The True Believer_ Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements - Eric Hoffer [61]
118
The interference of an active mass movement with the creative process is deep-reaching and manifold: 1) The fervor it generates drains the energies which would have flowed into creative work. Fervor has the same effect on creativeness as dissipation. 2) It subordinates creative work to the advancement of the movement. Literature, art and science must be propagandistic and they must be “practical.” The true-believing writer, artist or scientist does not create to express himself, or to save his soul or to discover the true and the beautiful. His task, as he sees it, is to warn, to advise, to urge, to glorify and to denounce. 3) Where a mass movement opens vast fields of action (war, colonization, industrialization), there is an additional drain of creative energy. 4) The fanatical state of mind by itself can stifle all forms of creative work. The fanatic’s disdain for the present blinds him to the complexity and uniqueness of life. The things which stir the creative worker seem to him either trivial or corrupt. “Our writers must march in serried ranks, and he who steps off the road to pick flowers is like a deserter.” These words of Konstantine Simonov echo the thought and the very words of fanatics through the ages. Said Rabbi Jacob (first century, A.D.): “He who walks in the way … and interrupts his study [of the Torah] saying: ‘How beautiful is this tree’ [or] ‘How beautiful is this ploughed field’ … [has] made himself guilty against his own soul.”6 St. Bernard of Clerveaux could walk all day by the lake of Geneva and never see the lake. In Refinement of the Arts David Hume tells of the monk “who, because the windows of his cell opened upon a noble prospect, made a covenant with his eyes never to turn that way.” The blindness of the fanatic is a source of strength (he sees no obstacles), but it is the cause of intellectual sterility and emotional monotony.
The fanatic is also mentally cocky, and hence barren of new beginnings. At the root of his cockiness is the conviction that life and the universe conform to a simple formula—his formula. He is thus without the fruitful intervals of groping, when the mind is as it were in solution—ready for all manner of new reactions, new combinations and new beginnings.
119
When an active mass movement displays originality, it is usually an originality of application and of scale. The principles, methods, techniques, etcetera which a mass movement applies and exploits are usually the product of a creativeness which was or still is active outside the sphere of the movement. All active mass movements have that unabashed imitativeness which we have come to associate with the Japanese. Even in the field of propaganda the Nazis and the Communists imitate more than they originate. They sell their brand of holy cause the way the capitalist advertiser sells his brand of soap or cigarettes.7 Much that strikes us as new in the methods of the Nazis and Communists stems from the fact that they are running (or trying to run) vast territorial empires the way a Ford or a DuPont runs his industrial empire. It is perhaps true that the success of the Communist experiment will always depend on the unfettered creativeness proceeding in the outside non-Communist world. The brazen men in the Kremlin think it a magnanimous concession when they say that communism and capitalism can continue for long side by side. Actually, if there were no free societies outside the Communist orbit, they might have found it necessary to establish them by ukase.
Some Factors Which Determine the Length of the Active Phase
120
A mass movement with a concrete, limited objective is likely to have a shorter active phase than a movement with a nebulous, indefinite objective. The vague objective is perhaps indispensable for the development of chronic extremism. Said Oliver Cromwell: “A man never