Both Brilliant and Blind

Introduction

I first read Eric Hoffer’s book The True Believer in 1984, over forty years ago now. I had also read Orwell’s 1984 in that same year because I thought it was an appropriate time to get around to it, and you could kind of see where things were going by that point.

Anyway, back to Hoffer. I recall really appreciating the book, although naturally enough I took issue with some things he said about the apostle Paul—who really was a true believer, but not of the Hoffer sort.

But as our times have continued to unravel, and as we are confronted daily with the hot mess that is conservative discourse today, and then nudged by means of a comment made by Michael Foster, I thought I should take a return pass through this book. And boy, was that rewarding.

As you survey our cultural landscape today, by which I mean our debris field, the explanatory power of this book is astounding.

Yeah, But Nevertheless . . .

Hoffer sets out to explain the psychology of mass movements, be they religious, political or Chinese virus related, and he really does have a good eye. His powers of description are amazing, and yet there remains an epistemic shadow that throws everything he says into the shade.

The basic problem I have is with his purported atheism, which provides no structural support for his humanistic liberalism, or for his solid horse sense either. He is just out there, floating in mid-air, which provides him with a really good view of the seething masses down below, and he does describe them all very well. But when questions arise, as they eventually must, like “how do you stay up there anyhow?” my thought experiment requires him to look down between his feet, you know, the way Wile E. Coyote always does.

In saying this, I am not disputing the fact that there have been Christian mass movements that actually fit into his descriptions very well. Christians are people, after all, and this is a very human phenomenon. The reason I am writing this is because I see a lot of Christians doing it now.

Rather, it is simply to say that if Christ was not raised from the dead, then we are all of us lost—and Hoffer’s unsupported and rootless liberalism will be of no value in countering the claims made by the worst versions of the true believer. Without Christ, the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity. If there is no absolute, then anything goes. Including the worst forms of absolutism. If there is no absolute, and Hoffer thinks there is not, then Hoffer’s chin stroking is no better than a goose step missile parade. I know that I used the word worst a lot right there, but if that is what we have on tap, it can’t be helped. Christ or chaos.

So then, there is my mixed review, right up front. Hoffer is both brilliant and blind. We live in a time where we really need to profit from his brilliance, while never forgetting that it was the post-war secular blindness, which he represents very well, that created such vast opportunities for our current crop of mountebanks, scamps, charlatans, hustlers, and frauds.

By the way, I know that I keep on saying that the post-war secular liberal consensus is a failed project, but I also know that there are still some defenders of the Ancien Régime out there, even some Christians, who would call upon me to prove it. Okay, I’ll prove it already. What is a woman?

Reminds me of that old children’s joke: “What is the difference between a mail box and a hippopotamus?” “I don’t know, what is it?” “Well, we sure won’t send you to mail any letters.”

A Small Sampling

But let us return to our theme.

For description and diagnosis, Hoffer really is very good. Here, let me give you a few examples, a few tidbits.

Those who are living comfortable and satisfied middle class lives are rarely in fighting trim. Those who are discontented with their lot, but who are close enough to see the perks being enjoyed by the suburbanite bourgeois types, are the ones who have that lean and hungry look. Ironically, that lean and hungry look can also be seen on the faces of children of enormous privilege, who grew up with lots of stuff, but who were never given any reason for the stuff. They want to justify their sorry materialistic existence, and so they frequently join up with the agents of wrath as well. The timid, those with everything to lose, rarely anticipate their danger.

Those who feel their own existence to be defective have a compelling urge to justify that existence by giving it away to a Cause. The claims of the Cause must be absolute, and so this is how the defective recruits justify themselves—by throwing themselves into a crusade that is, by definition, not defective.

I have seen this exact pattern with disintegrating marriages. The husband was a tyrannical toad in the early years of marriage, but the wife doesn’t leave him until he finally starts to improve. In a similar way, the French Revolution did not happen in the seventeenth century, when the aristocracy really was oppressive, but rather later, with the revolt aimed at the liberalizing eighteenth century aristocracy.

The time of harvest is now, but the disruption and decay has been metastasizing for almost a century. The attractions of communism on the left and Nazism on the right are inexplicable apart from this disintegrating establishment. And the corrosive agent in that establishment was the secular liberalism. Secular liberalism was not the establishment, but rather was the acid that rotted it out.

The government school system, the debunking historians, the post-war court cases that separated righteousness and state, critical theory in the universities, the attacks on legacy statues, the war on the unborn, the sick travesty of Obergefell, the corruption of our entertainment standards, and so on. The cancer has not just spread from the lymph nodes to the liver—the cancer is now in our toes. If you have been wondering where all the commies came from all of a sudden, I can assure you that it was not spontaneous generation. And Nazis too . . . jeepers. But if you are among those who have railed against “existing group ties” as glaring examples of white supremacy, then you may not be the disease itself, but you are certainly a carrier. Here’s looking at you, David French.

It is this truth that helps to explain the “horseshoe” phenomenon, where people on the hard right find mysterious common cause with people on the hard left. It is actually not all that mysterious. Hoffer points out that it is relatively easy to convert an ardent fascist to an ardent communist. This is because the common theme is a cause that makes absolute demands, and gives the convert a flag to fly, a direction to shoot, and a devil to overcome. It is not the content of the dogma, but rather the thrill of the dogmatism.

The theory of the movement is important to a handful of the eggheads, but we are talking about the formation of a mass movement here. What motivates the ground troops? Hoffer argues that one of the great unifying aspects of a mass movement is the fact of the movement. The movement, if it is to get anywhere, has to be led by men of action. There is something to do. There is somewhere to go. The goals are concrete and tangible.

But while Hoffer points out that action is one great unifying force, another one is the sharing of hatreds. There have been mass movements in the past without a belief in God, but there has never been a mass movement without belief in a devil. And when two different tribes come to believe in the same devil, that ought to be taken as a truly ominous sign. The hairs on the back of your neck ought to be standing up. In our time, the devil of the hard left is the Jew. And, also in our time, the devil of the unstable right . . . is also the Jew. And when you see something like that taking shape, mark it . . . there is a coalition in the works.

Now I know that the left hates Jews because they are behind all that evil capitalism, and the dank right hates Jews because they caused all the evil collectivism, but remember that the bonding agent is the mere fact of the hatred, not the content of the arguments. The arguments make no sense . . . but hatred doesn’t have to make sense. Hatred is its own reward.

So . . . Bulverism?

Now I know that one of the responses to this analysis when applied to the dank right, the reactionary right, will be to say that I am resorting to Bulverism. This is an informal fallacy that was given its name by C.S. Lewis. He had gotten tired of people explaining the genesis of your silliness instead of engaging with your arguments, and so he named the fallacy after an imagined boy named Ezekiel Bulver—who had heard his father make a point about geometry, and then had heard his mother reply that “you say that because you are a man.” A broad vista then opened up before him. Simply assume that your opponent is wrong, and then step forward to offer an explanation as to how he got that way.

And so, will it not be said that this is what I have done? And Hoffer also? Alas for my interlocutors, it is not so. The central point that Lewis makes is that you must first show that a person is wrong, via argument, before attempting to offer explanations as to why they are so wrong. But Lewis doesn’t say that it is wrong to analyze the psychology of error and/or sin. He does that many times himself—indeed, few perform that task better than he. His concern is that it is wrong to substitute such analysis for the needed refutation. The refutation is foundational and has to come first.

Just the other day I saw a couple of guys online complaining about my “quips.” They cited a couple of hot ones that I had written, and they were lamenting the fact that I was all quips and no substance. All those books I have written—nothing but quips, cover to cover. Now I don’t think these gents were being dishonest about not seeing the arguments. You can’t see them if you don’t know what one looks like . . . or if you haven’t ever bothered to read them. So I would simply say in reply that the metaphors and such are just raisins in the oatmeal. I am happy to assure my friends that there is plenty of oatmeal there. We are talking about a library of books, not a pantry of Sun-Maid raisins.

In short, if you have refuted an error dozens of times and in multiple venues, and the persons guilty of said error nevertheless proceed on their way in a cloud of serenity, the kind that only ignorance can bestow, it becomes possible—without Bulverism—to move on to the next point and to ask, “what if it’s envy?”

To which I imagine that Gaius replied, “What arguments? Two hours of shouting is not an argument. I was analyzing the shouting, not an argument.”

The Need for Hope

I was already convinced of this, but Hoffer’s book really did reinforce the point. Men cannot live without hope, and hope is directly tied to eschatology. Hoffer brought up the issues related to hope and the nature of the future time and again.

Postmillennialism is a doctrine about the future. Because it is a slow burn doctrine—the yeast works through the loaf gradually—it avoids the errors of revolutionary hastiness. But it also provides direction. Dominion is not a distraction from the gospel. It is the gospel, with hands and feet. As the saying goes, friends don’t let friends immanentize the eschaton. It is therefore reformational without being revolutionary. And so the future is not a fog bank of dark gray despair. You can build institutions. You can plant trees. You can have children. You can establish church plants. You can just do things.

All Christians share the blessed hope, to be realized when the Lord Jesus comes again. But that is at the end of history. Not all Christians have an optimistic and historical hope about the future of the church before that time. And it shows.