The True Believer
The profound psychology behind revolutions and mass movements
Hello reader,
Hope you broke all your new year's resolutions. If you haven’t, there are still a couple of weeks left- you can’t possibly enter February without abandoning them.
To make you feel better, we have a cracker of an idea to explore today. I briefly covered it in my 2022 Mental Models list.
Very rarely do I come across books that are shorter than 200 pages but with filled with an intriguing idea on every alternate one.
The True Believer was one such book, and I feel it is my duty to try and explain what I learned from it.
What does this term mean?
We’ve all heard of Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini. We’ve all seen crazy movements that started with a few people and turned into major upheavals that shook entire nations.
What kind of people join these political movements and what makes them tick?
To answer these questions, one has to understand the psychology of the true believer- a person who zealously supports a mass movement with unshakeable conviction and dedicates his existence to this ‘cause’.
But why do people give up their lives in order to pursue something that seems like madness?
It’s because the kinds of people attracted by these movements are the ones with a deep sense of frustration. And this isn’t the same frustration you and I feel after being mercilessly rejected by 17 rickshaw drivers on the trot.
It’s a much deeper sense of anguish. It makes the person feel distraught because of their circumstances and they believe that life has been spoiled beyond repair.
By tapping into this sense of despair, leaders of mass movements are able to offer a ray of hope, a chance to *fix* the world and bring it back to the days of the ‘glorious past’. An unflinching belief that the world needs to be reordered is what converts the frustrated into a true believer. They start thinking that their doctrine gives them immense power, and is the key to shaping a much better future.
To do so, the person also has to be a little naive and not understand what it really takes to change the political order. It’s far easier to destroy something than to build anew, and it’s this naive belief in their ability to create a newer, better world that motivates the frustrated into action as they seek to topple the existing political institutions or governments.
However, the desire to participate in such a radical, violent and tumultuous project doesn’t just emerge from a sense of frustration. There’s something deeper going on here.
Motivations
In the modern world, we value freedom more than almost anything else. But freedom can often be the deadliest of burdens.
When you realize that the responsibility for every decision you take is solely yours, freedom can start to seem pretty oppressive.
It might be difficult for the fortunate to imagine this, but consider the life of an individual born into difficult circumstances, riddled with a sense of having achieved nothing in life and living in misery.
There’s a constant sense of deprivation and injustice this person feels. And when you combine this with an open, free economy where the rich get richer (and rub it in everyone’s faces with their Gucci bags) while the poor get poorer, you can see how it worsens this sense of frustration.
Every attempt to improve his life situation ends in failure- and deepens the sense of humiliation. It’s better to attempt the impossible in such cases- because failing at something that was easier and actually possible is even more embarrassing- and the ultimate ‘ownership’ of that failure resides with the individual.
This is also the problem with modern meritocratic societies which reward winners like they’re truly special and brand everyone else as losers who were (rightfully) left behind because of their own shortcomings.
In such a society, the frustrated individual wants an escape from this freedom. He wants to fade into anonymity, so no one can detect his pitiable situation. In essence, the frustrated is seeking deindividuation- a total escape from one’s self. This is exactly what a mass movement offers, as fanatics blend into the crowd of the movement and lose their personal identities for the larger group identity. That’s why when you ask a fanatic who he is, the answer is never their own name. It’s always “Nazi” or “Communist” or any other tribe that they have sworn allegiance to.
This also explains why the frustrated and penniless Germans, beaten and bruised after the humiliations of WW1, immediately warmed up to this assertive, new general named Hitler who offered them a way out of their misery. Many are said to have joined the Nazi rank and file so they could be told what to do and not have to bear the responsibility for their own failures. They were seeking freedom from freedom itself.
Ideal candidates for mass movements
We’ve already identified some characteristics of a TB- a sense of frustration, a dogmatic faith and a sense of power derived from a doctrine, a hope for a much better world, and naivety with regard to the difficulties of building a new political order.
But are there certain types of people who naturally succumb to these movements? Conversely, what characteristics or qualities help people resist the urge to join them?
Hoffer observes that of all classes, the new poor are the most ideal candidates that end up joining mass movements. Memories of the good days are still fresh, which leads to immense frustration because of their impoverishment and impels them to work towards topping the present order.
The same goes for the misfits and sinners- in these movements, they find an avenue to forget all about their misdeeds.
This is even more amplified for the unemployed and the bored who find their meaningless existence hollow. Without any occupation to keep their minds churning, these people are the easiest to get absorbed.
That’s why spinsters and middle-aged wives played a big role in the Nazi and Islam revolutions. Hitler made full use of the insight that the society ladies thirst for adventure when they no longer get a kick out of love affairs. He was financed by the wives of big industrialists long before they’d heard of him. Even the French Revolution saw a similar role played by the bored wives of big businessmen!
There’s a lot more to unpack here. How do these movements start? What keeps them going? What are the stages they progress through, and what factors are essential to maintain them as going concerns?
It’d take many more articles to answer all of these questions in detail. But in writing this piece, I hope I have given you a quick peek into the fascinating philosophy of The True Believer.
If you enjoyed this article, please share your thoughts by responding to this email/using the comments. It’ll help me decide if I should dive deeper into this and put together another piece on this. And if you haven’t subscribed already, join the learning community right away:
Very interesting. But how you distinguish between a good revolution/mass movement and a bad one. Or there is no such distinction. Alternatively, are we saying that it is a futile exercise to be part of the movement and no meaningful change can happen through this ?
Hello Sahil, this article is insightful. Keep writing