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By Root 728 0

preoccupation is with the future, and it derives its vigor and drive from this preoccupation. When a mass movement begins to be preoccupied with the present, it means that it has arrived. It ceases then to be a movement and becomes an institutionalized organization—an established church, a government or an army (of soldiers or workers). The popular army, which is often an end-product of a mass movement, retains many of the trappings of the movement—pious verbiage, slogans, holy symbols; but like any other army it is held together less by faith and enthusiasm than by the unimpassioned mechanism of drill, esprit de corps and coercion. It soon loses the asceticism and unction of a holy congregation and displays the boisterousness and the taste for the joys of the present which is characteristic of all armies.

Being an instrument of the present, an army deals mainly with the possible. Its leaders do not rely on miracles. Even when animated by fervent faith, they are open to compromise. They reckon with the possibility of defeat and know how to surrender. On the other hand, the leader of a mass movement has an overwhelming contempt for the present—for all its stubborn facts and perplexities, even those of geography and the weather. He relies on miracles. His hatred of the present (his nihilism) comes to the fore when the situation becomes desperate. He destroys his country and his people rather than surrender.

The spirit of self-sacrifice within an army is fostered by devotion to duty, make-believe, esprit de corps, drill, faith in a leader, sportsmanship, the spirit of adventure and the desire for glory. These factors, unlike those employed by a mass movement, do not spring from a deprecation of the present and a revulsion from an unwanted self. They can unfold therefore in a sober atmosphere. The fanatical soldier is usually a fanatic turned soldier rather than the other way around. An army’s spirit of self-sacrifice is most nobly expressed in the words Sarpedon spoke to Glaucus as they stormed the Grecian wall: “O my friend, if we, leaving this war, could escape from age and death, I should not here be fighting in the van; but now, since many are the modes of death impending over us which no man can hope to shun, let us press on and give renown to other men, or win it for ourselves.”26

The most striking difference between mass movements and armies is in their attitude to the multitude and the rabble. De Tocqueville observes that soldiers are “the men who lose their heads most easily, and who generally show themselves weakest on days of revolution.”27 To the typical general the mass is something his army would turn into if it were to fall apart. He is more aware of the inconstancy of the mass and its will to anarchy than of its readiness for self-sacrifice. He sees it as the poisonous end-product of a crumbling collective body rather than the raw material of a new world. His attitude is a mixture of fear and contempt. He knows how to suppress the mass but not how to win it. On the other hand, the mass movement leader—from Moses to Hitler—draws his inspiration from the sea of upturned faces, and the roar of the mass is as the voice of God in his ears. He sees an irresistible force within his reach—a force he alone can harness. And with this force he will sweep away empires and armies and all the mighty present. The face of the mass is as “the face of the deep” out of which, like God on the day of creation, he will bring forth a new world.

XIV

Unifying Agents

Hatred

65

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass. Heine suggests that what Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.1

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement