Tucson, Arizona Tuesday, 23 October 2001
I was struck by the notion of this 50 year old book, which was unfamiliar to me.
Field guide to fanatics
By Paul Greenberg
It happens every time ideologues turn violent. A great mystification descends. Who could have done this? What could they have hoped to accomplish? What were their reasons?
It is as if the crazed need reasons for what they do. They need only a wild belief and a determination to destroy any competing belief, any alternate reality, any other way of life.
Whether that way of life is represented by gleaming modern skyscrapers in the West or ancient Buddhas from the East, both must be reduced to rubble.
For they represent the Other, the Great Satan, the Infidel, and must be obliterated by the faithful.
There's a name for this type: the True Believer. And it comes from Eric Hoffer's field guide to the fanatic, "The True Believer: Thoughts On the Nature of Mass Movements."
Published in 1951, and inspired by the Nazi and communist movements that had swept through the 20th century like the plague, Hoffer's little book is now being reissued on its 50th anniversary - just in time to explain the latest mass madness.
The book's author was a longshoreman and philosopher - in that order. He'd been around and been kicked around for so long, worked at so many jobs and seen so many things in the America of the '30s and '40s, that he'd developed a healthy, saving respect for what worked and an understanding of what wouldn't.
His country was his university, his times his teacher. What he brought to them was an unbiased mind and the habit of analysis.
Over the years, Hoffer began to jot down his intermittent thoughts about the society around him. He was no airy thinker but a worker unafraid of a little heavy lifting. He never pretended to be anything else.
For example:
* "All mass movements strive to impose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world."
* "Dying and killing are easy when they are part of a ritual, ceremonial, dramatic performance or game. There is the need for make-believe in order to face death."
* "Those who fail in everyday affairs show a tendency to reach out for the impossible. There is less risk in being discredited when trying the impossible."
It is always an assurance and light to have this little book around, but in good times it grows dated, and not very pertinent. In unsteady times like these, when violence breaks loose and a somnolent world is shocked awake, Eric Hoffer is so relevant he's mighty near indispensable.
What he may have valued most, besides the pleasure and freedom of thought itself, was the unspoken sense and joy of ordinary life, its stability and advance. In short, peace.
But what fascinated him, and what he kept writing about in concise bursts of wisdom, were the various ways men fooled themselves.
Sometimes, he realized, men are tricked by their own desperation and longing, but more often by a deep sense of dissatisfaction with their place in the world. They get no respect. Especially from themselves.
So they invent elaborate fantasies and ideologies, which they call social and economic or even religious theories, to explain why the world is so mistaken, so unappreciative of their unique talent and insight.
They're the victim of some all-embracing, hidden conspiracy - godless capitalism/communism, the West, the Jews, pick your demon.
With dismaying regularity, there comes across an editor's desk some scrawled manifesto, or these days an e-mailed one, claiming to unveil the secrets of the universe.
But a certain organizational ability is necessary to turn a "Mein Kampf" or a "Communist Manifesto" into a movement. To attain critical mass, it's necessary to recruit True Believers.
The True Believer has a way of rising up like foam on beer whenever society is stirred up, and Hoffer dissected the type's various incarnations: The frustrated artist who becomes a fuehrer, the bright teacher who makes a Bolshevik revolution and the deluded who follow them.
Now Hoffer is relevant again, unfortunately. He offers a welcome corrective to those eager to explain terrorism to the rest of us the way the learned might explain the reasoning of the Typhus bacillus and how to meet its demands.
In his latest press release, proclamation, fatwa, grand proclamation, general outpouring or whatever it was, a spokesman for Osama bin Laden warned that his followers love death the way the rest of us love life.
In that case, we may have to oblige them - if that is their True Belief.
* Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette . |
