The nation is struggling because four out of 10 citizens are submerged in a mass movement.
We Americans used to wonder how a great civilization could follow a carnival barker like Hitler to ruin. I’m interested less in the demagogue of the day than in the people who believe and follow him.
Like others who don’t think that the current mass movement is good for the country, I’ve been perplexed that I can’t talk to the believers. It’s like talking to a bot powered by artificial intelligence. If you ask a question, you’ll get an answer of a sort but you’ll see no evidence of thinking.
In his study on the nature of mass movements, Eric Hoffer says:
… the chief preoccupation of an active mass movement is to instill in its followers a facility for united action and self-sacrifice, and that it achieves this facility by stripping each human entity of its distinctness and autonomy and turning it into an anonymous particle with no will and no judgment of its own. The result is not only a compact and fearless following but also a homogenous plastic mass that can be needed at will.
I believe in conversation. But when I ask members of the movement a question, I do not get a thoughtful response. I get a slogan from one of the propaganda sites. It’s as if I were not talking with a person.
• Source: Eric Hoffer, The True Believer; Time Incorporated, 1963, p. 87. If you know the book by sections, the quotation is from §60.
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