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“A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrines and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves—and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.
It is obvious, therefore, that, in order to succeed, a mass movement must develop at the earliest moment a compact corporate organization and a capacity to absorb and integrate all comers. It is futile to judge the viability of a new movement by the truth of its doctrine and the feasibility of its promises. What has to be judged is its corporate organization for quick and total absorption of the frustrated. Where new creeds vie with each other for the allegiance of the populace, the one which comes with the most perfected collective framework wins…..[T]he chief passion of the frustrated is “to belong,” and that there cannot be too much cementing and binding to satisfy this passion.”
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
“the most perfected collective framework wins”
These words were published in 1951 and I think are as true now as they were 60 years ago.
Context, however, changed substantially in those years. The information age blossomed in the last 60 years to frame our understanding of structures in the world. A sea of information surrounds us; everyone swims in it.
Family and religious structures also changed dramatically from 1951 to 2012. The title of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart sums up in a phrase the weakened state of many bedrock American social structures today.
In the pessimistic future–and present–of Murray’s analysis, we should expect to see more adrift souls in “meaningless individual existence,” eager subjects for the next mass movement to scoop up under Hoffer’s theories. Surely some of this goes on, but the fading numbers of the nascent Occupy movement suggest that today’s adrift need something more substantive to pull them in.
I would credit information technology. More people than ever before think within an expansive historical context. Elementary school students from all income ranges routinely search the totality of recorded history on their cell phones to answer a query–they just text 242242 “ChaCha” for example. As human history becomes more closely mirrored on the web, most of it freely available to anyone possessing the ability to formulate a question, factual error is becoming more difficult to sustain, more apparent to all, and less tolerable.
The information bar rises as history permeates our context. Successful theories stand out and we make fewer errors. So while people still crave companionship and camaraderie in a cause larger than themselves, and while people may be less connected to traditional social structures, they are more intellectually empowered. Opening up the lens to include both traditional social structures and the richness of the contemporary milieu, people may be as involved with the world around them as ever, just through new mechanisms.
As a result, maybe people don’t need traditional social structures to the degree they used to. Certainly intellectually empowered people won’t so readily jump on to the next mass movement when they know it looks like a previous one that had a negative outcome. Maybe people expect more out of their mass movements than they used to.
So, perhaps all this means that people will still jump into a mass movement, but that derivative totalitarian movements aren’t going to work any more. One can hope so anyway.
This is probably a good time to set aside the rhetoric of the left. Marxist criticisms, progressive myths, totalitarian religions, pretty much the whole script of prejudgments that issue from the socialist side of matters are without merit. Those dogs won’t hunt. Why respond to them and throw good effort after bad?
After dumping all the dead end coercive philosophies of the 20th Century, what’s left to build a mass movement on?
- Consent,
- individual voluntary choice,
- moral accountability for one’s choices, and
- the harmony of social transactions arising from the matrix of mutual consent points between free people.
Of course we’ll still need social structures to deal with those who act outside the bounds of consent–i.e. criminals and those making war on us–but beyond those exigent situations, our understanding of normalcy needs to turn around 180 degrees from the ruinous basket of non-consensual philosophies, economics, politics and mythologies currently driving so much of our public policy.
The most “perfected collective framework” I can imagine is one where moral men live their lives unencumbered by forceful modalities. In a consensual society the regulatory state and the planned economy get thrown out as coercive laws that do not involve criminality. That is the vision of the Founders and we can rescue our country by returning to it.