As we try to make sense of our world, it helps to explore the wisdom and insight of people like Eric Hoffer. After the initial horrified reaction I experienced on September 11th of last year, my first question was: How could these terrorists sacrificed their own lives this way, and taken the lives of thousands of others, as well as causing such colossal destruction? What could lead them to justify, in their own minds, committing mass atrocities? This issue goes far beyond a debate over religious beliefs it goes to the very heart of human nature. What allows certain people to override any sense of community with their fellow human beings, and willfully cause death and destruction for the sake of a higher cause? In Hoffer's "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" he portrays his ideas and observations on the rise of mass movements and the leaders of them, who called upon their followers to annihilate all who differed in their world views. The book was based upon years of reflection, and his own observations of the rise of fascism, Nazism, and communism as reactions to the Great Depression. He stresses that for the "true believer," a person so committed to a cause that he or she is willing to unthinkingly die for it, ideologies are interchangeable. It is the frustrations of life which lead believers to join a cause that gives meaning to their own existences, and the more frustrated they feel, the more attracted they are to extreme revolutionary solutions to their problems. Such frustrations can be the basis for positive social change, but usually mass movements have less beneficial effects. The message that self-sacrifice is needed for the good of a cause can often justify the most heinous of endeavors, and followers are treated as interchangeable gears in machines rather than flesh-and-blood humans. Abstractions and atrocities often go hand-in-hand. .
Hoffer views "true believers" as disaffected undesirables.
