How do you stop a mass movement?

 Eric Hoffer thought mass movements were interchangeable.

In the 1930s, the world had Stalin in one country and Hitler in another because of the laws of human nature, Hoffer said. People become susceptible to mass movements when they are so discontented with their lives that they want revolutionary change.

Hoffer was skeptical of mass movements and asked himself how people could be sold a bill of goods by obvious hucksters. He thought people were prone to mass movements when these conditions prevailed:

• People are discontented but not destitute.

• People get a feeling of power from a doctrine, leader or technique.

• People hear messages that offer them extravagant hope in the future.

• People are ignorant of the difficulties involved. (People with experience are a handicap in a mass movement, which explains a lot about the people leading federal departments and agencies in the current mass movement.)

Most people would say there’s a great deal of difference between Stalinism and Nazism, but Hoffer didn’t think so. If certain social conditions prevail, people line up to buy the snake oil. The snake oil may vary from one country to another, but it’s all snake oil.

The view that one brand is pretty much the same as another has a surprising corollary:

 

The problem of stopping a mass movement is often a matter of substituting one movement for another.

 

I’m beyond weary of the mass movement that’s degrading this country and have been trying to imagine what a substitute would look like.

• Source: Eric Hoffer, The True Believer; Time Incorporated, 1963, p. 19. If you know the book by sections, the quotation is from §16.