The Bourgeois Man Makes His Case.

Going by the title, you might assume that this book would be some religious self-help text about strengthening one’s faith. You’d be wrong. Published in the aftermath of WWII, The True Believer is instead an attempt to describe the psychology of the individual member of a mass movement, any mass movement, from fascism to communism to Christianity. While Hoffer’s analysis is, in my opinion, desperately flawed (he himself acknowledges his own reliance on “half-truths” and exaggeration), it is nonetheless interesting and I think that many of his insights, if not entirely true, are valuable in thinking about our times. 

Though Hoffer may acknowledge some variation in the different subcategories for people who join mass movements (the poor, the misfits, the criminals), they are eventually all reduced to the concept of the impotent or unsuccessful man—the man whose primary motivation is his desire to cast of his “impotent” and “ineffectual” self. The objectives of any given mass movement is more or less irrelevant in Hoffer’s analysis of the individual member’s psychological profile. What is important to Hoffer is only the idea that he joins himself to the project only as a means of casting off this self, and he will join any cause which allows him to do this. The early chapters of the book are thick with repetitions of this belief, which echoes many of the same sentiments seen in Eric Fromm’s Escape from Freedom.  

The flaw in Hoffer’s analysis appears in the first few pages and it is his view, more implied than directly stated, that the individual bears all responsibility for his lot in life. 

There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change…It is understandable that those who fail should incline to blame the world for their failure. The remarkable thing is that the successful, too, however much they pride themselves on their foresight, fortitude, thrift and other “sterling qualities,” are at bottom convinced that their success is the result of a fortuitous combination of circumstances. The self-confidence of even the consistently successful is never absolute. They are never sure that they know all the ingredients which go into the making of their success. 

The idea that one’s outcomes might depend of elements of fortune or material circumstance is wholly outside of the realm of possibility for Hoffer and he treats the idea as if it were some type of delusion that afflicts both those who feel that they have been held back and those who think that their success was contingent on some element of luck. At least, this is the impression that he frequently gives when discussing the motivations of the person who joins a mass movement. To be fair to Hoffer, it may be a mistake to attribute this belief to him, but if it is, it is caused by a deep ambivalence and incoherence that is never resolved within the text. At certain times, he portrays the true believer as a fanatic whose only true motivation is to escape his “ineffectual self” (a phrase that is abused so often that one begins to feel sorry for it by the end); while at other times, he is perfectly happy to admit that there may be legitimate mass movements and that even a stable regime must at times rely on the tactics of de-individuation that he associates with mass movements in order to defend itself. The result is the impression that Hoffer can believe in the sometimes rational need for mass movements, but not in the possibility of rational individuals within them. It would seem odd that Hoffer would pin his entire analysis on something so obviously false, but it is necessary for him to do this so that he can psychologize the man who joins a mass movement. This man cannot be viewed by Hoffer as a rational agent—a fact which is revealing on its own—and so he must deny the obvious reality that material circumstances affect the outcomes of our lives and therefore a mass movement aimed at changing some material circumstance can be entirely rational and consist of rational agents. 

Selfishness

To Hoffer, self-interest is and can be the only legitimate motivation, “For self-sacrifice is an unreasonable act” (p. 7). The self-interested man is the only legitimate human type. All higher ideals are delusions, which Hoffer attributes to the fanatic’s need to be rid of himself. And this is also self-interested in the crudest and most unimaginative kind imaginable. There is no acknowledgment of the possibility that a man may find ways of extending his concept of his self to his children, to his family, to his countrymen, to his friend, and so forth, such that he might be persuaded to make sacrifices for their benefit, even potentially sacrificing his own life. Jesus said there was no greater love than the love of a man willing to lay down his life, but for Hoffer, this is simply fanaticism. 

Here is a typical case of a man casting his character as the only legitimate human type. Hoffer is the bourgeois man, the man interested in his own gain and comforts above all else, par excellence. But to his shame, he must find himself frequently reliant on the very people he looks down on.  His world is ever vulnerable to those who are not like him, who are able to set goals outside of themselves and make sacrifices and commitments beyond self-interest. At times he acknowledges the cowardice of his class, but only by bringing all of humanity down to their level: 

When the leader in a free society becomes contemptuous of the people, he sooner or later proceeds on the false and fatal theory that all men are fools, and eventually blunders into defeat…Whereas in an active mass movement, the leader…can operate on the sound theory that all men are cowards, treat them accordingly and get results. 

Hoffer does not imagine himself to be a fool, so it cannot be true that all men are fools; however, Hoffer is a coward (at least if we take him at his word), therefore all men must be cowards. Hoffer thereby effectively erases cowardice and the acknowledgement of the human type that are known as brave men. When all men are cowards, cowardice becomes ‘rational.’ However, this “rationality” then results in the ironic fact that “[p]eople who live full, worth-while lives are not usually read to die for their own interests nor for their country nor for a holy cause…It is strange, indeed, that those who hug the present and hang onto it with all their might should be the least capable of defending it” (73).  

To his embarrassment, Hoffer realizes that a regime of bourgeois men is incapable of even defending itself because a regime of cowards cannot rise to a fight. Nations must therefore rely on the ability to replicate the effects of mass movements in their own defense, or else they will always be victimized by the dispossessed and dissatisfied of other nations. And in raising this army, they must appeal to the same kinds of psychological mechanisms that Hoffer condemns in the members of mass movements. In short, they must encourage these people whom they turn into shoulders to deindividualize, to come to see themselves as part of some greater whole, so that they will be willing to die to protect it. There is something incredibly sinister about all of it, especially the cold sterile discussion of how these psychological changes could be effected. The impression that an unsympathetic reader will get is that the regime of the bourgeois man must put stock into the creation of men they regard as inferior to go and die selflessly for them so that they may continue to pursue their own self-interest freely. 

In an earlier chapter, Hoffer had described the despondency of the veteran as a function of having been returned to his individual responsibility after having previously been directed by others in most aspects of his life. There is surely some truth to this, but I also suspect that another factor may be his realization that he risked his life and probably witnessed his friends lose their lives so that these petty bugmen could continue their petty, acquisitive lives. 

Doublespeak

A huge portion of the book is simply various repackagings of Hoffer’s core assumption, that the true believer is in all cases motivated by some kind of deep sense of inadequacy and his desire to be free of his self. However, this must never be mistaken for any kind of virtue. 

The impression somehow prevails that the true believer, particularly the religious individual, is a humble person. The truth is that the surrendering and humbling of the self breed pride and arrogance. The true believer is apt to see himself as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness who is destined to inherit this earth and the kingdom of heaven, too.

This is ridiculous on numerous levels. First, it is a bit rich for Hoffer to offer this criticism when his foundational claim is that self-satisfaction is the sine qua non of the superior kind of man. The man who places himself at the center of the universe and gazes down from this throne of narcissism is not “prideful” or “arrogant.” No, he is “self-assured” and “confident.” This vacillation between words with favorable and unfavorable connotations in order to describe essentially identical phenomena and other forms of special pleading are more or less ubiquitous.  

The book is similarly overrun with a kind of shallow psychologizing bromides, the cracks in which are then papered over with a smattering of abstracted descriptors with positive or negative connotations as they are needed. 

It is easier to hate an enemy with much good in him than one who is all bad. We cannot hate those we despise. The Japanese had an advantage over us in that they admired us more than we admired them. They could hate us more fervently than we could hate them. 

or…

We do not usually look for allies when we love. Indeed we often look on those who love with us as rivals and trespassers. 

Try telling this to the people at a Taylor Swift concert. As he does so often, Hoffer lands with a great stomp on the exact opposite of the truth. Romantic, exclusive love would seem to be the exception to the rule rather than the other way around. In most other cases, we seem to welcome the presence of those who share our passions; just look at the rise of fandoms. Passages like these are everywhere and make the process of reading this book an excruciatingly slow one since one feels obligated to make note of and dismantle the various sophistries as they come. 

“Better People” or Just Petty Bourgeoisie  

Hoffer constantly speaks as though it were the idealist who longs to escape responsibility for himself by accepting the leadership of others and implies that those who do not “need” this are of a superior sort who take full, even radical, responsibility for themselves. He acts as if each non-believer is an incarnation of the “knight of faith” described by Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling, the man who appears perfectly at home in the world as a petty man who cares only for his own comforts, but is actually, in every moment committing a radical act of self-ownership. It is this radical action, utterly invisible to the outer observer, that marks the knight of faith from his opposite, the petty bourgeoisie. Hoffer takes advantage of this indeterminacy to disguise the fact that there is nothing noble about the anti-idealistic type which he lionizes throughout the book. 

The claim is always that the true believer cannot stand on his own, without the support of the movement, but the unbeliever can. 

Tosh. 

The unbeliever only stands alone in his self-aggrandizing fantasies. In reality the entirety of the present world props him up. He is not self-reliant, only self-satisfied. His self sufficiency is an illusion created by his arrogance. In reality, he depends on the estimation of the rest of the world. He is like the toddler who thinks it is walking on its own as its parents carry it by the arms only letting its feet brush against the earth. 

Most everything that Hoffer discusses must eventually be filtered through this lens of vanity, even the pursuit of truth itself, as is seen in his treatment of “men of words” (intellectuals): 

The genuine man of words himself can get along without faith in absolutes. He values the search for truth as much as the truth itself. He delights in the clash of thought and in the give-and-take of controversy. If he formulates a philosophy and a doctrine, they are more an exhibition of brilliance and an exercise in dialectics than a program of action and the tenets of a faith. His vanity, it is true, often prompts him to defend his speculations with savagery and even venom; but his appeal is usually to reason and not to faith. The fanatics and the faith-hungry masses, however, are likely to invest such speculations with the certitude of holy writ, and make them the fountainhead of a new faith.

Here is something that ought to be remembered but which is always being forgotten. If ever someone tells you that they value the search for truth as much as the truth itself, what they are actually saying is that they do not value the truth. If someone were to tell you that they valued courtship (something meant to end in marriage) as highly as they valued marriage, you would immediately understand that this person had misappraised both. This is not to say that the search for truth does not have its pleasures, obviously it does, but for the legitimate seeker, the search is also filled with agonies because there are times when one has to wonder if you will ever find the truth. Because the legitimate seeker understands that the search is a means to an end, and that the end is what matters. Any disputing this fact is a sure sign that the person is speaking in bad faith. And this is the case for Hoffer, if the truth were not profitable, if seeking it were not pleasurable, then he would simply advise against it since it is “irrational” to do anything against one’s own interests. 

Later, Hoffer writes…

[B]y undermining the convictions of the “better people” [It is unclear what function Hoffer’s quotation marks are supposed to serve here as all indication is that this is his formulation and belief. But I guess it would have been a little gauche to state it plainly.]–those who can get along without faith—so that when the new fanaticism makes its appearance they are without the capacity to resist it. They see no sense in dying for convictions and principles, and yield to the new order without a fight. 

This is the fundamental point which Hoffer unsuccessfully wrestles with throughout the book: his “superior” man is a pussy who is deeply afraid to get his hands dirty. 

Final Thoughts

But, if one is able to ignore Hoffer’s irritating tendency to put lipstick on that particular pig, there is some valuable insight to be gleaned from these pages, mostly pertaining to the managerial strategies of governing elites if they wish to diffuse or encourage mass movements, as well as the typical life-cycle of a mass movement. This information is valuable both for those who would wish to be political organizers and those who would like to thwart them, and it is also useful to understand the somewhat disheartening reality that even the most ardent reform or revolutionary impulse will eventually be open to corruption by the same type of self-seekers that Hoffer praises throughout his book. The bourgeois man is inevitable, and radicals and revolutionaries as well as men of spirit and depth must at some time or another grapple with this apparent fact. 

Reading this book (as I did out of happenstance) alongside Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is a striking experience in as much as it makes the reader keenly aware that there are two distinct types of man and two modes of living that define each of them. For Frankl, purpose was a weapon and a shield that one could use to endure unimaginable horrors. He acknowledged that there was always the temptation to be petty, small, cowardly, and self-interested, but that even in the depths of the concentration camp, it was still possible for a man to raise his spiritual temperature and behave decently and even heroically:

There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress. 

We who live in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Compared to the petty and self-interested rationalizations of The True Believer, passages like this one become even more heroic. Often, the ability to articulate oneself eloquently is taken as a sign for the correctness of the speaker’s position, but cases like these prove what Socrates already knew in 399 BC: that sophistry will always sound good, especially to those who want to believe it. Hoffer might be a better writer than Frankl, but he was an inferior specimen of man, and the quality of our beliefs is often a function of our character.