Corrosive Cope: A Review of the True Believer (Part 2)
Conspiracy Theories about Atomization as a Defense Against Human Nature
The True Believer is an excellent individual-level analysis of mass movements. In the first part of my review, I assert that trying to scale up this style of analysis, essentially treating large movements as conscious entities with goals and strategies, leads to many wrong predictions and poor solutions.
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.
This is characteristic of many dissident right political theorists. In my opinion it is the greatest drawback of the DR. Trying to paint the entire left as one organized conspiracy not only makes you sound crazy, but also causes mistakes in the political strategy for defeating your enemies in the first place. I’ll expand on this theme when I review The Populist Delusion, the newest DR elite theory book. Within the current review, I’ll stick to the psychological and social assessment. I often bring up the contradiction present in some DR thinkers between the belief that elites are incompetent loyalty hires and the belief that they run an all-reaching conspiracy. I resolve this contradiction by believing that the first is true and the second is false. This contradiction is also present in Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, to a lesser extent.
Collective Action
The second half of the book deals more with the unified collective than the individual participants. Part 3 considers collective action.
The vigor of a mass movement stems from the propensity of its followers for united action and self-sacrifice. When we ascribe the success of a movement to its faith, doctrine, propaganda, leadership, ruthlessness and so on, we are but referring to instruments of unification and to means used to inculcate a readiness for self-sacrifice. It is perhaps impossible to understand the nature of mass movements unless it is recognized that their chief preoccupation is to foster, perfect and perpetuate a facility for united action and self-sacrifice.
This runs very quickly into a root cause problem. There are plenty of unsuccessful movements which are great at imploring its members to self sacrifice, but do so in ineffective or counterproductive ways. History is littered with them. Perhaps the best example in recent memory is the January 6th protestors, who were certainly self-sacrificing but whose net effort was creating a massive propaganda and strategic victory for their enemies. Either way, this seems like a case of selection bias.
This pattern of selection bias or overgeneralization seems common within this section. One of the most grievous errors follows a trend of dissident right thought trying to blame atomization on elite interests. From part 2 of the book:
It is obvious that a proselytizing mass movement must break down all existing group ties if it is to win a considerable following. The ideal potential convert is the individual who stands alone, who has no collective body he can blend with and lose himself in and so mask the pettiness, meaninglessness and shabbiness of his individual existence. Where a mass movement finds the corporate pattern of family, tribe, country, etcetera, in a state of disruption and decay, it moves in and gathers the harvest. Where it finds the corporate pattern in good repair, it must attack and disrupt.
This is not only non-obvious, it is obviously false. There are plenty of modern examples of the opposite, including the infiltration of social justice through existing churches, organizations, university networks, et cetera. There is a line of argument that says this is only possible due to existing churches being frail, but this seems like a No True Scotsman fallacy. It was also false during Hoffer’s time. Family ties were crucial in Communist recruiting. The same is true for early religions such as Christianity or Islam. It is true that resistance to mass movements often came in the form of collectives:
The capacity to resist coercion stems partly from the individual’s identication with a group. The people who stood up best in the Nazi concentration camps were those who felt themselves members of a compact party (the Communists), of a church (priests and ministers), or of a close-knit national group.
But this isn’t because they are resistant from being pulled into a mass movement. The fervently religious and Communists are mass movements by Hoffer’s own classification. In terms of recruiting, it’s exactly the most atomized people who are least drawn in by the social pressures which characterize a mass movement – who would the social pressures come from?
In the broader context, there is a pattern of erroneously attributing atomization to some kind of grand conspirac. This is almost entirely cope. From all available data, from housing preferences for single-family homes to organizational membership (i.e. Putnam’s Bowling Alone) to religious participation, the more uninhibited people are in their decision-making, the more they reveal their preferences for atomization. And the more freedom they are granted by technology, the harder they reveal their preferences.
Part of this is the projection of what these writers believe is right onto what they think the majority wants. It is simply not the case that the majority dislikes atomization. The dissident right is correct that there are serious negative consequences to atomization, including for those people. There is little evidence that the majority knows or cares. This should be evident to them if they’ve read their elite theory. If you are a dissident right reader who opposes atomization, this should be your main takeaway: the people choose atomization freely, not as a result of any kind of conspiracy but as a matter of their own preference. Your mission involves imposing order on them, not freeing them. The initiative is completely on your end and this task is much more difficult than almost any dissident right writer except Yarvin makes it out to be.
Alternate Social Games
The overgenealization critique of Hoffer applies to the tropes in the second section, some of which I linked at the end of the first part of the review. As I said there, I doubt the tropes are intended to be taken seriously.
The capacities for united action and self-sacrifice seem almost always to go together. When we hear of a group that is particularly contemptuous of death, we are usually justified in concluding that the group is closely knit and thoroughly unified.
“What about the zero covid cult?” is my immediate reaction. Perhaps Hoffer is looking specifically at militiristic movements during his time, which once again generalizes from something specific to his time rather than any sensible definition of “mass movement”. Recall that Hoffer attributes the motive of joining a mass movement to a kind of self-hatred:
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.
I do think Hoffer is picking up something here, which is a strong loyalty to the group, which manifests in the form of paranoia and social anxiety. In my view, this is the primary sociological cause of mass movements. It squares the weak, bitter nature of most members of mass movements (an assessment which I agree with) with their cutthroat social dynamics. Hoffer attributes this to a desire for transformation or rebirth, in which a poor individual quality is substituted with a group quality. I don’t think our models are actually too far apart. What cult-like social pressures do is drop a member into a social minigame with an asymmetric advantage. The game is to conform, and as you recruit new members, you have a leg up over them. You have power over them in the form of dogma and taboos which you hold over them. You go from a loser to a winner, at least in this narrow sense. Exiting this minigame and going back to a sane social system with rules that reward accuracy and usefulness, which the member is even less capable of now that they’ve been conditioned into this minigame, is comparable to a death sentence. However, this only necessitates self-sacrifice if the minigame involves it. In many cases, such as Nazism, Communism, or early Islam, it certainly did. Once again I think Hoffer overgeneralizes this. It’s possible for a mass movement either to have social rules which highly incentivize self-sacrifice or to have ones which make members paranoid of self-sacrifice.
This line by Hoffer aged poorly for similar reasons:
Dying and killing seem easy when they are part of a ritual, ceremonial, dramatic performance or game. There is need for some kind of make-believe in order to face death unflinchingly. To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for. It is only when we see ourselves as actors in a staged (and therefore unreal) performance that death loses its frightfulness and finality and becomes an act of make-believe and a theatrical gesture.
Performance in American politics is way up and if anything acts as a sedative. People who are better at the humanities and who read more Baudrillard could probably hash out a narrative where Hoffer and I agree, but this assertion still seems crazy on its face. The rest of this part is much of the same.
At this point, I would certainly recommend against reading this part of the book in detail. The longer it wears on, the more repetitive it becomes. Reading the first one and a half parts is likely enough. There are many sections where I could have reiterated my earlier criticism with slight variation. The book is clearly supposed to outline broad strokes ideas (it certainly is not careful with its argumentation), but the repetitive writing style surely detracts from this.
Nonetheless, the True Believer is an excellent portrait of the “envious middle”, one part of three of the tripartite war. As I’ll expand on in different reviews and articles, all three parts play an important role. You can also anticipate how I would scale the arguments made by Hoffer in different ways, using institutional mechanisms and iterated systems, and arriving at very different results. For now, I recommend using Hoffer’s categories to identify the “envious middle” in your own life.