The True Believer

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Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. When equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.

Equality without freedom create a more stable social pattern than freedom without equality.

They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free country… Actually, their innermost desire is for an end to the “ free for all.” They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society.

Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves as the continuous ability to create.

The cause of revolution in a totalitarian society is usually a weakening of the totalitarian framework rather than resentment against oppression and distress.

The ideal potential convert is the individual who stands alone, who has no collective body he can blend with and lose himself in and so mask the pettiness, meaninglessness, and shabbiness of his individual existence.

When people revolt in a totalitarian society, they rise not against the wickedness of the regime but its weakness.

A prolonged war by national armies is likely to be followed by a period of social unrest for victors and vanquished alike… The returning soldiers find it difficult to recapture the rhythm of their prewar 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 for an established order than the passage from peace to war.

When opportunities are apparently unlimited, their is an inevitable deprecation of the present.

The least and most successful of a minority bent on assimilations should be most responsive to the appeal of a proselytizing mass movement.

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 slough off one’s individual distinctness and separateness, and salvation is found by losing oneself in the only oneness of the congregation.

Crime is to some extent a substitute for a mass movement. Where public 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 exaltation of mass movements (whether patriotic, religious, or revolutionary) common crime declines.

Migration can serve as a substitute for a mass movement...However, because of the quality of their human material, mass migrations are fertile ground for the rise of genuine mass movements…once they invaded a country, they were joined by the oppressed and dissatisfied in all walks of life:” it was a social revolution started and masked by a superficial foreign conquest.

Every mass movement is in a sense a migration—a movement toward a promised land.

Frustration not only gives rise to the desire for unity and the readiness for their realization, but also creates a mechanism for their realization.

"To illustrates a principle," said Bagehot," you must exaggerate much and you must omit much. “

When the individual faces torture or annihilation, he cannot rely on the resources of his own individuality. His only source of strength is in not being himself but part of something mighty, glorious and indestructible.

Make-Believe:

There is need for some kind of make-believe in order to face death unflinchingly. To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for. It is only when we see ourselves as actors in a staged (and therefore unreal) performance that death loses its frightfulness and finality and becomes an act of make-believe and theatrical gesture.

It is one of the main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a grandiose spectacle, a solemn or light-hearted dramatic performances.

…Their uniforms, flags, emblems, parades, music, and elaborate etiquette and ritual are designed to separate the soldier from his flesh-and-bolls self and mask the overwhelming reality of life and death.

Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience—the knowledge that our mighty deeds will come to the ears of our contemporaries.

A mass movement touches a responsive chord in every heart…There is an exhilaration and getting out of one’s skin in both participants and spectators.

All mass movements deprecate the present by depicting it as a mean preliminary to a glorious future; a mere doormat on the threshold of the millennium.

The present is a shadow and an illusion.

The self sacrifice is not possible without the hope (for the future).

Possessed of a vivid vision of past and future, the true believer sees himself part of something that stretches endlessly backward and forward—something eternal. He can let go of the present (and of his own life) not only because it is a poor thing, hardly worth hanging on to, but also because it is not the beginning and the end of all things. Furthermore, a vivid awareness of past and future robs the present of its reality.

Those who fail in every affairs show a tendency to reach out for the impossible. It is a device to camouflage their shortcomings. For when we fail in attempting the possible, the blame is solely ours; but when we fail in attempting the impossible, we are justified in attributing it to the magnitude of the task.

One of the rules that emerges from a consideration of the factors that promote self-sacrifice is that we are less ready to die for what we have or are than for what we wish to have and to be. …When men already have “something worth fighting for,” they do not feel like fighting. People who live full, worthwhile lives are not usually ready to die for their own interests nor for their country nor for a holy cause. Craving, not having is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself.

“Things which are not” are indeed mightier than “things that are.” In all ages men have fought most desperately for beautiful cities yet to be built or gardens yet to planted.

It is strange, indeed, that those who hug the present and hang on to it with all their might should be least capable of defending it.

The successful businessman is often a failure as a communal leader because his mind is attuned to the “things that are” and his heart set on that which can be accomplished in “our time.” Failure in the management of practical affairs seems to be a qualification for success in the management of public affairs.

It is not altogether absurd that people should be ready to die for a button, a flag, a word, an opinion, a myth and so on. It is on the contrary the least reasonable thing to give one’s life for something palpably worth having.

Self-sacrifice cannot be a manifestation of tangible self-interest. Even when we are ready to die in order not to get killed, the impulse to fight spring less from self-interest the from intangibles such as tradition, honor (a word), and, above all, hope. Where there is no hope, people either run, or allow themselves to be killed without a fight.

…For self-sacrifice is an unreasonable act. It cannot be the end-product of a process of probing and deliberating. All active mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world.

To rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason. It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.

Strength of faith, as Bergson pointedout, manifests itself not in moving mountains but in not seeing mountains to move.

Thus the effectiveness of a doctrine should not be judged by its profundity, sublimity or validity of the truths it embodies, but by howthoroughly it insulates theindividual from his self and the world as it is. What Pascal said of an effectivereligion is true of anyeffective doctrine:” it must be“ contrary to nature, to common sense and to pleasure.”

The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude…Crude absurdities, trivial nonsenses and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people from self-sacrifice they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth.

We can be absolute certain only about things we do not believe in.

A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength. Once we understand a thing, it is as if it had originated in us. And, clearly, those who are asked torenounce theself and sacrifice it cannot see eternal certitude in anything which originates in that self.

The devoutare always urged to seek theabsolutetruth with their hearts and not their minds.“It isthe heart which is conscious of god, not the reason.” Rudolph Hess.

When a movement begins to rationalize its doctrine and make it intelligible, it is a sign that its dynamic span is over; that it is primarily interested in stability… The stability of a regime requires the allegiance of the intellectuals, and it is to win them rather than to foster self-sacrifice in the masses that a doctrine is made intelligible.

If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable.

Pascal was of the opinion that “one was well-minded to understand holy writ when one hated oneself.”

What Stresemann said of the Germans is true of the frustrated in general:” [they]pray not only for daily bread, but also for daily illusion.”

A perculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture. The association of believing and living is not characteristic solely of children. The inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism.

The human plasticity necessary for the realization of drastic and abrupt changes seems, therefore, to be a by-product of the process of unification and of the inculcation of a readiness for self-sacrifice.

He embraces a cause not primarily because of its justness and holiness but beaches of his desperate need for something to hold on to.

He finds no difficulty in swinging suddenly and wildly from one holy cause to another. He cannot be convinced but only converted.

It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet.

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatic atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is God or not. The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion… So, too, the opposite of thechauvinist is not thetraitor but the reasonable citizen who is in love with the present and has no taste formartyrdom and the heroic gesture.

There seems to be a thin line between violent, extreme nationalism and treason.

The army is mainly an instrument devised for the preservation or expansion of an established order—old or new. The army is an instrument for bolstering, protecting, and expanding the present. The mass movement comes to destroy the present.

A popular army is often an end-product of a mass movement.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.

Common hatred unites the most heterogeneous elements.

The ideal devil is not only omnipotent and omnipresent, but also a foreigner.

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

It is chiefly the unreasonable hatreds the drive us to merge with those who hate as we do, and it is this kind of hatred that serves as one of the most effective cementing agents.

Even in the case of a just grievance, our hatred comes less from a wrong done to us than from the consciousness of our helplessness, inadequacy and cowardice—in other words from self-contempt. When we feel superior to our tormentors, we are likely to despise them, even pity them, but not hate them.

self-contempt is here transmuted into hatred of others.

Self-contempt produces in man “the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable, for he conceives a mortal hatred against that truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults.

That others have a just grievance against us is a more potent reason for hating them than that we have a just grievance against them. We do not make people humble and meek when we show them their guilt and cause them to be ashamed of themselves. We are more likely to stir their arrogance and rouse in them a reckless aggressiveness. Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.

The more sublime the faith the more virulent the hatred it breeds. (A sublime religion inevitably generates a strong feeling of guilt). ?????

We cannot hate those we despise.

Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.

The undercurrent of admiration in hatred manifests itself in the inclination to imitate those we hate. Thus every mass movement shapes itself after its specific devil.

It seems that when we are oppressed by the knowledge of our worthlessness we don not see ourselves as lower than some and higher than others, but as lower than the lowest of mankind. ???

There is a deep reassurance for the frustrated in witnessing the downfall of the fortunate and the disgrace ofthe righteous. They see in general downfall an approach to the brotherhood of all. Chaos, like thegrave, is a haven of equality.

The impression somehow prevails that the true believer, particularly thereligious individual, is a humble person. The truth is that the surrendering andhumbling of the self breed pride and arrogance. The truebeliever 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 thekingdom of heaven, too.

There is notelling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations,doubts and the vague stirrings of decency that go without individual judgement.

We find a new freedom—freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder, and betray without shame and remorse.

The right to dishonor.

Thus hatred is not only a means of unification but also its product. Renan says that we have never, since the world began, heard of a merciful nation.

The deindividualization which is perquisite for thorough integration and selfless dedication is also, to a considerable extent, a process of dehumanization. The torture chamber is a corporate institution.

The desire to belong is partly the desire to lose oneself.

A feeling of superiority counteracts imitation.

Hustling tends to produce uniformity.

Unification tends to intensify the imitation capacity.

Contempt for the outside world is of course the most effective defense against disruptive imitation. However, an active movement prizes hatred above passive contempt; and hatred does not stifle imitation but often stimulates it.

…The imitativeness of its members gives a thoroughly unified group great flexibility and adaptability…The rapid modernization of a united Japan or Turkey contrasts markedly with the slow and painful adaptation to new ways in China, Iran and other countries not animated by a spirit unity.

The truth seems to be that propaganda on its own cannot force its way into unwilling minds; neither can it inculcate something wholly new; nor can it keep people persuaded once they have ceased to believe…Rather than instill opinion it articulates and justifies opinions already present in the minds of its recipients.

He echoes their innermost feelings. Where opinion is not coerced, people can be made to believe only in what they already “know.”

“It is the music of their own souls they hear in the impassioned words of the propagandist.

Violence breeds fanaticism as that fanaticism begets violence.

…The more blood they “shed the more they needed to believe in their principles as absolutes.” ...The practice of terror serves the true believer not only to cow and crush his opponents but also to invigorate and intensify his own faith.

Conquest and conversion went hand in hand, the latter often serving as a justification and a tool for the former.

Persuasion is clumsy and its results uncertain.

The creed whose legitimacy is most easily challenged is likely to develop the strongest proselytizing impulse.

The leader cannot create the conditions which make the rise of a movement possible. He cannot conjure a movement out of the void…The leader had to wait for times to ripen before he could play his role. (But) the ripeness of the times does not automatically produce a mass movement.

The uncanny powers of a leader manifest themselves not so much in the hold he has on the masses as in his ability to dominate and almost bewitch a small group of able men.

The most decisive for the effectiveness of a mass movement leader seem to be audacity, fanatical faith in a holy cause,an awareness of the importance of a close-knit collectivity in a group of able lieutenants.

Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership. There can be no mass movement without some deliberate misrepresentation of facts.

The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.

…Actually, mass ferocity is not always the sum of individual lawlessness. Personal truculence militates against united action.

The true believer, no matter how rowdy and violent his acts, is basically an obedient and submissive person.

People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident. To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.

The Unwanted selves.

In a free society the leader follows the people even as he leads them. He must, as someone said, find out where the people are going so that he may lead them…Where, as in an active mass movement, the leader can exact blind obedience, he can operate on the sound theory that all men are cowards, treat them accordingly and get results. ???

Men of thought seldom work well together, whereas between men ofaction there isusually an easy camaraderie. Teamwork is rare inintellectual or artistic undertakings, but common and almost indispensable among men of action.

Even mere marching can serve as a unifier.

Marching kills thought. Marching makes an end of individuality.

By opening vast fields ofperish action a mass movement may hasten its end.

The true believer who succeeds in al he does gains self-confidence and becomes reconciled with his self and the present. He no longer sees his only salvation in losing himself in the oneness of a corporate body and in becoming an anonymous particle with no will, judgement and responsibility of his own.

Thus the taste of continuous successful action is fatal to the spirit pf collectivity.

The true believer is eternally incomplete,eternally insecure.

Where the articulate are absent or without a grievance, the prevailing dispensation, though incompetent and corrupt, may continue in power until it falls and crumbles of itself.

The masses listen to him( man of words) because they know that his words, however urgent, cannot have immediate results…Thus imperceptibly the man of words undermines established institutions, discredits those in power, weakens prevailing beliefs and loyalties, and sets the stage for the rise of a mass movement.

The western powers were indirect and knowing fomenters of mass movements in Asia not only by kindling resentment but also by creating articulate minorities through educational world which was largely philanthropic.

there is a deep-sated craving common to almost all men of words which determines their attitude to the prevailing order. It is a craving for recognition; a craving for a clearly makers status above the common rule of humanity. “Vanity,” said Napoleon, “made the revolution; liberty was only a pretext.”

Remusat said of Thiers: “He has much more vanity than ambition; and he prefers consideration to obedience, and the appearance of power to power itself. Consult him constantly, and then do just as you please. He will take more notice of your deference to him than of your actions.”

The grievance which animates him (man of words) is, with very few exceptions, private and personal.

Thoreau states the fact with fierce extravagance:” I believe that what to saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted…and he will forsake his generous companions without apology.”

Where all learned men are bureaucrats or where education gives a man an acknowledged superior status, the prevailing order is likely to be free from movements of protest.

Handfuls of impartial men of words were at the beginning if all nationalist movements.

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The generals, industrialists, landowners ad businessmen who are considered pillars of patriotism are latecomers who join the movement after it has become a going concern.

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The most strenuous effort of the early phase of every nationalist movement consists in convincing and winning over thesis future pillars of patriotism.

It is the deep seated craving of the man of words for an exalted status which makes him oversensitive to any humiliation imposed on the class or community to which he belongs however loosely.

The genuine man of words himself can get along without faith in absolutes…If he formulates a philosophy and a doctrine, they are more an exhibition of brilliance and an exercise in dialects 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 fact that mass movements as they arise often manifest less individual freedom than the order they supplant.

Actually, they only people cheated in the process are the intellectual precursors. They arise against the established order, deride its irrationality and incompetence, denounce its illegitimacy and oppressiveness, and call for freedom of self-expression and self-realization.

However, the freedom the masses crave is not freedom of self-expression and self-realization, but freedom from they intolerable burden of an autonomous existence. They want freedom from "the fretful burden of free choice,”freedom from the arduous responsibility of realizing their ineffectual selves and shouldering the blame for the blemished product…they sweep away the old order not to create a society of free and independent men, but to establish uniformity, individual anonymity and a new structure of perfect unity.

When the moment is ripe, only the fanatic can hatch a genuine mass movement.

The creative man of words, no matter how bitterly he may criticize and deride the existing order, is actually attached to the present. His passion is to reform and not to destroy…he turns it into a mild affair. The reforms he initiates are of the surface, and life flows on without a sudden break.

The noncreative men of words—the eternal misfits and the fanatical contemners of the present…He feels at home only in a state of chaos…Only when engaged in change does he have a sense of freedom and the feeling that he is growing and developing…Hatred has become a habit. With no more outside enemies to destroy, the fanatics make enemies of one another.

The creative man of words is ill at ease in the atmosphere of an active movement. He feels that its whirl and passion sap his creative energies.

A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated by men of action.

The genuine man of action is not a man of faith but a man of law…He takes great care to preserve in the new institutions an impressive facade of faith, and maintains an incessant flow of fervent propaganda, though he relies mainly on the persuasiveness of force.

In the hands of a man of action the mass movement ceases to be a refuge from the agonies and burdens of an individual existence and becomes a means of self-realization for the ambitious.

(He transforms the movement into an enterprise.)

Thus at the end of its vigorous span the movement is an instrument of power for the successful and an opiate for the frustrated.

No mass movement, however sublime its faith and worthy its purpose, can be good if its active phase is overlong.

The mass movement leader who benefits his people and humanity knows not only how to start a movement, but, like Gandhi, when to end its active phase.

It is not the idealism and the fervor of the movement which are the cause of any cultural renascence which may follow it, but rather abrupt relaxation of collective discipline and the liberation of the individual from the stifling atmosphere of blind faith and the disdain of his self and the present. Sometimes the craving to fill the void left by the lest or deserted holy cause becomes a creative impulses.

The true-believing writer, artist or scientist does not create to express himself, or to save his soul or to discover the true and the beautiful. His task, as he sees it, is to warn, to advise, to urge, to glorityfy, and to denounce.

The blindness of the fanatic is a source strength (he sees no obstacles), but it is the cause of intellectual sterility and emotional monotony.

Said Oliver Cromwell, “A man never goes so far as when he does not know wither he is going.”

Renan felt that socialism was the coming religion of the Occident, and that being a secular religion it would lead to a religiofication of politics and economics.

The small nations should give the Occident the blueprint of a hopeful future would in itself be part of a long established pattern. For the small state of the middle east, Greece and Italy, have given us our religion and the essential elements of our culture and civilization.

Stalin in his turn saw in the Nazis and the Japanese the only nation worthy of respect.

The inability to produce a full-fledged mass movement can be, therefore, a grave handicap to a social body. It has probably been one of China’s great misfortunes during the past hundred years that its mass movements deteriorated or were stifled too soon.

China was unable to produce a Stalin, a Gandhi or even an Ataturk, who could keep a genuine mass movement going long enough for drastic reforms to take root. Ortega y Gasset is of the opinion the the inability of a country to produce a genuine mass movement indicates some ethological defect.

It is probably better for a country that when its government begins to show signs of chronic incompetence, it should be overthrown by a mighty mass upheaval—even though such overthrow involves a considerable waste of life and wealth—than that it should be allowed to fall and crumble itself.

Foreign influence does not act in a direct way. It is not the introduction of foreign fashions, manners, speech, ways of thinking and of doing things which shakes a social body out of its stagnation. The foreign influences acts mainly by creating an educated minority, where there was none before or by alienating and existing articulate minority from the prevailing dispensation.

J.B.S.Haldane counts fanaticism among the only four really important inventions made between 3000 B.C. and 1400A.D. It was a Judaic-Christian invention. And it is strange to think that in receiving this malady of the soul the world also received a miraculous instrument for raising societies and nations from the dead—an instrument of resurrection.

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.

“When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse. ”