The True Believer and Western Politics

I have been rereading parts of Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, written in 1951, and am impressed by his insights into the psychology of collectivism. Hoffer identifies the organizing psychological force for man in his sense of individual efficacy. When a man sees himself as efficacious, when his own creative energy is regularly given form in the material world, he is content. Otherwise he is frustrated. And then he seeks to sublimate this frustration by merging his unworthy ego into the group -- the family, the tribe, the church, the nation, the race, or the movement. This closely parallels Ayn Rand's analysis of creators vs. second-handers already in The Fountainhead.

Hoffer proceeds to offer a taxonomy of the frustrated second-hander, dissecting the psychological malfunction characterstic of each variation. He points out that the various social organizations sought as an outlet by the second-hander are inherently competitive with each other. There is only so much social fodder to go around, and what the church gets, e.g., the nation must give up. Hoffer is mainly interested in competition between the more traditional outlets -- family, church, nation -- on the one hand, and mass movements on the other. The movement -- communist, Nazi, environmentalist, or evangelical -- frequently seeks to undermine the hold of traditional social structures. First it must demagnetize the potential convert from his local field in preparation to realign him with its own polarity.

These social forces bring about a certain kind of interesting second-order, cooperative effect. As the revolutionary movement seeks to undermine prior social orders, a reactionary conservative movement may seek to strengthen them simply to defend against the former. This kind of dynamics seems to underly the political landscape of the modern West.

It had always appeared to me an unfortunate historical accident that the advocates of economic freedom are for the most part also the advocates of traditional religion and "family values," i.e. the political Right. But perhaps it is no accident. Having performed the liberal economic revolution of the 18th century in America and Europe, what was once itself a kind of mass movement for individual liberty increasingly faced threats from other, competing movements rather than from the old order itself. When it was in its ascendancy, the liberal movement strove to disassemble extant social bonds, and its doctrine of individualism was a great asset. Having gained power, the liberal movement seems to have jettisoned this doctrine in an act of political expediency.

As in the old order, so in capitalism, the second-hander has a vast numerical majority in society. Now, further separated from the basic chores of his own survival by the fruits of capitalism, and in possession of ever greater amounts of leisure time, his frustration is magnified. The potential for new, contrary mass movements increases proportionately. The second-hander always has the power to shape his own intellect anew, to cultivate and express his own creative energy in whatever field and at whatever level his ability allows. But such a process, even when not begun on a second-handed precursor, is difficult and sometimes painful. The easier and more frequent shunt is a reversion to some form of collectivism.

In order to avert the disaster posed by modern collectivist movements, the liberal order was faced with two alternatives: (i) perfect the psychology of uncountable numbers of frustrated mediocrities or (ii) shunt them away from the revolutionary collectivism of modern mass movements and into the age-old collectivism of family and church. Fight syphilis by microscopic scrutiny of every resident microbe or by the equal-opportunity toxin of arsenic. The former (i) requires a grand, philosophical kind of revolution on at least the same order as the political revolutions being opposed -- a philosophic revolution whose very identity few in the liberal movement have ever grasped. The latter (ii) offers a concrete prospect for the current political epoch, and the liberal movement took it.

The danger is always that a dose of arsenic sufficient to subdue the invading microbe may be too great for the patient to withstand. But at least now I understand why the arsenic was tried in the first place. Ultimately, we need a better immunological technology.