August 10th
Amazing, life-changing book. I will go back and re-read it soon (which is extremely rare for me). There is so much in this book to absorb and to think over. After one read, I already look at the behavior of people around me differently based on what I learned from Eric Hoffer. A couple of quotes with my comments:
“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.”
Ain’t that the truth — I was 46 years old when I finally accepted that I AM responsible for my actions and decisions and my life and my happiness. What was happening around me was a good and easy and lazy explanation for my own personality failures. It was so easy to blame the outside circumstances on my inability to change — I mean, how am I to change everybody around me? To work on oneself is not easy and can be messy and unpleasant — but it’s the only way to live a fulfilling life.
“The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.”
Amen — wherever I look in my country but also around the world, I see that behavior on the rise. The more idiotic, moronic, stupid, parochial, narrow-minded, unhappy, and religious a person is, the more that person is waving the national flag and shouting nationalistic/xenophobic/racist/homophobic slogans and pledging death to “enemies of the nation/race/culture” — which is everybody who dares to be different or just to be happy.
“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 is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.”
Correct — people need to be scared and need to have a tangible enemy. They need “the others” (of different religions/races/genders/lifestyles/education) to be scared of, to be the reason for personal failures, and to justify violent outbursts. Being scared of the common enemy gives comfort in being in the right group in the “us” vs “them” worldwide struggle. There is more of this behavior visible now and I just now that soon a spark will be enough to start new pogroms — Jews no longer have a presence in Poland but there are LGBT people and immigrants as obvious targets.
“The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self, and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement.”
I’ll say — every mass movement needs those people, people who will abandon completely themselves and their will for an idea or a cause. They might scream and chant about freedom but it’s the freedom they want to escape. Freedom brings choices, and with choices responsibility. Being a part of a group (political, religious, fandom) takes away the burden of personal choice and freedom. They will make good soldiers/policemen/bureaucrats who will in a mass movement feel safe and be capable of unspeakable cruelty.
And I feel pity for the masses who live unexamined lives and need to belong to a group, any group to justify their sad and in reality unneeded existence.
