The Pete Quiñones Show - Pete Reads 'The True Believer' by Eric Hoffer Part 3

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

48 MinutesPG-13Pete continues a series reading Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements."The True BelieverPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Antelope Hill - Promo code "peteq" for 5% off - https://antelopehillpublishing.com/FoxnSons Coffee - Promo code "peter" for 18% off - https://www.foxnsons.com/Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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and get the episodes early and ad free, head on over to freeman beyond the wall.com forward slash support. I want to explain something right now if you support me through Substack or Patreon. You have access to an RSS feed that you can plug into any podcast. including Apple, and you'll be able to listen to the episodes through there. If you support me through Subscrib Star, Gumroad, or on my website directly, I will send you a link where you can download the file, and you can listen to it any way you wish. I really appreciate the support everyone gives me. It keeps the show going.

It allows me to basically put out an episode every day now, and I'm not going to stop. I'm just going to accelerate. I think sometimes you see that I'm putting out two, even three a day. And yeah, can't do it without you. So thank you for the support. Head on over to freeman beyond the wall.com forward slash support and do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to part three of my reading of The True Believer by Eric Hoffer.

Before I start, just want to remind everyone. that Thomas and I have been watching movies and commenting on them. It's over on my website, Freeman Beyond the Wall.com, forward slash movies. Last one we did for Halloween was the 1979 horror, quote unquote horror, sci-fi. Really pretty versatile movie called Fantasm. And we're planning out the next one. So check that out over on my website. All right, let's get to this. Let's see what Mr. Hoffer has in store for us, picking up where we left off.

The milieu most favorable for the rise and propagation of mass movements is one in which a once compact corporate structure is, for one reason or another, in a state of disintegration. The age in which Christianity rose and spread was one when large numbers of men were uprooted. the compact city-states had been partly merged into one vast empire, and the old social and political groupings had been weakened or dissolved. Christianity made its greatest headway in the large cities, where lived thousands of deracinated individuals, some of them slaves, some freedmen, and some merchants, who had been separated by force or voluntarily from their hereditary milieu,

as opposed to those who would seek to deracinate. Seems like there might be a difference. In the countryside where the communal pattern was least disturbed, the new religion found the ground less favorable. The villagers, Pagani, and the heath dweller's heathen, clung longest to the ancient cults. A somewhat similar situation is to be observed in the rise of nationalist and socialist movements.

movements in the second half of the 19th century. The extraordinary mobility and urbanization of population served to create during those decades an extraordinary number of persons uprooted from ancestral soil and local allegiance. Experiencing grave economic insecurity and psychological maladjustment, maljustment, mal adjustment, these were very susceptible to demagogic, propaganda, socialist or nationalist, or both. The general rule seems to be that as one pattern of corporate cohesion weakens, conditions ripen, become ripe for the rise of a mass movement, and the eventual establishment of a new and more vigorous form of compact unity. Or another way you can say that is,

is that man naturally is collective. And when he is deracinated and, torn apart, it is very natural for him to seek to recollectivize. When a church, which was all-embracing, relaxes its whole, new religious movements are likely to crystallize. H.G. Wells remarks that at the power of the Reformation, people objected not to the church's power, but to its weaknesses. There are movements against the church, within and without, were movements not for release from a religious control, but for a fuller and more abundant religious control. If the religious mood is undermined by enlightenment,

the rising movements will be socialist, nationalist, or racist. The French Revolution, which was also a nationalist movement, came as a reaction not against the vigorous tyranny at the Catholic Church and the ancient regime, but against their weakness and ineffectuality. when people revolt in a totalitarian society, they rise not against the wickedness of the regime, but its weakness. I'm thinking of Spain up to the Spanish Civil War. I don't know.

Let's keep reading. Where the corporate pattern is strong, it is difficult for a mass movement to find a footing. The communal compactness of the Jews, both in Palestine and the Diopause, was probably one of the reasons that Christianity made so little headway among them. The destruction of the temple caused, I don't even want, we can do whole episodes and series. We've talked about this before. Michael Jones talks about this. I mean, there's plenty of reasons other than because they're a collective.

The destruction of the temple caused, if anything, a tightening of the communal bonds. The synagogue and the congregation received now much of the devotion which formerly flowed toward the temple and Jerusalem. Later, when the Christian Church had the power to segregate the Jews in ghettos, it gave their communal compactness and additional reinforcement, and thus unintentionally ensured the survival of Judaism intact through the ages. Jews had power in Spain pretty much all through the Moorish conquest, all through the Moorish Empire.

They were given power over Christians. What are we talking about here when the Christian church had the power to segregate the Jews and ghettos? Are we talking about the palest settlement? Are we saying that the Tsars were... doing this because of their orthodoxy. I'm trying to understand this here. Like I said, I don't know if I've said this, but this book has been recommended to me for years. You know, it's one of those books that's supposed to explain what happened during COVID. Okay, well, I'm not getting where this is going. The coming of enlightenment undermined both orthodoxy and ghetto walls.

suddenly and perhaps of the first time since the days of Job and Ecclesiastes, the Jew found himself an individual terribly alone in a hostile world. There was no collective body he could blend with and lose himself in. The synagogue and the congregation had become shriveled lifeless things, while the traditions and prejudices of 2,000 years prevented his complete integration within the Gentile corporate bodies. Thus, the modern Jew became the most autonomous of individuals, and inevitably, too, the most frustrated.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the mass movements of modern times often found in him already convert. Okay, so in my reading of Israel Shahawks' Jewish history, Jewish religion, he mentions that when laws eventually were passed in certain countries, that basically, like in Russia, where, well, you couldn't be, or it doesn't have to be Russia. But Jews took advantage of not being tied to the synagogue anymore, and they went out into the world, and because they had been taught only what the rabbis wanted them to know, they went out and they took in as much information as possible.

I believe that. And you can study, like, the Jews that came to America and went into, like, the American South, the German Jews. And they became Southerners. You know, people can complain, oh, Judah Benjamin was this, that, and you just don't know the history of the war. You don't know the history of the South. You're working off of presuppositions. They very much became Southerner. It really wasn't until, you know, the war and reconstruction that they felt like they had to collectivize.

It wasn't, it was the, they were part of a society, and then that society got torn. So they collectivized because that's what people do. So I don't, just this. This argument here, I don't see it. Yeah, sure, many became the most autonomous of individuals, but frustration? I mean, I don't, he seems to think that the frustration was what may have led people to become revolutionary Bolsheviks and Marxist Jews, specifically, in Russia. and so what's the excuse for the Russian Revolution? What's the excuse for 1917?

They weren't, this wasn't because they were autonomous, the most autonomous of individuals that they decided to become revolutionaries. A major part of that in Russia was revenge, was what, and what, you know, E. Michael Jones calls the Jewish revolutionary spirit. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast.

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Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunebiog, Kush Farage. So I don't agree with this, so let me keep going. The Jew also crowded the roads leading to palletives of frustration such as hustling and migration. He also threw himself into a passionate effort to prove his individual work by material achievements and creative work. There was, it is true, one speck of corporateness he could create around himself by his own efforts, naming of the family, and he made the most of it. But in the case of the European Jew, Hitler chewed and scorched this only

refuge in concentration camps and gas chambers. Thus now, more than ever, the Jew, particularly in Europe, is the ideal potential convert, and it almost seems providential that Zionism should be on hand in the Jew's darkest hour to unfold him in its corporate immer. embrace and cure him of his individual isolation. Israel is indeed a rare refuge. It is home and family, synagogue and congregation, nation, and revolutionary party all in one. Jews, there were boatloads of Jews that were sent to the United States that were sent back. Why were they sent back? And nobody wants to talk about the fact that they, because of, you know, the narrative surrounding in the Holocaust is basically why so many were eager to go to Israel, and still most didn't.

So I'm of the opinion that international Jewry and international Zionism, let's say that. Let's say Zionism, was more than happy to allow anything to happen to Jews, and they were willing to sacrifice them, so that this narrative of, you know, a homeland would be something that many would want to hear, escaping persecution. So, yeah. I mean, let's remember in 1933, you know, I think it's the Daily Mirror, says Judea declares war on Germany. there was no country at the time.

That implies a collective. So saying that making the argument that there was individual isolation seems to go, I mean, this just seems to either be intentionally ignoring the facts of what happened or being completely ignorant as most even Americans are even now. Most people in the world are even now. So the argument for collectivization here because of individual isolation, that doesn't, to me, that doesn't hold up. The recent history of Germany also furnishes an interesting example of the relation between corporate compactness

and a receptivity to the appeal of mass movement. There was no likelihood of a genuine revolutionary movement arising in Wilhelmian Germany. The Germans were satisfied with the centralized authoritarian Kaiser regime, and even defeat in the First World War, did not impair their love for it. The revolution in 1918 was an artificial thing with little popular backing. The years of the Weimar Constitution, which followed, were for most Germans a time of irritation and frustration. used as they were, used to, I guess he's, all right, used as they were to commands from above in respect for authority, they found the loose, irreverent, democratic order, all confusion and chaos. They were shocked to realize that they had to participate in government, choose a party, and pass judgment upon political matters.

They longed for a new corporate, more monolithic, all embracing, and, glorious to behold than even the Kaiser regime had been, and the Third Reich more than answered their prayer. Hitler's totalitarian regime once established was never in danger of mass revolt, so long as the ruling national socialist hierarchy was willing to shoulder all responsibilities and make all decisions, there was not the least chance for any popular antagonism to arise. Let me keep reading this before I comment. A danger point could have been reached had the National Socialist discipline and its totalitarian control been relaxed. What de Tocqueville says of a tyrannical government is true of all totalitarian orders.

Their moment of greatest danger is when they begin to reform. That is to say, when they begin to show liberal tendencies. he basically just passes over Weimar as an annoyance because there was liberty and that the German people weren't used to that and they didn't want it. Not that they were being basically attacked and socially engineered from the outside, that they were supposed to become an international type of Paris that's what Berlin was supposed to become with a transgender clinic and open prostitution, mother-daughter, prostitution teams, male prostitution all over the place, children,

and pornography just showing up for no reason, seemingly no reason. And that is, according to Mr. Hoffer, that's just they couldn't handle this type of literature. liberalism. So they had to choose to go back into totalitarianism. It's, this is, this is folly. This is like sophomoric thinking. It's either intentionally ignoring what happened or just complete ignorance. I will say that when a totalitarian regime or what would be,

like a one-man regime. I mean, any Hoffer or anyone like this is going to call any kind of top-down totalitarian does start to show liberal tendencies. I can see where people would, because it's, if 2020 thought it's anything, people just want to be told what's doing, what to believe. If they're not being told what's doing what to believe anymore, they're going to look elsewhere. Another and final illustration of the thesis that effective collective bodies are immune to the appeal of mass movements, but that a crumbling collective pattern is the most favorable milieu for their rise is found in the relation between the collective body we know as an army and mass movements. There is hardly an instance of an intact army given rise to a religious, revolutionary, or nationalist movement.

On the other hand, a disintegrating army, whether by the orderly process of demobilization or by desertion due to demoralization, is fertile ground for a proselytizing movement. The man just out of an army is an idea-potential convert, and we find him among the early adherents of all contemporary mass movements. He feels alone and lost in the free-for-all of civilian life. The responsibilities and uncertainties of an autonomous existence weigh and prey upon him. He longs for certitude, camaraderie, freedom from individual responsibility, and a vision of something altogether different from the competitive free society around him. And he finds all this in the Brotherhood and revivalist atmosphere of a rising movement.

So again, what he appears to be arguing is that competitive free societies are at the top. That's what you want. And anything below it is just an excuse for people who can't compete. Not that it's in many people's nature not to want that. So if it's not in their nature to want that and it's being forced upon them, if it's being socially engineered into a collective, a society that's always been collective, then of course that person is going to, once he realizes that everything is being torn apart,

they're going to seek to recollectivize. And you have societies right now where that individualism has been preached for 100 years. And now people are seeking to recollectivize. And the people who have most bought into it and cheerily that are scared. As I'm sure, as is apparent Mr. Hoffer is, you know, when he considers, consider he wrote this in 51 what he just saw. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design.

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Trump on Thunbeug, Kush Faragea. Part 6. Misfits. The frustration of misfits can vary in intensity. There are first to temporary misfits, people who have not found their place in life, but still hope to find it. Adolescent youth, unemployed college graduates, veterans, new immigrants, and the like are of this category.

They are restless, dissatisfied, and haunted by the fear that their best years will be wasted before they reached their goal. They are receptive to the preaching of a proselytizing movement, and yet do not always make staunch converts. For they are not irrecoverably estranged from the self. They do not see it as irredeemably spoiled. It is easy for them to conceive an autonomous existence

that is purposeful and hopeful. The slightest evidence of progress and success reconciles them with the world and their selves. The role of veterans in the rise of mass movements has been touched upon in Section 35. A prolonged war by national armies is likely to be followed by a period of social unrest for the victors and vanquished alike. The reason is neither the unleashing of passions and the taste of violence during wartime,

nor the loss of faith in a social order that could not prevent so enormous and meaningless a waste of life and wealth. It is rather due to the prolonged break in the civilian routine of the millions enrolled in the national armies. the returning soldiers find it difficult to recapture the rhythm of their pre-war lives. The readjustment to peace and home is slow and painful, and the country is flooded with temporary misfits. Thus, it seems that the passage from war to peace is more critical from an established order than the passage from peace to war. I mean, the implication he's making here is that people who are born into a deracinated society, if they go into, using the example of the military, where they are hyper-collectivized,

when they get out, he's basically calling them misfits, or temporary misfits. It's, yeah, I'll keep going. The permanent misfits are those who, because of a lack of talent or some irreparable defect in body or mind, cannot do the one thing for which their whole being craves. No achievement, however spectacular in other fields, can give them a sense of fulfillment.

Whatever they undertake becomes a passionate pursuit, but they never arrive, never pause. They demonstrate the fact that we can never have enough of that which we really do not want, and that we run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves. 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. So basically he's saying that if you're somebody who, feels compelled to be a part of a collective, you're considered a permanent misfit. And there's no other thing here. The most incurably frustrated and therefore the most vehement

among the permanent misfits are those with an unfulfilled craving for creative work. Both those who try to write, paint, compose, et cetera, and fail decisively, and those who, after tasting the elation of creativeness feel, drying up of the creative flow within, and know that never again will they produce ought worthwhile, are alike in the grip of a desperate passion. Neither fame nor power nor riches, nor even monumental achievements in other fields can still their hunger. Even the wholehearted dedication to a holy cause does not always cure them. Their unappeased hunger persists, and they are likely to become the most violent extremists in the service of their holy cause.

All right. Part 7. The inordinately selfish. The inordinately selfish are particularly susceptible to frustration. The more selfish a person, the more poignant his disappointment. It is the inordinately selfish, therefore, who are likely to be the most persuasive champions of selflessness. The fiercest fanatics are often selfish people who, were forced by innate shortcomings or external circumstances to lose faith in their own selves.

They separate the excellent instrument of their selfishness from their ineffectual selves and attaches to the service to some holy cause. And though it be a faith of love and humility they adopt, they can be neither loving nor humble. Basically what I'm getting out of all this is that he is properly diagnosing. He's making a patient. He's making a pay. painting a picture of what the world looks like, of what how people act. But I don't, how he says they get there seems to just ignore human nature. It seems to be the very, I hate to bring this up because I always do libertarian in nature. Everybody wants to be free. everybody, if I could just teach everybody about liberty, about individual liberty, they'd want to be free.

Well, that's not true. That's just patently false. So he is, I mean, he's basically calling people who seeks to collectivize and be part of a group. You know, he's talking about mass movements here. And he seems to be thinking that the reason people join mass movements is because they're frustrated and their failure. and being individuals in an individual society, not what's a more, I mean, logical and empirical reason that people want to collect the bus. People exist in groups, they always have, they always will. And any kind of radical individualism where you're trying to just tear people

apart from one another is going to be met with some kind of movement to get back to where they believe they naturally belong, in my opinion. Part 8. The ambitious facing unlimited opportunities. Unlimited opportunities can be as potent a cause of frustration as a paucity or lack of opportunities. I assume posity. I'm not familiar with that word, but it looks like pauper to me, so it would be like a severe just not having, I think lack of opportunities explains it better. Poor. When opportunities are apparently unlimited, there is an inevitable depression of the present. The attitude is,

all that I am doing or possibly can do is chicken feed compared to what is left undone. Such as the frustration which broods over gold camps and haunts taught mines in boom times. Hence the remarkable fact that, joined with the ruthless self-seeking, which seems to be the main spring of gold hunters, land grabbers, and other get-rich-quick enthusiasts, there is an excessive readiness for self-sacrifice and united action. Patriotism, racial solidarity, and even the preaching of revolution find a more ready response among people who see limitless opportunities spread out before them than among those who move within the fixed limits of a familiar,

orderly, and predictable pattern of existence. Someone explained this to me because I have no clue what he's talking about. So gold hunters, land grabbers, and other get-rich-quick enthusiasts are more susceptible to collectivize and patriotism, racial solidarity, and even the preaching of revolution. I'm not, yeah. Part 9. Minorities. A minority is in a precarious position, however protected it be by law or force. The frustration engendered by the unavoidable sense of insecurity is less intense, in a minority, and sense on preserving its identity, than in one bent upon dissolving in and blending with the majority.

A majority which preserves its identity in is inevitably a compact hole which shelters the individual, gives them a sense of belonging, and immunizes him against frustration. On the other hand, in a minority bends on assimilation, the individual stands alone, pitted against prejudice and discrimination. He is also burdened with the sense of guilt, however vague, or of a renegade. The Orthodox Jew is less frustrated than the emancipated Jew. The segregated Negro in the South is less frustrated than the non-segregated Negro in the North. It's because they're among their people.

They're in where nature wants them, where God wants them. Use whatever rationalization you want. Ready for huge savings. We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November.

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Again, with a minority bent on assimilation, the least and most successful, economically and culturally, are likely to be more frustrated than those in between. The man who fails sees himself as an outsider, and in the case of a member of a minority group who wants to blend with the majority, failure intensifies the feeling of not belonging.

A similar feeling crops up at the other end of the economic and cultural scale. Those of a minority who attain fortune and fame often find it difficult to can entrance into the exclusive circles of the majority. They are thus made conscious of their foreignness. Furthermore, having evidence of their individual superiority, they resent the admission of inferiority implied in the process of assimilation. Thus, it is to be expected that the least and most successful of a minority bent on assimilation should be the most responsive to the appeal of a proselytizing mass movement. Least and most successful of a minority. Bents on assimilation. The least and most successful among the Italian Americans were the most ardent admirers of

Mussolini's revolution. The least and most successful among the Irish Americans were the most responsive to Devalor's call. The least and most successful among the Jews are the most responsive to Zionism. The least and most successful among the Negroes are the most race conscious. I'm the least and most successful among the Jews are the most responsive to Zionism. Rothschild, who is probably in 1917, the richest man in the world, arguments could be made one of at least controlled banking in many countries. He is the least responsive to Zionism as he's getting the mandate for Palestine. This doesn't make any sense to me.

The least and most successful among the Negroes are the most race conscious. Maybe because all of these groups have been, you know, the group have been deracinated. have had their collectivism attacked, have been propagandized with individualism. And their main response is to return to the collective. And I know there's grifters out there in all of these, but there are, I think his underlying premises are just wrong. 10. The board. There's perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society's ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom.

In almost all the descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of mass movements, there is reference to vast annui, and in their earliest stage mass movement, are more likely to find sympathizers and support among the board than among the exploited and oppressed. To a deliberate fomentor of mass upheavals, the report that people are bored, stiff, should be at least as encouraging as they are suffering from intolerable economic and political abuses. People weren't bored until industrial society. People had to work. People had to provide for themselves. They worked with their own hands. Industrial society, what some might call capitalism,

I think industrial society, Thomas said this, and I agree 100%, and we're just going off of what Ted Kaczynski wrote, yeah, this industrial society is probably a better term. People weren't bored. People weren't sitting around doing nothing until industrial society and all these riches came along and governments could give hand.

I mean, these are modern problems. This is problems of modernity. This isn't the natural state of things is people on their family farms working their whole lives until they die. Maybe they buy some more land. Maybe they do some traveling, but they always come home. And we've been so propaganda is to believe that that's backwards. Or, you know, how the Industrial Revolution just basically created jobs

wage jobs that were city jobs and jobs in great zip codes where people didn't have to work on the farm anymore. They didn't have to work with their hands. Or were socially engineered to believe that that was the way we were supposed to go. There's a bigger problem here that Mr. Hoffer is not addressing. When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored. The consciousness of a barren, meaningless existence is the main fountainhead of boredom. People who are not conscious of their individual separateness, as is the case with those who are members of a compact tribe, church, party, etc., are not accessible to boredom.

It's a hell of a sentence. The differentiated individual is free of boredom only when he is engaged either in creative work or some absorbing occupation, or when he is wholly engrossed in. the struggle for existence. I mean, this is opposite world. Pleasure chasing and dissipation are ineffective palletives. Where people live autonomous lives and are not badly off, yet are without abilities or opportunities for creative work or useful action, there is no telling to what desperate and fantastic shifts they might resort in order to give meaning and purpose to their lives.

Again, I'm just seeing industrial societies. its future right here. It's, well, what do they do? What do people do? Certain people, if they have a, if they're predisposed to it, become overssocialized, meaning that they see the government as to be all end all of everything. And that has nothing to do with that was engineered. And people can say, well, the government is a collective, so being part of the government, you know, when, wanting to be on the side of the government or looking towards the government is, you know, a way, yeah, but that's artificial. It's not something that's natural, especially the modern government. I could even see monarchies in the past or, you know, Holy Roman Empire or Spain under the Catholic Church.

Sure. No. Bortem accounts for the almost invariable presence of spinsters and middle-aged women at the birth of mass movements. Even in the case of Islam and the National Socialist Movement, which frowned upon feminine activity outside the home, we find women of a certain type playing an important role in the early stage of their development. Marriage has for women many equivalents of joining a mass movement. It offers them a new purpose in life, a new future, and a new identity, a new name. The bored of most spinsters and of women who can no longer find joy and fulfillment and marriage

stems from an awareness of a barren, spoiled life. By embracing a holy cause and dedicating their energies and substance to its advancement, they find a new life full of purpose and meaning. Hitler made full use of the society ladies thirsting for adventure, sick of their empty lives, no longer getting a kick out of love affairs. He was financed by the wives of some of the great industrialists long before, their husbands had heard of him. Miriam Beard tells of a similar role played by board wives of businessmen

before the French Revolution. They were devastated with boredom and given two fits of the vapors. Restlessly, they applauded innovators. I hope he's making the argument here that marriage and, you know, you say marriage has for many women equivalence of joining a mass movement. I mean, what argument are you trying to make? This is to argue anything different. To argue against marriage is to argue against our history of humanity.

Part 11. The sinners. The sardonic remark that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels has also a less derogatory meaning. Fervent patriotism, as well as religious and revolutionary enthusiasm, often serves as a refuge from a guilty conscience. It is a strange thing that both the injurer and the injured, the sinner, and he who has sinned against, should find in the mass movement and escape from a blemished life. Remorse and a sense of grievance seem to drive people in the same direction. It sometimes seems that mass movements are custom made to fit the needs of the criminal, not only for the catharsis of his soul, but also for the exercise of his inclinations and talents. The technique of a proselytizing mass movement aims to evoke in the faithful the mood and frame of a mind of a repentant criminal. Self-surrender, which is, as will be shown in part three, the source of a mass movement's unity and vigor, is a sacrifice, an act of atonement, and clearly no atonement is called for unless there is a poignant sense of sin.

Elsewhere, the technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement. movement as a cure? What if there actually is a malady? What if there actually is a sickness? And what if that sickness is liberalism? And I'm not talking about, you know, blue-haired. I'm talking about liberalism. Classical, put whatever you want in front of it. What a task confronts the American clergy laments an American divine, preaching the good news of a savior to people who for the most part have no real sense of sin. An effective mass movement cultivates the idea of sin. It depicts the autonomous self not only as barren and helpless, but also as vile. To confess and repent is to slag off one's individual distinctness and separateness and

salvation is found by losing oneself in the holy oneness of the congregation. There's a tender spot for the criminal and an ardent wooing of him in all mass movements. St. Bernard, the moving spirit of the Second Crusade, thus appealed for recruits. For what is it but an exquisite and priceless chance of salvation due to God alone that the omnipotence should deign to summon to his service as though they were innocent, murderers, ravishers, adulterers, perjurers, and those guilty of every crime? Revolutionary Russia, too, had a tender spot for the common criminal. though it is ruthless with the heretic, the ideological deviationist.

It is perhaps true that the criminal who embraces a holy cause is more ready to risk his life and go to extremes in its defense than people who are awed by the sanctity of life and property. Or if you know that you have and every society has them, people who are prone to violence, people who are prone to murder, people might want to throw them into the military. I'm not saying psychopaths. I'm talking about people. There are people who are just natural warriors. I mean, he's talking about criminals here.

Well, this just doesn't... A lot of what he's talking about doesn't comport with reality. Sure, if you're going to war, you want people, and you're looking for volunteers. You want people who not only believe in the cause, but have the ability to do what war is meant to do. It's a kill.

I mean, Shane mentions the revolutionary Russia. Of course. Crime is to some extent a substitute for a mass movement. Where opinion and law enforcement are not too stringent and poverty not absolute, the underground pressure of malcontents and misfits often leaks out in crime. It has been observed that in the exultation of mass movements, whether patriotic religious, or revolutionary common crime declines.

All right. Got up to part three, United Action and Self-Sacrifice, and I'm going to stop right there. Comments out on this probably more than any other book I've read for you just because, I mean, people are told to read this book all the time. Oh, read this book. It's great about it. Read this book.

It tells you why people do. Maybe this book explains why deracinating people from their culture causes people to want to seek to get back into collective groups. All right, that's it. See on Part 4. Thank you. Take care, everyone.