May 31, 2020: Making a Cult, Grandiosity of Glory, Intellectual Straight-Jackets

"A doctrine, any doctrine, is an intellectual straight-jacket"
       ----from The Quotations of Chairman Joe

A successful mass movement, Eric Hoffer reminds us, requires concerted action and self-sacrifice. All the other characteristics, organization, propaganda etc., are only means to elicit self-sacrifice and the marshal that sacrifice toward the desired ends. Self-sacrifice is, then, at the core of any mass movement.

“To ripen a person for self-sacrifice he must be stripped of his individual identity and distinctness. He must cease to be George, Hans, Ivan or Tadao—a human atom with an existence bounded by birth and death. The most drastic way to achieve this end is by the complete assimilation of the individual into a collective body. The fully assimilated individual does not see himself and others as human beings. When asked who he is, his automatic response is that he is a German, a Russian, a Japanese, a Christian, a Moslem, a member of a certain tribe or family. He has no purpose, worth and destiny apart from his collective body; and as long as that body lives he cannot really die...

“The effacement of individual separateness must be thorough. In every act, however trivial, the individual must by some ritual associate himself with the congregation, the tribe, the party, etcetera. His joys and sorrows, his pride and confidence must spring from the fortunes and capacities of the group rather than from his individual prospects and abilities. Above all, he must never feel alone. Though stranded on a desert island, he must still feel that he is under the eyes of the group. To be case out from the group should be equivalent to being cut off from life.” (1)

The movement, the cause, is everything. It is for these reasons that ritual was introduced. It is for these reasons that some denominations require daily observances, that some denominations require church attendance several times a week. Why religions often wear certain clothing, adopt certain culinary practices, or effect certain behaviors. It brands the devout with an identity, often one that cannot easily be momentarily put aside, much the same as the military crew cut brands the soldier so that when he is home on leave he, even if he discards the uniform, takes his new identity with him.

The military is a good example. It takes a lot to get a man to sacrifice everything, his home, his primary relationships, perhaps his very life. It takes a lot more to get a man to kill another man. Those who have studied battle universally report that many of the shots fired are intended to miss. Often a man will go through the motions though his rifle be empty. Killing is much easier at a distance. Tellingly, most of those who died during the First World War were killed not by machine gun fire but by artillery shells fired from long range. To get a man to kill requires the total submission of the self to the group. Any soldier will tell you that in the end, it wasn't the cause that mattered in the fight, it was the group who fought alongside. The cause could have been, and universally is, anything. The goals of every war change repeatedly: the Civil War from preserving the union to the abolition of slavery, the First World War from the resistance to aggression to making the world safe for Democracy; the War of Jenkins' Ear became in short order the War of Spanish Succession. What doesn't change is loyalty to the group. This is the cement that holds any movement together.

But what actuates this loyalty? Certainly not the cause, for the cause can be anything. What activates loyalty is separateness,in a word, Identity. An identity that must be maintained by constantly contrasting the group with the other. Only by maintaining the boundaries with between us and them can the group identity have any hope of longevity. And how does one maintain those boundaries? Through fear, loathing and, foremost, hatred. As Hitler once explained: if the Jews hadn't existed it would have been necessary to invent them. The use of scapegoats and the hatreds they engender, are always the handmaidens of propaganda. Hatred is the palliative of choice.

Perhaps a better example is that of the Christian Church whose Revelations, those lurid apocalyptic terrors binding the faithful has, over millennia identified the anti-Christ as, variously, ancient Rome, the Russians, and the Germans even, with Luther, the mother church, the Vatican itself. More recently the faithful, especially the evangelicals, have looked closer to home: Barack Obama, the Deep State, and that most fearful of all, grandmother Hillary Clinton. The object binding them together, that is the object of fear and loathing; of hatred and hostility, changes with the seasons, what doesn't change is their identity and the hatreds that manifest it. For the True Believer does not see himself or others as human beings; he does not see at all.

Then there is, as Hoffer points, out, the question of Glory:

“Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no string for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience---the knowledge that our mighty deeds will come to the ears of our contemporaries or 'of those who are to be. We are ready to sacrifice our true, transitory self for the imaginary eternal self we are building up, by our heroic deeds, in the opinion and imagination of others.

In the practice of mass movements, make-believe plays perhaps a more enduring role than any other factor. When faith and the power to persuade or coerce are gone, make-believe lingers on. There is no doubt that in staging its processions, parades, rituals and ceremonials, a mass movement touches a responsive chord in every heart. Even the most sober-minded are carried away by the sight of an impressive mass spectacle.”(2)

By jingo, who doesn't love a parade? Especially a military parade, so the tanks now roll through the streets of Washington

All mass movements deprecate the present as a mere prelude to a Glorious Future. It's never a more modest safe and secure future, but always invokes the grandiosity of Glory. The maggot hats “Make America Great Again” is always cast in superlatives, never so modest as “make America good again”, much less “Make America Decent”. And, if the past is put into service at all it is always a truncated, idealized version meant to further the cause to more dubious ends.

Finally, there is the question of Doctrine. All doctrines are intellectual straight-jackets.

“The effectiveness of doctrine does not come from it meaning but from its certitude. Now doctrine however profound and sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth. It must be the one word from which all things are and all things speak. Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth.

“It is obvious, therefore, that in order to be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but has to be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength. Once we understand a thing, it is as if it has originated in us. And, clearly, those who are asked to renounce the self and sacrifice it cannot see eternal certitude in anything that originates in that self...

If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable. One has to get to heaven or the distant future to determine the truth of an effective doctrine. When some part of the doctrine is relatively simple, there is a tendency among the faithful to complicate and obscure it. Simple words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer. He seems to use words as if he were ignorant of their true meaning. Hence, too, his taste for quibbling, hair-splitting and scholastic tortuousness. (3)

Yeah, even unto the speaking in tongues.

To be in possession of absolute truth is to assassinate all curiosity, remove from one's vision all of the wonder of the universe. “It is startling," observed Hoffer, “to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible”. Indeed it is, for one must, like a child, suspend disbelief in order to make belief possible. Or, in the words of our Caesar Disgustus, “don't believe what you read and hear” for your lying eyes deceive you. Faith tRUMPs everything. You don't ask questions when god's on your side. 

Mass movements, relying as they do upon alienation and resentments are, Hoffer instructs us, not only occasionally necessary but very malleable. Not all alienation is harmful, nor are all discontents. It is through alienation, that is the stepping back, that real intellectual inquiry begins, it is through alienation and it's discontents that the search to improve things originates. So mass movements are necessary in order to cleanse society of corruption, improve efficiencies, and create, in the immortal words of our founders, “a more perfect union”. It is in the malleability of the beast that the problem lies, for as stated throughout these posts the popular passions, like anything else, can be marshaled for good or ill. The question is who is to lead it and to what ends. Therein lies the tragedy of our times. For it fell upon a common and corrupt carnival barker from Queens who knows only how to vandalize.

____________

1. See Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer. Op. Cit. Pages 60-61
2. Ibid. Pages 65-66
3. Ibid. Pages 76-77

May 26, 2020: The Making a Cult, The Misfits, To Be Somebody

As Hoffer observes, The inert mass of a nation, for instance, is in its middle section. The decent, average people who do the nation's work in cities and on the land are worked upon and shaped by minorities at both ends—the best and the worst.

“The superior individual, whether in politics, literature, science, commerce or industry, plays a large role in shaping a nation, but so do individuals at the other extreme—the failures, misfits, outcasts, criminals, and all those who have lost their footing, or never had one, in the ranks of respectable humanity” (1) the latter being an exhaustive description of our would-be Caesar.

“The reason that the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that they are wholly without reverence toward the present. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both; hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy. They also crave to dissolve their spoiled, meaningless selves in some soul-stirring spectacular communal undertaking—hence the proclivity for united action.” (2)

This describes tRUMP and all that he represents to the proverbial Tee. The war on the Obama administration and all that went before—the war upon the world he inherited. The need to waste and wreck, the vandalism of institutions. And the chaos that follows.

The early recruits are among the most disaffected. Hoffer lists several: the poor, misfits, outcasts, minorities, adolescent youth, the ambitious, those in grip of vice or obsession, the impotent, the inordinately selfish, the bored, the sinners. (3) There are reasons that tRUMP makes war on education claiming to love the uneducated and counts the nations motorcycle gangs among his greatest supporters.

The Poor:

“Not all who are poor are frustrated. Some of the poor stagnating in the slums of the cities are smug in their decay. They shudder at the thought of life outside their familiar cesspool. Even the respectable poor, when their poverty is of long standing, remain inert. They are awed by the immutability of the order of thing. It takes a cataclysm—an invasion, a plague or some other communal disaster—to open their eyes to the transitoriness of the 'eternal order.'

“It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the 'new poor,' who throb with the ferment of frustration. The memory of better things is as fire to their veins. They are the disinherited and dispossessed who respond to every rising mass movement. It was the new poor in seventeenth century England who ensured the success of the Puritan Revolution. During the movement of enclosure, thousands of landlords drove of their tenants and turned their fields into pastures. 'Strong and active peasant, enamored of the soil that nurtured them, were transformed into wageworkers or sturdy beggars;...city streets were filled with paupers;. It was this mass of the dispossessed who furnished the recruits for Cromwell's army.

“In Germany and Italy the new poor coming from a ruined middle class formed the chief support of the Nazi and Fascist revolutions.”(4)

Abject poverty makes not a revolutionary. It isn't simply that a pall of permanence descends upon the victim's head, it isn't simply that all self worth and self confidence are beaten, by intent and by circumstance, out of the soul of the downtrodden. It's also because of, in modern parlance, the dysfunctional behaviors into which one is bred, born and raised. All this, after a measure, assumes the cloak of normal. Divorce, domestic violence, terror with and intimidation by the unfamiliar, all lead to a lack of striving—interpreted by the larger society as laziness and sloth. They are comfortable in their cesspools, as Hoffer puts it, not out of devotion or attachment but out of fear and intimidation. This is why poverty is so intractable and why the poor are hard to politically motivate.

“The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility. The goals are concrete and immediate. Every meal is a fulfillment; to go to sleep on a full stomach is a triumph; and every windfall a miracle. What need could they have for 'an inspiring super individual goal which would give meaning and dignity to their lives?' they are immune to the appeal of a mass movement.”(4)

No, it is those who suffering downward mobility, those who have fallen are fear they are about to fall who are the fodder of mass movements.

The Misfits

Here Hoffer lists the temporary misfits; young adults seeking niche in life, people going through serious life changes, divorce, career change, unemployment, which he describes as...”restless, dissatisfied and haunted by the fear that their best years will be wasted before they reach their goal. They are receptive to the preaching of a proselytizing movement and yet do nt always make staunch converts. For they are not irrevocably estranged from the self; they do not see it as irremediably spoiled. It is easy for them to conceive an autonomous existence that is purposeful and hopeful. The slightest evidence of progress and success reconciles them with the world and their selves...

“The permanent misfits are those who because of a lack of talent or some irreparable defect in body or mind cannot do the one thing for which their whole being craves. No achievement, however spectacular, in other fields can give them a sense of fulfillment. Whatever they undertake becomes a passionate pursuit; but they never arrive, never pause. They demonstrate the fact that we can never have enough of that which we really do not want, and that we run the fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.” (6)

These words could have been lifted verbatim and applied by Donald tRUMP's niece Mary who has recently published a book about her uncle entitled, appropriately enough, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man”. It was Mary who leaked the trove of financial documents to The New York Times that revealed to the world that in the 1980's tRUMP the businessman lost more than a billion dollars.

Totally lacking in talent, with every defect of body and mind, Mary tells about how his sister did Donald's homework and that he hired a bright friend to take his college entrance exams. It remains unclear who took the tests and who did the homework while in college, but it is clear that he he learned nothing. Growing up in his father's shadow, Donald sees himself as irredeemably spoiled—that is, worthless. How else does one respond to being exiled from home and shunted off to a military school? That no matter what he achieves will never be, in his mind's eye—seen in his father's reflection--enough. So he adheres himself to a movement, rising by the basest means to lead it. Speaking always in superlatives, his outlandish pomposity and grandiosity belies a shattered sense of self-worth. He is always in motion, always deflecting He is always running, but never arrives. He's running to stand still.

This is the picture of our disgusting Caesar his niece, a clinical psychologist, confirms to the nation. The inordinately selfish seeing perhaps unlimited opportunities in the presidency and bored with the litany of failures that daily visited tRUMP tower, from forays into the airline industry, to casinos, wine production, steaks and even a 'university', Disgustus, always drawn to shiny object settled upon nothing less that the presidency itself. Commandeering an emerging mass movement was, given his age, Donald J. tRUMP's last chance to become somebody. And the adoring multitude sees in him their own yearnings and their own reflection. Man makes god in his own image, likewise the multitude. Our Caesar Disgustus is nothing more and nothing less than a mass conceit.

An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Flush this turd, November 3^rd.

______

1. Ibid. Page 29
2. Ibid. Page 30
3. Ibid. Page 30
4. Ibid. Page 31
5. Ibid. Page 32
6. Ibid. Page 50

May 7, 2020: Making a Cult, Denial of Self, Identity Politics.

The next few posts will be, in light of the cancer of tRUMPism now racing through the body politic, an effort to divine the nature of cultism. For this purpose, I will revisit the writings of Eric Hoffer, the itinerant philosopher who published his seminal work The True Believer, nearly 70 years ago.

The True Believer, Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, was written in the aftermath of the Second World War in an effort to divine the nature of political movements and, more precisely, what it is about the converted that leads them to follow blindly as well as why the so willingly do so. The True Believer is an important work which, along with Jose Ortega de Gassett's Revolt of the Masses, should be required reading in every public school. These works are certainly more profound and penetrating than Orwell's Animal Farm, and head-and-shoulders above anything written by Ayn Rand or Henry David Thoreau. But, alas, Hoffer doesn't take prisoners, he doesn't pander to the masses, instead he reveals what they really are and why they are so easily misled; features that do not recommend the work to boards of education.

Query: What makes a mass movement? Answer: The True Believer. What makes a True Believer? That is the subject now under discussion.

Prospect of Change: Many who join an emerging revolutionary movement are drawn by prospect of change.

“Not so obvious is the fact that religious and nationalist movements too can be vehicles for change. Some kind of widespread enthusiasm is apparently needed for the realization of vast and rapid change.”(2) The overweening desire for change can originate in a deep emotional need to climb the social or economic ladder, or it can—as several historians of American History have pointed out—be motivated by displaced elites; men of property and standing who have been shouldered aside by new wealth and new captains of industry and power. The progressive movement of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries in the United States is an example of the latter phenomenon.

Embracing a radical prospect of change implies deep unhappiness with the present state of affairs, and represents an inclination to make war upon the present. But this war is conducted by a select few of the population. The very wealthy and well-to-do, of course, are content with the status quo. But it is not the downtrodden who are the fodder of the revolutionist, for they know that the situation—any situation—is hopeless and, if change comes, it is likely not to be beneficial. No, real mass movements are middle class affairs. It was the lawyers and burgers (small businessmen) and professionals who led the French Revolution. The Nazis, at the beginning, were financed by middle class housewives. It is those who have lost their status, and those that fear its loss, who compose the building materials of mass movements.

Renunciation of Self and Identity Politics:

“There is a fundamental difference between the appeal of a mass movement and the appeal of a practical organization. The practical organization offers opportunities for self-advancement, and its appeal is mainly to self-interest. On the other hand, a mass movement, particularly in its active revivalist phase, appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy a desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.

“People who see their lives as irremediably spoiled cannot find a worthwhile purpose in self-advancement. The prospect of an individual career cannot stir them to a single mighty effort, nor can it evoke in them faith and a single-minded dedication. They look upon self-interest as on something tainted and evil; something unclean and unlucky. Anything undertaken under the auspices of the self seems to them foredoomed. Nothing that has its roots and reasons in the self can be good and noble. Their innermost craving is for a new life—a rebirth—or,failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identification with the holy cause. An active mass movement offers them opportunities for both. If they join the movement as full converts they are reborn to a new life in its close-knit collective body, or if attracted as sympathizers they find elements of pride, confidence and purpose identifying themselves with the efforts, achievements and prospects of the movement.”(3)

Those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self or, perhaps, those who have been made to feel that one must reject that self. Luther, for instance, taught that we are, in the eyes of god, nothing but dirty rags. This is a lesson impressed upon even—and especially—the youngest minds in the flock. You are nothing, worthless, and irredeemable. Except, that for some god-forsaken reason, the lord wants to redeem you. Alas, the connection is made that one can only be made worthy by joining the elect, by adopting the tenets of the doctrine, by giving (sacrificing) your soul—like Jacob his son Isaac—upon the altar of the lord. Only in this way can one become good and noble; can one achieve any purpose in life.

The “unwanted self” may not simply be a result of personal failure in life, as Hoffer would have it. It is also, as any product of parochial upbringing will tell you, the immediate and enduring consequence of indoctrination—be it religious, philosophical, or political; an indoctrination that always terrorizes, especially the young. From images of filthy rags and worthlessness to Cotton Mather's famous depiction of god almighty dangling the sinner over the fire pits of hell, the impressionable young are beaten figuratively—when not literally—to the altar. How better to ensure future offerings than to assassinate the emerging self, and bend the remnants to one's own purposes?

There are parallels between Sunday School, Vacation Bible School, and the Hitler Youth. We must fashion their minds before they are old enough to think; before they have a chance to develop a healthy skepticism; when they still believe in magic. Santa Claus and sky gods are replaced in due course with Televangelists and Supermen. From the churches, to political movements, to the armed forces The breaking down of self and reforming it into the image of a larger “purpose” permeates every society. But make no mistake, the price of admission is high, for the devil wants nothing less than your identity—your soul. This is the nature of identity politics. And this is why our elections, have of late, become contests for the very heart and soul of the nation.

Look about you. The purpose of the national political convention is to bring the nation together, to bind up its wounds, as Lincoln would say. Previously, the parties would intentionally nominate candidates from different sections of the country—given our history of great sectional strife. Not any more. Today it is identity politics that rules supreme. The process must appease not geographical sections but the various identities that the masses carry into the political arena, be it race, gender, abortion or anti-abortion, guns. Where we stand on the issues is not a product of hard reasoning, self-interest, nor even enlightened self-interest, but is our very identity.

Malleable Identity

If you can't believe in yourself, you must believe in something. And that something can be just about anything, for there is a deep-rooted need to believe.

“It is rare for a mass movement to be wholly of one character...The religious movements of the Reformation had a revolutionary aspect which expressed itself in peasant uprisings, and were also nationalist movements. Said Luther: ' in the eyes of the Italians we Germans are merely low Teutonic swine. They exploit us like charlatans and suck the country to the marrow. Wake up Germany!

The religious character of the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions is generally recognized. The hammer and sickle and swastika are in a class with the cross. The ceremonial of their parades is as the ceremonial of a religious procession. They have articles of faith, saints, martyrs and holy sepulchers. The Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions are also full-blown nationalist movements....” (4) just as the American evangelical religious movement has morphed into the 'moral majority', a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican Party.

It is worth adding that Stalin was a refugee from an Orthodox Catholic Seminary, and the swastika was an ancient Christian symbol prominent in the Catholic church attended by a young Adolph Hitler. Indeed, in my youth, there was—and maybe still is—a crypto-fascist periodical published under the banner “The Cross and the Flag”.

“Since all mass movements draw their adherents from the same types of humanity and appeal to the same types of mind, if follows: (a) all mass movements are competitive, and the gain of one in adherents is the loss of all the others; (b) all mass movements are interchangeable. One mass movement readily transforms itself into another. A religious movement may develop into a social revolution or a nationalist movement; a social revolution, into militant nationalism or a religious movement; a nationalist movement into a social revolution or a religious movement.”(5)

And so, to fill the vacuousness left by the ridding of one's self, the True Believer will grasp at any straw, grab hold of any life-boat. This explains the compelling migration of the evangelical Christian to the religious wrong; from the innocuous meeting house to any political arena; from the sacrifice of self to the sacrifice of all. For you don't ask questions, and you don't count the dead, when god's on your side.

An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh.

Flush this turd, November 3^rd.

_________________

1. Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Copyright 1951. Perennial Library, Harper & Row. New York.
2. Ibid. Page 13
3. Ibid. Page 21
4. Ibid. Page 26