Discussing Eric Hoffer

talking with Claude about Hoffer's concept of The True Believer, whose political passions are cult-like

Because Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer seems relevant these days, I have been re-reading it. And I had a lengthy conversation with Claude about it.

If this were a discussion between two people, each of us would come away with greater clarity about our world view. Then we take this clarity with us into the next situation in which the topics come up. That is true for me, but I doubt that it is true for Claude.

If you or someone else were to discuss these topics with Claude, I assume that whatever pattern the conversation follows, that pattern will be unaffected by my conversation. Claude will give you its answers as if our conversation had never taken place. If I am right about that, I find it disturbing. If I am wrong about it, I would appreciate knowing the mechanism by which Claude takes my conversation into account when conversing with someone else.

I will include a lot of excerpts, but note that I leave out the majority of what Claude had to say.

I wrote,

I want to discuss how classic works in political philosophy would be judged by contemporary academic standards. Nowadays, your terms are supposed to be well-defined, and claims are supposed to be backed by studies. As an aside, I'm not sure that I buy studies as definitive. Anyway, I've been re-reading The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer. It's got a lot of claims that seem insightful and plausible, but also a lot of poorly-defined terms and very little evidence. He will justify a claim by quoting someone as saying something along the lines that support the claim. So, let's start with Hoffer. Would his book today stand up to a close reading?

Claude agrees that there are problems with terminology and evidence. But

Hoffer is doing something closer to what philosophers used to do and what good essayists still do: pattern-recognition across a wide reading of history, distilled into claims that the reader can test against their own experience and knowledge. The claims are meant to be evaluated by recognition — does this match what you've seen of how converts behave, how movements recruit, how the disillusioned reattach? That's a real epistemology, even if it's not the dominant academic one.

After a digression on how Plato and Aristotle would hold up methodologically, I returned to Hoffer.

I want to differentiate between a cult and a mass movement. An example of a cult is the group that surrounded Lyndon LaRouche (who in the 1970s called himself Lyn Marcus). An example of a mass movement might be Black Lives Matter. Joining up with LaRouche required making a complete break with all of your other relationships--family, friends outside of the group, and so on. It resonates with Hoffer's description of a person as erasing himself as a separate entity in order to be completely embedded in the group. Maybe there is a core of people who are all-in with BLM who are like that, but even among strong BLM supporters most of them retain their lives and identities apart from BLM.

Claude replied,

The LaRouche example is a good one because it's such a pure case of the dynamic Hoffer describes. The defining feature of a cult in the technical sense (the literature here is sociology of new religious movements — Lifton, Singer, Lalich, etc.) is total institutional capture: the group becomes the entire social, epistemic, and identity world of the member. The break with prior relationships isn't incidental; it's structurally necessary because competing relationships and information sources would dissolve the cohesion the group requires. LaRouche's organization required exactly this — denunciation of family members, 18-hour workdays, geographic dislocation, arranged or controlled relationships, a hermetic information environment where the leader's pronouncements override everything else.

Hoffer's psychology of the true believer fits this case almost perfectly.

…But here's where your observation cuts deep: this isn't how most participants in most mass movements actually function, including movements that look superficially extreme.

…Most participants in most movements are not psychologically disturbed seekers of self-erasure. They're reasonably integrated people responding to a situation, often through pre-existing networks (friends, churches, workplaces, online communities), and their participation is bounded rather than total.

Later on, Claude says,

Cults recruit broadly but retain selectively.

…The people who stay are systematically different from those who leave — more likely to be in a life transition, more likely to have weak or strained family ties, more likely to be seeking meaning

…Where it complicates Hoffer: it suggests the true believer type is relatively rare and that most people, even under intense institutional pressure, won't become one. The frustrated, self-erasing, cause-absorbing personality is a real type but probably a small minority of any given population. Most people in your hypothetical random sample would walk out of the LaRouche organization within a day, not because they're virtuous but because the demands wouldn't resonate with anything they wanted.

I wrote,

Hoffer says that having an enemy can help to motivate a mass movement. I agree that political movements get energy from having an individual or a group to blame and to oppose. But cults do not have that sort of narrowly-focused animosity. They see the whole world outside the cult as misguided, but they don't focus so much on a specific person or group.

Claude agreed.

Cults typically have what we might call diffuse exteriority rather than focused enmity. ..

What cults have instead of focused enmity is what we might call comprehensive epistemic separation. The members know things the world doesn't know.

…Political mass movements need to mobilize action in the world — they need people to vote, march, fight, donate, attack. Hatred is an extraordinarily effective mobilizer of action against specific targets.

…Cults don't have the same action requirement, or rather, their action requirement is mostly internal. The work of the cult is to maintain the cohesion of the group, to deepen members' commitment, to recruit new members, to preserve doctrine. These tasks don't require hatred; they require devotion, separation, and intensity of attention to the in-group's distinctive practices and beliefs. Hatred would actually be somewhat counterproductive because it would direct energy outward when the cult needs energy directed inward and upward (toward the leader, the doctrine, the practice).

Then I brought up the case of the Nazis as being both a cult and a mass movement. Claude replied,

…I think the Nazi case is unusually instructive precisely because it doesn't fit cleanly into either category — it's one of the few historical phenomena that genuinely combined cult-like and mass-movement structures at scale, and once you separate the elements, you can see how each was doing different work.

…A pure cult of Hitler-worshippers without the mass movement couldn't have taken power or fought a world war. A pure mass political movement without the cult core couldn't have produced the Holocaust — you need people who have undergone something like cultic absorption to staff the machinery of industrialized killing

…The Jew-hatred operated at both levels but in different forms. At the mass-movement level, it was the focused enemy that Hoffer's analysis describes

…At the cult level, though, Jew-hatred operated differently — as a kind of cosmological dualism, a theory of metaphysical evil, a doctrine of racial-spiritual struggle that gave the inner doctrine its content.

I then asked Claude to apply our analysis of cults vs. mass movements to the Trump phenomenon. Claude replied,

My honest read of the evidence is that something like a serious cult-like epistemic capture characterizes a relatively small core, maybe the most engaged 10-20% of strong supporters

…Many supporters seem to relate to Trump partly as a champion, partly as entertainment, partly as a vehicle for goals they care about — a more complex emotional relationship than the pure devotion characteristic of cult leaders.

…I'd say the most accurate description, using the categories you've developed, is: a mass political movement with a relatively conventional periphery that participates in bounded ways for mixed reasons, organized around grievance and enemy-identification in the way mass movements typically are, with a smaller core where something more intense is happening that has features (epistemic capture, intense identification with the leader, willingness to maintain implausible beliefs as loyalty signals) that resemble cult-adjacent psychology — and with a media ecosystem that produces some of those core effects at larger scale than classical institutional analysis would predict, without the institutional capture mechanisms that classical cults required.

I wrote,

Next, I would like to turn to the opposite side--the hard left that exists on college campuses and includes some Democratic Party politicians. Hoffer describes the true believer as seeing the present state of the world as terrible, especially in contrast with an imagined future state. It strikes me that the hard left has such an attitude. They can see nothing good about America today or in the past. Everything is evil: our economic system, patriarchy, racism. Hoffer speculates that individuals are projecting their negative feelings about themselves onto the society around them.

Claude replied,

There's a recognizable strand of contemporary left thought — concentrated in elite universities, parts of cultural-production institutions, certain activist networks, and some Democratic politicians especially in safe seats — that does exhibit the present-as-uniformly-terrible / imagined-future-as-redemptive structure he describes. The defining feature is not just criticism of American society (which any healthy political tradition engages in) but a kind of totalizing critique in which the founding, the economic system, the family structure, gender relations, racial arrangements, and the broader culture are seen as comprehensively compromised by interlocking systems of domination, with little acknowledgment of countervailing goods or genuine progress.

…Hoffer's structural observation fits this well. The true believer needs the present to be intolerable in order to justify the magnitude of the transformation required and the costs of the commitment.

…The hard-left student at an elite university is partly expressing personality features and partly responding to a social environment that rewards certain kinds of expression and sanctions others. Pure projection underweights the second factor.

…The most florid expressions of contemporary activist culture — the public confessions, the demands for purity, the cycle of denunciation and re-denunciation, the intense investment in the moral status conferred by holding the right views — do look like the kind of phenomena that classical analyses of revolutionary psychology were trying to understand. Eric Hoffer would recognize a lot of it, and so would Dostoevsky.

…The periphery — the much larger group of young people who hold leftish views, vote Democratic, repeat various pieces of activist vocabulary, attend an occasional protest, and post things on social media — is mostly not exhibiting Hoffer's true-believer psychology. They're participating in a political-cultural environment that rewards certain expressions, but their lives are not organized around the totalizing critique in the way the core's lives are.

I wrote,

I've written before of a two-dimensional political matrix: left vs. right, and institutionalist vs. brokenist. Brokenist (Alana Newhouse coined the term) means what we have been talking about as a total pessimism about the present. Brokenist rhetoric seems to me to be very prominent in both parties. If you say that problems are solvable, and especially if you say that they can dealt with through compromise and bipartisanship, you are going to take a lot of flak.

Claude replied,

Brokenism in your sense is essentially the political-cultural register that the true-believer psychology requires. If you think the present is mostly tolerable and that problems are solvable through normal institutional means, you don't need a mass movement and you don't need to organize your identity around political opposition. The true believer needs brokenism as a worldview because the alternative — that things are mostly okay and getting incrementally better — would dissolve the urgency that the movement depends on. So you'd expect brokenist rhetoric to be especially attractive to the true-believer core of any movement, and you'd expect institutionalist rhetoric to be especially threatening to it, because institutionalism takes away the cosmic stakes that the true believer needs.

…When institutionalism is identified with the people who benefited from the system and brokenism is identified with the people who didn't, the rhetorical position of institutionalism becomes harder to occupy without seeming to defend a specific class interest. This is a problem the older institutionalist consensus didn't have to manage as acutely because the benefits of the postwar institutional order were more broadly distributed.