I like Mike. However, about a year ago he proffered a point that I strongly disagreed with. Mike said something alone the lines of,

I’m on Twitter every day arguing with people because that’s where this century’s ideological battle is being won and lost.

I instinctively disagreed with Mike but I couldn’t pin down why. Well, The True Believer has been helpful in furthering my thinking. As I alluded to earlier, delusion can only flourish when societal norms are in shambles and people are desperate for the type of surety and stability that a mass movement can provide.

The milieu most favorable for the rise and propagation of mass movements is one in which a once compact corporate structure is, for one reason or another, in a state of disintegration.

Returning to Mike’s statement, I don’t think that jousting with a movement’s followers is liable to achieve very much. After all, it’s rarely the case that logic and a deep exploration of cosmic truths has led a true believer to embrace a cause in the first place.

This pithy phrase (that I read somewhere, I’m not that brilliant) provides a concise counterpoint to Mike Solana’s contention. Positive change will only happen by improving the societal soil such that people don’t feel like they must reach for extremes. We’re not going to argue our way back to sanity.

Conclusions

A few weeks ago I read an article on Substack entitled The Real Enemy is Normal. While I found the article to be well-written I nonetheless strongly disagreed with many of the points made. I took particular exception with the following passage.

I think a lot of us do miss the early days of the pandemic. It was one of the few times in our lives when we actually felt the pull-together effect. For once, we felt kindness and a sense of collective purpose.

I understand the point the author is making. The lockdowns gave a certain subset of the population purpose. The citizens could band together, make a few sacrifices (have their food delivered instead of going out) and these actions would defeat the detestable virus. The Covid lockdowns were this century’s holy crusade, a perfect opportunity for the dispirited to feel like they were making a difference.

Of course for me, and hundreds of millions of others, there was no fucking “pull-together effect” as I was left utterly alone and isolated from society to the point of skittishness. But let’s not quibble about personal trivia. The broader sadness I find in this passage is that it reveals that a group of people are finding so little meaning in their lives that a government dictated closure of home and business is actually an improvement over the status quo!

I’m no anthropologist but I would wager that there’s a large overlap between those who found lockdowns satisfying and those who are on the internet arguing that men can get pregnant and Abraham Lincoln was a racist schmuck who must be cancelled before his vile visage causes any more irreversible harm.

As humans we need meaning and a story in which we can be the good guy. If society does not provide that story we may go looking for an alternative in the dusty corners of the absurd. Nature abhors a vacuum and the question isn’t how to convince people that men can’t pregnant. What we’re called upon to put forward is a better story, a meaningful tome that we can all get behind. I fear that until we find that story we’ll be stuck with the nonsense slingers a while longer.

Here, as elsewhere, the technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure. - An effective mass movement cultivates the idea of sin. It depicts the autonomous self not only as barren and helpless but also as vile. To confess and repent is to slough off one’s individual distinctness and separateness, and salvation is found by losing oneself in the holy oneness of the congregation.

Do you want to dive deeper? Click here to check out a few more quotes from the book that didn’t fit into this review.