"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.
____________
- See Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer. Op. Cit. Pages 60-61
- Ibid. Pages 65-66
- Ibid. Pages 76-77
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