I finally had the time to sit down and read Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, and the truth is I could not put it down. I finished it in only a few days, which is a big accomplishment for me since I am a very slow reader, because it was so captivating and insightful. I was recommended this book by several different people and I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the competing mass movements we have today. The reason I am writing this article is to explain what I learned and how it relates to those movements.

First, let me explain the main premise of The True Believer and a little bit about Eric Hoffer. The True Believer was Hoffer’s first book, which is unbelievable in itself. It came out in 1951 shortly after the end of WWII where we saw several different mass movements around the world. The True Believer is Hoffer’s attempt to explain the rise, sustaining methods, and fall of different types of mass movements including nationalist movements, socialist movements, religious movements, and more. Even though these mass movements can fall under different titles and pushed by different ideologies, all these movements have a religious aspect even in the absence of a traditional religion. Hoffer’s ability to identify how these mass movements “practice the art of religiofication” that turns “practical purposes into holy causes” was very insightful. Even though he considered himself an atheist, Hoffer did seem to show respect to traditional religion and its place in society, but he also called out mass movements that turned everything into a religious, or holy, cause. One slight alteration I would make to his stance on religion is there is such a thing as a corrupt religion. A corrupt religion, as opposed to a healthy religion, does not allow room for forgiveness of our sins but only obedience to the leadership or cause as an ally who is never to be a real part of the movement. This leads to resentment and the ultimate destruction of the movement itself. Again, Hoffer does not make this distinction in this book, but I am willing to bet it is something he would agree with. And the last thing I want to point out about Hoffer is he is not some famous public intellectual pontificating on academic ideas at some prestigious university, at least not at the time of writing this book. He was a migratory worker and a longshoreman who liked to read and observe the world around him. He never really had a formal education and grew up poor and parentless. Everything was against him and he had no business thinking about the things he thought about so clearly without the label of expert pinned to his suit jacket, but he did it anyways – and did a damn good job of it.

There are a few other points I want to quickly make before diving into the meat of this piece. As I was reading this book it seemed like Hoffer was doing a step-by-step guide on how to characterize the actions and methods of the mass movement that I am very much against – wokeism, or what my friend Truman (@ReturnToReason) calls Far Left Orthodoxy (FLO). I believe this to be the case, even though Hoffer did not write this book to call out only one kind of mass movement, but there is a trap one can easily fall into when reading material like this – a kind of confirmation bias. I imagine if someone on the political Left where to read this they might think everything applies to what they refer to as Trumpism or the MAGA movement, and, if we are going to be honest with ourselves, we must be open to the possibility that we are in a mass movement ourselves that may be corrupted. Even though I believe the religion of the woke hits basically every marker for a corrupt mass movement, I am also open to accepting the faults of the mass movements on the political Right. My point here is, we must try our best to not just confirm our own biases when reading material like this. I did my best to apply the lessons I learned in this book to every mass movement at-large today, and I will add my thoughts on how the opposing mass movement on the Right can also turn corrupt at the end of this article.

Hoffer starts out with Part 1: The Appeal of Mass Movements. This is where he covers what conditions are needed to start a mass movement including the desire for change, the desire for substitutions, and the ability to change out one holy cause for another.

The desire for change might be the easiest precondition to understand. Whenever a large enough group of people feel left out, ostracized, or oppressed there is always a strong push for change in the social and political environment. Hoffer writes:

“It is a truism that many who join a rising revolutionary movement are attracted by the prospect of sudden and spectacular change in their conditions of life… Where self-advancement cannot, or is not allowed to, serve as a driving force, other sources of enthusiasm have to be found if momentous changes, such as the awakening and renovation of a stagnant society or radical reforms in the character and pattern of life of a community are to be realized and perpetuated… The resistance to change and the ardent desire for it spring from the same conviction, and the one can be as vehement as the other.”

Hoffer identifies that not only does a strong desire for change cause mass movements, but a strong desire for the status quo can also case a mass movement. It is easy to see which political ideology gravitates towards which precondition. Liberals and progressives, or the political Left, tend towards mass movements based on change, and conservatives, or the political Right, tend towards mass movements based on maintaining the status quo. Both cases can result in healthy or corrupt mass movements, so none of this is to say a mass movement built on the desire for change is inherently a bad thing. Wokeism is certainly a mass movement built on change, among other things we will get to later. They are identifying a real struggle for the everyday American to feel as if they are a part of the American Experiment like their ancestors before them. Brushing this off as a feature of a ‘soft generation’ is a bad idea often made by conservatives. The disagreement between the woke and their opposition is why are people feeling this way? The woke believe it is a problem with ongoing systemic oppression. The woke opposition has a few different theories as to why people feel left out, which might explain why the push back on wokeism is relatively ineffective at the moment, but one of the leading theories is because people have lost their sense of purpose. How do we remedy this? A mass movement seems like the right answer to both sides.

A precondition to a mass movement is also the desire for substitutes. What do they “substitute” for? Hoffer writes:

“There is a fundamental difference between the appeal of a mass movement and the appeal of a practical organization. The practical organization offers opportunities for self-advancement, and its appeal is mainly to self-interest. On the other hand, a mass movement, particularly in its active, revivalist phase, appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.”

A common theme throughout this book is Hoffer’s belief that one of the main functions of a mass movement is to sacrifice the self to a collective cause. The substitution comes at the individual level. A mass movement substitutes the self, with all its flaws and failures, for the goal of collective perfection. Hoffer dives more into this in the next section of the book that covers ‘converts’, but this is an important element for starting a mass movement as well as maintaining it. Just as a group can desire change to make their circumstances better, a group can also band together to mask the flaws of the individuals within the group. We see this more often than we think. Take the example of the now infamous Jussie Smollett incident in early 2019. Smollett is a talented actor and singer, but, for reasons we are not 100% sure of, he decided he needed more attention and he found the perfect way, in his mind, to get that attention. He hopped on the new wave of oppression narratives that reignited the careers of people like Colin Kaepernick and Robin DiAngelo. The basic story is this: Jussie Smollett hired some guys to stage a hate crime so he could claim he was targeted for being black in Chicago. Yes, the super radical Right-wing city of Chicago. Needless to say, the story fell apart almost immediately. I am not going to review the whole Smollett hate crime hoax here, but my point is this – there are many instances of manufactured oppression, needed due to the lack of real oppression, that uses narrative and a connection to a growing mass movement to cover for individual flaws, feelings of irrelevance, or lack of purpose. Wokeism deals in this type of substitution frequently including the Smollett example. Oppression narratives being pushed by educators, intellectuals, writers, the media, the entertainment industry, and many private companies is part of this substitution. This allows anyone who feels like they are not living up to their full potential to claim there is some exterior force holding them down. This is not beneficial to the individual or the society they are trying to change. Although there might be instances of a healthy mass movement using the desire for substitution in a positive way – think about a traditional religion substituting the individual sinner for the collective sin of man (and even this can be spun in a very corrupt way) – the religion of the woke is using these forms of substitution in very corrupt, dishonest ways.

Hoffer’s final method of appeal to mass movements is the ability to change out one cause for another. This is what he calls the “interchangeability of mass movements.” Hoffer writes:

“Since all mass movements draw their adherents from the same types of humanity and appeal to the same types of mind, it follows: (a) all mass movements are competitive, and the gain of one in adherents is the loss of all the others; (b) all mass movements are interchangeable. One mass movement readily transforms itself into another.”

Hoffer is not only referring to the competition of the specific mass movements at-large during the mid-19th century – like nationalism and communism – but also refers to one type of mass movement transforming into another. Hoffer continues:

“A religious movement may develop into a social revolution or a nationalist movement; a social revolution, into militant nationalism or a religious movement; a nationalist movement into a social revolution or a religious movement.”

Hoffer cites several examples of how past movements changed into and competed with one another, but this method also applies to mass movements today. There is no doubt that wokeism is in competition with Trumpism. These are competing mass movements that also exchange converts, typically in one direction. There are several examples of people getting what is now known as Red Pilled – when someone of the Left, or even a non-political individual, realizes the Left has gone too far and begins to identify with, subscribes to, or sympathizes with Right-wing views. There are not many, to my knowledge, people moving the other direction other than a few anti-Trump Conservatives. This is the competition aspect Hoffer talks about.

The interchangeability of mass movements is also something we see today. Wokeism covers a ton of ground, shifting whenever advantageous. Because this ideology prides itself on fighting against oppression, it will move from movement to movement to exchange oppression capital – the social currency backed by the virtue of tolerance and standing against oppression, often in the form of a virtue signal rather than advocating for actual positive change. One might argue that wokeism is not changing out one cause for another, but rather, casts a large net that covers more than one cause. I would agree with that observation if they did not advocate for causes that contradict one another. For example, feminism – advocacy for women’s rights and equality between the sexes – and the transgender rights movement – advocacy for no discrimination based on gender because there are no objective differences that ought to be recognized between sexes or genders – are in direct contradiction and, therefore, cannot exist in the same reality at the same time. The woke try to explain this contradiction away with some mental gymnastics, but their attempts are uncompelling to anyone who has ever met a man and a woman. As Ayn Rand’s character, Francisco d’Anconia, in her famous novel, Atlas Shrugged, was fond of saying, “Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.” The incorrect premise here is the application of science. Science has become a holy word for the religious woke. It really means whatever they want it to mean. It allows them to ignore objective, biological differences between men and women. It allows them to ignore the humanity of an unborn child. It allows them to take control of whole industries based on their predictions of the end of the world (a different prediction every 10 years or so). With this everchanging premise, their mass movement can jump from cause to cause without skipping a beat. If Hoffer were alive today, this section of the book would have been about 100 pages longer.

Thank you for reading, but due to the length of this piece, I need to split it into parts. The next part will be coming shortly. Also, I plan on releasing these in the Engineering Politics Locals Community a week or so before I republish them on Medium. This way the members of this community get to see it first. I really appreciate your support because this type of content takes some time and a lot of thought to produce. I will also do a podcast covering this material shortly after it is completed. Thanks again!