What We Can Learn from Eric Hoffer
by Larry L. Eastland

It has been more than 50 years since the raw, unbridled genius of Eric Hoffer produced The True Believer. Unspoiled and unaffected by Harvard and its intellectual contemporaries, the longshoreman saw with precise clarity the world of mass movements and discontent in which the modern era of industrialization's frustrations was born and flourished.

Now, practically forgotten in a television driven era, where mediocre minds and pretty faces bombard our living rooms with patently superficial observations on a nightly basis -- with the title and presumption of expert written in bold at the bottom of the screen -- Eric Hoffer's brilliant insight into the world of terrorism then ought to steel us today to the reality of the world we are attempting to tame for American-style democracy. And, as part of that reality, to the difficulty of the mission we have chosen to place before us.

The main points of Hoffer's view of the worldwide forces of fundamental religious and secular fanaticism are thus:

• Where self-advancement cannot, or is not allowed to, serve as a driving force, other sources of enthusiasm have to be found if momentous changes, such as the awakening and renovation of a stagnant society or radical reforms in the character and pattern of life of a community, are to be realized and perpetuated. Religious, revolutionary and nationalist movements are such generating plants of general enthusiasm.
• Those who would transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding and captaining discontent or by demonstrating the reasonableness and desirability of the intended changes or by coercing people into a new way of life. They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope. It matters not whether it be hope of a heavenly kingdom, of heaven on earth, of plunder and untold riches, of fabulous achievement, or world domination.
• People who see their lives as irremediably spoiled cannot find a worth-while purpose in self-advancement . . . 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 identification with a holy cause. An active mass movement offers them opportunities for both.
• All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something that might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives. Hence the embracing of a substitute will necessarily be passionate and extreme. We can have qualified confidence in ourselves, but the faith we have in our nation, religion, race or holy cause has to be extravagant and uncompromising.
• Since all mass movements draw their adherents from the same type of humanity and appeal to the same types of mind . . . 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 . . . . It is rare for a mass movement to be wholly of one character.
• Emigration offers some of the things the frustrated hope to find when they join a mass movement, namely, change and a chance for a new beginning . . .Migration, in the mass, strengthens the spirit and unity of a movement.
• The superior individual . . . 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 society. The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle . . . . 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.
• Not all who are poor are frustrated . . . 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 in their veins. They are the disinherited and dispossessed who respond to every rising mass movement.
• Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without a belief in a devil. [Using the example of the old Soviet Union, Hoffer continue] It is doubtful whether any gesture of goodwill or concession from our side will reduce the volume and venom of vilification against us emanating from the Kremlin . . . . Finally, it seems, the ideal devil is a foreigner . . . Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.
• The practice of terror serves the true believer not only to cow and crush his opponents but also to invigorate and intensify his own faith.

I truly could go on for the entire philosophy of Hoffer, but the obvious applicability to both the non-bordered movement of a Bin Laden, and the loss by Hussein's favored, show the remarkable vision of Hoffer beyond his time and circumstance. Whether it is Bin Laden's fanatic religious vision or the Iraqi Baathist's fanatical secularism, the recruits, their methods, and their goals are the same: (1) overthrow of the existing world order, (2) their conviction that America (in particular) and the Western world (in general) do not have the stomach for the fight, and (3) their absolute faith that they will prevail and that God will vindicate them. It is a dirty war where the combatants on one side seem ready to run when 1,000 of their soldiers die even though they are "winning," and the other side is willing to indiscriminately kill all the recruits of their own, and tens of thousands of the innocent, even though they are "losing."

At the heart of Hoffer's inquiry would be the question of whether or not -- because of the lifetime of despair (living "lives of quiet desperation") in most nations, tribes and families -- the American belief that within the breasts of all people across the globe flickers the nascent flame of desire for liberty waiting to be kindled; or, whether the very freedom they proclaim to desire is in reality too frightening in its nearness, because it robs them of their anonymity, and exposes them to the vulnerability of individual achievement and failure. It leaves them no one to blame but themselves, a thought too frightening for them to contemplate.

This is particularly true of those who equally fear the allure that American culture has on their rising generation of Levi-wearing, video watching, rock and roll listening, and Internet surfing youth; thus, stripping them of the power they enjoy over their own next generation. Far from embracing those elements of this new invasion of cultural Crusaders that add color to their black and white existence, they find fulfillment in complete rejection and hoped for destruction. Their ideal world does not revolve around life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To them this outcome is more frightening than Saddam, because it robs them of the hope of losing themselves as individuals whom they despise, in order to find themselves inside a structure that will provide meaning within the liberating confines of a group that pays collectively for the sins of the individual.

Thus, the dispossessed secular Baathist finds common cause with the migrant religious followers of Osama Bin Laden or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, thereby blending the only two kinds of terrorists: land terrorists and ideological terrorists. The land terrorist usually can be bought off; the ideological terrorist -- never. He must be eliminated. Unfortunately, when the two kinds of terrorists come together, it is the ideological terrorist who sets the rules of loyalty, group behavior, determination, sacrifice and unity.

It also is important to make a correct estimate of the terrorist leader, and the qualities that it takes. "What are the talents requisite . . . ? Exceptional intelligence, noble character and originality seem neither indispensable nor perhaps desirable. The main requirements seem to be: audacity and a joy in defiance; an iron will; a fanatical conviction that he is in possession of the one and only truth; faith in his destiny and luck; a capacity for passionate hatred; contempt for the present; a cunning estimate of human nature; a delight in symbols (spectacles and ceremonials); unbounded brazenness which finds expression in a disregard for consistency and fairness; a recognition that the innermost craving of a following is a communion and that there can never be too much of it; a capacity for winning and holding the utmost loyalty of a group of able lieutenants."

Eric Hoffer: brilliant and original, has stood the test of time. His works are as meaningful and prescient today as they were a half-century ago. And, the implications of his vision of the hitchhiker on the cause of this ism of Muslim fundamental fanaticism's hatred of the West, and its invasion of their world both culturally and militarily, is just as frightening in its implications for the world we live in today as it was in his.