A Beautiful Portrait of My Enemy: A Review of the True Believer (Part 1)

The Psychological Attributes fueling Revolutionary Movements

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer is a vital elite theory book. Its core theme is the psychological and social factors leading to participation in what Hoffer calls ‘mass movements’. These include Communism, Nazism, early Christianity and Islam, and would likely include the Dissident Right, Wokeism, Covid Zero, and National Conservatism today. It is a great aid in my thinking in trying to predict where these movements will go. In my view, where it shines the most is in illustrating the individual thinking and motivations of members of mass movements. This is done primarily in the first two parts of the book. Where it struggles, like many older political theory books, is when it tries to attribute agency or coordination to mass movements, which I think is not too predictive of even older movements such as Christianity or Communism, but is even more disastrously wrong when applied to contemporary politics. However, those criticisms are mostly saved for the second half of this review.

My initial claim that it is an elite theory book might be a bit controversial, not just because it is not part of the same intellectual tradition, but because Hoffer’s stance towards the people he describes is skepticism at best, open contempt at worst. This is precisely the reason why the book is vital for people trying to understand what types of people gain political power. This tone is a useful counterbalance to that of older thinkers such as Pareto, Moska, and Machiavelli. It is an even greater counterbalance to contemporary writers such as Curtis Yarvin, who describes the elite as “beautiful people”. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Hoffer is right and Yarvin is wrong or vice versa. It does mean that considering all avenues is a useful part of analyzing elite psychology. The book mainly consists of assertions with some historical examples to make the point. It is not a book of modern psychology. If I were someone with the depth of knowledge to do so, such as Rob Henderson, I would fill in the gaps with modern psychological research. Instead, I’ll mainly pivot off the book into political theory.

Mythbusting

The myth which Hoffer first executes is the myth of oppressor and oppressed, at least in the context of mass movements. The oppressed are simply not who join mass movements. This seems in line with the Brahmin Left and Merchant Right divide of the present day. 

Discontent by itself does not invariably create a desire for change. Other factors have to be present before discontent turns into disaffection. One of these is a sense of power. Those who are awed by their surroundings do not think of change, no matter how miserable their condition.

…

The abjectly poor, too, stand in awe of the world around them and are not hospitable to change. It is a dangerous life we live when hunger and cold are at our heels. There is thus a conservatism of the destitute as profound as the conservatism of the privileged, and the former is as much a factor in the perpetuation of a social order as the latter.

The second is the myth of self-interest, once again in the context of mass movements. Hoffer draws a distinction between a practical organization and a mass movement. A practical organization is one in which the main incentive is “self-advancement”, which Hoffer describes as an incremental change in oneself. In order to believe in self-advancement, one has to believe in oneself to begin with. A person who does not believe in himself will be utterly unmotivated by this type of organization. A mass movement is different. It promises rebirth. 

People who see their lives as irremediably spoiled cannot find a worth-while purpose in self-advancement. The prospect of an individual career cannot stir them to a mighty eort, nor can it evoke in them faith and a single-minded dedication. They look on self-interest as on something tainted and evil; something unclean and unlucky ... Their innermost craving is for a new life—a rebirth—or, failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of pride, conscience, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identication with a holy cause. 

Consequently, Hoffer does not prescribe that a mass movement try to convince people rationally. Instead, he suggests that it paints a hopeful dream of this rebirth. Part two will also consider the tension raised by modern mass movements attempting to use the power of practical organizations to coerce people into mass movements. I’ll take this moment to show how Hoffer makes the same point, but in a tone of contempt. Both of these sentences comprise an entire chapter:

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves. 

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

The Key Contrast

Misery does not automatically generate discontent, nor is the intensity of discontent directly proportionate to the degree of misery. Discontent is likely to be highest when misery is bearable; when conditions have so improved that an ideal state seems almost within reach. A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed …  It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt. 

The key constant Hoffer raises is between discontent and hope. 

Eric Weinstein coined the term “precariate” for the precarious elite. Those who have elite college degrees but severe debt. He and Vance believe that this is a profile of the average Elizabeth Warren voter, and that the promise of Warren is to take from the top 0.1% and give not to the bottom 90%, but to the top 10%. We hopefully will never see what Warren would do with the Presidency. But given her platform of student debt cancellation and massive expansion of government jobs, this is very plausible. 

Malcom Kyeyune on From the New World and in Compact describes a very similar phenomenon in Sweden and other countries, in which the college-educated upper-middle class exerts increasing influence over left parties, who use the language of socialism to redistribute money upwards, away from the bottom 50% to the top 10% through government jobs, consultants, and contracts.

We begin to see a clearer picture of the mass movement class today. Hoffer’s key contrast is best satisfied by those wielding cultural but not economic power. They are genuinely precarious because their skills are not worth much in the market. Their ideology results in extreme dissatisfaction and paranoia (documented on both the left and right in Michael Shermer’s book Conspiracy). Yet by being regime mouthpieces, they can collectively exert a significant amount of political power. This forms the “envious middle” of my tripartite war framework, between people motivated by instinct, envy, and optimization respectively. As I’ve hopefully clear, although they are the middle layer, they have preferences far removed from the median person.

Another Hoffer one-line chapter:

We dare more when striving for superfluities than for necessities. Often when we renounce superfluities we end up lacking in necessities.

Freedom To Fail

Many movements claim to be “liberatory” while advocating for actively tyrannical measures. The best examples of these are communism and social progressivism. Hoffer says this is due to the low quality of those in the movement.

Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity … No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority … They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society.

In short, those who cannot compete on ability compete on conformity. I am, of course, in agreement with this observation. It’s important not to take this in isolation, at a given point in time, but consider the results of a political system that has been subjected to many iterations of mass movements in this vein. In each step, the movement that is able to be most envious and resentful overturns the previous order. The customs and coalitions surrounding governance shift accordingly. This gives a constructive explanation of the administrative state. In the style of The Last Psychiatrist, the reason for the administrative state is not that it is effective or useful. The reason for its existence is the deferral of power away from elected officials. Because slave morality directs resentment towards decision makers, any movement which accumulates its political power within maximally deferential and paranoid institutions has a political advantage over movements which do not.

Is this the endgame? Is the only viable political strategy to become even more resentful than the ruling class? For several reasons I don’t think this is the case. Technology changes the distribution of who is useful and devalues the paranoid, midwitted, or resentful. Nietzsche is also right that slave morality suppresses many natural human instincts. I’ll expand on these ideas in future book reviews.

I’ll conclude this section with a list of brutal dunks by Hoffer, which may or may not be true, but are very funny:

The general rule seems to be that as one pattern of corporate cohesion weakens conditions become ripe for the rise of a mass movement and the eventual establishmen of a new and more vigorous form of compact unity.

Hoffer meets SBF:

Unlimited opportunities can be as potent a cause of frustration as a paucity or lack of opportunities. When opportunities are apparently unlimited, there is an inevitable deprecation of the present. The attitude is: “All that I am doing or possibly can do is chicken feed compared with what is left undone.” Such is the frustration which broods over gold camps and haunts taut minds in boom times.

Hoffer meets the dissident right:

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.

Hoffer meets liberals:

Boredom accounts for the almost invariable presence of spinsters and middle-aged women at the birth of mass movements … Marriage has for women many equivalents of joining a mass movement. It offers them a new purpose in life, a new future and a new identity (a new name). The boredom of spinsters and of women who can no longer find joy and fulfillment in marriage stems from an awareness of a barren, spoiled life.

Hoffer goes to NatCon:

The sardonic remark that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels has also a less derogatory meaning. Fervent patriotism as well as religious and revolutionary enthusiasm often serves as a refuge from a guilty conscience. 

Hoffer meets social progressives:

Crime is to some extent a substitute for a mass movement. Where public opinion and law enforcement are not too stringent, and poverty not absolute, the underground pressure of malcontents and misfits often leaks out in crime.

This brings part 2 of The True Believer to a close, which makes a good time to break this review in half. Otherwise, I’ll easily overrun Susbtack’s character limit again.